Like a Magic 8-Ball, the Court keeps coming up: “Ask again later.”

Gill v. Whitford was a challenge by Democratic voters to the grotesquely partisan legislative districts drawn by the Republican Wisconsin legislature after the GOP swept both houses in 2010. The case was heard in the first week of the term, and some observers predicted the result would almost single-handedly determine the future course of American democracy.

The case, however, ran into trouble from the start. Everyone agrees partisan gerrymanders are naughty. But how can a court tell unconstitutional partisanship from good old political sleaze? The lower court had adopted a mathematical test called the efficiency gap, which measured how many more votes it would take one party to win a specific level of power than would be required of the other party. By the time the case reached the high court, however, the plaintiffs had backed off the efficiency-gap test and proposed a menu of tests courts could use to detect excessive partisanship. At oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts complained that the Court was being asked to decide a constitutional issue on the basis of “sociological gobbledygook.” Justice Neil Gorsuch said the plaintiffs’ proposed tests reminded him of his supposedly delicious steak rub: “I like some turmeric, I like a few other little ingredients, but I'm not going to tell you how much of each.” (Really, turmeric?)

Three months after argument and conference, the Court calendared Benisek, the Maryland case. (If it had cleanly decided Gill, the most likely move would have been to “hold” Benisek, not to schedule argument.) At oral argument in March, Justice Stephen Breyer helpfully suggested that the Court schedule yet another session to hear both cases again, along with a pending Texas case: “We would enable people who have an interest in this subject generally to file briefs, and we’d see them all together and they could attack each other’s standards or they could support each other’s standards or they could attack any standard,” he proposed. This did not suggest a clear direction within the Court.

So it was an anticlimax but not a shock when the Court, in an opinion by Roberts, turned away the case because the plaintiffs lacked “standing to sue”—a federal jurisdiction term that in essence means the plaintiffs have no real dog in the fight.

The plaintiffs in Gill, the chief wrote, were complaining of a general injury to their party—statewide, Democrats have too few seats—rather than to themselves as individual voters. True, they had in fact alleged exactly that kind of individual injury in their pleadings. “The facts necessary to establish standing, however,” Roberts responded, “must not only be alleged at the pleading stage but also proved at trial.” He wrote that “not a single plaintiff sought to prove that he or she lives in a [gerrymandered] district.”