Ohio Republicans Say They Will Ignore State Election Results and Target the Judiciary

Tuesday, Ohio voters overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure which codified the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. On Friday, Ohio Republicans declared they intend to ignore the results of the vote—and will consider stripping the power to enforce it from the judiciary.

It’s a brazenly bad faith, antidemocratic gesture from the Republican Party—in other words, entirely in-character.

The bad faith preceded Friday’s explicit announcement. Earlier in August, GOP lawmakers in Ohio sought to preempt Ohio voters from passing such a ballot measure by holding a special election with its own ballot measure intended to lift the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from 50% to 60%.

Ohio voters saw the effort for what it was and voted it down decisively.

After the result of Tuesday’s measure—called Issue 1—a furious Jason Stephens, the Republican Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, vowed that the referendum was “not the end of the conversation.”

These words, along with public declarations to continue the fight over abortion rights from two dozen other Ohio Republican lawmakers, left many wondering: “how is a constitutional amendment not the end of a political conversation?”

Friday’s press release from the Republican conference of the Ohio House of Representatives is a blunt answer.

Four Republicans cited in the public declaration make unsubstantiated appeals to “foreign interference” in the referendum and its “dangerously vague and unconstrained language,” before they asserted their religious rights: “No amendment can overturn the God given rights with which we were born.”

The Republicans concluded that they will “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative” to “prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1.”

This is merely the latest, brazen example of the Republican Party’s freefall into unapologetic authoritarianism.