But the Republican legislature will leave nothing to chance; it’s not enough to merely manipulate the ballot and confuse voters at the ballot box; they now want the right to kill a bill altogether – based on it’s name – before signatures are even collected.
Let’s all bear in mind that citizen amendments are effectively a last resort for Ohioans who feel that their legislature is not representing the will of the people. In the face of the legislature passing a near-total ban on abortion, despite Ohioans’ strong support for reproductive health care, the citizens of Ohio succeeded in putting an amendment on the ballot. The ballot passed. Abortion heath care is now written into the Ohio constitution.
It seems clear that the Attorney General and the Republican leadership in the state want to make sure that nothing like that happens again, and that Ohio citizens will have no recourse, no last resort, if they feel the gerrymandered legislature is not representing their interests.
Perhaps most galling, Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, treats this new power as a matter of marketing, claiming that it is really in the best interest of the amendment. “It’s like a lot of things, why would you give it a bad title? If you want to sell a book, you want to give it a good title.”
And so easily, so glibly, with such patronization and, shall I say, gaslighting, the Republican leadership chips away at our democratic rights while trying to convince us that it’s in our best interests. They count on us to not pay attention, to be distracted, and to eventually give up.
This is how citizens can lose their rights. It isn’t necessary to have a coup; it’s possible to undermine and quietly dismantle a democracy from the inside, one law and one institution at a time, until the prevailing party controls all the levers of power. This is how democracies die.
It is too late to stop this newest power grab, which was quietly tucked into an otherwise-unrelated bill, but let us be very clear about what is going on, and not let anyone convince us this was in our best interest.
Gloria Skurski is a Dayton resident recently retired from thirty-five years in media, including ThinkTV I CET in southwest Ohio and CBS News in New York.
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