About three quarters of states have finished drawing their new congressional maps for the coming decade. As more states conclude the process, courtroom wrangling over partisan gerrymandering is heating up.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court settled on a new congressional map on Wednesday, avoiding a potentially fascinating call for at-large elections. And recent legal maneuvering in Alabama and Arkansas indicates partisans believe there is still advantage to be gained through the courts regardless of how mapmakers complete their assignments.
Pennsylvania’s congressional primary is set for May 17. Alabama and Arkansas are both scheduled to hold primaries on May 24.
Alabama
Perhaps the most important case involves the new congressional map in Alabama, which the Supreme Court will consider in the fall.
A lower court ruled in January that the map signed into law in November 2021 violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voice of Black voters. The new district lines, drawn by Republican legislators and approved by a Republican governor, include one majority-Black district, even though Black people represent 27 percent of the state’s population, a slight increase from the 2020 census.
The district court ordered new maps to be drawn but Alabama’s attorney general appealed the ruling, and the Supreme Court announced it would hear oral arguments in October. In agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court also directed the state to proceed with its elections using the approved maps.
“The stay order is not a ruling on the merits, but instead simply stays the District Court’s injunction pending a ruling on the merits,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote.
Alabama’s congressional map was included in a list of a dozen “ extreme gerrymanders ” produced by the cross-partisan democracy reform organization Issue One.
“In 2020, then-President Donald Trump carried Alabama by 25.4 percentage points — winning 62% of the vote compared to Joe Biden’s 36.6%. Yet experts predict that Republicans will likely control 86% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives under the new map passed in the state legislature by Alabama Republicans without any support from Alabama Democrats,” the report states.
Arkansas
Advocates for tossing out the new state House map in Arkansas suffered a setback on Tuesday, when a federal judge dismissed their case.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky ruled that the plaintiffs —the Arkansas Public Policy Panel and the Arkansas State Conference NAACP — had no standing to bring the case once the Justice Department decided not to get involved, reports NPR’s Little Rock affiliate.
According to the two groups, Arkansas mapmakers should have created 16 majority-Black districts (out of 100), rather than the 11 they approved. Nearly 17 percent of the Arkansas population is Black.
Pennsylvania
The most unusual move of the week occurred in Pennsylvania, where a group of Republicans asked the state Supreme Court on Monday to refrain from picking a congressional map. Instead, they want all of Pennsylvania’s U.S. House members chosen in an at-large election. However, the state Supreme Court set that argument aside and picked a map on Wednesday.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, vetoed the congressional map approved by the Republican legislators. That action moved the battle to a state court that was tasked with recommending a final map to the state Supreme Court. The lower court recommended the GOP map to the top court, which is dominated by Democrats.
And the Supreme Court picked a proposal, known as the Carter map, that is favored by Democratic plaintiffs but also beneficial to Republicans, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The selected map appears to be an acceptable compromise in a field where outside groups were also able to offer proposals.
“While we are disappointed that our proposed map was not selected, we believe that the Carter plan successfully holds most of the state’s communities of interest together, includes reasonably compact districts, and likely will produce a congressional delegation roughly in line with the preferences of voters across the state,” said Ben Geffen, an attorney representing a group of voters.
The lawsuit, brought by five Republicans (including two congressional candidates and a county commissioner), had argued the U.S. Constitution bars state courts from getting involved in congressional elections. They point to the elections clause, which empowers legislatures, not the courts.
According to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, the plaintiffs believe that because the state is losing a congressional seat, a federal law requires Pennsylvania to conduct an at-large election in which all candidates would appear on every voter’s ballot.
That law states that when a state loses a U.S. House seat, “Until a State is redistricted in the manner provided by the law … [members of the House] shall be elected from the State at large.”
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.