COLUMBUS, Ohio — In state after state since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats and their abortion rights allies have won victories over Republicans and others who oppose abortion. The latest battleground is Ohio, where a GOP supermajority has fought to consolidate its power in ways that critics — even some within the party — say threatens democracy.
Republican leaders here repeatedly defied directives from the state’s highest court to fix gerrymandered electoral maps, leaving the process in chaos and residents voting in districts with unconstitutional boundaries. They enacted more restrictive voter laws that hurt younger, less affluent Ohioans. And they’re now attempting to strip the state school board of its powers after Democrats gained control in last November’s election.
“Ohio is a case study in undermining democracy,” said David Niven, an associate professor of politics at the University of Cincinnati who has done research on gerrymandering. “You’re talking about the nation’s strictest voter ID law and state-of-the-art gerrymandering, and when that proved insufficient a proposed constitutional amendment to render majorities irrelevant.”
That change to the state constitution, had it succeeded in August, would have made passing amendments more difficult by requiring 60 percent of votes cast instead of a simple majority. To many people, abortion was the clear catalyst: As organizers were collecting signatures for an amendment protecting abortion rights, the legislature scheduled a special election to try to ensure their ultimate defeat.
Advertisement
Interest groups spent $54 million in the battle that erupted. Opponents leaned heavily into the potential threat to democracy in television ads, with one from the coalition One Person, One Vote accusing “corrupt” politicians of “stripping freedom from ‘We, the People.’” The measure was defeated by 14 points amid huge voter turnout, with more than a third of eligible voters participating.
“It was a power grab, period,” said Betty Montgomery, a Republican and former state attorney general who opposed the special election. The result, she noted, would have weakened citizens’ ability to circumvent the legislature — “a necessary part of the checks and balances in a democracy, especially when there is a supermajority, to assure the public is heard.”
Both sides expect millions more in funding to pour into the state between now and Nov. 7, when voters will at last decide whether to guarantee abortion rights. There is intense national interest in the proposed amendment, which would ensure abortion is legal until the fetus is viable, about 24 weeks, or beyond that time frame to protect a pregnant patient’s “life and health.” Abortion is currently legal here up to 22 weeks of pregnancy since a measure to ban abortion at six weeks was blocked by a judge last October.
Advertisement
Ohio is the most recent test in the abortion rights movement’s push to have voters resolve the issue. Those in other red states such as Kansas and Kentucky have shored up protections in the past 14 months. A July poll from USA Today and Suffolk University found that 58 percent of Ohioans backed the proposed amendment, and 32 percent opposed.
But Senate President Matt Huffman (R) says it would be a “mistake” to think the resounding defeat of August’s constitutional amendment — which drew wide bipartisan support, even in some traditionally Republican districts — means the pro-abortion forces have a lock on winning in November. That “assumes that the voters aren’t even reading what’s in front of them,” he added.
Ohio was once a pivotal swing state. Yet it has grown reliably red in recent years, with Donald Trump winning each of the past two presidential races by eight percentage points and the GOP currently enjoying unassailable power in the legislature, the governor’s office and statewide elected nonjudicial offices.
Advertisement
“We can kind of do what we want,” Huffman told a Columbus Dispatch reporter last year.
His offhand comment still resonates in political circles in Columbus and throughout the state. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, he dismissed as “ludicrous” criticism that the Republican-controlled legislature has been impinging on people’s rights.
“Here’s what I meant by that, and I would laugh to see you actually put this in the newspaper,” Huffman said. “We have a majority in the House and in the Senate, and they’re unified and believe the same things, and we’re able to put through legislation that the people want.”
Even so, the gamesmanship continues.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose — who is running for the U.S. Senate next year, hoping to oust incumbent Sherrod Brown (D) — won a skirmish Sept. 20 when the state’s conservative Supreme Court approved the bulk of the summary language that will appear on the ballot.
Advertisement
LaRose wrote a summary for the state’s ballot that was longer than the amendment itself and replaced the word “fetus” with “unborn child,” among other controversial edits challenged in court. The actual amendment language states that every individual “has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including on contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage and abortion.
“This was about playing games with an election, not about playing around with the language that goes directly into the Ohio Constitution,” said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio and a member of the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition’s steering committee.
The supermajority’s actions have mirrored those of supermajorities in other states. Tennessee legislators in August turned their back on their own GOP governor, as well as the wishes of a majority of Tennessee voters, and refused to take any significant action on gun control. The session on public safety cost taxpayers an estimated $420,000.
Advertisement
The Ohio legislature voted to hold this summer’s special election — which cost taxpayers more than $20 million — just months after passing a law that banned most special elections on grounds that they are costly and ineffective. Republican leaders denied that their effort was about abortion and contended that the idea of upping the margin to alter the constitution had been around for years. Huffman said he served on a 2017 bipartisan commission that voted “unanimously” to raise the margin of victory needed for constitutional amendments, when in fact the panel tabled that proposal amid much outcry.
“It’s my belief that the Republican majority in the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate are pushing the envelope are far as it could possibly be pushed to maintain supermajority control of the legislature and the congressional delegation,” said Mike Curtin, a former editor of the Columbus Dispatch and co-author of the “Ohio Politics Almanac,” who served two terms as a Democratic state representative.
The party’s actions in recent years suggest as much. Though voters in 2015 and 2018 approved constitutional amendments designed to make the process of drawing districts for both the legislature and Congress more fair, the 2021 redistricting process erupted in chaos when the GOP-led redistricting commission repeatedly pressed forward with state legislative maps found to be unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.
Advertisement
“It was a brazen violation of a basic democratic principle — the rule of law,” said Steven H. Steinglass, dean emeritus at Cleveland State University College of Law. “It was an egregious dereliction of their duty.”
The court also rejected a legislative plan for congressional boundaries, meaning voters went to the polls in 2022 with flawed boundaries for both their congressional and state representatives.
Huffman countered that the justices were ordering changes that were outside of their role, essentially legislating the new maps from the bench. “The system we have in place will work if we don’t have an interventionist Supreme Court,” he said.
In 2021, GOP leaders also passed a law making appellate and Supreme Court races partisan for the time in more than a century. The outcome of the 2022 midterms gave the court a conservative majority, which already included the governor’s son R. Patrick DeWine, who never recused himself from ruling on the maps’ boundaries. Former Supreme Court chief justice Maureen O’Connor, who sided with Democratic justices on the redistricting maps, is now leading an effort to put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot requiring a citizen-led commission to draw future voting maps.
Advertisement
The court recently dismissed two lawsuits challenging the state’s congressional map, clearing the way for flawed boundaries to be used again in next year’s elections. Given the court’s makeup, the League of Women Voters and other groups decided to withdraw their lawsuits and throw their energy and support to O’Connor’s efforts. The redistricting commission last week reached a compromise on the state legislative maps — but Democrats argue that Republicans still have an unfair advantage.
When asked why lawmakers in his party seem to be moving so aggressively, former governor Bob Taft replied, “You’ll have to ask them, but I guess they might say they do this because they can.”
Scott Clement, Alice Crites and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLuiwMiopWhqYGeAcH2PaGdvZ5%2BdtrB5wJumq6yZpLtus8SrqbKlkaOxpr7Ip55mqpWlwqO4yJyYp6tdqMKxsdGmmKOnop7Buns%3D