Right up until the Supreme Court handed down opinions yesterday morning, the justices seemed likely to flinch from ruling on one of the major remaining issues left on their docket—a case with the power to weaken the already failing health of American democracy. Because of recent developments in North Carolina, the Court could have declared the case moot. Instead, it decided to tackle the case, Moore v. Harper, head-on. And it did so in a way that has many lawyers and democracy advocates breathing a sigh of relief.   

The question in Moore involved the “independent state legislature” theory, which suggests that the Constitution reserves special powers for state lawmakers in how they choose to administer federal elections. The contours of the theory are fuzzy and disputed. But in the most extreme versions, state legislatures couldn’t be constrained by state constitutional guarantees or rulings by state courts, potentially limiting voters’ protections against partisan gerrymandering or legislative attacks on voting rights. Political candidates or state officials could potentially lean on the theory to challenge aspects of election administration and cast doubt on the integrity of the vote—not unlike Donald Trump’s campaign did in 2020. As a result, when the Supreme Court announced it would hear Moore, onlookers on both the left and the right expressed concern about what the case might portend.

[Adam Serwer: The Roberts Court draws a line]

But by the time that the justices heard oral arguments in Moore in December, the case had become snarled up in the jurisdictional equivalent of a train crash. Moore originated in North Carolina, where the state’s supreme court had ruled that a political gerrymander by the Republican-controlled state legislature was prohibited by North Carolina’s Constitution. After a handful of GOP lawmakers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the legislature continued a protracted back-and-forth with North Carolina judges, which ended when the state’s high court—now under Republican control—tossed out the original ruling in dispute. The Supreme Court ended up ordering multiple rounds of briefing on whether it even still had the authority to rule on Moore. As of May, most of the parties involved, including the Justice Department, were arguing that the Court should simply set the case aside.

Punting on Moore would have had the advantage of allowing the Court to avoid tackling a difficult legal question. But it would also have left that question open for potential 2024 election chaos, including potential bad-faith litigation aimed at generating confusion and distrust over election results. The justices chose a different approach. Writing for a 6–3 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a firm, punctilious opinion rejecting the maximalist vision of the independent state legislature theory and closing the door—most, if not all of the way—on the mayhem it could have created.

The majority’s arguments for why it had jurisdiction to decide the case, despite the developments in North Carolina, are somewhat puzzling—as Justice Clarence Thomas, who would have tossed Moore out, argues in his dissent. Perhaps the Court was motivated less by the cold logic of legal reasoning and more by a simple desire to get the problem of the independent state legislature theory out of the way before a flood of pre-2024 litigation arrived at its doorstep.

But whatever the reason, the majority opinion represents a major defeat for the theory’s strongest boosters. Roberts described how state constitutions have constrained state lawmakers in federal election administration back to the time of the country’s founding, a tradition that the independent state legislature theory would have upended. He emphasized that “when legislatures make laws, they are bound by the provisions of the very documents that give them life”—that is, constitutions. If a state legislature is created by a state constitution, he reasoned, it can’t act outside the constitution’s strictures, and a state court must be able to review those actions.

Roberts also took a moment to gut a particular misrepresentation of a past Supreme Court case, McPherson v. Blacker, which Trump boosters had relied on in 2020 to argue for upending the election and handing the then-president a second term. That argument had always been an extreme distortion of the independent state legislature theory, and now it’s dead for good. (In a fitting touch, the former Trump adviser John Eastman is currently facing disciplinary charges from the California state bar in part for his advocacy of this approach, though his trial was delayed the day of the Moore decision because his lawyer was sick.) What’s more, since the justices agreed to hear Moore, Congress has passed reforms that do a great deal to close the loophole that Eastman and others were relying on for their paperwork coup attempt to work. All of this is reason to be somewhat more cheerful headed into 2024.

But for good or ill, the Court did not entirely foreclose future litigation over the authority of state legislatures in federal elections. “Although we conclude that the Elections Clause does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law,” Roberts wrote, “state courts do not have free rein.” The majority emphasized that, in certain instances, it may be appropriate for federal courts to step in and push back on state courts infringing on lawmakers’ authority. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurrence, practically rolls out the red carpet for future legal challenges. Writing in Slate, the election-law expert Rick Hasen worries that this aspect of Moore will “give great power to federal courts, and especially to the U.S. Supreme Court, to second guess state court rulings in the most sensitive of cases”—potentially even in litigation that could decide an election. What happens, for example, if the Court decides to reconsider the ruling of a state judge on election procedures in a swing state?

[J. Michael Luttig: The Court is likely to reject the independent state legislature theory]

Adding to the potential upheaval, the majority explicitly declined to provide a clear sense of just how far state courts can go before they cross the line. As Thomas writes in his dissent, that could be an invitation for future confusion, as both state and federal judges struggle to figure out what the Court has in mind.

At the same time, the majority’s tone is not that of six justices eager to start upending state judicial rulings left and right. “The Court is signaling that the bar is going to be very high” for federal courts to step in, Carolyn Shapiro, of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, who submitted an amicus brief in Moore arguing against an expansive interpretation of the independent state legislature theory, told me.

As with the Court’s recent ruling declining to wipe out the Voting Rights Act in Allen v. Milligan, the conservative supermajority seems to have taken a step back from the brink, at least for the moment. It’s always difficult to divine the currents motivating a famously secretive institution. Perhaps the right-wing lawyers pushing the maximalist independent state legislature theory moved too aggressively for the Court’s comfort. Perhaps the justices are sensitive to mounting public criticism and the perception that the Court is nothing but a purely political body.

Either way, the proof will be in how the justices handle the disputes that inevitably end up before the Court in the coming election cycle. The Court’s decision in Moore sets the worst possible outcomes out of reach, but entirely shielding elections from legal meddling by those acting in bad faith is difficult. If the Court wants to fashion itself as the arbiter of such disputes, the justices will need to be ready to identify and reject that meddling when they see it.