The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a challenge to the state’s congressional maps. The case is the second congressional maps lawsuit the Court has accepted in recent weeks, again raising the ire of the Court’s conservative minority. 

The case, Bothfield v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, was filed last summer and argues that Wisconsin’s congressional districts are illegally gerrymandered for partisan advantage. Following a law enacted by Republicans under former Gov. Scott Walker, the case was sent to a panel of three circuit court judges. In March, the panel dismissed the case, finding that it was too similar to previous failed challenges against the congressional maps. 

Late last month, the Court also agreed to hear an appeal of a different judicial panel’s decision in Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy v. WEC, which challenged the maps on the grounds that they’re illegally anti-competitive. 

As in the previous case, the Court’s liberal majority agreeing to hear challenges to the congressional maps — which currently give Republicans control of six of the state’s eight districts — drew pointed criticism from conservative justices Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler. 

“An astonishingly activist court will once again revisit precedent it doesn’t like in order to do the bidding of its political masters,” Bradley wrote. “The Democratic Party bought multiple seats on this court to achieve yet another outcome unobtainable democratically. Like last time, the United States Supreme Court will likely reverse the majority’s unlawful ruling and protect our Republic. No kings. No queens either.”

With less than five months until this year’s November elections, and the candidates for those elections having already filed to get on the ballot, neither map challenge will be completed in time for new maps to be in place before the midterms. 

But the ongoing lawsuits keep Wisconsin involved in the ongoing national battle over gerrymandering congressional maps. Republicans across the country have moved to draw maps that will protect the party’s slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision weakening the Voting Rights Act that kicked off a round of southern states redrawing their maps to reduce Black political representation.