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The Supreme Court’s new decision tilting the midterms toward Republicans, explained

The Court’s new gerrymandering decision is tough to explain, unless you think the justices are GOP partisans.

Here’s a familiar story. On Tuesday night, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that will almost certainly give the Republican Party an additional seat in the US House of Representatives. Not all of the justices disclosed how they voted, but the decision appears to have come down 6-3 along partisan lines — that is, the six Republican justices voted to give the GOP another House seat, while the Court’s three Democrats dissented.

In fairness, the GOP justices’ most recent decision in Allen v. Milligan fits a broader pattern in this Supreme Court’s gerrymandering cases that can be explained without accusing those Republican justices of deciding election cases solely on the basis of partisanship. The Court has spent the past seven years dismantling all federal safeguards against gerrymandering.

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

Allen fits this pattern. On its face, the Republican justices’ brief opinion in the case is just the next iterative step toward a legal regime where states can draw maps however they want, regardless of whether those maps are drawn to favor one political party, or whether they are drawn to lock nonwhite voters out of power.

But the Republican justices’ new decision stands out because, while the Allen opinion is consistent with the Court’s broader trend toward redistricting anarchy, its actual legal arguments are inconsistent with things the same justices said as recently as one month ago. The decision is also inconsistent with previous orders that the Court’s Republican majority handed down in the Allen case itself.

If you want the full rundown of all of these inconsistencies, go read Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in this most recent decision. There are so many of them that it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Court’s Republicans aren’t being honest about their true motivations. The simplest explanation for Tuesday night’s decision is that the Court’s Republican majority is bending the rules because they want the Republican Party to hold a majority in the House.

The decision in Allen breaks a rule that the Supreme Court announced one month ago

At the end of April, the Court’s Republican majority handed down Louisiana v. Callais, which completed a project that at least........

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