Slouching toward democracy

Some thoughts on where the state of my birth went wrong.

It was big news in a nation that’s not exactly starved for electoral stories right now. Regardless, the balloting this past Tuesday in the state of Ohio was hailed as a victory for pro-abortion forces who will have a measure on the ballot later this fall designed to enshrine abortion into the Ohio constitution. I talked about this a few weeks ago as the lead item in my odds and ends.

At question is whether the right to abort a baby is enshrined in the Ohio state constitution this November or not. Polling suggests that over 50% of voters support this, but not 60 percent. After spending an election cycle not caring that their Democrat party was changing the goalposts in the middle of the game, suddenly their panties are in a wad when the Republicans do it.

The reason I wrote this is that, cynically, the state of Ohio had planned to do away with the special August elections after this year. But Frank LaRose, the Republican Secretary of State - who himself is looking for a promotion to Senator, hoping to defeat Democrat incumbent Sherrod Brown next year - was among those who pushed to get this proposal on the ballot because they knew what was coming. In any other time, the measure may have had a fighting chance: the argument that out-of-state interests have taken over the process is a valid one. And, as I noted in my post, the vast majority of these amendments pass with more than 60% of the vote anyway.

But since the Dobbs decision, those who favor unfettered access to abortion have declared holy war on anyone or anything which interrupts their good time that Roe v. Wade used to provide. In this case, that jihad resulted in millions and millions of out-of-state dollars coming into an election that normally might have 15% turnout. (Oftentimes, when there’s no state issue, the August ballot is the refuge of desperate school districts needing a property tax increase. So you might have 40% turnout in some districts with controversial issues, but 10% elsewhere.) Instead, for this election’s Issue 1 the voters turned out in comparative drones, with turnout in the 35% range.

(Ironically, Issue 1 as a number will be recycled for November for a different statewide proposal. I think it will be the minimum wage proposal, with the abortion measure as Issue 2. But we’ll see; regardless, those who urged Yes on 1 this time will likely be on the other side three months hence.)

Because the referendum was made into a proxy for abortion rights, lost in the discussion was the philosophy behind it. Not only was the threshold for passage going to be raised to 60 percent, but there were two other pieces of the puzzle: the elimination of the 10-day “cure” period for validating signatures found incorrect and the requirement that the sufficient number of signatures be gathered from all 88 counties, instead of the 44 current law allowed. Basically, this allowed people to poach all the signatures from the big cities and suburban areas and ignore the smaller rural counties (like the one I spent my teenage years in.)

Yet I read an interesting perspective in the Washington Examiner that outlines some of the problem. Columnist Adam Carrington argues:

When given the choice, Americans have moved toward more direct democracy, not less. Frenchmen Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous work Democracy in America, noted the trend and its underlying tendencies back in the 1830s. Since his time, Americans have only continued in that direction. We have extended the vote to essentially universal adult suffrage and lowered the voting age to 18. Through the 17th Amendment, we instituted the direct election of U.S. senators. At the state level, most states now have some combination of ballot initiatives and referendums regarding laws as well as the recall of elected officials.

So the question is how we move in a more (small-r) republican direction. Remember, this is 50% + 1 of those voters who bother to show up, which in some off-year Ohio elections may be 25% of the voters. (This year is a off-year election in Ohio, with just local offices and issues on the ballot.) It was rather shrewd of the abortion lobby to push for the ballot measure this year, when turnout is somewhat lower and chances for victory are increased, than wait until 2024 and risk the state’s Republican lean defeating them again. After all, it was the GOP trifecta that brought about the abortion laws that the pro-abortion lobby was trying to overcome.

The argument from the Yes on 1 side was that most of those supporting it have, in their bylaws, a rule that changing their regulatory documents requires a supermajority of their membership. A second argument was made that out-of-state interests were buying Constitutional amendments with a deluge of campaign cash. That, to me, is the more successful one.

So I say bring this measure back in November 2025 and use the examples from 2023 to make the argument that these 50-50 issues have no place in the state’s constitution, which is overly long thanks to all of the amendments passed over the years. It may make repealing the abortion amendment more difficult for awhile, but it would allow Ohio to more jealously guard the precious jewel of their constitution until the time when it can be rewritten - in 2032 there will be a madated question (it comes up every twenty years) on the ballot regarding a constitutional convention, and that’s the time to set up the Ohio constitution properly.

Now, back to work setting Delaware straight…