A fascism too far
By 
This is probably the best decision on the INDEPENDENT STATE LEGISLATURE theory that could have been expected from this Court:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the majority opinion. The Constitution, he said, “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. It is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections.
Chief Justice Roberts rejected that position. “The Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review,” he wrote.
The ruling soundly dismissed the theory, one that an unusually diverse array of lawyers, judges and scholars across the ideological spectrum viewed as extreme and dangerous.
But election law specialists cautioned that Tuesday’s decision elevated the power of federal courts in the process, allowing them to second-guess at least some rulings of state courts based on state law.
As Chief Justice Roberts put it, “state courts do not have free rein” and are subject to oversight by federal courts in cases involving federal elections. But he said quite little about the nature and extent of that oversight.
“The questions presented in this area are complex and context specific,” the chief justice wrote. “We hold only that state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
The “free rein” section is indeed a little disturbing, but then the Court didn’t need any precedent at all to do Bush v. Gore — if a majority really wants to overrule a state court’s interpretation of its own constitution in an election dispute they will find a way. Any version of the theory with more teeth than that was rejected pretty soundly. and Roberts didn’t take the procedural offramp he could have.
One way you can tell that this was a major loss for the neoconfederacy is that 1)Alito, who was notably belligerent even by his standards at oral argument, did not even write and did not join Thomas on the merits and 2)Thomas’s subdued dissent focused mostly on arguing that the case was moot, with only a desultory few pages even devoted to the merits. And as at oral argument, the dissenters had to retreat from some obvious implications of the ISL theory as advanced by North Carolina Republicans, conceding that it does not eliminate the gubernatorial veto.
It could have been somewhat better but it also could have been far worse, and with this Court you’ll sign for that.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court's incoming liberal majority watching SCOTUS affirm state courts' authority to strike down congressional gerrymanders pic.twitter.com/DfsJNeLnBc— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 27, 2023