Ohioans vote Tuesday on a measure that would make it harder to pass future changes to the state constitution. Ideastream’s Karen Kasler explains the possible implications for abortion access in Ohio.
Sources:
NPR: A look ahead at the Ohio special election
Five Thirty Eight: Everything You Need To Know About The Ohio Ballot Measure That Could Block Abortion Rights
CNN: Ohio special election becomes proxy for abortion rights fight
PBS News Hour: Ohio voters to decide on constitutional change before determining abortion rights
The Guardian: Republicans pushed a special election in Ohio – what does it mean for abortion rights?
AP: Voters in Ohio reject GOP-backed proposal that would have made it tougher to protect abortion rights
NY Times: Ohio Voters Reject Constitutional Change Intended to Thwart Abortion Amendment
Well the point of a constitution is to bind the future majority, so it makes sense to require significant/overwhelming majority of counties to support it.
Change “counties” to “people” and I might agree. But “significant majority of counties” is just an extension of the anti-democratic bias that we see in the Senate and EC. It should always be one-person-one-vote.
But a federalist system isn’t meant to be democratic. It is supposed to guarantee rights and some influence to everyone including minorities.
Requiring a majority of counties to agree on things isn’t good for minorities in general.
It generally grants outsized power to one specific minority in particular - white rural voters.
Yes rural voters. That is again the point. Federalism is supposed to balance power between the entities of the federation- which aren’t necessarily the populace.
No.
Federalism is about division of power at different scales of government.
In a confederation, the general level of government is subordinate to the regional level. In a unitary government, regional government is subordinate to the general level.
Israel, the UK, and China are examples of unitary states. The EU is a confederation, and the US was one for about a decade before the constitution was passed.
In a federal system, different levels of government are of equal power, but have different powers. States can’t control interstate commerce; the federal government can’t regulate state speed limits except by doing something like withholding federal highway trust fund money.
While the US federal government started out as an alliance between existing colonies, states didn’t start out as an alliance of counties. US States are mostly (all?) unitary governments; Ohio counties have the powers the state government delegates to them.
Counties historically have been a matter of pragmatic. Counties are small so everyone could easily travel to their local county government on foot or horseback. They weren’t intended as a way to gerrymander state populations to entrench rural power.
There’s a reason that neither the Ohio senate nor the Ohio house follow ‘one county, one representative’. Because that would be absolutely bonkers.
What are you talking about? “Minorities” in this context refers to the people with the lower number of votes cast. They lose. It’s the very definition of voting.
Yes.
Not necessarily? Plenty of candidates lose the popular vote then win elections in all sorts of campaigns.
Wanting to raise the threshold isn’t inherently bad. But from what I’ve read on this their legislature previously banned August elections like this because of poor turnout and they’re also trying to make it effectively impossible to even put a measure like this on the ballot to get that increased majority by requiring a large amount of signatures from every county in the state. Meaning it would only take one county to not get enough people and it theoretically wouldn’t matter if literally every single other person in the state signed onto the petition; It wouldn’t get in the ballot.
It seems like the 60% rather than 50% is just to try and hide the ball so they can effectively outlaw popular grassroots action going directly to the ballot.
Republicans in Ohio saw what Michigan Democrats have been able to do because of constitutional amendments and shit themselves
Ballot initiatives and referendums and amendments are proving to be the bane of the Republican Party. Even in Missouri, a referendum had voters approve an ACA Medicaid expansion. Voters weren’t willing to send a majority of Democrats to the legislature to accomplish the same thing.
This is an Achilles’s Heel to the Republican strategy of total loyalty to the party. The voters can still be liberal on individual issues, and these direct democracy votes bypass party loyalty to get at the actual issue.