At the behest of President Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are in the midst of making their state even more of a mockery of the concept of representative democracy than it already was. In an attempt to preserve the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, lawmakers are tinkering with the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts to create five more safe Republican seats, forcing several Democratic incumbents to seek re-election next year in districts that are suddenly, alarmingly red. Scrambling the map in this manner would ensure that in a state in which Trump earned 56 percent of the vote in 2024, Republicans would lock up 80 percent of the state’s representation in Congress for the rest of the decade.

In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked lawmakers in his state to create a new map that would eke out five additional safe Democratic seats until 2030. Ambitious elected officials elsewhere are exploring similar retaliatory options, eager both to make the national electoral landscape friendlier for their parties and also to publicly take credit for doing so. In Texas, Republicans grew so desperate to maintain the quorum necessary to move forward that they had a handful of Democrats physically confined to the chamber overnight—generally speaking, not a sign that democracy is “in a good place.”

As is so often the case in American politics, you can draw a straight line between this frantic gerrymandering arms race and a mind-bendingly stupid decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the five Republican justices held that court challenges to partisan gerrymanders could not go forward in federal courts because such cases present a “political question”—basically, a question that judges (ostensibly) cannot answer using legal principles. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the Constitution yields no workable standard for determining when a given gerrymander goes too far to be legal. Citing the line in Marbury v. Madison about the Court’s duty to “say what the law is”—always a good sign that a conservative justice is about to bullshit you—Roberts concluded that this time, the Court’s “duty is to say, ‘This is not law.’” (Do you see what he did there?)

It is of course true that the Supreme Court did not invent partisan gerrymandering, let alone force Texas Governor Greg Abbott to speed-run fascism by issuing civil arrest warrants for Democratic lawmakers who had the temerity to oppose his redistricting gambit. But the Court is responsible for its choice to tie its own hands six years ago, thus enabling these lawmakers to cement themselves in power without fear of interference from pesky, meddling federal courts.