Disabled voters have suffered one of their biggest recent setbacks at the Supreme Court.
The court Wednesday night upheld Alabama's fresh prohibition on curbside voting, which the state's two biggest cities wanted to offer to accommodate people with disabilities or at high risk of serious problems if infected with Covid-19.
The 5-3 decision, with the three liberal justices dissenting, was not only a defeat for the cause of rules protecting the franchise for minority groups. It was also a sign that other election-smoothing moves in response to the pandemic will face rough going if they reach the Supreme Court, especially if ordered by federal judges.
"I am not at all surprised by this ruling," Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, wrote on his blog after the brief and unsigned order was issued. "It is clear that the conservative justices believe that it is up to states, rather than federal courts, to decide how to best balance health concerns related to voting during the pandemic with burdens on voting rights."
The next election case on the court's docket is an effort by Democrats and voting rights groups to revive a deadline extension for absentee ballots to arrive in battleground Wisconsin, which a federal trial judge ordered but an appeals panel stopped.
But a handful of other matters affecting how many people get to vote — as well as the speed and accuracy of the results — could get to the justices in the dozen days before the balloting stops Nov. 3, or as soon as the tabulating is close and the parties start fighting about which votes should be tossed.
Alabama will almost certainly not be part of that fight. President Trump carried the state's 9 electoral votes by a 2-1 margin last time and is assured of extending the GOP nominees' streak in the state to 11 elections. And Doug Jones is the only Democratic senator who's become a clear re-election underdog this fall.
But the high court's decision has ramifications beyond the state, because it amounts to a rebuke for the one in five Americans who say they have a physical disability. Fewer than half of them vote in most elections, in part because they describe the mechanics of the process as too often too difficult.
The ruling supports "unconscionable voter suppression and potentially genocide, not to mention illegal discrimination," said Valerie Novack, who focuses on the rights of the disabled at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. "It is a blatant form of ableism and disregard for more than 20 percent of the population with a disability."
In the past two elections, several counties in Alabama had curbside voting — allowing people to vote from their cars outside polling places and hand their ballots to poll workers. But when county officials in Birmingham and Montgomery announced a repeat for the primary this year, GOP Secretary of State John Merrill told them they could not.
Several disabled and high-risk people sued, and federal Judge Abdul Kallon in May ruled the restriction violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. A divided 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his ruling, and Merrill asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
"Some level of risk is inherent in life and in voting, pandemic or no," his brief said.
Curbside voting has been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic, and the Justice Department has endorsed it as a way to prevent violations of the ADA.
Dissenting from the high court's action were Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor wrote a dissent for the group arguing that in-person voting is considerably easier for the disabled than voting by mail in Alabama — because poll workers can offer help and there are no witness or photo ID requirements like there are for absentee ballots.
But it is illegally discriminatory this year, she said, to make vulnerable voters "wait inside, for as long as it takes, in a crowd of fellow voters whom Alabama does not require to wear face coverings."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.