Supreme Court justices, from left, John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch attend the State of the Union address on February 5, 2019. | Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a one-sentence order announcing that California’s newly gerrymandered maps, which are expected to give Democrats as many as five more seats in the US House, may go into effect during the 2026 midterms. These maps were enacted to counterbalance a Republican gerrymander in Texas, which could also give Republicans as many as five House seats.

If you believe that the Supreme Court applies consistent legal rules, regardless of who benefits from them, then Wednesday’s order in Tangipa v. Newsom is completely unsurprising. In January, the Court handed down a different order blessing Texas’s Republican gerrymander. That decision, in a case called Abbott v. LULAC, didn’t just permit Texas’s maps to take effect; it also imposed new, extraordinarily high barriers in front of any plaintiff challenging a legislative map.

So, if the Court had struck down California’s maps after issuing such a broad decision in the Texas case, the only plausible explanation would have been partisanship.

But the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has also spent the past several years validating all the worst fears of the Court’s most cynical critics. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Donald Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. And it’s the same Court that spent 2025 removing legal barriers to Trump’s mass deportations and mass firings of civil servants.

The Republican justices, moreover, routinely bend the rules when they feel strongly about the politics of a particular case. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), a decision shielding an anti-abortion law from judicial review, five of the Court’s Republicans handed down a legal rule that, if applied in cases that don’t involve abortion, would allow any state to eliminate any constitutional right. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Republican justices made up fake facts to justify ruling in favor of a conservative Christian litigant — and then stuck to their made-up narrative even after Justice Sonia Sotomayor produced photographic evidence that they were lying.

The truth is that neither the Court’s most earnest defenders — who believe that every Supreme Court decision is rooted in a good faith effort to apply the law to the facts of a particular case — nor the Court’s most bitter cynics paint a fully accurate picture of how this Court operates. The justices consider a wide range of factors when they decide a case, including what outcome they would prefer, which party they are more sympathetic toward, which outcome their political party prefers, what outcome is dictated by their own previous opinions, and what the law actually says.

In some cases, especially cases that involve technocratic issues that are not politically controversial, all nine justices typically decide their case based solely on........

© Vox