While wrapping up a term in which it denied biological autonomy to women, loosened gun restrictions in violence-plagued cities, devastated federal efforts to fight climate change and eroded the wall between church and state, the U.S. Supreme Court last week announced its next target: elections.

The court has agreed to hear a case that could put state legislatures outside the reach of state courts on issues like gerrymandering, election restrictions and even the choosing of presidential electors. In essence, it would give lawmakers more power to control election outcomes — this as America is being reminded anew how eager many Republican officeholders are to overturn the will of the voters for the sake of power.

At first glance, the case of Moore v. Harper sounds like the kind of mundane legal spat that goes on all the time between different branches of government with seemingly little real-world impact on regular people. North Carolina's Supreme Court threw out the congressional district map created by the state's Republican legislature, saying it was gerrymandered. The state House speaker is challenging that ruling.

That the map is gerrymandered is pretty obvious — in a state where Republicans and Democrats are closely divided, it would effectively hand as many as 11 of the 14 districts to the GOP — but that's not even the crucial point. The lawsuit isn't asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the propriety of the map itself but to throw out the very concept that a state court can review what a legislature does in the realm of federal elections.

That's the crux of what's known as the "independent state legislature" theory, a construct that legal scholars generally dismiss but for which several of the Supreme Court's conservative members have hinted support. The implications are ominous, especially in the current political moment.

If that theory were to prevail, the sudden power of legislatures to gerrymander to their hearts' content without any oversight from state courts would be only the start. The same theory could prevent challenges to even the most onerous voting restrictions. And it would conceivably give lawmakers the power to throw out the voters' presidential electoral slates and substitute their own. In fact, this legal theory almost looks custom-made to remove the barriers that prevented former President Donald Trump and his minions from succeeding in their attempted coup against democracy after the 2020 election.

The court's conservative bloc has lately shown disregard for precedent, misplaced faith in often-radical state legislatures, and nonchalance about the real-world impact of its rulings — all of which might lead it to a decision in this case that would further undermine America's already-teetering electoral institutions. There's nothing Americans can do about that in the short run, but the long-term solution is to vote like the future of democracy depends on it. Because it does.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: Veronicatxoxo at Pixabay