Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to rehear two voting rights cases it decided just two months ago. No one on the court suggested that the court failed to hear important information at the time it first decided the cases, nor that any new facts had come to light since the verdicts. The only thing that changed was the court’s partisan composition; Republican judges now make up the majority of the court.

In other words, North Carolina Republicans simply granted themselves the right to reinstate a gerrymandered electoral map and stricter voter identification requirements — the subjects of the two cases — on little basis beyond not getting what they wanted the first time.

These partisan do-overs represent an unusually blatant disregard for the polite fiction that judges are objective interpreters of the law, but they are only the latest attempt by the Right to monopolize power over the country’s least accountable branch of government. As Republicans’ ability to muster legislative majorities declines and their hold on power comes to rely increasingly on gerrymandering and voter suppression, the Right is looking to make it both legally and culturally easier for judges to take on the role of policymakers. In North Carolina as well as Ohio, candidates for the state supreme court now run explicitly on party lines, thanks to laws passed by Republican state legislatures. But that is only one expression of a broader trend in both state and federal courts.