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Ohio lawmakers vote to set Aug. 8 election for controversial 60% constitutional amendment proposal [1]
['Andrewjtobias Jzuckerman', 'Andrew J. Tobias', 'Atobias Cleveland.Com', 'Jake Zuckerman', 'Jzuckerman Cleveland.Com', 'Cleveland.Com']
Date: 2023-05-10 21:07:01.135000+00:00
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republican state lawmakers voted to set an Aug. 8 election in which Ohio voters will decide whether it should be harder for citizens to make future changes to the state constitution, a proposal intended to spoil a potential abortion-rights ballot issue that could come later this year.
The Ohio House approved Senate Joint Resolution 2 on Wednesday by a 62 to 37 vote. The “yes” votes all came from Republicans, while five Republicans — Reps. Jamie Callender, Jay Edwards, Brett Hillyer, Jeff LaRe and Tom Patton — joined minority Democrats in voting “no.”
The Republican-dominated Ohio Senate passed the measure shortly afterward 26-7 on a party-line vote. The votes set up what will be a heated summer election — a typically sleepy time in the election calendar — that could be the first round in deciding whether abortion should have broad, difficult to undo legal protections throughout Ohio.
Wednesday’s votes follow months of delays in the House, accompanied by months of intense lobbying from Republican activists and socially conservative groups. Two influential lobbying groups, Ohio Right to Life and the Buckeye Firearms Association, led a public effort to whip votes and pressure House Speaker Jason Stephens, a Lawrence County Republican, to put it up for a vote. In the closing stretch before the vote, a Super PAC backing the measure popped up airing TV ads pressuring individual lawmakers by name, bankrolled by a Republican megadonor from Illinois.
Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis, a key outside advocate for the amendment, issued a statement calling the vote “a great day for democracy.”
“Ohioans are grateful that the Ohio House and Ohio Senate trust ‘we the people’ by creating an election for all of us to self-determine what Ohio’s future may look like,” Gonidakis said. “Speaker Jason Stephens and House Republicans made the clear statement today that they unequivocally trust Ohio’s voters.”
Opponents vowed an aggressive opposition campaign. The coalition includes abortion-rights advocates, voting-rights groups, labor unions and Democratic activists, as well as several recent Republican governors and state attorneys general. The election may well draw national attention, with Ohio becoming the latest frontier in an ongoing political battle over abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. The opponents have released internal polling claiming a majority of Ohioans initially oppose the 60% threshold.
“This amendment is a political ploy – designed by special interests and politicians to get voters to give up their rights under false pretenses. Ohioans won’t fall for it,” said Dennis Willard, a spokesman for the “anti” campaign, which is calling itself the The Protect One Person One Vote campaign.
Both sides already have been running ads ahead of the vote, with the largest spending coming from the pro-60% campaign, which is funded with a $1.2 million contribution from an Illinois billionaire. The opposition campaign also has been active, mounting several demonstrations, including a rollicking one Wednesday at the Statehouse ahead of the vote. There, hundreds of opponents chanted loud enough from the atrium for their voices to pierce the thick walls of the House chamber and be heard from the floor.
Similar measures setting higher thresholds for state constitutional amendments have fallen in other states in recent months. Voters in Arkansas and South Dakota both voted against proposals to require a 60% supermajority approval for amendment proposals last year, although neither of those proposals were tied to abortion.
Republican leaders called the vote Wednesday following roughly 90 minutes of debate. In floor speeches, Democrats called the measure undemocratic and predicted voters will reject it in August. Anti-SJR2 protesters chanted following an initial vote, leading Stephens to call for House sergeants-at-arms to clear the gallery.
“This would create minority rule in Ohio,” said state Rep. Richard Brown, a Columbus-area Democrat. “A 40.01% minority of Ohio can dictate to the 59.99% majority of what Ohio’s constitution could say.”
Democrats just started a “one person one vote” chant that has overturned the session pic.twitter.com/8RElb1qnsl — Jake Zuckerman (@jake_zuckerman) May 10, 2023
Republicans, meanwhile, generally downplayed the role the measure would have in creating potentially unsurmountable hurdles to the abortion-rights ballot issue in November. They said it would safeguard the constitution from special-interest groups.
“I think it’s a fair bill. We’re not taking anyone’s votes from them,” state Rep. Phil Plummer, a Dayton Republican, said ahead of the vote. ”We’re giving them an opportunity to vote on this. This is ultimately up to the people.”
State constitutional amendments are a way through which members of the public can propose law changes without the involvement of the legislature. SJR2 asks voters to require a 60% supermajority to approve future constitutional changes, compared to the 50% simple majority standard that’s been in place for more than a century. SJR2 itself would need just a simple majority to pass.
SJR2 also would create new legal hurdles making it even harder for proposed amendments to qualify for the ballot. It’s already a complex and expensive process that involves collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures from registered voters around the state within legally set timeframes.
Right now, groups that want to send proposed constitutional amendments to voters first must collect 412,591 signatures — 10% of the total votes cast in the most recent election for governor — including a set number from 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Supporters of the potential abortion-rights ballot issue currently are working to meet these signature requirements ahead of a July 5 deadline.
SJR2 would require that a certain number of signatures for future amendment campaigns come from all 88 counties, which would make organizing drives more expensive and more complex.
It also would eliminate a current 10-day “cure period” during which amendment campaigns can collect additional signatures if the first batch they collect ends up falling short.
The proposed abortion-rights ballot issue would create broad legal protections for abortions. The campaign has hired a professional signature-gathering firm to aid in the process, a major step given the tight timelines they face.
