The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority erased all doubts about the sweeping nature of its recent voting rights jurisprudence Tuesday night with a shadow docket ruling that effectively reverses the Court’s own decision in the same matter just three years ago.

The unsigned emergency order in Allen v. Milligan goes beyond the court’s recentLouisiana v. Callais decision, which merely nullified the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) prohibition on unintentional racial discrimination, to also make it all but impossible for judges to strike down a map as intentionally discriminatory.

It does so by essentially flipping its own 2023 ruling in the same case.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated that decision to go down the “path” that “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law, leading to “a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

Sotomayor noted that Tuesday’s decision was the third time Alabama’s congressional map had found its way before the high bench, lamenting that “[e]ach turn reveals just how unconscionable the Court’s action is today.”