Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.
Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.
Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.
In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.
Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”
Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”
The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”
For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)
Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”
For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.
“With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism.
If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.
In other years, a rules tweak like this one might pass without much notice. But next week’s referendum has galvanized Democratic opposition inside and outside Ohio, turning what the GOP had hoped would be a sleepy summertime election into an expensive partisan proxy battle. Conservatives have argued that making the constitution harder to amend would protect Ohio from liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, tighten gun laws, and fight climate change. But the Republican-controlled legislature clearly timed this referendum to intercept a progressive march on one issue in particular: Ohioans will decide in November whether to make access to abortion a constitutional right, and the outcome of next week’s vote could mean the difference between victory and defeat for backers of abortion rights.
A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the back-to-back votes will also test whether abortion as an issue can still propel voters to the polls in support of Democratic candidates and causes. If the abortion-rights side wins next week and in November, Ohio would become the largest GOP-controlled state to enshrine abortion protections into law. The abortion-rights movement is trying to replicate the success it found last summer in another red state, Kansas, where voters decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion, presaging a midterm election in which Democrats performed better than expected in states where abortion rights were under threat.
To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.
“I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.
That Ohio Republicans would try a similar gambit so soon after the defeat their counterparts suffered in Kansas struck many Democrats as a sign of desperation. “The winds of change are blowing,” Celeste said in Toledo. “They’re afraid, and they should be afraid, because the people won’t tolerate it.”
The upcoming vote will serve as an important measure of strength for Ohio Democrats ahead of elections in the state next year that could determine control of Congress. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio. Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and 2020, and Republicans have won every statewide office except for that of Senator Sherrod Brown, who faces reelection next year. Still, there’s reason to believe Celeste is right to be optimistic. A Suffolk University poll released last week found that 57 percent of registered voters planned to vote against Issue 1. (A private survey commissioned by a nonpartisan group also found the August amendment losing, a Republican who had seen the results told me on the condition of anonymity.) Early-voting numbers have swamped predictions of low participation in an August election, suggesting that abortion remains a key motivator for getting people to turn out. Groups opposing the amendment have significantly outspent supporters of the change.
Abortion isn’t explicitly on the ballot in Ohio next week, but the clear linkage between this referendum and the one on reproductive rights in November has divided the Republican coalition. Although the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, backs Issue 1, the two living GOP former governors, Bob Taft and John Kasich, oppose it as an overreach by the legislature.
“That’s the giant cloud on this issue,” Steve Stivers, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, told me. The Chamber of Commerce backs the amendment because, as Stivers said, it’ll help stop “bad ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, marijuana legalization, and proposals supported by organized labor. But, he said, many of his members were worried that the group would be dragged into a fight over abortion, on which it wants to stay neutral: “The timing is not ideal.”
Democrats have highlighted comments from Republicans who have departed from the party’s official message and drawn a connection between the August referendum and the abortion vote this fall. “They’ve all said the quiet part out loud, which is this election is 100 percent about trying to prevent abortion rights from having a fair election in the fall,” the state Democratic chair, Liz Walters, told me.
But to broaden its coalition, opponents of the amendment have advanced a simpler argument—preserve “majority rule”—that also seems to be resonating with voters. “I’m in favor of democracy,” explained Ed Moritz, an 85-year-old retired college professor standing outside his home in Cleveland, when I asked him why he was planning to vote no. Once a national bellwether, Ohio has become close to a one-party state in recent years. For Democrats, citizen-led constitutional amendments represent one of the few remaining checks on a legislature dominated by Republicans. Moritz noted that the GOP had already gerrymandered the Ohio legislature by drawing maps to ensure its future majorities. “This,” he said, “is an attempt to gerrymander the entire population.”
To Frank LaRose, the suggestion that Issue 1 represents an assault on democracy is “hyperbole.” LaRose is Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and, of late, the public face of Issue 1. Traversing Ohio over the past few weeks, he’s used the suddenly high-profile campaign as a launching pad for his bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024.
LaRose, 44, served for eight years in the state Senate before becoming Ohio’s top elections officer in 2019. (He won a second term last year.) He’s a smooth debater and quick on his feet, but on the Issue 1 campaign, he’s not exactly exuding confidence.
In an interview, he began by rattling off a litany of complaints about the opposition’s messaging, which he called “intentionally misleading.” LaRose accused Issue 1’s opponents of trying to bamboozle conservative voters with literature showing images of the Constitution being cut to pieces and equating the amendment with “Stop the Steal.” “That’s completely off base,” he said. “We’ve had to compete with that and with a mountain of money that they’ve had, and with a pretty organized and intentional effort by the media on this.”
LaRose likes to remind people that even if voters approve Issue 1, citizens would still be able to pass, with a simple majority, ballot initiatives to create or repeal statutes in Ohio law. The August proposal applies only to the state constitution, which LaRose said is not designed for policy making. Left unsaid, however, is that unlike an amendment to the constitution, any statutory change approved by the voters could swiftly be reversed by the Republican majority in the legislature.
“Imagine if the U.S. Constitution changed every year,” he said. “What instability would that create? Well, that’s what’s at risk if we don’t pass Issue 1.” LaRose’s argument ignored the fact that Ohio’s rules for constitutional amendments have been in place for more than a century and, during that time, just 19 of the 77 changes proposed by citizen petitions have passed. (Many others generated by the legislature have won approval by the voters.)
LaRose has been spending a lot of his time explaining the amendment to confused voters, including Republicans. When I spoke with him last weekend, he had just finished addressing about two dozen people inside a cavernous 19th-century church in Steubenville. He described his stump speech as a “seventh-grade civics class” in which he explained the differences between the rarely amended federal Constitution and Ohio’s routinely amended founding document. The laws that Ohio could be saddled with if the voters reject Issue 1, LaRose warned, went far beyond abortion: “It’s every radical West Coast policy that they can think of that they want to bring to Ohio.”
The challenges LaRose has faced in selling voters on the proposal soon became apparent. When I asked a pair of women who had questioned LaRose during his speech whether he had persuaded them, one simply replied, “No.” Another frustrated attendee who supported the proposal told LaRose that she had encountered voters who didn’t understand the merits of the idea.
Republicans have had to spend more time than they’d like defending their claim that Issue 1 is not simply an effort to head off November’s abortion amendment. They have also found themselves playing catch-up on an election that they placed on the ballot. “They got out of the gate earlier than our side,” the state Republican Party chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me, referring to an early round of TV ads that opposition groups began running throughout the state.
The GOP’s struggle to sell its proposal to voters adds to the perception that the party, in placing the measure on the ballot, was acting not from a position of strength but of weakness. The thinly disguised effort to preempt a simple-majority vote on abortion is surely a concession by Republicans that they are losing on the issue even in what has become a reliably red state.
When I asked LaRose to respond to the concerns about abortion that Stivers reported from his members in the Chamber of Commerce, he lamented that it was another example of businesses succumbing to “cancel culture.”
Confidence can be dangerous for a Democrat in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the state twice, but in both 2016 and 2020, late polls showing a tight race were proved wrong by two eight-point Trump victories. A similar trajectory played out last year, when the Republican J. D. Vance pulled away from the Democrat Tim Ryan in the closing weeks to secure a seven-point victory in Ohio’s Senate race.
“Democrats in the state are beaten down,” says Matt Caffrey, the Columbus-based organizing director for Swing Left, a national group that steers party donors and volunteers to key races across the country. He’s seen the decline firsthand, telling me of the challenge Democrats have had in recruiting canvassers and engaging voters who have grown more discouraged with each defeat.
That began to change this summer, Caffrey told me. Volunteers have flocked to canvassing events in large numbers, some for the first time—a highly unusual occurrence for a midsummer special election, he said. At a canvass launch I attended in Akron over the weekend, more than three dozen people showed up, including several first-timers. As I followed Democratic canvassers there and in Cleveland over two days last week, not a single voter who answered their door was unaware of the election or undecided about how they’d vote. “It’s kind of an easy campaign,” Michael Todd, a canvasser with the group Ohio Citizen Action in Cleveland, told me. “Not a whole lot of convincing needs to be done.”
The response has prompted some Democrats to see the August election as an unexpected opportunity to reawaken a moribund state party. The referendum is a first for Swing Left, which has exclusively invested in candidate races since it formed after Trump’s victory in 2016. “It’s a great example of what we’re seeing across the country, which is the fight for reproductive freedom and the fight for democracy becoming closely attached,” the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, told me in Akron. “We also think it’s really important to build momentum in Ohio, a state that we need to keep investing in.”
A win next week would make the abortion referendum a heavy favorite to pass in November. And although Ohio is unlikely to regain its status as a presidential swing state in 2024, it could help determine control of Congress. Brown’s bid for a fourth term is expected to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and at least three Ohio districts could be up for grabs in the closely divided House.
For Democrats like Caffrey, the temptation to think bigger about a comeback in Ohio is tempered by the lingering uncertainty about next week’s outcome—whether the party will finally close out a victory in a state that has turned red, or confront another disappointment. “It would be hard for Democrats in Ohio to feel complacent. I wish we would be in a position to feel complacent,” Caffrey said with a smile. “This is more about building hope.”
The numbers: Two U.S. regional gauges of manufacturing sentiment showed signs in June that they may be improving after a rough patch, according to data released Thursday.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s manufacturing index slipped further to a reading of negative 13.7 in June from negative 10.4 in the prior month, but economists had expected a reading of negative 14.8, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of economists. This is the tenth straight negative reading.
MONTGOMERY — The Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission selected 21 licensees Monday for the exclusive rights to grow and distribute medical marijuana in the state.
With more than 90 applicants, the licenses were highly sought-after among companies looking to get in early on the medical marijuana industry as the state rolls out its pilot program allowing doctors to prescribe cannabis to eligible patients.
‘When we leave here today, there’s going to be some terribly disappointed people’
The commission met early Monday morning at the RSA Dexter Avenue Building in Montgomery, the room filled with dozens of company representatives all hoping to be selected. Shortly after kicking off the meeting, the commission went into recess in order to commence the candidate review process, which was not open to the public.
Returning in the afternoon, Commission Executive Director John McMillan attempted to temper expectations of some of the business representatives in the room before the commission announced their decisions.
“When we leave here today, there’s going to be some terribly disappointed people. To the recipients, we look forward to working with you in a partnership manner.”
Licenses will be awarded in July after a period for possible challenges and licensing fees are paid. Annual licensing fees range from $30,000 to $50,000. McMillan…
The unpleasant reality facing the anti-abortion movement is that most Americans don’t actually want to ban abortion.
This explains why the pro-life summer of triumph, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a season of such demoralizing political outcomes. Voters in Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky in November rejected ballot measures to make abortion illegal; just last month, in Wisconsin, voters elected an abortion-rights supporter to the state supreme court.
Yet the movement’s activists don’t seem to care. Thirteen states automatically banned most abortions with trigger laws designed to go into effect when Roe fell; a Texas judge this month stayed the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, setting in motion what is sure to be a drawn-out legal battle; and some lawmakers are pursuing restrictions on traveling out of state for the procedure—what they call “abortion trafficking.”
Even as the anti-abortion movement lacks a Next Big Objective, a new generation of anti-abortion leaders is ascendant—one that is arguably bolder and more uncompromising than its predecessors. This cohort, still high on the fumes of last summer’s victory, is determined to construct its ideal post-Roe America. And it’s forging ahead—come hell, high water, or public disgust.
The groups this new generation leads “are not afraid to lose short term if they think the long-term gain will be eliminating abortion from the country,” Rachel Rebouché, a family-law professor at Temple University, told me.
