Ohio Republicans Are The Latest Dog To Catch The Car They Were Chasing
Question 1 Defeated Resoundingly In Victory For Abortion Rights
Yesterday, Ohio voters resoundingly rejected Question One, which would have raised the threshold for ballot initiatives to amend the state’s constitution from 50% to 60%. Question One was explicitly designed to make it more difficult for Ohio to adopt a constitutional amendment at the ballot in November that would guarantee abortion rights. Question One was defeated 57-43, and the polling shows that the November abortion rights amendment will likely win by a similar margin.
This is the latest electoral defeat for anti-choice ballot initiatives in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and held that abortion rights were to be determined at the state level. Since Dobbs, anti-choice measures have been rejected in Kansas and Kentucky . Wisconsin voters flipped the majority on the state Supreme Court to Democrats, in an election dominated by abortion rights. Democrats are putting abortion rights on the ballot in every state they can, because even in usually Red or Purple states, abortion rights keep winning.
For nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that a woman had a right to choose an abortion (at least during the first two trimesters), the GOP organized around overturning Roe and “returning the issue to the states.” That has proven to be a catastrophic success for Republicans in the elections since Dobbs was decided in June 2022. The Democrats likely held on to control of the Senate because pro-choice voters showed up in the mid-term elections.
What does this have to do with my usual topic: law and the courts? To the extent that the 6 conservative Justices (CJ Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett) take politics into consideration as they decide future big cases, some of them (but likely not Thomas or Alito) may be chastened that they have roused a sleeping majority who will vote for public officials who will appoint judges and Justices who will undo their dismantling of the past 60 years of Supreme Court precedent (going back to Griswold v. Connecticut (which upheld the right to contraception on the basis of “privacy interests”).
We will see.