ReportWire

Tag: ballot initiatives

  • Arizonans Asked to Block Themselves From Voting on Abortion

    Arizonans Asked to Block Themselves From Voting on Abortion

    [ad_1]

    Anti-abortion activists only favor votes on the subject if it promotes their point of view.
    Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/The Republic/USA Today Networks

    Throughout the 49 years during which Roe v. Wade set abortion policy in this country, one of the mantras of the anti-abortion movement was “Let the people decide!” “Unelected federal judges,” we were told, had usurped the right of the public to determine the laws governing reproductive rights via the instruments of state politics and government, as they had done before Roe was handed down in 1973.

    Well, the U.S. Supreme Court did reverse Roe in 2022, and wherever they had the power, anti-abortion Republicans enacted the most thorough abortion restrictions they could impose in any given state. There was, however, a strong popular backlash to these new laws, even in strongly Republican states. Where it was possible to roll them back or prevent their enactment by passing or rejecting ballot initiatives, the pro-choice popular majority won again and again, in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Ohio.

    So as the 2024 election approaches, efforts are underway to place abortion policy on the ballot in a host of states (including Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Dakota). Democrats are hoping to galvanize general-election turnout, and anti-abortion activists have been looking high or low for ways to make that harder. In Ohio, the Republican legislature tried but failed to create supermajority requirements for ballot initiatives changing state constitutions. In Florida, the Republican attorney general is seeking to stop a ballot initiative on grounds of allegedly deceptive wording.

    In Arizona, however, anti-abortion activists battling an effort to put a pro-choice constitutional amendment on the November ballot are trying a more direct method: convincing voters they should not sign petitions enabling the ballot initiative because they should not decide abortion policy. Politico explains this “decline to sign” campaign, spearheaded by the hard-core anti-abortion group Students for Life:

    The activists are deploying everywhere signatures are gathered — making their case at festivals, libraries, big box parking lots and coffee shops across Arizona. Some are simply trying to reach voters with an anti-abortion message before the other side does. Others are turning to more confrontational methods: tracking the locations of signature-gatherers on a private Telegram channel, filming them, interrupting their work, and calling security to get them removed from high-traffic spots around town.

    “We will make sure no one will get approached to sign without hearing the other side of the story,” said Chanel Prunier, who leads Students for Life’s electoral advocacy arm. She called her decline-to-sign volunteers going door-to-door across the state the “ground troops” of the anti-abortion movement.

    To some extent, these “ground troops” are promoting misinformation about the implications of the proposed amendment, arguing that it guarantees the right to an “abortion up until birth.” In fact, the initiative would simply restore the Roe standard of a right to choose prior to fetal viability, with post-viability abortions only protected in cases of a threat to the life or health of the pregnant woman. But the “up until birth” argument is key to the more general claim of anti-abortion activists that their opponents are the real “extremists” on this issue.

    The underlying argument, of course, is that voters shouldn’t be voting on abortion policy at all, at least where they might relax rather than increase restrictions. Politico quoted this line from a “decline to sign” protester standing near booths set up to secure ballot-initiative signatures:

    “There are things that shouldn’t be voted on,” Jacob Minic, one of the demonstrators, told POLITICO. “When it comes to extreme moral issues like this one, I don’t think it should be on the ballot.”

    It’s very much a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to the issue: “The people” should be able to ban abortions but not protect them. This is, of course, in line with the anti-abortion movement’s fundamental values beneath all the rhetoric. They oppose abortion on biological, ontological, or religious grounds that have nothing to do with public opinion or democracy. Given a chance, they would embed constitutional protections for the fetus even stronger than the reproductive rights overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. So they’re not at all daunted by the clear pro-choice majority that has emerged since abortion policy was turned over to the states — even in many red states. Whatever it takes to use the power of government to force each and every pregnancy to full term, they’re for it, even if that involves more than a bit of deception. We should all get used to it.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

    How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

    [ad_1]

    Ask anyone what Mehmet Oz said about reproductive rights during last month’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, and they’ll probably tell you that the TV doctor believes an abortion should be between “a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders.” The truth is, that dystopian Handmaid’s Tale–esque statement did not come verbatim from the Republican’s mouth. But it may have cost him the election anyway.

    Instead, that catchphrase entered Pennsylvania voters’ consciousness—and ricocheted across social media—via a tweet by Pat Dennis, a Democratic opposition researcher. Dennis’s megaviral post included a clip purporting to show Oz pitching something akin to a pregnancy tribunal. But the clip was, well, clipped: In the 10-second video, Oz does not even say the word abortion. Did it matter? Not in the least. Here was Oz’s fuller, unedited response to the question:

    There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I’ve been in the room when there’s some difficult conversations happening. I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.

    Although that by no means utterly rebuts Dennis’s three-clause summary, it is different. Of course, voters zeroed in on—and recoiled from—the pithier version. Oz failed to shake his association with the thorny abortion hypothetical, much as he failed to shake the long-running joke that he actually lives in New Jersey. Abortion decided this race, and Oz was on the wrong side of history.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    In red and blue states alike, reproductive autonomy proved a defining issue of the 2022 midterms. Although much pre-election punditry predicted that Pennsylvania Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s post-stroke verbal disfluency was poised to “blow up” the pivotal Senate race on Election Day, the exit polls suggest that abortion seismically affected contests up and down the ballot.

    Concerns over the future of reproductive rights unequivocally drove Democratic turnout and will now lead to the rewriting of state laws around the country. In deep-red Kentucky, voters rejected an amendment that read, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” In blue havens such as California and Vermont, voters approved ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights into their state constitutions.

    In Michigan, a traditionally blue state that in recent years has turned more purple, voters likewise enshrined reproductive protections into law, with 45 percent of exit-poll respondents calling abortion the most important issue on the ballot. In the race for the Michigan statehouse, the incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, trounced her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, who had said that she supports abortion only in instances that would save the life of the woman, and never in the case of rape or incest. Dixon lost by more than 10 percentage points and almost half a million votes.

    After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the federal right to abortion in June, many observers wondered whether pro-abortion-rights Democrats would remain paralyzed with despair or whether their anger would become a galvanizing force going into the election season. The answer is now clear—though, in fact, it has been for some time.

    Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

    In August, just six weeks after Dobbs, Kansas voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution that could have ushered in a ban on abortion. That grassroots-movement defeat of the ballot initiative was a genuine shocker—and it showed voters in other states what was possible at the local level.

    Nowhere in the midterms voting did abortion seem to matter more than in Pennsylvania. Oz, like his endorser, former President Donald Trump, spent years as a Northeast cosmopolitan before he tried, and failed, to remake himself as a paint-by-numbers conservative. That meant preaching a party-line stance during the most contentious national conversation about abortion in half a century. It came back to haunt him.

    At the October debate, Fetterman was mocked for (among other things) his simplistic, repetitive invocation of supporting Roe v. Wade. Even when asked by moderators to answer an abortion question in more detail, he simply kept coming back to the phrase. Whatever it lacked in nuance, Fetterman’s allegiance to his pro-abortion-rights position was impossible to misconstrue. This was an abortion election, and voters knew exactly where he stood.

    [ad_2]

    John Hendrickson

    Source link