The U.S. Supreme Court handed a political victory to Georgia Republicans on Wednesday in upholding state legislative districts drawn by federal judges this spring.

The 8-1 order by the court ends a lawsuit brought 18 months ago by 29 Republicans who claimed they had been disenfranchised by earlier state House and Senate district boundaries configured by Democrats.

"The state should now proceed with elections under the court-drawn redistricting plans," Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said Wednesday. Party primary elections are July 20, less than three weeks away.

The Georgia Republican Party claimed victory in its redistricting wars with the Democrats.

"This is a great day for democracy in the state of Georgia," Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue said. "It is my hope that Georgia never returns to the partisan days in which politicians choose their constituents rather than the people choosing their representatives."

Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson seized the opportunity to blast the Democrats. "The sad news is that millions of dollars have been spent on lawyers because of the arrogance of one-party rule and a desperate attempt to hold onto power," Johnson said. "It was so unnecessary. How many nursing home beds could we have funded if we had not had to pay for lawyers? How much prenatal care could we have covered?"

After a three-judge federal panel in Atlanta ruled against the election districts as drawn by a Democratic-controlled General Assembly in 2001 and 2002, the attorney general, a Democrat, appealed on behalf of the state, despite the Republican governor's objections.

The federal judges hired experts to draw new legislative districts for the primaries and the Nov. 2 general election.

The new districts paired 11 sets of incumbents in the same districts, prompted a number of officeholders to retire and created 54 open legislative seats. One definite result will be more new legislators, of both parties, when the General Assembly convenes in January.

The federal judicial panel had ruled that the maps drawn by the Democrats violated the one-person, one-vote guarantee under the U.S. Constitution, by spreading Democratic voters across more districts and packing Republican voters into fewer districts. Democrats argued that previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowed them to draw districts that varied in population as much as 5 percentage points either way from the average-sized district.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote Wednesday's order, said such variation, when used for political purposes, violates the "equal protection clause" of the Constitution.

Stevens predicted that in a future case, the court would issue a "stern condemnation for partisan gerrymandering that does not even pretend to be justified by neutral principles."

The lone dissenter, Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote that "'politics as usual' was a traditional redistricting criterion. He said that "ferreting out political motives in minute population deviations seems to me more likely to encourage politically motivated litigation than to vindicate political rights."

Some political observers agreed with legal experts that the Supreme Court decision might invite more redistricting lawsuits. Cases based on the "equal protection clause" could threaten legislative plans in other states, they said.

"Once the court is involved in this process, even a little bit, it's going to stay involved, because the political process is going to argue about the rules of the game," said M. David Gelfand, a Tulane University political scientist and redistricting expert. "I don't think the court wants to get into the politics, but the litigation is politically motivated."

Historically, political boundaries are redrawn once a decade, the year after each census is taken. But increasingly, when a political party wins control in a legislative chamber, it attempts to enhance its power by redistricting.

Last year, Texas Democratic legislators twice fled the state to prevent the House and Senate in Austin from voting on legislation that would have reconfigured congressional districts to favor Republicans.

Also this year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a Pennsylvania redistricting case in which Republicans were criticized for changing political lines to help their candidates. The justices said that case was not the right one for determining how much political gerrymandering should be allowed.

"In Georgia, they did find some limit," said Tim Storey, a senior fellow with the National Conference of State Legislatures. "They said you cannot push the population out just to" help one party.

Georgia Republican Party Chairman Alec Poitevint on Wednesday blamed Attorney General Baker and Secretary of State Cathy Cox, also a Democrat, for the cost to taxpayers.

"Attorney General Thurbert Baker should have heeded Gov. Sonny Perdue's call to end the appeal and saved the taxpayers of Georgia millions in legal fees," Poitevint said.

The legal bills are pending, but the cost is estimated at $2.4 million. Because the state lost the case, it will have to pay the estimated $1.13 million in legal bills for the Republicans who sued. The state already has paid its outside lawyers $424,000.

Taxpayers also will have to pay fees and expenses for the experts who drew the maps. Their bill was for $378,442.