One such leader is Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life. After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,“some organizations had to go through this period where they had to reflect and figure out what they were going to do,” she told me. “But nothing changed in our organization—we’d already had that conversation years ago.” Students for Life participants have been calling themselves “the post-Roe generation” since 2019; that’s the year they launched a political-action committee to beef up their state-level presence and begin drafting legislation for a post-Roe society. In 2021, the organization started the Campaign for Abortion-Free Cities to promote what they call “alternatives to abortion” and neighborhood resources for pregnant women.
“What the anti-abortion movement is, who’s leading it, and what it stands for are still being contested,” Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who has written about abortion for The Atlantic, told me. But organizations such as Students for Life will, in all likelihood, “be the ones running the movement going forward.” To understand the goals of people like Hawkins is, in other words, to peer into the future of America’s anti-abortion project.
The thing about Hawkins is that she’s an optimist—and not a cautious one. So when the draft opinion suggesting that the Supreme Court was about to overrule Roe v. Wade leaked last May, she wasn’t particularly surprised, she told me—she felt vindicated. Other pro-lifers had refused “to let themselves even dare think that a post-Roe America was coming,” Hawkins said. “Of course it was.” She’d always assumed it would happen in her lifetime.
As soon as the draft opinion came out, anti-abortion leaders began to consider their response. Some were worried that taking any kind of victory lap would be inappropriate—that it might scare the justices into moderating or reversing their ultimate decision. Hawkins didn’t care about any of that. “Why would we be guarded? It was important, good news!” she told me. “Folks across the country needed to see this generation celebrating.” Students for Life was one of the first anti-abortion organizations to release a statement praising the draft opinion—while being careful to condemn the leak itself.
Hawkins, who is 37, styles herself as a straight shooter. She doesn’t dress up arguments with religious rhetoric—despite being Catholic herself—and she can be an effective, if sometimes abrasive, debater. Which makes sense, because she came to the pro-life movement through electoral politics. Hawkins knocked on doors for local and state Republican candidates; in college, she worked for the Republican National Committee to reelect President George W. Bush—and, for a year, she worked in his administration. Then, when Students for Life came looking for a new president in 2006, she eagerly accepted.
Hawkins “saw the politics in this in ways a lot of people don’t,” Ziegler told me—and she brought that acumen to the movement. She knew how to lead a grassroots campaign, and how a state legislature functions. Then just 20, she was younger than other pro-life leaders, so she had a better idea of how to engage young people. Hawkins is trying, Ziegler said, “to grow the movement in a way that no one else really ever did.”
The organization’s 14,000 participants campaign for state-level anti-abortion candidates and legislation in their local legislatures. Hawkins, who oversees a staff of 100 paid employees, spends her days traveling to meet with chapter leaders, organizing demonstrations, delivering speeches, and generally doing her best, as she put it to me, “to stir up discussion.” In March, during a visit to Virginia Commonwealth University, protesters shouted over Hawkins when she tried to speak. Demonstrators called her a Nazi and a fascist. Eventually, campus security shut down the event, and police arrested two protesters (who weren’t actually VCU students). Hawkins, who livestreamed the drama, later went on Fox News to offer a full account.
The Students for Life YouTube channel has a 22-minute highlight reel called “Greatest Pro-Choice Takedowns,” in which Hawkins responds to questions from young, often-emotional abortion-rights advocates. As you might expect, the videos feel mean. In each clip showing Hawkins facing off against a different student with a shaky voice, she makes them look silly and ill-informed, a relatively easy thing to do when your opponent is not being paid to perfect her talking points. But these exchanges don’t seem intended to change minds; they’re meant instead to humiliate—and thereby reveal the purported weaknesses in abortion-rights arguments.
Doggedness and moral conviction have always characterized the anti-abortion movement. Activists have sustained their energy for 50 years “by believing that success was possible, even in the absence of clear victories,” Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. Dobbs gave this new generation a taste of victory. Activists like Hawkins are bolder now. Without Roe, they reason, anything is possible.
Students for Life, in particular, is “more abolitionist than prior generations of similar groups,” Rebouché told me. In contrast to other organizations that have pursued incremental progress, the group adopts strategies that are “totalizing and absolute.” Throwing out the rule book, they operate as though they’ve got nothing to lose.
“I admire their persistence; I admire their sacrifices,” Lila Rose, the president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Live Action, says of previous generations of anti-abortion activists. “But we’re playing to win. This isn’t just some nonprofit job.” Rose, who is 34, achieved early prominence in the movement back in 2006 for partnering with the conservative activist James O’Keefe to film undercover exposés at abortion clinics. Live Action doesn’t have the kind of nationwide membership that Students for Life has, but its email list contains more than 1 million contacts, Rose told me, and its social-media following runs into the millions.
Students for Life and Live Action frame their anti-abortion efforts as not just saving babies but empowering women—enabling them to avoid the depression and regret the organizations say can be caused by having an abortion. These aren’t new ideas in themselves, but they’ve been repackaged in a way that mimics the language of a modern social-justice movement appealing to young people. “They’re using phrases like born privilege,” Jennifer Holland, a gender-and-sexuality professor at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “Language that’s hip—in the culture—but that still leads back to this one point of view that maybe you thought was old or conservative.”
Historically, there’s been “a lack of vision” in the movement, Rose said. It was great, she allowed, that the National Right to Life Committee fought so hard in the 2000s to ban what they called “partial-birth abortion” (using a pro-life term not recognized by medical professionals). But, to Rose, pill-induced abortion is just as “anti-human and anti-woman”; a 15-week abortion limit is nothing to celebrate. “I don’t think that we do ourselves any favors as a movement by, like, walking over to the opponent’s side of the field and saying that that’s a victory.”
Hawkins’s master plan to completely eradicate abortion in America begins with passing as many state controls as possible. She calculates that 26 state legislatures contain enough anti-abortion Republicans to be amenable to a strict ban of some sort, and her organization is pushing an “early abortion” model, which means that it drafts and supports legislation restricting abortion either entirely or after six weeks. Hawkins claims credit for pressuring reluctant Republican state leaders in Florida to take up the six-week abortion ban that Governor Ron DeSantis signed late Friday night. Gone are the days of small-ball second-trimester limits, Hawkins says, because most abortions happen before then. “We’re not going to spend a significant amount of resources to pass legislation that’s going to save only 6 percent of children.”
Right now the centerpiece of Students for Life’s campaigning is the effort to ban medication abortion—what Hawkins and her allies call “chemical abortion.” For two years, the group lobbied Republicans in Wyoming to prohibit mifepristone from being sold in pharmacies; the governor signed that measure into law last month. Now it’s setting its sights on the pharmacy chains Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS—which Hawkins singles out as “the nation’s largest abortion vendor.”
On campuses, Students for Life leaders are trying to mobilize young people who might otherwise be ambivalent about the abortion pill; Hawkins says they’ve had luck with the message that mifepristone, when flushed, enters the water system and threatens the health of humans and wildlife. “Young people are aghast to find out that something they care deeply about—the environment—is now conflicting with their views on abortion,” Hawkins told me. Never mind that there is no evidence for these claims. According to Tracey Woodruff, the director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UC San Francisco, the amount of mifepristone found in drinking water is so small that it might not even be measurable.
“Of all the things we have to worry about with our drinking water,” she told me, “this is not one of them.” Students for Life’s messaging on this, she added, is “a perverse use of science.” The organization is nonetheless backing new laws in several states that would require women prescribed abortion pills to use medical-waste “catch kits” and return them to a health-care provider.
Hawkins is realistic about the fact that her movement’s progress has a ceiling. Some states, especially the liberal strongholds of Illinois and New York, are never going to go for the kinds of laws that she’s pushing for. This is when, she says, her organization will shift its emphasis to the federal government—pushing for a constitutional amendment that would recognize fetal personhood, or for a ruling from the Supreme Court to affirm that the Fourteenth Amendment already does.
Abortion should become “both illegal and unthinkable” in America, Hawkins said. But even when the anti-abortion movement can no longer change hearts and minds, it plans to find a way to change the law anyway. She favors using the law as a tool because, in her view, people tend to derive morality from legality: “Nothing’s going to change their minds until the law changes their minds.” Hawkins envisions a future, 20 years from now, in which university students will discover with abject horror that other states allow the murder of babies in the womb—culturally, she believes, “that’s gonna be massive.” The idea that young people in college would be shocked to learn that different states have different laws on abortion may seem implausible now, but Hawkins is articulating her larger goal—of making abortion unconscionable.
Yet American culture seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Dobbs ruling, though exciting for anti-abortion activists, was so enraging for abortion-rights supporters that, in some places, they responded by enshrining the right to abortion into state law. These and other political losses suggest that the pro-life movement is already overreaching—and generating a backlash. “It’s breathtaking to see people so motivated and so well funded to push an agenda that is so incredibly unpopular,” Jamie Manson, the president of the abortion-rights organization Catholics for Choice, told me. The months since Dobbs have exposed a fundamental tension between the outcome that abortion-rights opponents want and the one democracy supports.
As it becomes clear that abortion is not always an election winner—that, on occasion, it is even a predictable loser—some Republican legislators have broken from the movement in order to support rape and incest exceptions; others have simply avoided the issue. “Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters last fall. Hawkins and Rose are happy to criticize those Republicans they see as wishy-washy on abortion. When former President Donald Trump blamed Republicans’ 2022 midterm losses on the extremism of the anti-abortion movement, Rose called it “sniveling cowardice.” But Hawkins and Rose may be underestimating how much more challenging and complex the post-Roe environment is.
“This is much more expensive politics around abortion,” Holland said. “It used to be cheap: You could promise all sorts of things” without penalty, because with Roe intact, such radical measures would never pass.
Does this give Hawkins any pause—the idea that her movement’s aims are so antithetical to what most Americans want? Hawkins said that public opinion doesn’t concern her. The fact that most Americans support abortion access doesn’t make them morally correct, she argued, and neither does it make her own efforts undemocratic. “Do I look upon abolitionists in pre–Civil War America as undemocratic for trying to change people’s minds and prevent the proliferation of owning another human being for your own financial gain? No,” she said.
Hawkins has spent a lot of time thinking about this question. Consider the civil-rights era, she went on. “We had states that stubbornly refused to integrate.” In the end, federal legislation forced them to comply. The implication is that the same sort of national ban should eventually happen for abortion.
Given this goal, we can expect that abortion will be an issue in almost every single election, in almost every single state, for the next many cycles. In some parts of the country, the anti-abortion-rights movement will fail. In others, it will skate along with utter success. Lawmakers will tighten laws, ban pills, and restrict travel. They may even feel audacious enough to venture into the broader realm of reproductive tools—outlawing or restricting IUDs, the morning-after pill, and even in vitro fertilization.
Post-Roe, we can expect these hungry, mobilized activists to seek new conquests. But even as they do, pro-life leaders will have to wonder whether they are guiding their movement toward righteous victory—or humiliating defeat.
The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.
Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place.
But the contest between the liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative former state-supreme-court justice Dan Kelly has also become a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.
Protasiewicz and her allies have centered her campaign on portraying Kelly as a threat to legal abortion and an accomplice in Donald Trump’s schemes to undermine democracy—the same issues that helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in last November’s elections. Kelly and his allies have centered his campaign on presenting Protasiewicz as soft on crime, the same accusation that Republicans stressed in many of their winning campaigns last year.
With the choice framed so starkly, in a state that has been so evenly balanced between the parties, Tuesday’s result will measure which of those arguments remains more potent, particularly among the suburban voters who loom as the critical swing bloc in 2024’s presidential contest.
If Kelly wins, after being significantly outspent on television, it would underscore how much risk Democrats face from rising public anxiety about crime. But a Protasiewicz win, which most political observers in Wisconsin expect, would suggest that support for legalized abortion has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP that is already evident among college-educated suburban voters. And such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections.
