Garland is a very careful, cautious prosecutor and he will ultimately have to decide whether "prosecuting Trump destabilizes the country more than it puts it upright," adds former federal prosecutor and NBC News analyst Joyce Vance, but he and his team already seem to have shifted from opposing the idea to realizing "as the evidence got worse and worse, at some point they just crossed the Rubicon and realized, you've got to investigate."

"You can only shoot people in the middle of Fifth Avenue so many times before someone is going to arrest you and put you in jail," former government ethics lawyer Norman Eisen tells the Financial Times.

"The core dilemma that confronts Garland is this: He came in wanting to depoliticize the department," certainly "a laudable goal, after the way Barr misled Americans about the Mueller report and all the moves Trump made trying to enlist Justice in stealing the election," Mark Hosenball writes at The New Republic. But "how does he best defend democracy? By keeping the department out of partisan entanglements or by following the law wherever it goes?"

"If Garland's efforts to depoliticize the department ultimately lead him to put the former president and his inner circle above the law by never approving the indictment of Trump and his co-conspirators in the attempted coup and the insurrection that followed, then no doubt Garland would have undermined his own efforts by allowing the subversion of democracy," Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe tells Hosenball. He thinks Garland is "both smart enough and dedicated enough to democracy" to avoid "that tragic end."

In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution's Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.

Based on this independent state legislature theory, they contend that the North Carolina state courts' decision to throw out and replace the legislature-drawn map violates the federal constitution — an argument that radically departs from the U.S. Supreme Court's historical record of deferring to state courts on how state constitutions and laws should be interpreted.

A Supreme Court endorsement of the theory could upend elections laws across the U.S.
The high court declined in March to weigh in on an emergency request for this case, but in a dissenting opinion, three of the court's conservatives – Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas – signaled they would likely side with the Republican lawmakers' embrace of this theory.