A case study illustrating just how much Republicans despise democracy is now unfolding in the state of Ohio. It has the full-throated support of that state’s GOP-controlled legislature—and now, apparently, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.
Stung by their failed attempt last August to stymie the ability of Ohio citizens to pass a referendum enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution, and still smarting at the subsequent success of Ohioans in passing a ballot initiative that did exactly that, Ohio Republicans are now employing a strategy designed to prevent a repeat.
They are attempting to draft a new law restricting citizen initiatives such as the 2023 abortion referendum, in exchange for allowing President Joe Biden to be listed on Ohioans’ ballot this November. They are also attempting to condition Biden’s access to the ballot on passage of a law that would allow the Ohio Supreme Court to more swiftly impose new abortion restrictions. This is foisted by the state’s Republican legislature, despite the passage of that pro-choice constitutional amendment last fall.
Not coincidentally, what they are proposing is the work of Christian activist organizations who see an opportunity to reinstate their anti-abortion agenda on unsuspecting Ohio citizens. Their efforts are also being championed by the state’s Republican senator, J.D. Vance, and his colleague, Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Democrat Sherrod Brown for the state’s other Senate seat. Last week, DeWine signed onto these efforts by his GOP colleagues, calling for a special session of the Ohio legislature, set to begin on Tuesday, with a vote expected later this week.
Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose declared last month that he intends to exclude Biden from the ballot in November. This is because Biden will not be officially nominated at the Democratic party convention until two weeks after the state’s official deadline for certifying presidential nominees. As explained by Chris Cameron, writing for The New York Times, “This is usually a minor procedural issue, and states have almost always offered a quick solution to ensure that major presidential candidates remain on the ballot.” In fact, it is a technicality that has been remedied by the Ohio state legislature twice in the past, both in 2012 and 2020.
But both the state’s Senate and House are controlled by Republican supermajorities. So, rather than quickly resolving the issue, Republicans have seized on this technicality to try to force through a measure that includes two distinct ”poison pills,” both aimed directly at the heart of participatory democracy in Ohio. (A clean bill that would allow the president access to the ballot is now sitting in the Ohio House, but the GOP-dominated Senate refuses to take it up.)
The first measure, crafted in deceptive language, purports to ban any ballot measures in which “foreign nationals” have contributed funds. That sounds wonderfully innocent, except such foreign contributions to candidates and “issues groups” are already prohibited under Ohio law, a prohibition that both Democrats and Republicans in the state support. Why then the sudden necessity for new legislation? Because, as David Pepper, former chair of the Ohio Democratic party, explains in his Substack, “foreign money” is simply a red herring. The actual intent here is to cripple any efforts of Ohio voters to pass any more citizen-sponsored initiatives:
[T]he new structures and enforcement mechanisms they are proposing for such campaigns would dramatically undermine the overall viability of grassroots ballot initiatives in Ohio—imposing low contribution limits, amid other changes, that could greatly dry up overall support for such initiatives (not because of foreign dollars, but far less American dollars). Along the way, the bill creates an enforcement scheme that threatens supporters of these measures with the prospect of onerous investigations by GOP officials who (as we learned last year) are happy to use and abuse their offices (remember, they even manipulated the ballot language) to sink ballot initiatives they don’t agree with. In short, the combination of changes could deal a major blow to citizen-led efforts that they so forcefully oppose. And for reasons that have nothing to do with the boogie man rhetoric of foreign money.
Unsurprisingly, as Pepper points out, these restrictions are being championed by the very same people who tried and failed to raise the bar in Ohio last August for restricting such citizen initiatives. Pepper notes that Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, was the head of the extremist, forced-birth group that led that effort, which would have required a 60% majority of voters to amend the state’s constitution. Baer is now backing the new Republican bill. But what is really driving Republicans’ sense of urgency, according to Pepper, is a grassroots effort underway in the state that would curtail—by ballot initiative—Republicans’ ability to gerrymander their districts. Stopping that effort at all costs is Republicans’ paramount concern.