“The margins are still very narrow, and of course the economy and other issues will come into play next year, but if it simply becomes a test between abortion and crime, I would say yes, [abortion] is more powerful by a slight, slight margin,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who has worked in Wisconsin for decades.
Like the state itself, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is closely divided. Conservatives now hold a 4–3 majority (though Brian Hagedorn, one of the four conservative justices, has voted with the liberals on some key cases, particularly four rulings denying Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results). The retirement of a conservative justice has provided Democrats this opportunity to secure a 4–3 liberal majority.
Though Tuesday’s election is technically nonpartisan, the race has become a brawl between the two parties. The state GOP is mounting an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign for Kelly, who was appointed to the state supreme court by Republican then-Governor Scott Walker to fill an unexpired term in 2016 before losing his bid for a full term in 2020. State Democrats, meanwhile, have raised and transferred millions of dollars into the campaign for Protasiewicz, who served as an assistant county district attorney before winning election as a county-circuit-court judge . The tension between the race’s openly partisan character and traditional notions of judicial neutrality and nonpartisanship has itself become a central point of contention in the campaign.
Protasiewicz has pushed the envelope for a judicial candidate by offering voters explicit declarations of her views. She has unequivocally affirmed her support for legal abortion, described the gerrymandered state legislative maps as “rigged,” and declared that the signature legislation Walker passed to eviscerate the power of the state’s public-sector unions is unconstitutional. But in the next breath she insists that those views—which she calls her “values”—will not affect her decisions on the bench.
The juxtaposition of those two assertions can be head-spinning. At a forum this week on the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee campus, Protasiewicz declared, “I’ve been very clear with everybody that I think women should have a right to choose. Obviously, I can’t comment about what I would do on any case. That robe goes on; my personal opinions go out the door.”
After her appearance, I asked Protasiewicz why her “values” should matter to voters if they are irrelevant once she dons her judicial robe. “I truly believe that people have an absolute right to know what a candidate’s personal thoughts and personal values are,” she answered. Even if, I asked, they are irrelevant to your decisions? “I put them aside,” she said.
Kelly and other Republicans have argued that Protasiewicz’s candid expression of her “values” renders her too partisan for a judicial position. (At the Milwaukee forum, the conservative state-supreme-court justice Rebecca Bradley, appearing for Kelly, maintained that Protasiewicz would be forced to recuse herself from cases involving abortion, redistricting, and other issues because she has expressed such clear positions on them—a view that other legal experts reject.) But Kelly is, to say the least, an imperfect messenger for the argument that anyone else is too biased. He has been far more involved than Protasiewicz in direct partisan activities: Kelly has served as a paid legal adviser to the state’s leading anti-abortion group as well as to the state Republican Party.
Andrew Hitt, the former state GOP chairman, testified to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he had “pretty extensive conversations” with Kelly and another lawyer about the fake-electors scheme that Trump supporters developed after the 2020 election in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Kelly says his involvement was limited to a single 30-minute conversation in which he explained he was not “in the loop” on the plans. But at the sole debate between the candidates earlier this month, Protasiewicz described Kelly as “a true threat to our democracy.”
In the past, local observers say, Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have more narrowly centered on debates about crime and criminal justice (even though the court isn’t directly involved in handing down sentences). “Law-and-order candidates have traditionally done very well,” Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, told me.
Kelly is running in that tradition. Ads from his campaign’s final days are focused almost exclusively on lashing Protasiewicz over rulings she made to sentence a rapist and other violent offenders to limited or no jail time. So many sheriffs are appearing in Kelly ads that it’s reasonable to wonder who is still patrolling the state’s highways this week.
Protasiewicz has responded with ads defending her record on crime, and also jabbing Kelly over his work as a criminal-defense attorney. But mostly her advertising has insisted that Kelly would uphold the 1849 state abortion ban that snapped back into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. (Both sides agree that the state supreme court will eventually need to decide whether to sustain or strike down that law, which prohibits abortions in almost all cases, and is now being challenged in a lower state court.) Protasiewicz and the groups supporting her are heavily stressing abortion in their ads and have aired nearly four times as many ads across all subjects as Kelly and his backers, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks ad purchases. (That disparity exists largely because Democrats have raised enough money to allow her to buy the ads directly through her campaign, which receives lower rates, while Kelly’s relying mostly on outside groups that must pay higher rates.)
That huge tactical advantage for her is one reason some observers are cautious about drawing too many conclusions from next week’s outcome. Conversely, Trump’s indictment yesterday might inspire enough Republican turnout to lift Kelly, especially because far fewer people vote in these off-year contests than on a typical November Election Day.
Yet a Protasiewicz win could put an exclamation point on a subtle but discernible shift in the state’s political direction.
Though close elections are usually the rule in Wisconsin, early in this century it often leaned Democratic. The state was part of what I termed the “blue wall”: the 18 states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. (Democrats actually started their Wisconsin presidential winning streak in 1988.) Democrats also controlled both U.S. Senate seats throughout most of that same period, and the governorship for two terms after 2002.
But the tide began to shift around 2010, with the election of Republican Governor Walker and a GOP sweep of the state legislature. In 2016, two years after Walker won reelection, Trump dislodged Wisconsin from the blue wall, carrying it by 22,748 votes. Like Trump’s 2016 victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which had also been part of the “blue wall,” the former president’s Wisconsin breakthrough symbolized his success at forging a winning coalition that revolved around massive margins among non-college-educated and non-urban white voters.
Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in the state, says Wisconsin today remains divided almost evenly between the parties: 45 percent of voters identify as Republicans, 44 percent as Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated. Yet since Trump’s initial victory, Democrats have won most of the state’s key contests. The Democrat Tony Evers beat Walker for governor by about 30,000 votes in 2018 and won reelection by triple that amount last year. In 2018, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won a landslide reelection. Democrats also won big in state-supreme-court elections in 2018 and 2020. Biden carried the state by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The major Republican victories over this period have been narrow ones: Hagedorn’s 6,000-vote 2019 win for the state supreme court and the roughly 27,000-vote win last November by GOP Senator Ron Johnson over the Democrat Mandela Barnes.
Those results suggest that Democrats have come out slightly ahead from the demographic and geographic re-sorting of the electorate that Trump accelerated here. As in states across the country, Republicans have grown stronger in heavily blue-collar and white rural areas, primarily across Wisconsin’s northern and western counties where Democrats once competed effectively. But Democrats have been boosted by offsetting gains in the state’s most populous cities and towns, many of them relatively more racially diverse or better educated. (About 90 percent of Wisconsin voters are white.)
Craig Gilbert, a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, calculated that from the 2018–22 governor races, Evers improved his performance in all 30 communities that cast the most votes except for Kenosha (where he was hurt by a backlash against the 2020 riots over the police shooting of a Black man in the city). The places where Republicans are winning “simply aren’t growing,” while Democrats are generally improving in the places that are adding population, Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up with that trend.”
Democrats have benefited from improved showings mostly in two areas. One is the so-called WOW suburban counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) around Milwaukee. Though the GOP still comfortably wins all three, Democrats have noticeably narrowed its margins. As Gilbert calculated, in Waukesha, which he described as “the most important Republican county in Wisconsin,” 21 communities have shifted at least 20 points toward the Democrats in gubernatorial races since 2014.
Even more significant has been the explosive Democratic gains in Dane County, the highly educated hub for biotech, insurance, and government jobs centered on the city of Madison, home to both the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital. The Democratic share of the vote in Dane County has increased from about 70 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 75 percent for Biden in 2020 to 79 percent for Evers in 2022; Dane actually provided Evers a larger net vote margin than Milwaukee County did, something that would have been almost unimaginable even a decade ago. Franklin says Dane has become a triple threat for Democrats: “It is growing fast, the turnout keeps rising, and the lopsided partisan margins keep growing.”
The flip side of the Democrats’ improving performance in Dane and the Milwaukee suburbs is rising concern in the party about lackluster turnout among Black voters, especially in Milwaukee. Some local leaders fear that a political competition between the parties focusing more on social issues such as abortion simply doesn’t engage enough lower-income Black voters, who are focused more on material needs such as jobs and health care. “If people feel like their issues are not going to be reflected, they are going to sit out,” Angela Lang, the executive director of the group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, told me.
Lagging Milwaukee turnout next week would be another signal that Democrats, as in 2020, continue to face challenges not only with non-college-educated whites, but also with blue-collar voters of color. But if abortion rights, in effect, trump crime and allow Protasiewicz to extend the Democrats’ gains in white-collar suburbs, that could signal trouble for anti-abortion Republican presidential candidates in 2024—not only in Wisconsin but in the suburbs of any swing state. The Democrats’ rural and inner-city troubles in Wisconsin, which still might allow Kelly to eke out an upset win, testify to the fragility of a modern Democratic coalition bonded less by economic interests than by cultural values. But a Protasiewicz win, in a state that Republicans probably must recapture to regain the White House in 2024, would demonstrate again that there’s formidable power in that new coalition too.
The numbers: The New York Fed’s Empire State business conditions index, a gauge of manufacturing activity in the state, tumbled 21.7 points to negative 32.9 in January, the regional Fed bank said Tuesday.
This is the lowest level since the worst of the pandemic in May 2020 and among the lowest levels in the survey’s history, the regional Fed bank said.
Economists had expected a reading of negative 7, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal.
Any reading below zero indicates contraction.
Key details: The new orders index fell 27.5 points to negative 31.1 in January. Shipments fell 27.7 points to negative 22.4.
The indexes for prices paid and prices received moved lower.
The employment gauges were also weak.
Firms expect little improvement in coming months, with the futures index at 8.
Big picture: The Federal Reserve’s steady increase in interest rates is having a slowing impact on capital spending as firms are scaling back investment, economists said. Demand for goods is also slowing after two strong years on the weak global economy. Added to the mix is the strong dollar which makes U.S. exports more expensive.
The market pays attention to the Empire State index because it is seen as a early read on the national ISM manufacturing index to be released early next month.
The ISM factory index contracted in December for the second straight month, falling to 48.4% from 49% in the prior month.
Looking ahead: “Manufacturing conditions in the U.S. are deteriorating and the worst is likely ahead,” said Gurleen Chadha, economist at Oxford Economics.
SPX, -0.20%
opened lower on Tuesday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.489%
retreated to 3.51% after reaching 3.57% in early morning trading.
The long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley is, for lack of a comparison closer to home, Iowa’s Queen Elizabeth II. This is partly a matter of sheer longevity. At 89, the senator is older than John Deere’s first self-propelled combine, which appeared in 1947. He was 26 when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in 1959. The year Kevin Costner filmed Field of Dreams in Dyersville, 1988, Grassley was 55.
Age aside, Grassley is simply a part of Iowa’s political furniture—many voters in the state have never known a time without him. When I was born, in 1993, he’d been the state’s senior senator for 12 years; he has held elected office—first in the state House, then in the U.S. House and Senate—since my father was 4 years old. For many Iowans, the day when Grassley would not be their senator has been scarcely imaginable.
Until now, maybe. Every six years, Iowa Democrats have inched closer to unseating the seven-term Republican senator. This time, they seem closer than ever: A recent poll showed Grassley leading 64-year-old Mike Franken only narrowly, suggesting that this will be Grassley’s toughest reelection fight in four decades.
Twelve years ago, he defeated Roxanne Conlin by 31 points. In 2016, he beat Patty Judge by 24. This year’s race against Franken didn’t seem particularly newsworthy until earlier this month, when Selzer & Company, Iowa’s most respected polling firm, released results from a survey showing that Grassley was leading Franken by a mere three percentage points. “It says to me that Franken is running a competent campaign and has a shot to defeat the seemingly invincible Chuck Grassley—previously perceived to be invincible,” J. Ann Selzer, the president of Selzer & Company, told the Des Moines Register.
