On May 22, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Virginia U.S. House districts that were drawn earlier this year by a 3-judge U.S. District Court. Wittman v Personhuballah, 14-1504. The U.S. District Court had redrawn the districts because it found the legislature’s plan, enacted after the 2010 census, to be a racial gerrymander.

The U.S. Supreme Court opinion is only eight pages and is by Justice Stephen Breyer. It does not decide the issue of whether the legislature’s plan was a racial gerrymander. Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court only decided that no one challenging the 3-judge U.S. District Court decision any longer has standing.

The Virginia State Board of Elections was controlled by Republican appointees when the original case was filed, in 2013. In Virginia, the State Board of Elections has three members, and two members must be members of the Governor’s party. Democrats won the governorship in November 2013, so under the new Governor, Terry McAuliffe, an all-new Board of Elections switched to a Democratic majority. The new board did not wish to appeal the decision of the U.S. District Court to the U.S. Supreme Court, so some Republican members of Congress from Virginia intervened in the case, and said they have standing because the new districts injure them, because the new district boundaries removed a portion of their “base”, and replaced them with “unfavorable Democratic votes.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that these members of Congress don’t have standing because they failed to submit any evidence that these allegations are true.

Thus, the case turned on the technicality that attorneys for the Republican members of Congress failed to prove that a Republican member of Congress is harmed by a redistricting plan that tilts the partisan balance of his or her district toward the other major party. Certainly, if the attorneys for the Republican members of Congress had realized that the U.S. Supreme Court would take advantage of this technicality, they easily could have proved this, but they probably assumed it was obvious and that no proof was needed.