The federal courts’ essentially incoherent jurisprudence on racial gerrymandering and the creation of majority-minority districts became even more so with today’s Supreme Court ruling invalidating two of North Carolina’s congressional districts.

All nine justices agreed that one of the two seats in question — North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District — was created based on impermissible racial criteria. The reason that even the dissenting justices concurred in this part of the decision is that state legislative leaders made the mistake of openly saying they were deliberately creating this district as a 51% black-majority district in order to get preclearance from the Obama administration’s Justice Department.