The poll is only a snapshot in time, and it could certainly prove wrong. But it’s reasonable to assume, given other polling since then, that Franken is closer to unseating Grassley than any challenger before him. The most obvious reason for this is that Iowans may finally be noticing how old their senator is—a veritable crinoid in the creek bed of Iowa politics. Although Grassley seems healthy—he runs several miles each morning and kicks off campaign events by doing push-ups onstage—more than 60 percent of the Selzer poll’s respondents said his age was a real concern. “There are a lot of voters between 75 and 85 who think, I wouldn’t want to be in the United States Senate right now. I wouldn’t want to have that life; why does he?” Jeff Link, an Iowa Democratic strategist, told me.
For the first time in the history of this particular poll, more Iowan respondents disapprove of Grassley’s job performance than approve of it. Pair that dissatisfaction with the fact that Franken is a strong candidate. A retired Navy vice admiral from deep-red northwest Iowa, the Democrat could provide a nonthreatening alternative for the independents and Republicans who are reluctant to give Grassley another term. Franken “is energetic, very smart—almost loquacious—but he knows what he’s talking about,” David Oman, a state Republican strategist and a former co-chair of the Iowa GOP, told me. Despite that positive assessment, the recent emergence of an assault allegation from a former campaign manager might cool Democrats’ enthusiasm. (Franken has denied the allegation, and police have closed the case, calling it “unfounded.”)
Undergirding all of these factors is the plain reality that Iowa, like the rest of the country, is becoming more partisan and more polarized. For 30 years, Iowans sent both Grassley and a Democrat, Tom Harkin, who retired in 2014, to the Senate at every chance, no matter which party was in the White House or who was occupying the governor’s mansion. The consensus among Iowans was that such a balance was ideal. But the days of winning big by being part of that balance are over.
Grassley has changed, too. Back then, he was viewed as a kind of farmers-first independent, interested chiefly in restraining federal spending, whistleblower protections, and promoting free trade. Democrats liked him—and often voted for him. In 1991, Grassley was one of just two Republicans to vote against the Gulf War. “That made him seem above partisanship,” David Yepsen, a former reporter for the Des Moines Register, told me. Grassley’s image, among Iowans, was of a man who operated above the partisan fray.
That gloss began to wear off in 2009. At first, Grassley seemed a willing negotiating partner on President Barack Obama’s plans for health-care reform; he worked for months on a bipartisan bill. But he hadn’t bargained for how unpopular the Affordable Care Act would be with his party’s base. During a tour of central Iowa that summer, Grassley was mobbed by Republicans and Tea Partiers who rejected the plan. He buckled under the pressure, abandoned the talks, and ultimately voted against the final bill. “He’d never been treated that way by his own party. It changed him,” Yepsen said. “It made him mindful that there’s a new kind of conservative out there, a new generation coming on—the populists.” And he responded accordingly.
In the ensuing years, Grassley came to recognize that there were fewer and fewer points to be earned by working across the aisle. In 2016, as the chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was party to the Senate’s refusal to give Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, and along with Republican leadership, he held open more than 100 seats on the federal bench during the final months of the Obama administration for Donald Trump to fill. “You can’t underestimate Democrats in Iowa watching his leadership in the Judiciary Committee putting all these conservatives on the Court, and seeing them now do their thing on the Dobbs decision,” Yepsen said. “Conservatives love it. But it makes him much more of a partisan.”
Whether Grassley would support the candidacy of Donald Trump was initially an open question. The womanizing, scandal-plagued Republican presidential nominee seemed, after all, to be the Iowa senator’s bizarro opposite. Yet Grassley, like most others in the GOP, fell in line. He has stuck by Trump through vulgar comments and allegations. In 2019, Grassley—an actual author of the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act—defended Trump’s firing of the whistleblower and impeachment witness Alexander Vindman. Lately, Grassley has broken from his party only a handful of times, including to gently push back on some of Trump’s “America First” protectionist trade policies and to support the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill. The senator seems altogether untroubled by Trump’s effort to discredit the 2020 election, and continues to appear alongside him at rallies.
“The way that [Grassley] didn’t stand up for much of anything is emblematic of the Republican Party in the years of Trump,” Bill Kristol, the editor at large of The Bulwark, told me. “People you thought would be independent just ended up going along.”
Nowadays, the way Iowans view Grassley simply reflects their politics, not some old-timey desire for balance and comity. Democrats see him as an utter disappointment—a caricature of the man they may once have disagreed with but at least respected. Some Republicans are pleased with the careful line he’s walked, embracing Trump while hanging on to moderates. For other Republicans, Grassley is not nearly MAGA enough. This year, for the first time in his Senate career, Grassley faced a primary challenger. Jim Carlin, a state senator who has criticized Grassley for voting to certify the results of the 2020 election, earned 26 percent of the primary vote.
Given this transformation in how Iowans regard Grassley, defeat at the hands of a Democrat is more plausible than it’s ever been. More plausible, but still not likely. The Selzer poll may have given Franken a jolt of momentum, including a burst of Hail Mary fundraising, but the state is reddening and the gap in party registration is wide and growing: The Iowa GOP has roughly 88,000 more registered voters this year than the Iowa Democratic Party, according to the Iowa secretary of state’s office. In 2020, that advantage was only about 20,000. This gap, combined with the historical precedent of higher Republican turnout in off-year elections, seems likely to add up to a Grassley victory. The numbers are “hugely problematic,” Jeff Link, the Democratic strategist, said—even for a three-star admiral.
A world without Chuck Grassley in power is one in which most Iowans have never actually lived. That may be why “Faith in adversity” has recently become the unofficial motto of the state’s Democrats. This year, they even decided to put it on a sign. Orange placards dapple grassy lawns throughout Iowa, each bearing a message of hopeful conviction—We believe Michael Franken will defeat Chuck Grassley, the signs say—as though they can speak such a mammoth upset into existence.
FREMONT, Mich. – A family from Fremont, Michigan has been missing for five days following “paranoid” behavior from the father.
Fremont is in Newaygo County, north of Grand Rapids. The Fremont Police Department put out an alert for the missing family on Wednesday night.
Police said the Cirigliano family is “very concerned” about their missing family members Anthony (Tony), 51, Suzette, 51, Brandon, 19, and Noah, 15. Other family last had contact with them on Sunday, Oct. 16, 2022.
Suzette Cirigliano’s mother, who has dementia and needs full-time care, was found walking around the neighborhood around 9 p.m. on Monday, according to News 8. Neighbors called police and that’s when the search for the family began.
According to the report, the home’s doors were locked and the family’s minivan, a 2005 Toyota Sienna with the license plate DJL1982, was missing. Pets were left at the home.
Silver colored 2005 Toyota Sienna LE (not actual vehicle) (Fremont Police)
Relatives told News 8 that Suzette Cirigliano’s cell phone was still in the house, but Tony Cirigliano’s cell phone is missing. Police said the family’s phones were off.
Brandon and Noah both have autism, according to police. The two sons were homeschooled and the family kept to themselves, relatives told News 8.
Listen to the 911 callTony Cirigliano made on Sunday: ‘People want to erase me from the face of the Earth’
Police told News 8 that Tony Cirigliano was “exhibiting some signs of paranoia” before the family vanished.
Tony Cirigliano called 911 just after midnight on Sunday and two officers went to his home.
“Tony was talking about issues or information that he had regarding the Sept. 11 attacks. But, really, what my officers were spending a great deal of time doing was talking to everyone making sure everybody was safe and trying to make sure that mental illness wasn’t putting anybody in jeopardy,” Fremont Police Chief Tim Rodwell told News 8.
According to the report, officers spent around 45 minutes to an hour talking to Tony Cirigliano and his wife. Family told News 8 that they do not believe Tony Cirigliano would hurt his family, and believe that he may be trying to protect him.
They said he was troubled over the weekend and believed “bad things” were going to happen.
You can read a transcript of the 911 call below:
Operator: Newaygo County 911.
Tony Cirigliano: Yes, hello. This is Anthony John Cirigliano. (Says address).
Operator: OK, what’s going on tonight?
*30 seconds of silence in the recording*
Tony Cirigliano: Yes. Everyone is OK. But I need the Fremont Police Department and I believe he is Captain Jon Geeting. I need some police protection immediately.
Operator: (Intelligible).
Tony Cirigliano: It is of vital national interest. It is related to Sept. 11 and people want to erase me from the face of the Earth. I’m not crazy. Mr. Geeting knows me. I’m a Christian. I just need some help and then the U.S. government will take it from here. I know this sounds crazy. You don’t have instructions for this. Please send someone that knows Geeting and can talk to U.S. authorities, please.
Operator: OK, And do you have any weapons there?
Tony Cirigliano: No weapons at all. Not even a BB gun.
Operator: Alright, and how do we spell your last name?
Tony Cirigliano: Sure, it’s C-I-R-I-G-L-I-A-N-O.
Operator: And your phone number?
Tony Cirigliano: We have no landline.
Operator: OK, alright, we’ll get him over there for you. (Address).
Tony Cirigliano: Can they come with their lights off not to frighten my children, please.
Operator: Yep. Definitely.
Cirigliano: OK. I’ll look for them and knock on the door. Please try to send Mr. Geeting even if he has to be awoke from his sleep. It’s that important, please.
Operator: Yep. He’s on right now.
Cirigliano: OK, thank you.
Operator: Yep, bye.
Family is concerned: ‘We definitely just want to let him know there’s nothing to be scared of’
Tony’s brother, Paul Cirigliano, told Local 4 it’s unlike them to be out of touch.
“They usually wouldn’t even go so far as like Walmart without letting somebody know, so it’s very unlike them,” said Paul Cirigliano. “It’s certainly not an abrupt vacation by any means.”
Paul Cirigliano found the 911 call made by his brother concerning.
“We think maybe he might be having mental health sort of issue, and maybe he’s scared of something, but we definitely just want to let him know there’s nothing to be scared of, and he can reach out, and we’ll help him,” Paul Cirigliano said.
Surveillance footage shows the Cirigliano family at a gas station in the Upper Peninsula. (WOOD)
Family stopped at UP gas station Monday, report says
The family was seen at the Blaney Park Quik Stop on US-2 near M-77, northeast of Manistique and about 70 miles west of the Mackinac Bridge. News 8 said the Fremont Police Department says surveillance video confirmed it was the Ciriglianos.
News 8 spoke to the gas station manager, Heidi Bowler, who told them the mother and two sons came into the gas station to use the restroom. One of the sons asked to use a phone to make a call, but didn’t know how to use it.
“He was acting a little strange, so we were just watching him,” Bowler told News 8. “The only reason we paid attention to them is because the boys were a little different. I thought, ‘I wonder what’s wrong. Like, why is he using the phone? No one else is asking.’ It was just a little odd.”
According to the report, the family was only there for about 15 minutes. Police said they got gas and purchased some food.
Bowler said she was scrolling through Facebook when she saw a post about the missing family.
“I looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh my God, that lady looks very familiar,’ and then once I looked at the boys, I was like, ‘Wow, they look familiar, too,’” she told News 8.
She decided to watch the surveillance footage, checked the license plate and was sure it was them. She did contact the police.
Police continue searching for family
Police do not know if the family is still in Michigan, somewhere in the Midwest or somewhere else. They hope the family will see news reports and contact police or their family.
Name
Height
Weight
Other
Tony Cirigliano
5′6′’
180 lbs
Brown hair, clean-shaven
Suzette Cirigliano
5′9′’
120 lbs
Blonde hair, glasses
Brandon Cirigliano
5′8′’
120 lbs
Brown hair, brown eyes
Noah Cirigliano
5′6′’
120 lbs
Brown hair, brown eyes
News 8 reported that police are going through the family’s financial information and trying to ping their cell phones.
