Ohio Statehouse Republicans are getting closer to raising the bar for the amount of a popular vote needed to amend the state Constitution.
David Petkiewicz | cleveland.com
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A state House committee scheduled a committee vote next week on a Republican-led initiative to change a more than 110-year-old rule and raise the popular vote share required to amend Ohio’s constitution.
Requiring a 60% majority vote to amend the constitution instead of the current simple majority sets up a high-stakes showdown over a pending effort to seek a November vote that could create a constitutional right to abortion in Ohio.
Both House and Senate Republicans have offered similar proposals to make it harder for organizers to change the Constitution. The details vary, but both call for putting forward a simple question to voters: Should Ohio increase the popular vote needed for future amendments from 50%-plus one to 60%?
The Senate’s plan, backed in concept by some House Republicans, calls for a special election in August on the constitutional issue. The resolution requires the support of 3/5 of lawmakers and 50% of the voters. That election would cost $20 million.
The timing is critical.
Just a few months ago, state lawmakers voted to scrap most August elections in Ohio, deeming them overly expensive and anti-democratic given the meager voter turnout. Meanwhile, pro-choice activists, energized by signs of support for abortion access in several Republican-leaning states since a Supreme Court ruling overturned a federal right to the procedure, are gathering signatures in hopes of placing the question of abortion access on the November 2023 ballot. Lawmakers would need to pass a resolution by May 10 to organize an August 2023 election if they want to ensure the pro-choice coalition would need a 60% vote for victory instead of 50%, according to Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
The anti-abortion and gun-rights lobby have both applied external pressure on House Republicans on the issue. That includes circulating a letter and amassing signatures of support for the joint concept of the new constitutional scheme and an August election.
Neither Buckeye Firearms Association Legislative Director Rob Sexton nor Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis would divulge precisely how many signatures they’ve obtained. While 67 Republicans won office in November, one has died and another was appointed as the state’s agriculture director, leaving for a tight vote.
“We’re doing good, we’re well on our way,” Sexton said last week, adding that there’s still work to do.
Rep. Allison Russo, the ranking House Democrat, says she suspects Republicans are short on votes to pass the bill, House Joint Resolution 1. A spokesman for House Speaker Jason Stephens, who has expressed some ambivalence on the idea, didn’t respond to an inquiry.
Democrats have attacked the proposal as anti-democratic: ballot referendums give the people a direct say on a given issue. So why should an idea need a supermajority rather than a simple majority? They say the measure is a power-grab, designed to lock in the fruits of longstanding GOP control of state politics.
Rep. Tavia Galonski, an Akron Democrat, sits on the newly created House Constitutional Resolutions Committee, which is scheduled to vote on the issue. In 1912 Ohio reworked its founding document to give voters chance to directly propose or reject constitutional amendments and legislation. It has worked out just fine since then.
“That’s direct democracy,” she said. “I don’t know why we’d try to undo 112 years of that working out.”
Republicans have, for the most part, coalesced behind the issue. LaRose, widely rumored to be running for the U.S. Senate in 2024, has been among its loudest champions. In a recent op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch, he argued predatory actors want to prey on Ohio’s lax standard for amendments, which should require a broad and bipartisan consensus.
“All it takes to ratify an amendment is a well-funded, dishonest political campaign and a simple majority vote,” he said. “It shouldn’t be that easy.”
Abortion advocates aren’t the only ones eyeing changes to the Ohio Constitution. On the liberal side, various organizers have tried to raise the minimum wage or expand voter access through policies like automatic voter registration.
Conservatives have their ideas as well. In 2011, they successfully passed a “Health Care Freedom Amendment” as a rebuke to Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature health care law, commonly known as “Obamacare.” In the most recent cycle, voters approved GOP amendment proposals including one prohibiting noncitizens from voting and another expanding the reasons judges can prohibit the release of people suspected of crimes. Anti-vaccine activists have proposed a “medical right to refuse” amendment as well.
Rob Walgate, vice president of the American Policy Roundtable, is an anti-abortion conservative who opposes the amendment and thinks Republicans aren’t thinking the issue all the way through.
“Anyone that supports the 60% trusts politicians far more than I trust politicians,” he said.
In an interview Wednesday, Gonidakis said he wouldn’t be surprised if the resolution is voted out of committee next week. He rejected the notion that raising the threshold is anti-democratic – 50% of the voters would need to directly approve the matter before it kicks in. What’s undemocratic, he said, is not allowing voters to settle the issue.
Between the potential for citizen-led constitutional referendums over an independent redistricting commission, increasing minimum wage, or “the weed guys” pushing recreational marijuana, he said items could wind up in a sacrosanct Constitution that don’t belong there.
“This is accelerating,” he said.
In some ways, Jen Miller, executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters, agrees. While citizens do have the option of what’s called an “initiated statute” where they can essentially gather the hundreds of thousands of signatures required to propose a law and pass it via the ballot, there’s nothing to stop lawmakers from reversing all that work. This incentivizes organizers to push constitutional amendments, which lawmakers can’t undo alone.
But that shortcoming can be fixed without starving voters of the opportunity to change their constitution with a simple majority.
“The best way to protect the Constitution is not to take away people’s right to determine their own futures through ballot initiatives, it’s easing the [initiated statute] process,” she said.
As introduced, the House’s version of the proposed constitutional amendment would make for a greater burden on those seeking future amendments. Beyond raising the voter threshold, it would require organizers to gather signatures from all 88 counties, not just the 44 currently required.
However, the bill is scheduled for a possible amendment Tuesday and possible committee vote Wednesday.
As the Columbus drama unfurls, organizers are gathering the 413,000 signatures needed to place the abortion access question on the November ballot. If it passes, Ohio’s Constitution would guarantee that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” on matters including abortion. While abortion may be prohibited after the point of “fetal viability,” it states that physicians would have the right to conduct the procedure if it’s required to protect the life or health of the mother in their professional judgement.
Jeff Rusnak, a strategist for the Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, said they are on track to round up enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in November. He said anyone trying to characterize HJR1 as some kind of government reform idea is lying, and said Gonidakis specifically “insults Ohioans every time he opens his mouth and says something like that.” The issue boils down to access to abortion and raw political power.
“They know they can’t win at the ballot box, so they’ve got to change the rules,” he said.
This week, Gongwer News Service, along with the Columbus-based Werth public relations firm, polled lawmakers on the issue of raising the constitutional threshold. Only 45 of 133 responded to all four questions, but those sampled revealed a few patterns. For one, 100% of Democrats opposed the plan, while 88% of Republicans supported it. Of the 12% of Republicans who don’t support, 3% opposed while 9% were undecided.
But from there, virtually every sampled Democrat plus 20% of Republicans think voters will reject the idea if it comes to a popular vote. About 25% of Republicans were unsure.
