Wisconsinites with ballots sitting on their kitchen tables have received the same message now from two of Washington's most influential institutions, the Supreme Court and the Postal Service: Complete them and get them in the mail right away. As in, Tuesday.
USPS long ago set this day as the best-practices cutoff for mailing an absentee ballot with confidence it would arrive by Election Day. The warning took on special urgency Monday in one of the top presidential battlegrounds, when the high court voted 5-3 against Wisconsin accepting any mailed ballots arriving after the polls close a week from now.
The decision was the last in an election law dispute before Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed and sworn in Monday night. She can now participate in the appeals of ballot receipt extensions in two other tossups, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Wisconsin estimates that, while 1.1 million people have already voted by mail, 670,000 more packets have been delivered but not returned. Those people can now hope for decent mail service or go vote in person. Their number is 30 times more than President Trump's margin in carrying the state's 10 electoral votes four years ago. Former Vice President Joe Biden has a narrow polling lead now.
A federal judge last month ordered Wisconsin to count ballots delayed in the mail as long as six days so long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3, describing that as a reasonable accommodation while the coronavirus has made logistics difficult for both the electorate and the post office.
The Supreme Court put a stop to that order at the request of Republicans, with the justices named by GOP presidents in the majority and those named by Democrats in dissent.
"We're dialing up a huge voter education campaign," state Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler said on Twitter after the decision was announced..
Just a few minutes after the ruling came out, Trump pressed anew his almost entirely fact-free assault on the integrity of an election that will be more reliant on mailed votes than ever before.
"Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd," he tweeted without any evidence — and overlooking the fact that many states have already said that counting close contests will take several days. (Twitter labeled the post "disputed," saying it "might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process.")
Justice Brett Kavanbaugh, put on the bench by Trump two years ago, used his Monday opinion to offer a sort of buttoned-up echo of what the president has been hammering at.
"States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election," he wrote. "States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter."
If they are similarly successful, the next two GOP appeals to the high court would help Trump get some of the certainty he says he wants next week.
The law in North Carolina, with 15 electoral votes, already says ballots are valid if they arrive three days late, but the party is hoping to block an additional six-day extension ordered by the state Board of Elections and backed by a federal appeals court last week.
Also last week, the Supreme Court itself allowed Pennsylvania (with 20 electoral votes) to keep a three-day extension ordered by the state's top court, because the justices deadlocked 4-4 on whether to block it. Barett's vote would tip the scales in the fresh appeal.
In that case, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's liberals — which he did not do Monday. In a brief opinion, he said the Pennsylvania extension was decided by state courts citing state law while the Wisconsin extension was decreed by a federal judge applying federal law, which the court has said several times this year should happen sparingly in disputes shaping election rules.
"No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in reiterating that view Monday. "But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people's representatives have adopted."
The court's first ruling in a 2020 elections procedure case concerned voting by mail in Wisconsin's April primary, during the first Covid-19 surge. The justices rejected a postmark extension ordered by a lower court but did not touch a similar six-day extension for the arrival of ballots — mainly because the appeal did not seek to reverse that part of the judge's ruling. As a result, about 80,000 ballots (or 5 percent of the total) were tabulated even though they arrived after primary day.
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.