Michigan State Police are now involved in the search. Suzette Cirigliano’s mother is in the care of other family members.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Fremont Police Department at 231-924-2400, Silent Observer at 231-652-1121 or 911.
Police in West Michigan are looking for a missing family of four who was last contacted on Sunday. The Cirigliano family is from Fremont, which is in Newaygo County, north of Grand Rapids. The Fremont Police Department put out an alert for the missing family on Wednesday night.
Copyright 2022 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit – All rights reserved.
Kristen McDonald Rivet let out a big, slightly rueful laugh. “I was underestimating the level of national attention this race was going to get,” she told me. “In the extreme, I was underestimating it.”
A city commissioner in Bay City, Michigan, McDonald Rivet decided earlier this year to run as a Democrat for the State Senate. She knew the race would be competitive in a closely divided district. But she had little inkling that the seat she was seeking would come to be regarded by Democratic operatives as one of the most crucial in the country.
Thousands of people run for state legislatures every two years, and many of the campaigns are important but sleepy affairs that hinge on debates over tax rates, school funding, and the condition of roads and bridges. Not this year, however, and not in Michigan. With Republican election deniers running up and down the ballot in key battlegrounds, many Democrats believe that the fight for power in state capitals this fall could ultimately determine the outcome of the presidential election in 2024.
Democrats have carried Michigan in seven of the past eight presidential elections, but they have not held the majority in its State Senate for nearly 40 years. This year, however, they need to pick up just three seats to dislodge Republicans from the majority, and a new legislative map drawn by an independent redistricting commission has given Democrats an opportunity even in a year in which the overall political environment is likely to be challenging for the party.
If Michigan is famously shaped like a mitten, the Thirty-Fifth District sits between its thumb and forefinger, encompassing the tri-cities of Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland near the shores of Lake Huron. The area voted narrowly for Joe Biden in 2020, but Mariah Hill, the caucus director for the Michigan Senate Democrats, told me she considers it the party’s “majority-making seat.”
McDonald Rivet won her election as a commissioner in Bay City with about 350 votes; this year, in her first run for a partisan office, she told me she had raised about $425,000, which is a considerable sum for a state legislative candidate. National groups such as EMILY’s List, the States Project, and EveryDistrict are directing money and resources to her campaign.
Progressives have been intensifying their focus on state legislative power over the past decade. In the 2010 GOP wave, Republicans caught Democrats flat-footed, swept them from majorities across the country in 2010, and then locked in their advantage for years to come through gerrymandering in many states. Democrats reclaimed seven state legislative chambers in 2018, but their momentum slowed in 2020, when they failed to pick up a single chamber. They also lost the majorities they had gained in New Hampshire.
In an earlier era of U.S. history, battles for control of state legislatures took on national importance as proxy fights for power in Washington. Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures—not voters—appointed U.S. senators. In modern times, however, state legislatures are frequently overlooked relative to their influence on policies that most directly affect voters’ lives. Donors shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to sway presidential and congressional elections. But while gridlock often consumes Capitol Hill, state capitals are hives of legislative activity by comparison.
The urgency behind the Democratic push to win back legislative chambers escalated in the run-up to 2020, when the party knew that the majorities elected that year would be tasked with drawing legislative and congressional maps after the decennial census. But it might be even greater now. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June allowed states to severely restrict or altogether ban abortion, instantly raising the stakes of legislative races across the country.
Another potential Supreme Court decision has spiked Democratic fears to a new level. The justices in the term that begins this month will hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, an election-law case that legal experts say could dramatically reshape how ballots are cast and counted across the country. Republican litigants want the high court to affirm what’s known as the independent-state-legislature theory, which posits that the Constitution gives near-universal power over the running of federal elections to state legislatures. A ruling adopting that argument—and four conservative justices have signaled that they are open to such an interpretation—would allow partisan legislative majorities to ignore or overrule state courts and election officials, potentially granting legal legitimacy to efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to overturn the will of voters in 2024.
With the next presidential election in mind, Democrats have prioritized gubernatorial elections in the closely fought states, including Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where Trump tried to jawbone legislators and other high-ranking officials into overturning his defeat in 2020. They’ve also steered donations to long-neglected secretary-of-state races in some of those same battlegrounds. But the looming Supreme Court ruling in Moore v. Harper has, for some Democrats, turned the fight for state legislative control into the most pivotal of all. “A single state legislative race in Michigan or Arizona could well prove more important to our future than any congressional or U.S. Senate race in America,” Daniel Squadron, a co-founder of the States Project, told me.
Squadron’s group is spending $60 million to back Democrats in state legislative races in just five states, in what it is calling the largest investment by a single outside organization ever for those campaigns. The effort is in part designed to counter what has historically been a significant GOP advantage, led by the Republican State Leadership Committee and major conservative donors, such as the Koch family.
Precisely how realistic the States Project’s goals are, and where Democrats should be spending most heavily, is a source of some debate within the party. In Arizona, a swing of just more than 1,000 votes in the State House and 2,000 votes in the State Senate would have flipped those chambers to Democrats in 2020, and the party needs to pick up only one or two seats this year to win majorities. But Arizona’s maps became more favorable to Republicans in redistricting, and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee—the party’s official state legislative arm—views winning majorities there as a relative long shot, especially during a difficult midterm year in which Democrats typically lose seats. The DLCC is instead more focused on protecting Democratic incumbents in Arizona and defending the party’s narrow advantages in states like Colorado and Nevada. Jessica Post, the committee’s president, acknowledges that there is a “philosophical difference” between the DLCC and some of the outside progressive groups.
“We think that the playing field is wider than simply flipping three battleground states,” Post told me. “We think that we have to protect Democratic majorities across the country.” The States Project is also investing in a few states where Democrats narrowly control the legislature, including Maine and Nevada. But Squadron defended the decision to play offense elsewhere, noting that swaying state legislative races costs “a fraction” of what it does to influence statewide and national elections. “It’s necessary,” he said. “The stakes are high enough that whether the odds are low, medium, or high, we have to take this on.”
There is widespread agreement, including among Republicans, that the Michigan State Senate is in play, and that the race in the Thirty-Fifth District could be decisive. “There’s no question things are tight right now,” Gustavo Portela, the deputy chief of staff for the Michigan Republican Party, told me. GOP candidates are focusing their campaigns heavily on inflation, he said, though he noted that the new maps tilt toward Democrats and that Republicans currently lag them in fundraising.
Campaigns and outside groups are running TV ads in some districts, but the candidate who wins a state legislative race tends to be the one who knocks on the most doors. McDonald Rivet is facing a Republican state representative, Annette Glenn, who supported Trump and called for a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Michigan, which Joe Biden won by more than 150,000 votes. (Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
With an army of about 100 volunteers, McDonald Rivet told me her team has already knocked on more than 30,000 doors. Many of the people who answer cite worries about kitchen-table economic issues, or schools, or health care, or abortion—the topics you’d expect voters to bring up. But a surprising number, McDonald Rivet said, express unprompted concern about the future of American democracy, about whether election results will be respected. “I often hear people say, ‘I never thought I would question the health of democracy,’” she said. “‘These are things I have taken for granted my entire life.’”
Protecting democracy is just one of the many issues McDonald Rivet highlights when she talks with voters, either at their homes or during the small meet-and-greet events she holds in the district. But she, too, is worried. Michigan Republicans have nominated election deniers for both governor and secretary of state. McDonald Rivet told me that some Republican candidates for the state legislature have stated publicly that the only electoral outcome they would accept in 2024 is a Trump victory.
When I asked Portela whether a Republican legislative majority would honor the result of the popular vote for president, he twice dodged the question. “That’s nothing but fear-mongering from Democrats who are desperate,” he replied. “That’s not what’s at stake right now.” Perhaps he’s right. But to Democrats, it’s the evasiveness, the refusal to affirm a fundamental tenet of American elections, that suggests they are right to worry.
The Supreme Court delivered appalling decisions in June—on abortion, guns, and environmental regulation—but the conservative supermajority is poised to strike an even greater blow against American democracy. The justices now have the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in their sights. On October 4, the second day of the new term, they will hear Alabama’s challenge to a federal district court’s finding that the state has to create a new majority-Black congressional district. This is no ordinary case of statutory interpretation. At stake is a crowning achievement of the civil-rights era, and the meaning and measure of racial equality in the hands of a Supreme Court reshaped by Donald Trump.
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Back in February, in a 5–4 vote, the Court’s conservative majority temporarily blocked the district court’s order; the majority didn’t even deign to issue an opinion explaining its reasoning. The justices’ audacious move freed Alabama to hold November’s congressional elections in districts that the lower court had declared invalid. This went too far even for one of the Voting Rights Act’s best-known critics, Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented. To resurrect a pungent phrase, his colleagues out-segged him. But it would be a mistake to read his dissent as a sign that he has abandoned a project that has obsessed him since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department.
The most likely explanation for his dissent was that he flinched at the optics: Alabama’s request for a stay had arrived on the Court’s “shadow docket.” Every court maintains an emergency docket to handle matters that can’t wait for a full hearing. But during the Trump years, the Supreme Court exploited this device to hand victories to the president without a full briefing, public argument, or even advance notice.
Although Alabama is 27 percent Black, only one of its seven congressional districts—the one that includes Birmingham—has a Black majority, despite large Black populations concentrated in Mobile and in the “Black Belt” counties that stretch across the state. It may have struck the chief justice that using the shadow docket to preserve this status quo in defiance of the lower court’s decision was an unappealing step, and an unnecessary one at that.
When the justices decide the case, Merrill v. Milligan, this term, they will be free not only to overturn the lower court’s decision, but to rewrite the rules governing how the Voting Rights Act applies to similar cases anywhere in the country. Roberts conceded in his dissent that the district court had correctly followed precedent. He also made it clear that, in his view, the precedent is overdue for revision. As we saw in June, overturning precedent is no obstacle to a majority ready and willing to use its power to get what it wants.
The justices have framed the question for this round as “whether the State of Alabama’s 2021 redistricting plan for its seven seats in the United States House of Representatives violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” But the real question, the perilous one underlying that seemingly benign formulation, is this: Is Section 2 itself constitutional? And in the dangerous space forced open by that question, the young John Roberts and the chief justice of the United States meet.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits any electoral practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” A violation has occurred if members of a racial or language minority group “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Section 2 is about the allocation of political power. It takes aim at “vote dilution,” defined as dispersing a cohesive minority group among several districts or lumping members of the group into one district. “Cracking” and “packing” seem to be what was happening in Alabama.
A 1986 decision, Thornburg v. Gingles, laid out a road map for how to prove such a case, requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate that the minority group was “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority.” That test is central to the Alabama case. Obviously, applying that test requires an awareness of race. How can line-drawers, or courts, know whether a minority group’s vote is being diluted without knowing where the members of the group live, and how many of them there are?
And yet Alabama argued that, by taking race into account at all, the district court indulged in “the noxious idea that redistricting begins and ends with racial considerations.” The creation of a new majority-Black district, the state claimed, was therefore nothing more than a “racial gerrymander,” a phrase that Alabama’s lawyers used multiple times in the application for a stay. Unless the justices blocked the order, the state warned, “Alabamians will suffer the constitutional harm of being assigned to racially segregated districts, irreconcilable with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the VRA as initially conceived.” Section 2 is supposed to be a “shield against racial discrimination,” the state’s formal brief reads. “It is not a sword to perpetuate it.”
These sentences merit parsing with care. The words invite a dramatic conclusion: that the heart of the Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court a generation ago and as applied many times since, is unconstitutional.
