Gerrymandering is bad. Supreme Court is right not to fix it

State governments still mean something. They are still sovereign. They retain meaningful power of self-governance, and federal judges are just not supposed to take over their legislatures’ powers without a specific legal mandate.

This is the most important implication of last week’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, the partisan redistricting case. Chief Justice John Roberts and the majority invoked the well-known legal doctrine of the “political question,” which refers to issues that are supposed to be decided by the elected branches of government and not by judges.