Two Georgia Supreme Court justices fended off unusually spirited election challenges from a pair of liberal attorneys on Tuesday, in a setback for Democrats who’d hoped to make inroads on this court in order to advance abortion and voting rights.

One of Tuesday’s two supreme court races was a rout: Justice Sarah Warren led former Democratic state Senator Jen Jordan by about 19 percentage points early Wednesday.

The other contest was much closer: Justice Charlie Bethel, a former Republican state representative, led personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin by roughly 2 points when the Associated Press called the race shortly after midnight.

Results were delayed on Tuesday because gunshots near an elementary school in the morning resulted in an hourslong manhunt and shut down a polling site in the Atlanta suburbs. Voting eventually resumed there, but a judge ordered the site to remain open an extra four hours, which prevented Fulton County from releasing any of its results until after 11 p.m.

Both of Tuesday’s winners were appointed to the bench by former Republican Governor Nathan Deal and endorsed this spring by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, the state GOP, and various conservative groups. Jordan and Rankin ran with the support of former President Barack Obama, the state Democratic Party, and other left-leaning groups. Bethel and Warren each earned six-year terms, as did incumbent Justice Ben Land, who was unopposed on Tuesday.

On Monday morning, the Justice Department announced a settlement agreement between President Donald Trump and his own federal government that would create a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” — by all appearances, a slush fund — to make payments to Trump allies who claim the federal government mistreated them. This proposed “settlement” stems from a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS, seeking $10 billion in damages over the 2017 leak about his personal income taxes.

The lawsuit and proposed settlement represent Trump’s most brazen attempt to date to co-opt the legal system for his own ends. They are also emblematic of an underappreciated dimension of Trump’s efforts to consolidate power during his second term. Trump has sought to exploit legal processes by using the courts to extort legal settlements and expand his own powers. Unlike previous settlements between Trump and private corporations, in this one, Trump’s allies will be enriched while taxpayers will foot the bill, which could be in the billions.

To be sure, Trump’s many lawsuits against media entities, ostensibly brought in his personal capacity to redress personal injuries, are part of a pattern. Most of the lawsuits have asserted claims that are unlikely to be availing under extant law. Nevertheless, some of the lawsuits have resulted in eye-popping settlements. The costs of these settlements are not simply monetary — they ratify the president’s unsupported account of the law, chill dissent and give the president substantial control over accountability institutions that might check his administration’s worst excesses. Indeed, some of the settlements have the stench of quid pro quo corruption, in which media entities fork over money in exchange for presidential access and the administration’s favor.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump insisted that a lawsuit he filed against Facebook for suspending his account “be resolved before” Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, could be “brought into the tent.” Referring to a similar settlement brokered between Trump and Twitter/X, the New York Times reported that the agreement “further cements the relationship between Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.”