Dobbs will further intensify Republican attacks on democracy

Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw observe that it’s not just Ohio where Republicans have tried to transfer power away from voters to (typically heavily gerrymandered) legislatures in the wake of Sam Alito’s fateful blog post:

The legislative push to raise the threshold — which came about after a lobbying campaign funded in part by the billionaire donor Richard Uihlein, who has supported similar efforts in other states — seems plainly designed to thwart the effort to guarantee abortion rights in Ohio’s Constitution.

Ohio is not the only state to concoct such schemes. In Arkansas this March, the legislature substantially increased the number of counties from which signatures must be collected to qualify an initiative for the ballot — a move that was widely regarded as a hedge against efforts aimed at expanding reproductive rights in the state.

Similarly, Republican lawmakers in Missouri, North Dakota and Mississippi have gone to great lengths to try to twist and reshape the rules around state voter initiatives, in each instance apparently to limit voters’ ability to directly register their preferences on abortion and reproductive rights.

Viewed together, these efforts paint a disturbing portrait of Republican officials who are afraid of their constituents when it comes to abortion and who are taking increasingly aggressive steps to prevent voters from making their voices heard.

Recent polling suggests that Ohio voters are on track to reject the ballot measure. But the episode should serve as a reminder that despite the Supreme Court’s claim that Dobbs merely returned the question of abortion to the states, for opponents of abortion, allowing the residents of each state to decide this issue for themselves was never the goal, at least not in the long term.

Instead, the long-term goal is to prohibit abortion as widely and as completely as possible. That’s the reason some states have refused to include exceptions for rape or incest in their post-Dobbs abortion laws, despite broad popular support for such exceptions. It’s why some states are seeking to penalize aiding travel to other states to obtain abortions and to end access to medication abortion throughout the country.

Direct democracy is by no means a panacea. But it is an important mechanism for preserving a role for the people. That’s especially true at this moment, with grossly gerrymandered legislatures passing draconian bans that endanger women’s health and freedom — and with threats to democracy extending well beyond the topic of abortion.

It’s worth noting here that extreme gerrymandering matters even when it will typically not shift partisan control of the legislature per se. Ohio Republicans don’t need gerrymandering to win control of the state legislature in most elections. But it is enormously helpful if you want to govern like Mississippi Republicans in Ohio. Rucho, again, was a critical predicate for Dobbs.

At any rate the question of whether Dobbs will be a net improvement for American democracy was always a question easily answered in the negative, and that is only becoming more clear over time.