Abortion in Ohio currently is legal up to 22 weeks into pregnancy, but only pending a court challenge to the state’s “Heartbeat” law that would ban abortion as early as six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. The Ohio Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 4-3 majority, is considering the case.
The higher standard would potentially cause the expected ballot issue to fail, since abortion-rights advocates racked up wins in the 53% to 59% last year in elections in states like Kentucky, Kansas and Michigan. The issue polled in Ohio at 59% support last November. The new 60% standard would go into effect in November, although the new signature-gathering rules wouldn’t go into effect until 2024.
The 60% rule would have broader ramifications, since the higher standard would apply to any other citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Citizen-led amendments in the past have been used to hike the state minimum wage, legalize gambling and ban smoking in public places. They also have been used to approve Republican-backed policies, like banning same-sex marriage in 2004 — although this was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court — and forbidding state government from requiring healthcare coverage.
Republican supporters at times have downplayed the connection between the proposal and the abortion issue. Lawmakers over the years have grumbled about Ohio’s constitutional amendment process, since it allowed casino interests to bankroll a campaign in 2009 granting themselves a monopoly, including writing their parcels of land into permanent law. Even the threat of a ballot issue, like a forming anti-gerrymandering reform a decade ago, at times has spurred the legislature into action, leading to the redistricting reforms lawmakers helped pass in 2015 and 2018.
But over time, Republicans have become increasingly explicit in tying the 60% proposal to the potential abortion campaign. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed the measure last week, with its committee members describing it as a key part of their plan to defeat the abortion amendment.
“Extremists have said the quiet part out loud,” state Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney, a Westlake Democrat, said during floor debate ahead of the Wednesday vote. “Today, we’re here about abortion.”
But not all Republicans are on board with tying the issue to defeating the abortion measure. Rep. Haraz Ghanbari, a Perrysburg Republican, repeatedly denied as much after the vote.
“For me this is about protecting the constitution. Period,” he said.
As the potential abortion-rights amendment picked up steam last year, so did the proposal to make it harder to amend the state constitution. Republicans tried but failed to approve it in the hectic lame-duck session last December, and failed again in January, thanks to the complicated politics that emanated from a heated leadership fight.
During the House’s first session of the year on Jan. 3, Stephens became speaker, defeating a rival Republican candidate who’d appeared to lock the position up, thanks to support from minority Democrats. In exchange for their votes, Democrats believed at the time that they had at least an implied promise from Stephens to halt the 60% proposal, which was a top priority of Stephens’s rival, state Rep. Derek Merrin.
The measure did indeed miss a February deadline, dooming the chances of putting the 60% proposal up for a statewide vote in the May election. Republicans seemed to be out of opportunities to pre-empt the abortion issue, since they had just voted in December to eliminate most August special elections. But in March, Senate President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, revived the proposal, pushing to revive August special elections specifically to handle the 60% proposal.
Before the final Wednesday vote, House Republicans undid a confusing amendment a House committee added to SJR2 on on Tuesday. The amendment, at the behest of GOP state Rep. Sharon Ray, would have set the election on SJR2 for November. The measure in that form never would have passed, since it would have undermined the Republican goal of blocking the abortion-rights amendment. But it allowed Ray, a former elections official who said she promised her former colleagues she wouldn’t vote for an Aug. 8 election, to allow the measure to advance while nominally keeping her promise.
“I also think it enabled some of our members to express their disapproval of an August election on the floor today, but still not totally cancel out their vote for the resolution all together,” Stephens said to reporters.
The Wednesday vote to strip the November election from SJR2 and restore the Aug. 8 date passed by a 56-42, including 10 Republican “no” votes. Five Republicans — reps. Jon Cross, Adam Holmes, Mike Loychik, Gayle Manning and Ray — voted against the amendment changing the election date back to Aug. 8, but voted for the final resolution.
House Minority Leader Allison Russo, the ranking House Democrat, scoffed at their political position.
“It shows an extreme lack of courage, and the theatrics around trying to pretend that you stand on some principle, but when push comes to shove, caving to an extremist view,” she said.
A court challenge to SJR2 also is possible. That’s because Republicans have decided to abandon an accompanying bill that would have funded the election, and partially undone a law Republicans approved in December banning most August special elections.
Stephens told reporters Tuesday that even though Republicans initially thought the companion bill was legally important enough to try to pass, he thinks lawmakers have legal authority to set election dates without it. Joint resolutions can’t be challenged with a referendum, while opponents were preparing to potentially do so to the companion bill, Senate Bill 92.
Opponents of the 60% proposal said Tuesday using a joint resolution to set an August election is illegal — an assessment backed up by Steven Steinglass, a retired Cleveland State University law professor and state constitutional law expert — and have said they will consider their legal options if SJR2 passes. Huffman told reporters on Wednesday they have their own legal opinion that says they have the legal authority to do what they’re doing.
Killing SB92 also killed a $20 million appropriation lawmakers proposed to pay for the August election. Both Huffman and Stephens suggested Wednesday that county boards of election may wind up fronting the money for the contest, to be reimbursed by the state later.
Stephens, a former county auditor, acknowledged that elections make for a “pretty heavy expense” for counties, but said they’d be made whole down the line.
“I think we have many different opportunities for appropriation measures in the future, so we will be looking at that,” he said.
Andrew Tobias covers state politics and government for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer
Jake Zuckerman covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer
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[1] Url:
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/05/ohio-lawmakers-vote-to-set-aug-8-election-for-controversial-60-constitutional-amendment-proposal.html
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