The Wisconsin Supreme Court will be the next player in the high-stakes game of legal pingpong over the future of 209,000 names on the registration rolls.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which has been fighting since last fall to get those people stricken from the roster of eligible voters, is asking the state's highest court this week to reverse an appeals court ruling from last week that said there should be no such removal.
The dispute is the most intense voter purge fight now underway in an undeniable presidential battleground. Donald Trump's margin of victory in the state was less than 23,000 last time — or about one-ninth the number of voters now in dispute, most of whom are identified with addresses in Democratic precincts. And Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes are central to the strategies of both parties this fall.
"Wisconsin deserves clean elections in 2020," Rick Esenberg, the president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said in announcing the appeal.
"I think that this decision is a win not only for the voters who were close to being purged, but also for democracy," said Josh Kaul, the state's Democratic attorney general.
A decision by the state Supreme Court not to get involved (it's bypassed opportunities to intervene so far) would be a decisive win for voting rights advocates. But if the justices decide to hear the case, and end up reversing the 4th District Court of Appeals to decree that the names should get dropped, the voters will put their hopes in a separate lawsuit being pressed on their behalf in federal court by the League of Women Voters.
The dispute got started last fall after 209,000 registered voters were flagged by a computer algorithm as having changed their residences. The state Board of Elections, with an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, decided unanimously that — since such computer runs in the past had mistakenly tagged thousands of voters as having moved away — any purge should be delayed until after this November's election to allow any errors to be identified without disenfranchising people.
That's when the conservative legal foundation sued, arguing state law did not give the board that sort if discretion. The law requires deactivating the registrations of people who don't respond within a month to notices saying there is reliable information they have moved out of state.
A judge in Ozaukee County, a heavily Republican suburban area north of Milwaukee, ordered the voters immediately removed. When the state board deadlocked on how to respond, he ordered them fined and held in contempt.
On Friday, three judges on the appeals court unanimously took the opposite position — essentially ruling that state law leaves it up to local elections clerks to decide when to deactivate voters, and provides no role for the state elections board.
"In interpreting the Wisconsin Statutes, courts may not rewrite the plain language of the statutes the Legislature has enacted," the judges wrote. "Acceptance of the arguments of plaintiffs would cause us to rewrite statutes enacted by the Legislature, and that we cannot do."
The decision will allow for the thousands of voters to stay on the rolls for at least the next five weeks, when Democrats will award 84 delegates in the April 7 presidential primary.
And even if a voter has their registration deactivated, they may register again, even on Election Day when they show up at the polls, assuming they have the necessary proof of identity and residency.
The initial computer run produced a list of 234,000 inactive voters, but that number has been reduced about 10 percent by people who have proven their eligibility and residency.
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.