The US Supreme Court late Tuesday gave Alabama a green light to use an aggressively gerrymandered congressional map that a lower court said was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

The unsigned decision, from which the high court’s three liberal justices dissented, enables Alabama’s Republican-dominated government to replace its current congressional map, which has two majority-Black districts, with a map that the US Supreme Court struck down in 2023. That map has just one majority-Black district.

In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the court today doubles down on chaos.”

“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” wrote Sotomayor. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

The liberal justice noted that in order to switch to the map previously struck down by the high court, Alabama election officials “will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the state to new congressional districts.”

“Three of Alabama’s counties will be particularly hard hit because they are split across two congressional districts,” Sotomayor noted. “These counties have about 600,000 registered voters between them (roughly 15% of the state’s total number of registered voters).”

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, postponed US House primary elections in the wake of the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which severely narrowed the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination and paved the way for Alabama and other states to impose new maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

“The Supreme Court’s shameful ruling allowing Alabama to move forward with a gerrymander that was drawn with the explicit intent to dilute Black voting power—as found by a panel of judges that included two Trump appointees—is an absolute affront to the founding principles of our democracy, and wipes out whatever was left of the court’s credibility,” said Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation. “This country deserves better, and we must continue to work toward federal legislation that not only bans partisan and racial gerrymandering but also ensures that our rights cannot be undermined by captured courts.”

The ruling drew condemnation from the two Democrats in Alabama’s US congressional delegation. Rep. Shomari Figures, who was elected to the US House under the independently drawn map that Alabama Republicans are working to replace, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court has now confirmed that there is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America, and states are essentially free to discriminate against minority voters with no consequences.”

“This is a dangerous ruling that sets the state and this nation back decades,” said Figures.

Rep. Terri Sewell called the ruling “just the latest in a pattern of outrageous Supreme Court decisions that help Republicans desperately cling to power ahead of the midterm elections while diluting Black voices and erasing decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.”

“No matter how hard Alabama state officials may try, they will not succeed in silencing our voices,” said Sewell. “We will not go back to the Jim Crow era. The fight for fair representation continues.”

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday accused US President Donald Trump of “orchestrating a $1,700,000,000 fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies” amid new reporting on the terms Trump is seeking in talks to settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.

ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government.

The president is also expected to receive a public apology from the IRS for the leak of his tax returns during his first White House term.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement that the reported settlement terms represent “another installment” in Trump’s “ongoing effort to turn the federal government into a personal cash machine for his unpopular extremist movement.”

“This is a massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people,” said Raskin. “Worse still, this is only the beginning—a declaration that the prior payouts were just a down payment, and that he now intends to earmark billions more in taxpayer dollars for his political allies, sycophants, and private militia of unemployed insurrectionists.”

“The president has no authority to conjure up billion-dollar compensation schemes or raid the Judgment Fund, which exists to settle valid lawsuits. Trump is systematically converting neutral government mechanisms into a presidential slush fund to build his army of political dependents,” Raskin continued. “Congress must act immediately to reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government.”

According to ABC, which cited unnamed sources who emphasized that the settlement’s terms should not be considered final until officially announced, the deal is “expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”

“The arrangement would be an unprecedented use of taxpayer dollars with little oversight,” ABC noted. “Under the terms of the potential settlement agreement, President Trump would have the authority to remove members of the commission running the fund without cause, and the commission would be under no obligation to disclose its procedures or decision-making process for awarding more than a billion dollars.”

ABC’s story came on the heels of reports earlier this week revealing internal Justice Department discussions on settling Trump’s lawsuit, which he filed in late January. Last month, a federal judge questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s suit, noting that “he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”

“Real story: Judge was about to throw out the case because Trump controls both parties,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) wrote late Thursday. “Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a ‘settlement.’ Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.”

“Mind-boggling corruption,” Goldman added.