Some of the most consequential and trust-shattering Supreme Court decisions of late have been ones that could have been predicted decades ago. Certainly that’s the case with the Dobbs decision. Callais doesn’t have quite as long a history, in terms of attempts to overturn the precedent. But certainly it’s been in the cards for at least a decade. Still, it’s some of the smaller decisions that tell us just who and what this corrupt court is. Kate Riga notes one of them here: Conservatives on the Supreme Court have previously invoked the “Purcell principle” to rule that a change couldn’t be made to districts on the “eve” of an election. Now it’s fine to do so in states like Louisiana and Alabama where primary elections are actually already underway and tens of thousands of cast ballots must be invalidated.

The message is simple: there are no rules. Only power. It reminds me of my hand tool woodworking shop. There are a big selection of tools. And it’s just a matter of what helps the GOP and the Court in that particular moment. In a way it’s clarifying. Even helpful.

We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.

Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the belief that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.