Many of the most severe restrictions on voting in Wisconsin may remain on the books, a federal appeals court has decided, concluding a nine-year partisan battle in time to shape the presidential election in one of the most hotly contested battleground states.
The unanimous decision Monday also likely reduces the chances of success for a wave of fresh lawsuits, filed surrounding the state's nationally notorious April primary. Plaintiffs hope to ease the path to the November polls in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
The sweeping and multifaceted ruling from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upholds laws restricting early in-person voting, requiring Wisconsinites to live in their neighborhood for a month before voting, and prohibiting the use of email or faxes to deliver absentee ballots.
The three-judge panel concluded none of those rules pose an undue burden, especially because voters still benefit from more liberal absentee ballot regulations and registration rules, and longer poll openings on Election Day, than in most states.
"Wisconsin has lots of rules that make voting easier," Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote. "These facts matter when assessing challenges to a handful of rules that make voting harder."
The decision itself made access to the voting booth easier in two ways. It said expired school IDs must be acceptable proof of identity for college students and upheld rules permitting people to vote without an ID after signing an affidavit saying they tried to get one. The court also struck down a requirement that universities provide citizenship information about dorm residents who are registered to vote, saying that violates federal student privacy law.
The election laws were significantly tightened by Republicans after they secured control of both the Legislature and the governor's mansion in 2011. They set new photo ID requirements for voting, banned the faxing or emailing absentee ballots except to Wisconsinites overseas, shrunk the calendar for in-person early voting to 12 days from 30, ended early voting on weekends, limited early voting to one location in every municipality and lengthened the residency requirement before voting to 28 days instead of 10.
The decision was the outgrowth of lawsuits pursued soon after by Democrats and voting rights groups. They had scored decisive victories in the trial courts, with one judge tossing out many of the laws four years ago as unconstitutionally crafted to curb the ability of racial minorities to vote.
The appeals panel, all of them put on the bench by GOP presidents, disagreed — concluding that gaining partisan advantage in elections was the permissible motive.
"This record does not support a conclusion that the legislators who voted for the contested statutes cared about race; they cared about voters' political preferences," the opinion concluded. "If one party can make changes that it believes help its candidates, the other can restore the original rules or revise the new ones."
Republicans hailed the decision, asserting the laws would help safeguard against election fraud. President Trump claims, without evidence, that is a main impediment to his re-election, but nothing beyond sporadic and isolated rule-breaking has been identified in Wisconsin.
Democrats railed against the ruling. It is an "egregious assault on voting rights," state party Chairman Ben Wikler said. "Trump knows his path to victory involves suppressing the vote as much as possible, and as we saw on April 7 when Republicans forced thousands of people to vote in-person during a pandemic, there is no low they aren't willing to stoop to to grab power."
The Supreme Court has signaled strongly it is not eager to referee disputes over states' voting rules within four months of a national election. That means the rationales of Monday's decision will shape the outcome of suits challenging Wisconsin's rules as improper during Covid-19 — filed in a flurry both before and after the primary, when last-minute court decisions compelled thousands to don masks and stand in long lines during a surge of cases.
Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in some recent statewide polling. He carried Wisconsin last time by just 23,000 votes (eight tenths of a point), the first Republican to secure its 10 electoral votes since Ronald Reagan 32 years earlier.
Statewide turnout in 2016, when some of the laws were on hold because of the court challenges, was 69 percent of eligible voters, fifth-highest in the country.
And when the delay during the appeal continued in 2018, Democrats in charge of the two biggest cities, Madison and Milwaukee, expanded early voting hours and locations and their candidates ended up winning every statewide office.
The case had been in an unexplained limbo since the 7th Circuit heard oral arguments three years ago. It was the oldest unresolved case on the docket of the Chicago-based court before Monday.
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.