The Supreme Court for the first time on Thursday came down on the side of relaxing a burden on voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
But the justices made clear their decision — which will allow Rhode Islanders to vote absentee without a witness this fall — was a purposeful exception to their reasoning in an unbroken string of seven rulings since the spring, each of which has kept the exercise of democracy difficult in the face of a public health crisis.
Unlike the other cases, where a state was fighting easements to its rules, Rhode Island officials had already agreed to settle a lawsuit by relaxing its unusually strict mail-in requirements for the September primary and general election. That left the Republican Party, which sued to reverse the deal on the grounds it would promote election cheating, no legal leg to stand on, the court said.
Unlike "similar cases where a state defends its own law, here the state election officials support the challenged decree, and no state official has expressed opposition," the court's unsigned order said. "Under these circumstances, the applicants lack a cognizable interest in the state's ability to enforce its duly enacted laws."
Three of the most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — said they would have granted the GOP's appeal.
Rhode Island requires voters mailing their ballots to sign them in front of two witnesses or a notary public, verification requirements matched in difficulty by only a handful of other states.
Gov. Gina Raimondo suspended the requirement for the June presidential primary, saying it would wrongly make people risk infection with Covid-19 in order to vote. When her fellow Democrats in charge of the General Assembly deadlocked on a bill keeping the suspension going for the year, a suit to make it so was filed in federal court by Common Cause, the ACLU and the League of Women Voters.
State officials agreed not to enforce the witness requirement in a consent decree finalized two weeks ago. That was when the GOP went to court, echoing President Trump's arguments about permissive mail voting being an invitation to fraud and asserting the change should have been produced by legislators instead of a lawsuit.
"Voters should never have to choose between their health and their right to vote. Democracy was upheld by today's decision," said the head of LWV in Rhode Island, Jane Koster. "Witness and notary requirements do nothing to improve the security of our elections, and now voters can cast their ballots free from the burden of fulfilling these requirements during a deadly pandemic."
One state with an almost identical mail-in verification rule is Alabama. In one of the earlier election cases this year, the Supreme Court did what the state government in Montgomery wanted and refused to consider an appeal arguing those witness requirements were excessively burdensome.
The other rulings from the high court have preserved the timetable for the Wisconsin primary during the initial peak of the pandemic, upheld strict excuse requirements for casting a mail vote in Texas, delayed the restoration of felon voting rights in Florida and preserved signature gathering rules for ballot measures in Oregon, Utah and Ohio.
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.