What Alabama is saying, essentially, is that any effort to eradicate racial discrimination is itself racial discrimination. But how can that be? How can we know when a Voting Rights Act remedy is called for unless we can take account of race? Alabama is trying to turn the statute inside out and upside down. The district court, in rejecting the state’s argument, observed that it was “obvious” that its logic would “preclude any plaintiff from ever stating a Section Two claim.”
That conundrum will be obvious to the Supreme Court as well. But for the conservative justices, the problem is not how to satisfy the Gingles test but rather the test itself. Roberts made that point in his dissent from the stay. “While the District Court cannot be faulted for its application of Gingles,” he wrote, “it is fair to say that Gingles and its progeny have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty.” He then quoted Justice Anthony Kennedy, who warned in a 1994 vote-dilution case that “placing undue emphasis upon proportionality risks defeating the goals underlying the Voting Rights Act.”
Proportionality is a loaded word. Section 2 explicitly disclaims the goal of proportional representation: “Nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” But the justices who decided Thornburg v. Gingles remained worried about the specter of proportionality. While nominally unanimous, they produced four separate opinions. They were clearly grappling with whether the decision would hardwire a proportionality standard—in effect, a quota—into a statute that purported to reject it.
That concern has never fully been put to rest. The statute remains unfinished business, like the fight over affirmative action, which the conservatives on the Court have been trying to finish off for decades. It’s not by chance that voting rights and race-conscious university admissions have both ended up on the docket this term. Why wouldn’t they, when their final unraveling is within reach?
The same law firm—Consovoy McCarthy—is representing Alabama and the plaintiffs in two cases the Court will soon hear challenging any consideration of race in admission to Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The firm’s founding partner William Consovoy, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, is one of the right wing’s go-to lawyers; he defended President Donald Trump in his efforts to shield various records from disclosure in 2019. The firm’s two lawyers on the Alabama brief represent the rising generation: One clerked for Thomas and the other for Roberts.
Consovoy’s case against Harvard failed in two lower federal courts, but those defeats were a warm-up act. Now comes the real show. The first line of his petition to the Court is breathtaking for its brash confidence—and its cheekiness: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” Instantly recognizable, this is a quotation from one of Roberts’s earliest Supreme Court opinions, in which he dissented from the majority’s finding of vote dilution in Texas, in a Section 2 case.
Although the Court decided Gingles 19 years before Roberts became chief justice, the case was no abstraction to him. Early in his career, he was deeply involved in a monumental political battle that ultimately led to the decision.
In 1980, the Supreme Court decided City of Mobile v. Bolden. At issue was the validity of a common form of municipal government in the South, a commission consisting of three members who were elected at large rather than from individual districts. At-large systems all but guaranteed that even cities with sizable Black populations would have no Black members in elected positions. And indeed, no Black candidate had ever been elected to the city government in Mobile, Alabama, where racial polarization ran so deep that even a white candidate viewed as sympathetic to the interests of the Black community was doomed to lose.
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, representing all Black citizens of Mobile, claimed that the at-large system violated Section 2 and the equal-protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court made short work of both claims. Section 2, Justice Potter Stewart wrote for the majority, was no more than a statutory mirror of the Fifteenth Amendment, which bars racial discrimination in voting and which the Court interpreted as applying only to intentional discrimination. The Fifteenth Amendment “does not entail the right to have Negro candidates elected,” Stewart observed gratuitously. The Fourteenth Amendment was also a lost cause; four years earlier, in Washington v. Davis, the Court had ruled for the first time that proof of intentional discrimination was necessary to establish a violation of the equal-protection clause. The fact that a policy disproportionately harmed or disempowered one racial group, in other words, was not enough.
After this devastating ruling, civil-rights activists turned to Congress. The Supreme Court had administered something close to a death blow to Section 2, and only an amendment making clear that the law covered discriminatory outcomes as well as discriminatory purpose could save it. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives responded quickly and produced such a bill. John Roberts, 26 years old and having recently completed a clerkship for then-Justice William Rehnquist, was working as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general. His portfolio included voting rights, and in a series of memos that came to light soon after his 2005 Supreme Court nomination, Roberts argued vigorously against the passage of the proposed amendment.
In one memo, he wrote: “Violations of Section 2 should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” The proposed “effects test,” he wrote, “would establish essentially a quota system for electoral politics” that was “inconsistent with this Nation’s history of popular sovereignty.”
Ultimately, the Senate passed the bill and Reagan signed it. But the fight wasn’t over. To the contrary—first under Chief Justice Warren Burger, then under Rehnquist, and finally under Roberts himself, the Supreme Court went assiduously about disengaging the federal government from the civil-rights revolution. Busing for integration ended at the school-district line. White contractors were deemed the victims of city policies aimed at guaranteeing minority-owned businesses a share of the work. The Court weakened the part of the Fourteenth Amendment that gives Congress the power to enforce its guarantees.
No one in a position of power has done more for this cause than John Roberts. One of his first major opinions, the Parents Involved school-integration case in 2007, declared his determination to get government out of the business of counting people by race. (Roberts actually borrowed the most famous line of that opinion—“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”—from another federal judge, without attribution.)
In Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts’s majority opinion essentially killed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the highly successful “preclearance” rule under which jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get permission from the Justice Department or a federal court before making any change in voting procedures. The South had done so well in correcting the sins of its past, Roberts wrote, that the law as applied could no longer be justified.
The impact of the Shelby County decision was stunning. Within hours, Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas and now the state’s governor, announced that a stringent voter-ID law that had been blocked under Section 5 the previous summer would go into effect “immediately.” That was just the beginning. States across the South and the Southwest have been quick to exploit their new freedom from the federal scrutiny that once would have deterred changes in voting hours, ID requirements, and other seemingly neutral moves with disproportionate effects on minority voters.
The end of Section 2 could be even more damaging because, in many respects, it is the more powerful provision. It applies nationwide, and does not require, as Section 5 did, proof that the challenged policy has made things worse for minority voters, only that such voters have been deprived of an opportunity that should have been theirs. The prospect that Section 2 may now follow Section 5 into oblivion feels at once scarcely believable and sadly inevitable. If this comes to pass, it will be almost impossible to prove that a state has gerrymandered its electoral districts to disempower minority voters, or for a court to order that its map be redrawn.
Look again at that curious phrase from Alabama’s lawyers, the one describing the district-court order as “irreconcilable with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the VRA as initially conceived.” What is “initially conceived” supposed to mean? It can only be a reference to that 1981 fight over the meaning of Section 2, when the young John Roberts argued that it should not be “too easy to prove” that a state had violated the voting rights of its citizens. The Alabama lawyers are speaking directly to Chief Justice Roberts, telling him that the law has been constitutionally problematic for decades, and that now, in this very case, in this very year, he finally has the chance to make it right.
This article appears in the October 2022 print edition with the headline “John Roberts’s Long Game.”
JAY, Maine—Services at the New Life Baptist Church had just wrapped up, and in the parking lot outside its tiny chapel, Paul LePage was standing behind me with his arm wrapped around my head. He held a cellphone inches from my face, as if he were filming an extreme close-up. The former and perhaps future governor of Maine had insisted on reenacting an incident that had occurred a few weeks earlier, when he’d threatened “to deck” a Democratic operative tracking his campaign. “If you come into my space,” LePage had warned the young man, “you’re going down.”
I had asked LePage about the flap because it represented exactly the kind of uncivil confrontation for which the pugnacious Republican has become known. For more than a year, he had studiously been trying to avoid such encounters—and had largely succeeded. LePage, who as governor once challenged a Democratic legislator to a duel, famously bragged that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump.” After two tumultuous terms, he left office four years ago with an approval rating of just 39 percent. Now 73, LePage is attempting a comeback, bidding to oust the Democrat who replaced him, Janet Mills. With Trump eyeing a revival of his own in 2024, the gubernatorial race this fall could serve as a test of Maine voters’ appetite for the return of a Trumpian leader after four years of somewhat calmer Democratic governance.
A changed man LePage is not. But he is trying at least to sand down his rough edges, perhaps recognizing that the bombastic style he pioneered is no longer a winning formula in a state that shifted left in 2018 and decisively rejected Trump two years later. The governor who labeled people of color as “the enemy” of the nation’s whitest state has joined the parade of candidates denouncing the vitriol and even occasional violence that have infected American politics. “There’s an awful lot of hate in the hearts of many people, and it’s sad,” LePage told the parishioners inside the church, during a service on the 21st anniversary of 9/11. “We have to pray it away,” he said. “We have to come together as one nation.” Quoting Abraham Lincoln’s warning that a house divided cannot stand, LePage bemoaned the deep fissures between Republicans and Democrats. “It’s becoming vile and horrible.”
Was LePage trying to present a kinder, gentler version of himself this election? I asked the ex-governor that exact question outside the church. “No,” he replied. “What I’m saying is life is a journey. And along the way you learn and you get better, and hope that every day, the rest of my life, I’m a better man.”
An admirable sentiment. But did LePage think that during his time in office he had contributed to the hate he now recognizes in this country? He replied in a way that suggested he had some practice answering this query. “Am I perfect? No,” LePage said. “Did I make mistakes? Yes. Did I defend my family? Yes. Will I continue to defend my family? Yes.”
LePage likes to respond to inquiries with questions of his own. When asked about his critics’ pointing out how often he had promised to change his ways only to fall back into confrontations and insults, he responded by asking if I had seen such a lapse during this campaign. I replied that personally I had not. But of course, there was that pesky matter of the run-in with the Democratic operative. Clearly, LePage did not count that as one of his mistakes.
“He came into my personal space,” LePage said. “Let me show you what he did.” Before I knew it, the former governor had swung around me and begun the demonstration he hoped would exonerate him. Once he had shown me his quick version of events, LePage returned to where he had been standing for our interview. “If somebody attacks me,” he said, wagging a finger, “I will defend myself.”
When I checkedthe video of LePage’s brief confrontation with the Democratic operative, the interaction looked nothing like the former governor’s reenactment. The operative had approached LePage as the two men were stepping over a puddle after a parade (LePage was holding a Tim Hortons doughnut), but the closest the man came to LePage appeared to be a couple of feet, not inches. Yet the reason Democrats were so keen on broadcasting the incident as widely as possible—and why LePage was so intent on defending his reaction—was that the whole thing seemed so familiar, so very LePage.
Long before Trump shocked (and, in many cases, enthralled) voters on the campaign trail and upended Washington with his unfiltered, impulsive, often downright mean governing style, LePage had been doing the same in Maine. When in 2016 LePage described himself as Trump before Trump, “he was 100 percent correct,” says Roger Katz, a former GOP state legislator in Maine who backed LePage’s first gubernatorial run in 2010 but is now endorsing Mills. “The same kinds of insulting behavior and lack of respect for people is how he governed.”
LePage’s blatantly racist comments about Hispanic immigrants and Black people often made national headlines, but the many stories about his impulsive governing and frequent tirades have become local legends in Maine. Almost everyone I spoke with who had worked with the governor had a tale to share. Katz recalled the time that, in a fit of rage at lawmakers, LePage vetoed every single bill at the end of a legislative session, including those that he himself had proposed. Jeff McCabe, a Democrat who served as majority leader of the Maine House of Representatives, told me about how LePage had abruptly ordered a state prison closed in the middle of a dispute with lawmakers, resulting in the hasty transfer of inmates during the dark of night. “People woke up and thought there had been a prison break,” McCabe said.
