The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that states may require presidential electors to cast their ballots for the candidate chosen by popular vote.
The decision, written by Justice Elena Kagan, appears to end the quixotic pursuit of a legal endorsement for "faithless electors" — Electoral College delegates who want to follow their own conscience instead of the voters' wishes.
By clearly rejecting the idea that electors can vote however they want, the ruling removes one strategy that opponents of President Trump attempted to use in 2016 and may have wanted to employ again if Trump were reelected this fall.
Kagan concluded that the electors have "no ground for reversing the vote of millions of its citizens."
"That direction accords with the Constitution — as well as with the trust of a nation that here, We the People rule," she concludes.
Kagan's opinion, which includes references to the TV show "Veep" and the smash-hit Broadway musical "Hamilton," was joined by all of the justices except Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
The two endorsed the outcome of the ruling but disagreed with Kagan's reasoning that the prohibition on electors going their own way was based on the Constitution.
Instead, they say the matter is not clear in the Constitution and therefore is left to the states.
The case emerged from the state of Washington, where three Democratic electors pledged by state law to support Hillary Clinton in 2016 decided to cast their ballots for someone else. The three hoped to convince others to follow their example, particularly those in states won by Trump. Their goal was to deprive him of a majority of electors and throw the election into the House. The electors voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, but they were replaced and fined $1,000 each.
The electors issued legal challenges but lost in district court and state Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled the opposite way in a case involving a faithless elector in Colorado. That court said the Constitution gave electors some discretion in casting their votes.
The Supreme Court took up the case to resolve the conflict.
Paul Smith, vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, said the ruling was correct because it eliminates the danger that a candidate could buy an election.
"If electors had been turned loose to violate state law and ignore state's voters, they would have been free to accept contributions from wealthy special interests who want to influence our politics," Smith wrote.
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.