(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Election Day for Ohio Issue 1 [1]
[]
Date: 2023-08-08
We begin today with Lily Carey of the Columbus Dispatch reporting high turnout and long lines in early voting over the weekend in Ohio for Issue 1; a voter referendum to change the Ohio state Constitution to require 60% of the vote to change the state Constitution via voter ballot initiative.
While many projected low turnout for the Aug. 8 election on Issue 1, Ohio voters have headed to the polls at incredible rates over the past few weeks, according to election officials. For the first time, Ohio no longer allows early in-person voting on the Monday before election day. "For the naysayers who said there would be low turnout for an August election, I think the turnout for early and absentee voting has been very robust," said Rob Nichols, spokesperson for the Secretary of State's office. Complete early voting numbers are not yet available, according to Nichols. Ohioans will decide Tuesday whether it should be harder to change the state constitution. If passed, Issue 1 would require 60% of the vote to enact new constitutional amendments, instead of a simple majority of 50% plus one...
If Issue 1 passes, it will also require signatures from all 88 counties in the state to get an amendment on the ballot and remove the 10-day cure period to fix those signatures.
While Ohio’s November 2023 abortion referendum is driving high turnout for today’s special election, Madison Fernandez and Alice Miranda Ollstein of POLITICO point out that Issue 1 will have wide-ranging impacts on other issues.
Few initially expected Issue 1 to draw so much attention during a historically low-turnout election. It’s a technical issue pertaining to ballot measures and, beyond that, the stakes for abortion are complicated by the fact that courts are currently blocking enforcement of Ohio’s abortion ban, making the procedure legal in the state — for now. But as both sides rake in millions in out-of-state donations, the vote has become a proxy for something larger. The campaigns are working to remind the public that Issue 1 could have dramatic implications for a number of issues that come before voters in the state. [...] Abortion may not be the only popular issue on the ballot this November. Activists in Ohio also submitted thousands of additional signatures for a marijuana ballot initiative after they fell short of the required number last month. And opponents of Issue 1 are warning of its wide-ranging impacts on a whole host of policy fronts.
For Example, here’s a report from NBC4 in Columbus about how Issue 1 will have an affect on the battle over gun rights in Ohio...and this is for starters.
Laleh Ispahani of The New Republic says that the fight over abortion rights and the fight for democracy are very much the same thing.
Anti-democratic measures like Ohio’s Issue 1 are emblematic of how the fight for abortion rights is playing out in a post-Roe America. With almost 70 percent of Americans supporting abortion rights, opponents are increasingly offering no substantive response. Instead, they’re deploying a quiet, nationwide strategy of altering the playing field in ways that concentrate power in the hands of conservative extremists—limiting abortion by undermining democracy itself. Anti-abortion activists realize they can’t win a fair fight, so they’re changing the rules of the game. This approach is not new. Attacking democratic initiatives and voting rights has long been at the forefront of an anti-abortion strategy. In Georgia and Missouri, gerrymandering concentrated power in the hands of conservatives, with harsher abortion laws following soon after. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill significantly restricting voting rights the same week that a law essentially banning abortions at six weeks took effect, making his legislative agenda harder to reverse. Across the country, anti-abortion laws and anti-democracy efforts have gone hand in hand, allowing an extremist minority to impose its will on a majority of Americans. We need to push back on restrictive anti-abortion laws—but in order to win, we must understand that the fight for abortion rights is being waged through erosion and neutralization of our democratic processes. The rules that provide the scaffolding for abortion—and many other fundamental rights—must be vigorously defended. To protect abortion, we must protect democracy itself.
Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review notes major and minor dualities in media coverage of Number 45’s many indictments.
