The hours-long lines that confronted hundreds of thousands of Texans on Super Tuesday are sure to be even worse in November unless the state's new ban on straight-ticket voting is reversed, Democrats maintain in the fifth voting rights lawsuit they've filed in the state in recent months.
Permitting voters to make a single choice on the ballot, in favor of all the candidates of their political party, has been a feature of Texas elections for a century and was the way two-thirds of the state's voters, 5.6 million of them, cast ballots in the 2018 midterm. But the Republican Legislature has voted to eliminate that option starting this fall.
Doing so will "unjustifiably and discriminatorily burden Texans' fundamental right to vote" in an election where historic turnout is anticipated," the lawsuit argues. "Texas has recklessly created a recipe for disaster at the polls."
The second most populous state has been reliably red for the past quarter-century, but Republicans are aware that grip is loosening because rapid population growth is almost entirely in cities, white-collar suburbs, and Latino and African-American communities. Democrats believe that, if their turnout is enormous enough this fall, they have shots at securing Texas' 38 electoral votes, upsetting Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn's bid for re-election and picking up as many as six House seats.
Although Tuesday's turnout exceeded the 2016 Democratic primary, Texas historically has had some of the lowest voting participation rates in the country — just 51 percent four years ago, for example, when the national turnout was 60 percent.
And reversing that trend will be much less likely, Democrats say, if voters this fall are required to mark choices in several dozen partisan contests that will be on the ballots in some places — not just for president and Congress but also for state legislative, county government and judicial positions.
Democratic voters were picking nominees for all those jobs on Tuesday, not just making a presidential choice. That was one reason the lines moved slowly statewide. But a much bigger problem was the shortages of election workers and equipment, and problems with the voting systems, that created wait times as long as six hours to vote in all five of the state's biggest urban counties.
The new lawsuit, filed in federal court in Laredo, says that an end to straight-ticket voting would violate the Voting Rights Actand be an unconstitutional denial of free speech and equal protection rights to voters who will inevitably be dissuaded by such excessive wait times from casting ballots starting Nov. 3.
"We remain confident that Texas voting laws are in full compliance with the Constitution and all voters have equal opportunity to vote for the candidate of their choice," the Texas attorney general's office, led by Republican Ken Paxton, said in response.
The Democrats' legal claim is a novel approach to preserving an election option that's been fading steadily in recent years. Just seven states are sure to have straight-ticket voting this year: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Six have done away with the practice in the past decade, most recently Pennsylvania last fall.
Republicans have led the criticism of the system. They say it makes the electorate less engaged, punishes lesser-known candidates and gives too much power to partisan organizers. Democrats and most good-government groups disagree and point to research showing straight-party voting boosts turnout.
The plaintiffs in the new suit — the state Democratic Party and the national House and Senate Democratic campaign committees — have also sued Texas in the past year for ending the use of mobile voting sites for early voting, prohibiting electronic signatures on registration forms, complicating the process for registering while getting a driver's license and requiring that the political party of the governor (always a Republican since 1995) be listed first on all ballots.
It's the most aggressive vein of the Democrats' expansive courthouse campaign to make it easier to vote in bellwether states this fall. The party has committed more than $10 million to pressing more than two-dozen suits, promoting the Republican Party to promise it will spend comparablyto defend the voting laws at issue.
"Texas is the center of our battlefield and we will not stop taking on the obstacles Republicans put in place to shrink the electorate as they attempt to cling to power," said Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
"I wish I could say that the hard work is done in fighting voter suppression for 2020. However, in many ways, the fight has just begun," said the attorney coordinating the party's effort, Marc Elias. "State legislatures are considering new voting laws that will suppress the vote. And, in many states, election officials are implementing other creative ways to block people from voting."
Attorneys from the Texas Civil Rights Project, meanwhile, pressed the state Thursday to spend generously in the next seven months to assure there are more machines in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin and that the voters there are encouraged by the state to cast ballots in the fall.
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.