Drew Gattine, now the chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, was serving in the state legislature in 2016 when he criticized LePage for comments in which the governor claimed that virtually all of the drug dealers arrested in Maine were “Black and Hispanic people.” In response, LePage left Gattine a voicemail in which he called him “a little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker.” The governor went on: “I want you to record this and make it public, because I am after you.” LePage later apologized to Gattine, but not before he told reporters that he wished it was “1825,” so the two men could duel. “I would not put my gun in the air,” LePage said at the time. “I guarantee you, I would not be [Alexander] Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt.”
Protesters upset with then-Governor Paul LePage hold a rally outside the governor’s mansion in Augusta, Maine, on August 30, 2016. (Yoon Byun / The New York Times / Redux)
When I asked 63-year-old Joanne Glidden, an amateur motorcyclist with the United Bikers of Maine, what she liked most about LePage, she replied with a wide grin, “He reminds me of Trump!” As with Trump, LePage’s combativeness and lack of a public filter endeared him to many Republican and independent voters, who form the base of his current support. Glidden was among a dozen or so people who lingered at a fairgrounds in Windsor, Maine, after LePage had spoken to the biker group. “He spoke his mind, and I liked that,” Dan Adams, a 57-year-old crane operator, told me. “He don’t pull no punches.” The owner of a day-care center, Penny Nava, 56, told me she didn’t want to see LePage change his approach. “You need to be who you are,” she said. “You let that go, and you lose yourself.”
Maine is not as deeply blue a state as the most recent presidential election might suggest. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s three-point margin of victory in Maine came closer than all but one other state (Nevada) to matching her slim advantage in the national popular vote. The state backed Biden by nine points in 2020, but Maine voters split their ballots and reelected Republican Senator Susan Collins by nearly the same margin, shocking Democrats who had spent nearly $100 million to defeat her. In both years, Trump won an electoral vote by carrying Maine’s rural Second Congressional District, where LePage yard signs have become ubiquitous.
Unlike Trump, LePage grew up in poverty, not wealth and privilege. The eldest of 18 children, he ran away from home to escape an abusive, alcoholic father and was homeless for a time, working odd jobs to survive. He eventually graduated from college, started a business, and then worked for many years as the general manager of a discount chain store before launching his career in politics. LePage ran for governor after two terms as mayor of Waterville, a Democratic-leaning city that is home to Colby College.
He won each of his two gubernatorial races in three-way contests that allowed him to capitalize on a divided opposition. In neither election did he capture a majority of the vote, winning with just 37.6 percent in 2010 and 48.2 percent in 2014. He spent eight years governing conservatively, reducing taxes and fighting for lower spending. After Maine voters approved a referendum to expand Medicaid, LePage blocked its implementation. His elections galvanized the movement in Maine toward ranked-choice voting, as advocates argued that the system would favor more-moderate candidates and would ensure that the winner ultimately secured votes from at least 50 percent of the electorate. Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice balloting and used the system in 2018 and 2020. But in a twist, a judge ruled that the system could go forward only in federal elections—for president and Congress—and not in state races. So it will not be in place for the Mills-LePage matchup this fall, although the lack of a serious independent candidate likely means that the change will have little effect.
Mills has held a small but consistent lead in the limited public polling so far, and Democrats expect the race to be close. They worry that the passage of time will have caused voters to forget what they disliked about LePage’s leadership style, so they’ve taken it upon themselves to remind them about his most memorable outbursts and dispute assertions that he’s changed. The strategy could be a preview of a national campaign against Trump should he run again in 2024. Across the country, this fall’s ballots feature plenty of Trump allies, acolytes, and would-be clones, most notably the gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. But Maine voters had already experienced eight years of Trump-style chaos before they turned in the other direction, and now they face the unique question of whether they want to go back. LePage “has never lost an election,” Mark Brewer, a political-science professor at the University of Maine, told me. “So betting against him historically has been a losing bet.”
Donald Trump shakes hands with Maine Governor Paul LePage as he is introduced at a rally in Merrill Auditorium on Thursday, August 4, 2016. (Derek Davis / Portland Press Herald / Getty)
If LePage is a stand-in for Trump this November, Janet Mills is a Biden-esque figure in Maine. At 74, she hails from a prominent political family and has served in public office with only a few years’ interruption since the ’70s. Mills’s parents were friends of the longtime Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and one of her brothers twice ran for governor as a Republican. After decades as a prosecutor and state legislator, Mills won election as Maine’s attorney general in 2008 and again in 2012. From that perch, she battled frequently with LePage, who at one point sued her for refusing to represent his administration when it sided with then-President Trump over his executive order restricting travel from Muslim-majority countries. (The state supreme court ruled in favor of Mills.)
Mills became Maine’s first woman governor after earning 51 percent of the vote in 2018—a higher share than LePage won in either of his victories. She acted immediately to implement the voter-approved Medicaid expansion and has increased spending on education, on infrastructure, and in the fight against climate change. Like Biden, she has occasionally worked with Republicans, most recently drawing bipartisan support to send $850 relief checks to citizens as a way to reduce the effects of inflation. Mills has also occasionally tangled with progressives, vetoing some bills passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature.
Mostly, Mills seems to have lowered the temperature of state politics. She’s warm and unassuming; when I saw her greeting patrons at a small farmers’ market, she drew little attention to herself and seemed to blend in with the crowd. On a recent Saturday morning, Mills spoke briefly to mark the tenth anniversary of the opening of a local grain mill. She read her remarks off an iPhone while a dancing toddler competed for the audience’s attention nearby.
If Democrats find fault with Mills, it’s that she is perhaps too low-key. “I don’t think she’s brought in a lot of people,” Nancy Baxter, a 65-year-old health administrator for the federal government, told me at the market. “I don’t see her having excited the state as much as we’d hoped.”
I met Mills outside the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, where the governor had worked for many years as a lawyer before entering politics. During a 30-minute interview, she touted her administration’s handling of and emergence from the pandemic. Like its neighbors in New England, Maine has a relatively high vaccination rate and low death rate, especially considering its population is one of the oldest in the country. Mills boasted about the state’s migration rate, which she said was the country’s seventh highest. “We’re turning the corner, and people are coming here,” she said. “We’ve become branded as a safe and welcoming state, and I like that.”
Mills brushed off LePage’s frequent attacks on her. “I can’t judge who he is today, but the people of Maine know who he was before,” she said. Mills sounded a bit like a candidate who believes she’s ahead in the polls. She noted that LePage had appeared in the state with Trump during the height of the pandemic, in 2020, when the former president called her “a dictator.” “I thought, This is ridiculous,” Mills recalled, dismissively. “For the better part of my career, I’ve listened to weak men talk tough. Loud men talk tough to hide their weaknesses.”
Trump hasn’t come to Maine to campaign for LePage this year. During my swing through the state, the Trump-before-Trump himself was a tough man to find.
He’s running a decidedly low-profile statewide race—“a stealth campaign,” as Mills described it to me—having apparently determined that the easiest way to stay on his best behavior is to steer clear of situations that would test his discipline. After formally launching his gubernatorial campaign a year ago, LePage has held virtually no large rallies and given few press conferences or interviews (aside from appearances on conservative radio stations). Maine’s political press corps is not large, and LePage frequently evades reporters by publicizing his appearances only after they’ve occurred, usually by posting photos to his Twitter or Facebook pages.
LePage’s campaign ignored me entirely. My many calls and emails went unreturned, and when I stopped by his campaign headquarters early on a Friday afternoon after Labor Day, no one was there. (“Don’t take it personally,” Katz, the former GOP lawmaker and LePage critic, assured me, noting that LePage “had a terrible relationship with the press” when he was governor.) When I showed up at a local GOP fundraiser that Democrats said LePage would be addressing, the organizers told me he had never been on the schedule. They directed me instead to the charity event that the United Bikers of Maine was holding about an hour away. LePage had indeed spoken to the group, but he was long gone by the time I got there.
I finally found the former governor on the morning of September 11 in the rural town of Jay, about 30 miles northwest of Augusta, the state capital. The New Life Baptist Church is the size of a modest, one-story house, and LePage arrived with his wife, Ann; a campaign aide; and a trio of local Republican legislators. He had befriended the church’s pastor, Chris Grimbilas, during his second term as governor, and the two have stayed in close touch in the years since. Grimbilas told the approximately 30 parishioners gathered in the sanctuary that LePage was not there “to campaign,” although LePage sounded very much like a candidate on the stump during his brief remarks from the pulpit. The theme of the Sunday service was to honor first responders, and LePage began by comparing the state’s firing last year of police officers and firefighters who refused COVID-19 vaccinations to the horrors of 9/11. “It was the most vicious of attacks on first responders I’ve seen since the World Trade Center,” he said, pledging to reinstate those who lost their jobs in January if he becomes governor again.
LePage’s sparse public schedule might seem like a questionable campaign strategy, but it could prove effective. As a recent two-term governor, he does not need to introduce himself to voters, and he might be hoping that a midterm backlash against Democrats nationwide will return him to office.
As for Trump, LePage is happy to have the votes of Mainers who associate him positively with the former president. But he’s not emphasizing the connection. For some voters, the link between the two men seems to be thinner than it was when both were in office. Despite their similar personalities, LePage and Trump had very different upbringings, and they’ve diverged again during their (perhaps temporary) retirements.
Unlike Trump, LePage left office willingly when his term was up in 2019. He and his wife initially moved to Florida, but he returned to Maine and worked as a bartender at McSeagull’s Restaurant for two summers, in the coastal tourist town of Boothbay Harbor. The gig served as good publicity for both the bar and LePage, who was already talking about challenging Mills for governor. Although he struggled to keep up during busy times, LePage’s fellow bartenders told me he was a good colleague who took direction well. “He needs to keep his mouth shut,” Gigi Frost, 41, told me. But she added: “I really do like him personally.” Frost, an independent, said she hadn’t decided whether to vote for LePage or Mills. Yet she saw LePage as distinct from Trump. “I despise Trump,” she said. “I don’t think LePage is as bad.”
That assessment matched what I heard from some other Maine voters, including those who hadn’t spent a summer pouring beers with the former governor. Trump is in a whole other category now from LePage. “LePage is better than Trump,” Shirley Emery, a 74-year-old retiree, told me in Windsor. “He’s honest. He’s not a womanizer.”
LePage seems to be hearing those voices too, and his cautious, buttoned-up strategy suggests that he sees Trumpism waning in the upper reaches of New England. When I asked him whether he still aligned himself with Trump, the former governor clammed up. “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine,” he said, “and I’m not going to talk about national politics.” I tried again. Should Trump run again in 2024? “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine, all right? And that’s it.”
Perhaps Paul LePage is a transformed man after all. The conservative who ran on unvarnished, tell-it-like-it-is authenticity has finally discovered his filter and learned the coded deflection of the blue-state Republican. Distancing himself from the president he once claimed as a protégé, the straight-talking governor has, in pursuit of one more term in power, almost become a conventional politician.
CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.
“A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California.
“You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”
Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1.
“Because we have this on the ballot, Republicans cannot run away from this issue,” says Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant who is advising Christy Smith, the party’s nominee against Republican Representative Mike Garcia in another Los Angeles–area district. “Every Republican in a competitive district is vulnerable with this issue at the top of the ballot as a constitutional amendment. I think it is going to drive turnout.”
California will provide a crucial measure of how broadly the abortion issue may benefit Democrats this year. On both sides, there’s agreement that abortion’s increased prominence will strengthen Democrats in districts with a large number of white-collar voters—including the coastal seats south of Los Angeles now held by Democratic Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin. Less clear is whether the issue will prove as powerful in districts, such as those held by Republican Representatives Garcia and David Valadao, with larger numbers of blue-collar and Latino voters who may be acutely feeling the effects of inflation. The district in which Chen is challenging Steel demographically falls somewhere in between.
