A newly bipartisan group of Wisconsin legislators is pushing a bill to get politicians out of the business of drawing the state's electoral maps. It's the first such concerted move in a state capital since the Supreme Court last month gave a constitutional green light to unlimited partisan gerrymandering.
The effort still faces long odds in Madison, where Republicans have a solid hold on the Legislature thanks to their aggressive drawing of boundaries after the last census.
Their maps allowed the GOP to maintain a lopsided 63-36 majority in the state House in last year's election, and a 19-14 edge in the state Senate, even though Democrats won 53 percent of the cumulative legislative vote statewide.
A federal lawsuit — in which Democrats challenged those maps as unconstitutionally limiting their free speech and equal protection rights — was effectively killed by the Supreme Court's ruling in June that federal courts have no power to police political power plays in districting.
The decision leaves that power to voter referenda, state legislatures such as Wisconsin's or state courts like the one now considering a challenge to North Carolina's map under the state constitution.
Before that decision, a pair of senior Democrats in Wisconsin had introduced a measure that would have turned the coming round of state legislative cartography, after next year's census, over to civil servants under the oversight of a commission without any partisan majority. At a news conference Tuesday, they announced the support of three GOP assemblymen who represent competitive districts.
"We can no longer count on anyone else to do it for us. If we want fair and competitive elections, we must all do the work," state Sen. Dave Hansen said. "We now have what we truly can call a bipartisan bill. The time is right. The time is now."
But the GOP Assembly speaker, Robin Vos, vowed to oppose any effort to hand over legislative mapmaking to "an unelected, unaccountable board of bureaucrats appointed by politicians."
The current boundaries, which Scott Walker approved as a new GOP governor eight years ago, packed Democratic voters into a relatively few state legislative districts in Milwaukee and Madison in order to minimize their influence across the suburbs and rural areas.
The congressional map was similarly drawn, and so the GOP has regularly won in five of the eight districts — including last fall, when the party got just 45 percent of the statewide vote for House candidates.
Walker is now in charge of a group coordinating the Republican efforts to maximize their congressional and state legislative power in maps drawn for the next decade.
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.