Supreme Court says Alabama can use 2023 congressional map

The latest: Tuesday's decision halts the May 26 order from a three-judge panel that barred the use of the 2023 map, which the federal court previously ruled was racially discriminatory, and ordered that Alabama use a court-drawn one.

• The Supreme Court says the lower court "failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns."
• "While federal courts should not impose changes close to an election ... States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interest," it says.

The other side: Dissenting alongside Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes that the decision is "a blow to the rule of law."

• She writes that Alabama has in the past argued that changing congressional districts for months before primary elections threw the 2022 election "into chaos" and left "almost no time for ... hundreds of thousands of voters to be reassigned to new districts."
• "What was previously impossible to achieve in four months is suddenly possible to achieve in less than one week," Sotomayor writes.

• Deuel Ross, director of litigation at the Legal Defense Fund, said in a statement that the high court's decision "gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence."

What they're saying: Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statement Tuesday night celebrating the "win for the people of Alabama and our elections."

• Candidates who qualified by May 22 under the 2023 maps will be on the ballot Aug. 11, the statement from Ivey's office says.