It is unusual for courts to throw out a political map so close to an election — but district court judges wrote that the case “presents unusual circumstances.” The Supreme Court vacated a similar decision earlier this year, ordering the district court to retry the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Gill v. Whitford ruling.
A three-judge panel ultimately returned the same decision, finding that Republican state legislators had violated the First Amendment and the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when they drew congressional lines that favored their party. Ten of the state’s 13 House districts are held by Republicans, despite the state’s political competitiveness…..