WHEN William Penn won a charter to found a colony across the Atlantic in 1681, he pitched Pennsylvania as a haven where “no law can be made...but by the people’s consent”. On February 5th, the United States Supreme Court took a step toward renewing that promise. Justice Samuel Alito quietly rebuffed an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to preserve their highly gerrymandered map for congressional elections. The implications are huge: correcting the skewed districts could send as many as five more Democrats to Washington, improving their party's prospects of taking control of the House of Representatives in mid-term elections in 2018.

The battle began last month when Pennsylvania’s highest court threw out the state’s district boundaries as “clearly, plainly and palpably” violating the right to vote enshrined in its state constitution. The court ruled that the Republican-drawn map had subverted popular will by delivering 13 of the state’s 18 seats in the House of Representatives to Republicans in 2012, 2014 and 2016—despite the fact that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state and that roughly half of voters opted for Democrats in each of those elections. By a 5-2 vote, the court ordered that new maps be drawn up to more fairly reflect Pennsylvanians’ voices in the election coming up in November.

Republicans reacted with fury. They flouted an order to turn over election data to the state Supreme Court. They demanded that Justice David Wecht, one of the five judges tossing out the map, remove himself from the case because he had spoken ill of gerrymandering in 2015. They asked the nation’s Supreme Court to step in and block the ruling lest “chaos” ensue. And now that it has refused to do so, Cris Dush, a Republican legislator, is calling for the five judges who voted down the Pennsylvania gerrymander to be impeached for “misbehaviour in office”.

The rage is unsurprising, given the national stakes, but desperate. It is a well-understood feature of America’s judiciary that state courts handle matters of state law, and federal courts hear cases involving federal laws. Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the meaning of its state constitution, which provides that elections must be "free and equal" and that "no power...shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage". Though it has not yet issued a promised full opinion, the court noted that the Pennsylvania constitution was “the sole basis” for its decision to strike down the congressional map.

The Republican plea for help at the Supreme Court faced quite long odds. It should not come as a shock that Justice Alito, who hears emergency requests from the federal circuit encompassing Pennsylvania, turned down Republicans’ demand to get involved in a state-law question over which the nation’s highest court has no jurisdiction. Some observers were surprised, though, that one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative members did not even take the usual step of formally consulting his colleagues before acting. He turned down the Republican lawmakers without referring the matter to the entire court.

The speed of the rebuke (delivered without comment) may reflect Justice Alito’s unease with the Supreme Court inserting itself—with tenuous justification—into a highly partisan intra-state dispute. Pennsylvania Republicans had claimed their state Supreme Court stood in violation of the federal constitution's elections clause, which says state legislatures get to set the “times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives”. They pointed to Bush v Gore, the 2000 case in which the Supreme Court effectively put George W. Bush in the White House, as a precedent for the justices policing state elections. But recent Supreme Court decisions cast doubt on the Republican legislators' interpretation of the elections clause, and the justices already have two partisan gerrymandering cases on their docket falling squarely under the federal constitution. With the ghost of Bush v Gore still haunting them a generation later, they do not want to be perceived as meddlers in state tussles as well.

What happens next? Pennsylvania lawmakers say they will set to work crafting a new map, which the state’s Supreme Court wants to see by February 15th. If they miss that deadline, the court becomes cartographer, drawing the map itself with the help of an election-law scholar at Stanford. Meanwhile, Joe Scarnati, the Republican leader in the state senate, and Mike Turzai, the house speaker, warn they “may be compelled to pursue further legal action in federal court”, and Mr Dush is appealing to his colleagues to join him in moving toward impeachment of the five offending judges. But by the time he musters a majority of House members to impeach the jurists and two-thirds of senators to remove them—if that ever comes to pass—it will be too late. America’s most egregious gerrymander will be history.