This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Seven years ago, midway through a multiyear demolition of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts’s Supreme Court heard a case on a slightly different topic: partisan gerrymandering. Republican legislators from North Carolina had drawn a map of U.S. House districts that courts, including the high court, had found was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the VRA. So the North Carolina lawmakers tried again, this time going out of their way to make clear that they were trying to reduce Democratic representation, not Black representation. The gambit worked. Roberts, writing for the majority, lamented that partisan gerrymandering was pernicious and unfair. “Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust,” he wrote in Rucho v. Common Cause. But the majority nonetheless concluded that federal courts had no role to play in policing partisan gerrymandering, because it was a …