Complex Republican maneuvering over the future of election rules and voting rights in Georgia, newly one of the nation's premier battlegrounds, is headed to another level this week.
The first vote could come as soon as Tuesday, on an expansive GOP package designed to make it much harder to cast a ballot — mainly by ending early voting the Sunday before Election Day, limiting drop boxes and requiring proof of identification along with every absentee ballot application.
But while a state House committee prepared to advance the bill along party lines, the leaders of the Republican-run General Assembly signaled their demand for a more modest approach, fearing that making it too difficult to vote would backfire by generating a huge Democratic response ahead of highly competitive elections for governor and senator next year.
One Georgia Republican who was just ousted from the Senate, Kelly Loeffler, decided to take a somewhat different approach Monday by launching a group that will focus on boosting conservative turnout in 2022 along with promoting enhanced "election integrity." The financial services executive said she would spend more than $1 million standing up Greater Georgia, which she described as modeled after — and a counterweight on — Fair Fight Action, which Stacey Abrams started days after her narrow 2018 defeat for governor.
"By registering new voters, broadening our outreach, and rebuilding trust in our election process, we can create better outcomes, strengthen our democracy and lift up more voices in our state," Loeffler said.
She also signaled she may use the new group to help her mount a Senate comeback run next year. The other GOP senator ousted in January, David Perdue, said Tuesday he would not be doing likewise.
Loeffler — who planned to support Donald Trump's challenge to the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 but changed her mind after the insurrection — did not specify what she meant by Greater Georgia pushing "election transparency and uniformity" reforms, beyond saying she supports toughening ID requirements for those wanting to vote by mail. And she asserted that some of the efforts to ease access to the polls last year had driven down public confidence in election integrity.
Abrams, who is likely to be the Democratic candidate for governor again next year, derided the new effort. "It's deeply disheartening that a former U.S. senator would spend her time and her resources to publicly engage in the type of conspiracy theories that say that only certain Americans should be valued," she said.
The sweeping GOP legislation, on course to get to the floor of the House by the end of the week, survived a withering day of criticism Monday from voting rights advocates — who labeled it as voter suppression, particularly of the Black electorate, in the guise of tackling an election security problem that does not exist.
After Joe Biden became the first Democrat since 1992 to carry the state, although by a scant 12,000 votes, Donald Trump focused his campaign of lies about election fraud on Georgia more than any other place. Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both fellow Republicans, said unequivocally that three different tallies revealed no suggestion of widespread cheating. The district attorney in Atlanta is now investigating Trump's efforts to subvert the state's result.
Still, many of Trump's allies at the state capital continue to profess skepticism about Georgia's voting systems — particularly about the integrity of absentee voting. Georgians who voted by mail shattered records because of the pandemic and accounted for more than a quarter of all ballots cast for president in November and almost a quarter cast in the twin Senate runoffs in January, won by Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to give Georgia two Democratic senators for the first time in 15 years.
These Republicans maintain the rules for obtaining and returning envelopes made it too easy for illegitimate votes to get cast. (To be sure, none of those GOP lawmakers have questioned the results of their own races.)
Their bill would require a driver's license number, state ID number or copy of a photo ID with each vote-by-mail application. It would cut off those submissions 11 days before each election. And it would prohibit the use of drop boxes excerpt inside early-voting locations.
Perhaps the most contentious proposal, though, is to end early voting on Sunday, which would smother the longstanding tradition of "souls to the polls," people in Black neighborhoods heading out to vote after church the weekend before the election.
The fate of the package is not as clear as it might at first appear, because the top two Republican legislative leaders have decided sweeping new voting restrictions would not be good politics. House Speaker David Ralston and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who presides over the Senate, have both announced they will not support any bill that curtails eligibility to vote by mail. Duncan has also taken committee chairmanships away from two Republicans who planned to push sharp restrictions in the Senate, making it tougher to get such bills through that chamber.
Instead, three modest bills were approved Monday by Senate committees. One would compel local officials to continue tabulating ballots until their work is done -- not take any breaks on election night, which happened in several major urban and suburban counties in November and gave rise to a host of conspiracy theories. Another would allow for a special kind of grand jury to investigate election crimes. A third would limit the use of the sorts of mobile polling stations that helped drive up turnout in Atlanta last fall.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.