DRAWING THE LINE.(congressional districts)

For three days in October of 2003, Tom DeLay left his duties as majority leader of the House of Representatives and worked out of the Texas state capitol, in Austin. During the previous year, DeLay had led his Republican colleagues there in an effort to redraw the boundaries of the state's congressional districts. For more than a century, congressional redistricting had taken place once every decade, after the national census, but the Texas Republicans were trying to redraw lines that had been approved just two years earlier. Several times during the long days of negotiating sessions, DeLay personally shuttled proposed maps among House and Senate offices in Austin. Once, when reporters glimpsed DeLay striding through the corridors of the state capitol, they asked him about his role in the negotiations. "I'm a Texan trying to get things done," he said.

Before the end of the month, the Republicans had pushed their plan through both houses, and it paid off in November of 2004. The Texas delegation in the House of Representatives went from seventeen to fifteen in favor of the Democrats, to twenty-one to eleven in favor of the Republicans. Martin Frost was the third-ranking Democrat in the House when the Republicans eliminated the district he had represented for twenty-six years. "I knew what DeLay was doing," Frost told me. "I didn't like it, but he wasn't just trying to get me, he was trying to get as many Dems as possible. I went ahead and ran in one of the other districts. It was almost impossible to win, and I didn't. But I went out with my boots on."

The struggle over redistricting amounted to a Promethean display of political power by DeLay, and his subsequent downfall has been similarly epic. DeLay's recent travails, which include a criminal indictment in Texas last year and his resignation as majority leader, can be traced to the redistricting fight. Today, his victory in that battle looks fragile. On March 1st, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Texas congressional map, and the outcome is by no means clear. In the first major case to be heard by the two new Justices, John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., the Court will weigh the constitutionality of the Texas plan, which represents just one of the partisan gerrymanders that have transformed Congress in recent years. The Republican majority in Texas and the Bush Justice Department are asking the Court to preserve the Texas plan. But DeLay's political fortunes have changed so much that, paradoxically, the best thing that could happen to him now may be for the Court to strike down the plan he created.

In cases of extreme partisanship in gerrymandering, it is often difficult to identify the original sin. The current controversy in Texas dates to the period just after the 1990 census, when Democrats still controlled both houses of the Texas legislature. Even though Texas was by that time trending strongly Republican in statewide and Presidential races, the Democrats drew district lines that enabled their party to win twenty-one seats in the House in 1992, compared with just nine for the Republicans. By the time of the next census, in 2000, the Republicans were understandably eager to redress the balance. "Republicans had been on the receiving end of what was known as the shrewdest gerrymander of the nineteen-nineties," John Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general who is now a U.S. senator, said. "There are those who thought that what happened next was payback."

By 2000, Republicans controlled the governorship and the State Senate, but Democrats still had a majority in the Texas House. A deadlock between the two legislative bodies prevented Texas from adopting any redistricting plan, and the conflict ended up in federal court. The following year, a three-judge panel, ill-disposed to take sides in a political fight, ratified a modified version of the 1991 map, with two new seats awarded to high-growth districts. "The court essentially carried forward the 1991 Democratic gerrymander of Texas, which is increasingly problematic, given the over-all Republican tilt of the state," Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at New York University School of Law, told me. "The status-quo ante looked like a distortion."

In the 2002 elections, DeLay set out to give the Texas House a Republican majority and thus remove the last obstacle to full Republican control of the state. That year, he created two PACs, which raised and spent $3.4 million on twenty-two races for the Texas House. The law firm of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist whom DeLay has described as one of his "closest and ...