Ohio senator and vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance chimed in, supporting his fellow Republicans’ efforts and calling them a “reasonable compromise.”
From Vance’s X feed (formerly Twitter):
What the Republicans are demanding isn’t “compromise,” but extortion. Again, there is a clean bill ready to go in the state house, allowing Biden’s name to be added to the ballot. It’s a very simple matter to pass that bill, without any additional provisions. Republicans are simply taking advantage of the situation in order to advance their own interests to the detriment of Ohio voters.
The other “poison pill” Ohio Senate Republicans have attached to “permitting” Ohio citizens the right to vote for Biden is a measure that would render immediately appealable any finding by an Ohio trial court that a law is unconstitutional and requires an injunction preventing its enforcement. That is how Ohio courts have halted or stalled draconian abortion measures passed by the state’s Republican legislature in the past. The new measure, however, would expedite appeal of such injunctions directly to the virulently anti-abortion Ohio Supreme Court (which would then presumably rule against the injunction). Again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with allowing Biden on the ballot.
Plainly, very few Ohio citizens would understand the implications of either of these complex and deceitful laws. Which is why DeWine, an anti-abortion proponent who last year released a video with his wife urging Ohioans to oppose reproductive rights, came out last week to champion the Republican legislators holding Ohio voters hostage to their demands.
From the Ohio Capital Journal’s X feed (formerly Twitter):
In taking this unusual step, DeWine is playing the role of the concerned executive sternly urging his legislature to do the “right thing.” But what he’s actually doing by calling this “special session” is putting himself behind the Republican effort to choke off any further citizens’ ballot initiatives. As Pepper points out, in his proclamation issued last week that supports tying Biden’s ballot access to the misleading “foreign contribution” legislation, DeWine also endorsed the Senate taking up the “poison pill” legislation (SB114) that would expedite appeals of trial court injunctions to the Ohio Supreme Court. As Pepper wryly notes, DeWine’s own son is a justice on that court, is himself virulently anti-abortion, and recently wrote a legal opinion raising the issue of whether such injunctions were “appropriate.”
So, as Pepper observes, Ohio’s GOP legislature, governor, and even a member of the state’s supreme court are seemingly on board in the Republican scam to exact conditions before they allow Ohioans to vote for Biden. If they really cared about providing Ohio voters access to the candidate of their choice, they would simply pass the “clean bill” currently stagnating in the Ohio House. But that’s not what Republicans want. Their priority is to satisfy the forced-birth lobby and preserve their own power. If that means trampling on the rights of Ohio citizens, so be it.
This duplicitous effort by DeWine and Ohio’s GOP legislature is part of a broader national push—mainly by Republicans—to make it difficult if not impossible to get citizen-sponsored initiatives on the ballot. As explained by Alexi Comella, writing earlier this year for the Brennan Center for Justice:
[B]allot initiatives enable citizens to overcome structural impediments to true representative democracy — for example, by translating voters’ preferences into policy when gerrymandered legislative districts otherwise stymie the popular will. In recent years, lawmakers have been changing the procedural rules to make it harder for citizens to exercise this power. And they appear to be doing so, not because of valid concerns that the process is insufficiently regulated, but rather because they do not like the policies citizens are enacting or are poised to enact.
Of course, in pushing to allow immediate appeals from trial court injunctions, the “poison pill” law also ingratiates Republicans with the anti-abortion lobby, which apparently can’t fathom the fact that citizens in Ohio have rejected its theocratic agenda. Pepper notes that despite the state’s new constitutional amendment permitting abortion access, the anti-abortion lobby will continue to feed Republican legislators laws to restrict abortions any way they can. Their best hope for approval of those restrictions is getting them directly, and as quickly as possible, to their radical judges on the Ohio Supreme Court.
What’s transpiring now in Ohio is a textbook example of how Republicans simply do not care about what the majority of their citizens want, and the lengths they’ll go to force their agenda down their voters’ throats.
