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The Supreme Court broke democracy by saying the quiet part out loud

SCOTUS has lost its sense of when to shut up.

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of majority-Black or majority-Latino legislative districts. The GOP justices’ decision has already kicked off another round of skirmishes in the gerrymandering wars.

Louisiana suspended its US House elections until new maps can be drawn that will elect more white Republicans. Mississippi’s legislature will hold a special session where it could draw similar maps. Tennessee and Alabama also appear likely to draw whiter and more Republican maps before the upcoming midterm elections.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

The United States has never had robust protections against gerrymandering, and it’s allowed wealthy donors to shape politics for a very long time.

But both gerrymandering and campaign finance got so much worse after the Supreme Court explicitly said it would not solve either problem.

The Court also gave Trump explicit permission to prosecute his political opponents.

Meanwhile, lefty groups are already plotting to overcome rigged Republican maps with equally rigged Democratic ones. Fair Fight Action, an advocacy group founded by former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has a plan to turn 10 US House seats blue right away — and to turn as many as 22 districts into gerrymandered Democratic seats if Democrats pick up enough seats in the right state legislatures.

This latest round of gerrymandering, moreover, builds on the previous year’s worth of redistricting fights in Texas, California, Virginia, and Florida. And the Supreme Court also deserves the lion’s share of the blame for those gerrymanders. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority ruled that federal courts may never, ever intervene to block a partisan gerrymander. So gerrymaxxing lawmakers no longer need to worry if their maps are constitutional or not.

That said, it’s not like the United States had particularly robust safeguards against gerrymandering before Rucho came along. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), the Supreme Court said that a sufficiently partisan gerrymander could violate the Constitution, but it didn’t actually strike down the Indiana maps at issue in that case. The Court reached a similar result in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), which upheld a Pennsylvania congressional map even as a majority of the justices warned that they might intervene in a future case.

For more than three decades, in other words, the Court maintained a kind of strategic ambiguity. It never struck down a map drawn to give an unfair advantage to one political party or the other. But it also kept open the possibility that it might strike down a truly egregious gerrymander in the future. And that strategic ambiguity mattered.

Before Rucho, state lawmakers drew plenty of gerrymandered maps, but they typically only did so every 10 years. (The Constitution requires each state to update its maps following a new US Census.) And even when lawmakers did draw biased maps, they did not always squeeze every drop of partisan juice out of their states. After the 2010 Census, for example, Texas Republicans drew a map that gave them two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts in an election when Republicans earned about 58 percent of the vote.

Texas’s newest map, by contrast, was drawn to give Republicans 30 of the state’s 38 US House seats — nearly 80 percent of the state’s congressional delegation.

Nor is Rucho an isolated case. The Roberts Court has a penchant for giving bad actors explicit license to engage in........

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