Early in-person voting can begin in Texas earlier than usual next week, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, greenlighting the singular significant move by the state to make its election easier in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The justices rebuffed several top Republicans who sued to keep the polling places closed for another six days beyond Tuesday. They were furious that Gov. Greg Abbott, who's also Republican, issued an executive order this summer adding those days to the election calendar, arguing he'd violated a state law that voting in person could not start until Oct. 19.
Since voting by mail remains more restrictive in Texas than any other battleground state, and since there's no more "one punch" option for quickly casting a straight-party ballot, long lines at the polls are nearly assured. The added earlier days were designed to hold down the Election Day crowds in the nation's second most populous state, where the 38 electoral votes could fall either way and so could half a dozen congressional contests.
The suit was filed by state GOP Chairman Allen West, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and several members of the Legislature.
But the state's highest civil court, where Republicans hold all the seats, ruled 7-1 that the plaintiffs waited too late to sue and noted the election has already started because people are returning their absentee ballots. "To disrupt the long-planned election procedures as relators would have us do would threaten voter confusion," Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote for the majority.
But at the same time Wednesday, the same court as expected put the final nail in an effort by Harris County, the state's largest and a Democratic stronghold, to send unsolicited mail ballot applications to all of Houston's 2 million voters. State law does not leave any room for such a move, the justices ruled. (Mail voting in Texas is generally limited to those older than 64, the disabled and people out of town for the entire election season. But more than 200,000 applications have already been filed, double the county's usual total)
Harris is spending $27 million to expand voting access, including by tripling the number of early polling places and keeping seven of them open for all 24 hours of Oct. 29, the final day for early voting.
Last week Abbott reversed himself on another election easement he'd made and said there could be only one drop box for returning absentee ballots in each county — the six with more than a million people, the six bigger than 1,500 square miles and the other 242 as well. Lawsuits challenging that move had been filed in federal and state courts.
Democrats and voting rights groups have unsuccessfully pressed to ease voting on several other fronts — most prominently by allowing Texans to vote by mail by claiming fear of Covid-19 exposure as a reason, and by blocking the state law that ended straight-ticket voting. The latter move means more time at not-always socially distanced polling places.
While many counties have promised solid safety precautions at the polls, including plenty of sanitizer and mandated six-foot gaps between voters and poll workers alike, masks are encouraged but not required at polling places — one of the few exemptions in Abbott's statewide mask order.
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.