The state of Ohio has filed an emergency application in the Supreme Court seeking a stay of last week’s 300-page three-judge district-court ruling that invalidated Ohio’s congressional districting map as an unconstitutional “partisan gerrymander.” I will pass over debating the merits of that ruling here.

As Ohio points out, what is particularly bizarre about the ruling below is that the court has given Ohio’s General Assembly only until June 14 to enact a new map. That deadline is some two weeks before the end of the Supreme Court’s term, when the Court is expected to issue its redistricting decisions in Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek. Those decisions could well effectively overrule the district-court’s ruling on Ohio’s map.

The district court’s June 14 deadline is also bizarre in light of the fact that the court has recognized that a new map adopted as late as September 20 could be used for the 2020 congressional election. Indeed, the district court purports to be “committed to working with that timeline for establishing a remedial plan.” (Opinion, p. 294.)

So why didn’t the court stay its own ruling until the Supreme Court issues its decisions in Rucho and Lamone? Why is it pressuring the Ohio legislature to (as Ohio puts it) “waste substantial resources unnecessarily passing new legislation mere weeks before [possibly] learning that there is no need to do so”? Why did it not set a later deadline?

Ohio provides a perhaps overly delicate answer to these questions: “Unfair though it may be, a great many intelligent people on the street are likely to view the lower court’s decision as an attempt to evade or frustrate Supreme Court review.”