With Trump’s prior indictments, my top initial takeaway from the coverage was its sheer breathlessness, which, while instinctively justified by the stakes, often felt uncomfortably like it was playing into Trump’s broader rigging of our attention economy: he played assignment editor with his social media posts; cameras followed him to court like he was O.J. in the white Bronco; punditry often focused on the strength of the cases against him, but also fussed over optics and his mood. Roughly the same things have been true this time—and yet my top takeaway has been how tired and rote a lot of the coverage has felt, despite its persistent wall-to-wall extent. At this point, there is both everything and nothing to say about Trump; the indictment is both unprecedented and precedented, astonishing and unsurprising. Many of the words written and spoken about his subversion campaign have stressed its enormity—and yet I increasingly can’t shake the conclusion that too many reporters and editors have normalized it, at least implicitly, by covering Trump as in any sense a normal candidate for 2024. In recent days, my thoughts have returned to an observation that the media reporter Brian Stelter made in Vanity Fair last month (prior to the latest indictment): that “many news executives and political analysts appear to have succumbed to revisionist history, downplaying Trump’s destruction of a shared reality and his shredding of democratic norms”; that “it’s hard to even recall that sliver of time after January 6 when it seemed like Trump was being excommunicated from American politics.” In recent days, various reporters and pundits have made the case that as far as Trump’s many legal woes go, this is the big one. This itself feels both obviously true and also like a dangerous argument. The stakes for democracy this time are clear, more obviously so than, say, in a case involving hush-money payments in an extramarital affair with a porn star. And yet—as I wrote after Trump was charged in just such a case, amid a prior outbreak of prosecutor-pundit hand-wringing about its relative unimportance—those charges are serious, too, and merit better than glib dismissal-by-talking-head. It is, of course, possible to take both cases seriously while treating the election case with more gravity. But we should, as always, be wary of grading Trump on a curve. And respect for democracy and the rule of law is at stake across the board in Trump’s indictments, not only in the one to which those concepts are most explicitly central.
Kaitlin Lewis of Newsweek reports that Special Counsel Jack Smith issued a prompt response to the Trump defense team’s proposals for handling the DOJ’s proposed protective order in the Jan. 6 case United States v. Donald J. Trump.
The DOJ filed a request last week to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing Trump's 2020 election case, to place a protective order concerning which pieces of evidence the former president is allowed to discuss publicly. Trump pleaded not guilty during his arraignment hearing last week to all four criminal counts stemming from the federal investigation into the former president's alleged efforts to remain in office after losing the election to President Joe Biden. Trump's defense team, however, argued in a court filing on Monday that Smith's proposed protective order was an infringement on the former president's First Amendment rights, and was much too broad and restrictive. Instead, Trump's lawyers gave their own proposals, countering the DOJ's call to prohibit evidence deemed "sensitive" from being discussed publicly. [...] Smith responded quickly to Trump's counterproposal Monday evening, stating that the government's first order was "a standard, reasonable order that will streamline the flow of discovery to the defendant while preserving the integrity of these proceedings." The special counsel also tore apart Trump's filing, pointing to "specific deficiencies" in the looser protections outlined in the 29-page document. "The defendant has proposed an unreasonable order to facilitate his plan to litigate this case in the media, to the detriment of litigating this case in the courtroom," Smith wrote in his response, which was obtained by Newsweek. "Normal order should prevail."
Mariel Padilla of The19thNews notes the gender-based inequities within the VA system.
Former NBA player Etan Thomas pens an essay for the Guardian highlighting the utter hypocrisy of the Orlando Magic’s $50,000 to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Orlando Magic’s decision to make a $50,000 contribution in support of the presidential bid of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, sends a clear message to their Black players, employees and fans. And that message is a U-turn from the one in the summer of 2020 when the United States was in an uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the shooting of Jacob Blake as well as countless other examples of police brutality. [...] Let me be clear. I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that the Magic and their governors, the DeVos family, don’t have the right to support whichever presidential candidate they choose, just as NBA players have the right to support whichever candidate they choose. My book, We Matter: Athletes And Activism, encouraged and pushed for athletes to continue the rich tradition of sportspeople using their voices and their platforms to take a stand on issues that affect our communities. So it would be hypocritical for me to now say that the Magic don’t have that same right. Of course they do. However, I also have the right to point out the hypocrisy of claiming to be “deeply committed” to equality, and dedicated to rooting out “racial bias and abuses of power particularly in the Black Community”, then offering financial support to a person like DeSantis, the Republican governor who has dedicated himself to the very ideals the Magic claimed to oppose.
Finally today, Paul Krugman of The New York Times says that climate change is now an issue in the culture wars.
True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support. And this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment — a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever. [...] We saw the effect of this anti-science trend when Covid vaccines became available:...Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats. Does anyone seriously doubt that similar attitudes are driving rank-and-file Republicans to oppose action on climate change? The other day my colleague David Brooks argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to “offend the elites.” He’s right. Look at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves, and while it’s clear that special interests were, um, fueling the fire, there was also a strong culture-war element: The elites want you to get an induction cooktop, but real men cook with gas.
Have the best possible day everyone!
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/8/2185907/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Election-Day-for-Ohio-Issue-1
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
