It's the equivalent of there being a mass casualty event, and you're a doctor trying to stem the bleeding from a number of different patients.

And somebody comes in and tells you, actually, you can't help all those people.

You just got to, like, stick with one.

For decades, states like North Carolina have gerrymandered on the basis of race and then gone into court and said all we were really doing was sticking it to Democrats.

They can't do that anymore.

Hi, and welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

Now, if you're a longtime listener of this show, you've probably noticed a little shift away since, say, last fall, from what had been a pretty single-minded focus on the show on the highest court in the land. With law-related fireworks going off all over

the place since inauguration, we've been trying to do our best biweekly to keep up with

everything. Now, before this Jim Comey situation blew up, a lot of those fireworks had to do with

Trump's possibly unconstitutional travel ban.

And today on the show, we have for you yet another installment in travel banorama.

Turns out the Justice Department is actually going after some of the immigration attorneys in Seattle,

who so happened to have been involved on behalf of immigrants in the travel ban wars earlier this year.

But first, the court.

And this week, with the president abroad and the budget and health care scoring and everything else happening here at home, you may have actually missed a surprising big, huge decision that came

down from the Supreme Court, which still is somehow doing stuff. The case involved race and

gerrymandering, and we actually covered it on the show. What was surprising was the very

odd grouping of justices in the majority. So this was a case that we covered when it was argued in December. It posed a question about whether two gerrymanders approved by the North Carolina legislature violated the 14th Amendment because they were driven by race considerations instead of just political considerations. Keep that in your head. We'll get back to it.

Now, eight justices heard the case. Cooper v. Harris. Neil Gorsuch was not yet on the court.

On Monday, all eight of them agreed that one of the majority minority districts in question,

District 1 was in fact unconstitutionally gerrymandered. but as to District 12, the court split 5.3 and the

...