“Presumably you’ll see coastal Republicans split with the party on things like choice,” predicts Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes state elections. “On the other hand, when you are looking at some inland and Central Valley districts, they are very different,” he told me. Although “there’s all this chatter that abortion is so important,” Sragow added, “I suggest most Americans do not wake up with abortion the thing they are most worried about,” particularly in working-class communities.
Though solidly Democratic at the state level—Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is cruising to reelection this year without serious Republican opposition after defeating a GOP-backed recall effort—congressional contests in California have proved highly susceptible to swings in the national mood. As part of the “blue wave” in 2018, the party flipped seven Republican-held seats, reducing the GOP to its smallest share of California’s congressional delegation since the 1880s. But in 2020, Republicans recaptured four of those districts—a key part of their unusual success at gaining House seats nationwide while losing the White House.
Earlier this year, when inflation was raging and the Democratic legislative agenda seemed stalled, Republicans were optimistic about advancing farther across California by potentially ousting Democratic Representatives Josh Harder in the Central Valley and Porter and Levin in Orange and San Diego Counties. Although Democrats acknowledge that those races (and another Democratic-held open seat) remain competitive, they now see the opportunity to go on the offensive against Steel, Valadao, and Garcia, as well as potentially Representatives Ken Calvert and Young Kim in Southern California; they also see an opportunity to contest a Republican open seat in the Sacramento area.
Several other issues have also contributed to this reversal of fortune: increased attention to gun violence after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; renewed focus on Donald Trump amid the revelations from the House January 6 committee and the firestorm over his mishandling of classified documents; and climate change after the passage of the Democrats’ slimmed-down reconciliation bill. But analysts in both parties see the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe as the pivotal factor shifting the congressional landscape across California. “We are just seeing an unprecedented level of outrage,” Representative Levin told me in an interview.
As in other states, Republicans continue to express cautious optimism that frustration over inflation and disenchantment with the performance of President Joe Biden will outweigh views on abortion. “Of course [abortion] is going to be an issue, way more than it was in May of this year,” Lance Trover, a Republican consultant advising Representative Steel, who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020, told me. “But at the end of the day, the fundamentals of the economy are going to be key.”
California Republicans face an unusually powerful headwind in moving beyond the abortion issue. Almost all Republicans holding or seeking congressional seats have staked out hard-line anti-abortion positions that directly collide with polls showing deep and broad support for abortion rights across the state.
Polling in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that more than two-thirds of state residents opposed the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. That included about three-fourths of African Americans and Asian Americans, seven in 10 white voters, and just over three-fifths of Latino voters. About three-fourths of independents, whom Republicans need to compete in California, because they are so outnumbered by registered Democrats, opposed the ruling. Opposition to the decision was greatest in the big blue metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even in areas where Republicans have traditionally performed somewhat better, such as Orange and San Diego Counties and the Central Valley, preponderant majorities opposed the decision.
In another survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times, more than seven in 10 California voters said they intended to support the constitutional amendment inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution.
“From a public-opinion perspective, it’s a settled issue in California,” Mark Baldassare, the PPIC president, told me. “We have seen what we would describe as overwhelming support for abortion rights in California consistently in our polls over many, many years … That’s pretty consistent across demographic groups and regions of the state.”
The state’s Republican congressional delegation—as well as the party’s challengers in the key races—have placed themselves firmly on the opposite side of that consensus. Four of the House Republicans facing the potentially toughest contests—Steel, Garcia, Valadao, and Calvert—signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. All of them but Calvert have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, a Republican bill that would define the unborn as a person under the Constitution from “the moment of fertilization” and effectively ban abortion nationwide, legal scholars say. Representative Kim, another Republican facing a potentially competitive race in an Orange County district, did not co-sponsor that bill, but has described herself as a “proud pro-life woman” who believes “the rights of the child must be respected.” The GOP challengers to Harder, Levin, and Porter have also publicly declared their opposition to legal abortion.
As signs have grown of the backlash to the Supreme Court decision—including the Democratic victory in a New York congressional special election and the resounding defeat of a Kansas ballot initiative that would have opened the door to state abortion restrictions—several of the California Republicans have tried to obscure their positions. For instance, although the Life at Conception Act offers no exceptions and Steel earlier this year said she supported legal abortion only when the mother’s health was endangered, she told me in a statement, “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother, and baby.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times this week, Representative Garcia backed the same exceptions—which, again, are not included in the “life begins at conception” bill he is co-sponsoring.
In her statement, Steel downplayed the possibility that a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to ban abortion nationwide, though notably without disavowing the idea: “Discussions surrounding a nationwide ban on abortion are purely hypothetical at this point,” she declared.
But such vague dismissals may not dispel the vulnerability California Republicans face over the possibility of a national ban on abortion, particularly amid the parallel debate over amending the state constitution.
Though neither supporters nor opponents of the constitutional amendment have yet raised much money, Newsom, who is emerging as a national leader for Democrats on cultural issues, is expected to campaign heavily for it and raise its visibility this fall. “I don’t want to give away our plans … but I would expect him to play a very prominent role,” Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, told me. Abortion rights and the constitutional amendment to protect them, he added, are “going to have an effect in every single race in California.”
The proposed amendment on the ballot in November represents the third level of protection for abortion rights in California. In earlier rulings, the state supreme court has already decided that the procedure is protected under the state constitution’s guarantees of liberty and privacy. This amendment, placed on the ballot by Newsom and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, adds an explicit guarantee that “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom … which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”
Yet even all those reinforcing levels of protection for abortion rights in the California constitution would be preempted if Congress approved a national ban, legal analysts agree. The Life at Conception Act would surely face legal challenges if a future Republican-controlled Congress passes it, but should the law be upheld, it would override any California action to guarantee abortion rights, according to Cary Franklin, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA and the faculty director of its Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “If Congress were to pass a national ban on abortion, that would trump state law, even state constitutional law,” she told me.
That’s a message Democrats are likely to pound across the state in the campaign’s final months. “If Steel has her way, she will pass a federal ban on abortion, which will override our protections here, and I think Californians are coming to realize that,” Chen, a Naval reservist and the owner of a business that manages commercial properties, told me. By contrast, Chen, like the other Democratic incumbents and challengers, supports legislation restoring a national right to abortion.
Opponents of the state constitutional amendment, such as Steel, say it would authorize abortions at any point in pregnancy, ending current state restrictions after a fetus is viable outside the womb (unless the mother’s life is endangered). Its sponsors deny that interpretation, but it will likely become the centerpiece of the campaign against the amendment. “Pro-life people may have had enough,” Susan Swift Arnall, the vice president of legal affairs at California’s Right to Life League, told me. “They may say, ‘This is too far. This is too extreme … And we want to send a message back to the legislature that we don’t support abortion on demand for all nine months and even into the birth of the baby.’”
But the greater likelihood is that the amendment mobilizes turnout among the decisive majority in the state who support abortion rights. “There’s no question the [Supreme Court] decision has really created a great deal of increased interest from women voters for sure, and not just Democrats,” Levin said. “We are talking about independents, even some Republicans. Those who historically haven’t voted in midterm elections, I think, are motivated.”
By solidifying Democrats in suburbia, abortion rights’ growing visibility, like the increased focus on gun violence and renewed attention to Trump, may narrow the range of House districts the GOP can realistically contest both in California and nationwide, and lower the ceiling on their potential gains. But not enough voters may prioritize abortion to neutralize Republicans’ other advantages in economically strained areas. Like so much else in modern American politics, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe seems likely to further widen the chasm between white-collar and culturally cosmopolitan metropolitan areas trending toward the Democrats and blue-collar, socially conservative smaller places hardening in their support for the GOP, even in staunchly Democratic California.
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RED DOT nursing teams arrive within a rapid response time to augment a facility’s existing healthcare staff and assist in caring for patients until the emergency is clear and the crisis is over.
Press Release –
updated: Aug 18, 2021
LAS VEGAS, August 18, 2021 (Newswire.com)
– SpectrumACS, the company specializing in medical services for correctional facilities and state and county institutions, provides healthcare solutions in the form of temporary nursing staff, specialty physicians, digital radiology, and their unique rapid response unit. RED DOT, the emergency response team named from an incident where designated medical staff were identified by a red dot on their ID badge and locked down until the emergency cleared, is made up of Temporary Nurses that respond to incidents due to natural disasters, FEMA preparations, and other emergencies.
Today viruses and civil unrest are posing a unique threat to correctional and secured facilities, forcing lock-downs for the safety of staff and inmates. But something that can never be compromised no matter the emergency is an institution’s ongoing medical care. Barry Goldstein, President of SpectrumACS notes, “Our staff are truly on the front lines in every state and facility we serve. The pandemic and civil unrest has changed and increased demand in a number of ways which has given us the opportunity to dispatch teams like RED DOT to respond to any emergency.”
Led by SpectrumACS, a healthcare organization with more than 30 years of experience in this space, the highly specialized RED DOT team provides temporary relief nurses to psychiatric hospitals, correctional institutions, and Public Health Facilities. A RED DOT team arrives within a rapid response time and augments the facility’s existing healthcare staff to assist in caring for patients. SpectrumACS’s experienced Nurses stay inside the institution until the emergency is clear and the crisis is over.
By providing response teams nationwide, including travel nurses to vaccination clinics, SpectrumACS has been managing provider pools of more than 100 nurses in Colorado alone. Willette Stringer, Staffing Manager for SpectrumACS, says she’s grateful for the work that their nurses have been doing to assist Colorado with the vaccine administration. “They all take pride in the fact that they are making a difference in the fight against COVID-19 and other variants by helping to put an end to the pandemic,” Stringer says.
About Spectrum ACS
Under American Correctional Solutions, Inc, SpectrumACS was launched in 2013 with a singular focus on nurse staffing and registry services. Led by a team with decades of experience in healthcare staffing and recruiting, SpectrumACS provides nursing services to vaccination clinics, mental health hospitals, correctional facilities, medical centers, and Public Health Departments across the country, with operations overseen by their corporate headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. American Correctional Solutions, Inc. has supplied specialty medical services and staffing to county jails, and state and federal prisons for more than three decades.
CLEVELAND, January 27, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– SCA Sweeping Corporation of America (“SCA”), the largest self-performing power sweeping company in the United States, has acquired Columbus, OH-based Contract Sweepers & Equipment Company (“CSE”). This acquisition adds 105 customer-focused associates and 110 frontline trucks in Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton, OH, as well as Huntington, WV.
SCA’s President & CEO Christopher Valerian stated, “We are excited to have CSE join the SCA team. Their associates bring extensive experience in the industry, as well as a history of providing quality service to their customers. This transaction significantly enhances SCA’s service in the state of Ohio and is consistent with our strategy of buying best-in-class businesses.”
Gerry Kesselring, former President of CSE, will take a leadership role with SCA, overseeing the combined Ohio sweeping operations. He added, “Joining forces with SCA brings unmatched resources to our customers and associates.”
About SCA
Headquartered in Cleveland, OH, SCA is the largest self-performing power sweeping company in the United States. SCA services municipalities, departments of transportation, road and paving contractors, retail and commercial parking lots, and industrial complexes. SCA serves its customers daily with a presence across 40 locations in 15 states. For additional information, please visit www.sweepingcorp.com.
About Contract Sweepers & Equipment Company
Contract Sweepers and Equipment is the largest sweeping service provider in the Midwest and one of the nation’s elite NAPSA certified sweeping contractors. Since 1960, our reliable power sweeping and property maintenance services have been trusted by commercial, parking, industrial, and municipal properties throughout Greater Columbus, Ohio. Through the years, we have expanded to also serve Dayton and Cincinnati in Ohio, as well as Northern Kentucky, Southeast Indiana, and Huntington, West Virginia.
Contact: Mike Siragusa (216) 777-2747 msiragusa@sweepingcorp.com
