One month from North Carolina's potentially pivotal primary, the battle over making voters abide by one of the country's strictest photo ID laws is not close to done.
Last week lawyers for both the NAACP and the state urged a federal judge to hold fast to her decision to block the law from being implemented March 3, when the state's 110 Democratic delegates are the third-biggest prize on what's dubbed Super Tuesday. Lifting it so close to the balloting would cause chaos and confusion for voters, attorneys generally on opposite sides of voting rights issues in the state agreed.
The fight over the law has emerged as one of the premier voting rights cases in the country ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Their briefs, filed Friday, came in response to a last-minute effort by top Republicans in charge of the General Assembly to persuade U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs to change her mind in time for the primary. In December she blocked the voter ID law from taking effect at least until after a trial to decide the statute's ultimate fate.
North Carolina voters approved a ballot measure in 2018 requiring voters to produce an ID when they cast their ballots. The GOP-controlled Legislature passed a bill the next month to implement the ballot measure. It was vetoed by the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, but the Legislature overrode him. Civil rights groups quickly filed suit, arguing the law disproportionately harms African-American voters.
North Carolina "has a sordid history of racial discrimination and voter suppression stretching back to the time of slavery, through the era of Jim Crow, and, crucially, continuing up to the present day," the judge said in putting a halt to the law.
Following Biggs' injunction, Republican state in the state House and Senate filed a motion with the court, requesting that the injunction be lifted ahead of the primary. North Carolina is among 16 states and territories where Democrats will declare their presidential favorite on March 3. Only California and Texas offer more delegates.
On Friday, lawyers from the state attorney general's office responded, saying such a move would be reckless, seeing as hundreds of absentee ballots have already been returned by voters, and those ballots would be subject to provisions of the proposed photo ID mandate. Early voting also begins next week.
The State Board of Elections "has taken a number of specific measures to comply with the court's order, and it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and confusing to the public, to unwind many of these actions in an orderly way if the order were stayed," the state's lawyers said.
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.