What Do Next Week’s Election and Abortion Have in Common?

I thought you’d never ask.

First up, today’s headline should serve as a reminder that many San Diegans have ballots yet to be submitted for this year’s general election.  How about you?

My intention is part encouragement to build brain muscle memory about the act of voting. It’s also a reminder that every election everywhere in the coming months will be part of a much bigger picture, namely the preservation of secular democracy and rule of law. 

While local ballots don’t have anything saying “yes” or “no” for a theocratic autocracy, in the context of an issue  -abortion– and the far right’s plan affecting a huge chunk of the country, the County District 4 Supervisor choices are relevant.

I’ll get to why they are locally relevant further on in this post, but first we need to look around the nation at events related to the far right’s cudgels in their quest for absolute power: abortion (as a prelude to disenfranchisement of women) and voting (as a prelude to restoration of white supremacy).

These examples are glimpses into what the MAGA crowd sees as the future.

Idaho - As it turns out, a court ordered suspension (while on appeal) of the state’s ‘abortion trafficking law’ wasn’t enough to keep authorities from bringing a case against a teenager and his mother for bringing his teenage girlfriend out of state for an abortion. 

The pair were charged with multiple felonies, including second degree kidnapping. The male in this relationship (they were living together in his mother’s home) turned 18 during the course of their relationship, so he’s also been charged with rape and sexual exploitation of a child.

Complicating this case is evidence that the young man and his mother engaged in abusive behavior, including providing the teenager with methamphetamine and smoking it with her regularly. Publicizing the drug aspect represents an attempt by prosecutors to prevent those charged from gaining public sympathy. 

(Thanks to Jessica Valenti’s substack Abortion Every Day for this info. You should subscribe; I did.)

Ohio - The second round of attempts to deny the will of the people by the state’s GOP is underway, with mail in ballots already being returned on the question of adding protection of reproductive rights to the Ohio constitution. 

Back in August, voters turned back an attempt to raise the threshold for referendums to 60%, a ploy by GOP strategists who saw polls saying pro-abortion forces would garner 58% of the vote in this upcoming election.

Losing round one in August has only stiffened the resolve of the anti-abortion forces. 

From Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

• The following month, the GOP-dominated state Ballot Board got the Ohio Supreme Court to agree that it could use “unborn child” rather than “fetus” on the November ballot. Voters now won’t see the actual text of the amendment, which seeks to add the protection of reproductive rights to the state constitution. Instead, they’ll see language that the referendum would “always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy regardless of viability if, in the treating physician's determination, the abortion is necessary to protect the pregnant woman's life or health."

• Then, in September, the state purged 26,000 voters from its rolls, with over 4,000 of those voters being purged from Franklin County, which includes Columbus, a reliably Democratic vote. The state’s conservative Secretary of State, Frank LaRose, didn’t announce the purge when he did it in September, and since Ohio voters have to register by October 10, those who only just learned they were removed are out of luck.

• As none of these things appear to be moving the needle, Republicans have now resorted to using a taxpayer-funded legislative website to say that passage of the referendum means there will be “dismemberment of fully conscious children.”

Virginia –  Control of the state legislature will be determined by voters in the Old Dominion in the general election, with voting already underway. Soon we’ll know if Virginia will remain the only Southern state where abortion is accessible. Unfortunately, many Black voters may find out that their votes won’t be counted.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who’s made no secret of his aspirations for higher office, has floated passage of a “15 week ban” on abortions should the GOP gain control of the House of Delegates.

Fifteen weeks is bs, as Rewire explains:

• The dissolution of abortion as critical reproductive health care is the Republicans’ calling card, but now they’re creating a fanciful diversion.

• The six weeks versus 15 weeks debate is a false choice meant to distract you from the truth that the GOP wants to enact a federal ban despite abortion being widely popular. According to Gallop, 85 percent of Americans support abortion—and that’s across parties, despite GOP groaning.

• Republicans can reframe the conversation as much as they want, but pregnant people looking to have abortions are not concerned with gestational limits, they are concerned about their lives.

In keeping with the Republican tradition of voter exclusion, (Via Popular Information): 

• Election officials working under Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) have admitted to removing “nearly 3,400 qualified voters from the state’s rolls.” The Youngkin administration originally discovered the mistake at the beginning of October but grossly underestimated the number of voters affected. At the time, the team stated that they had removed just 270 eligible voters. 

• The problem, which was originally identified by VPM, occurred after Youngkin’s Elections Department “discovered 10,588 people on the state’s voter rolls who were ineligible to vote because of felony convictions” in late 2022.

Virginia law says a felony conviction deprives an individual of all rights of citizenship. A policy by the previous governor of restoring rights to individuals who had served their time and paid all fines was revoked by Youngkin.

One in ten Black Virginians are deprived of the right to vote, the law being left over from the post-civil war Jim Crow era.

North Carolina - Republicans gained control of the State Supreme Court in 2022 elections, and voter suppression and redistricting rulings were tossed.

From Public Notice:

• In just one day only a few months after the new court was seated — April 28, 2023 —the state Supreme Court reversed both the voter ID and redistricting cases. After that, the writing was on the wall, with multiple news outlets writing that same day that the path was now clear for the GOP to pass its gerrymandered maps. 

• Last week, the General Assembly approved those gerrymandered maps again, giving the Republicans 10 safe seats to the Democrats’ three, with one swing district. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, cannot veto redistricting legislation, so there’s nothing to put the brakes on the GOP. 

A state trending purple in recent years is now ruled by a political party that intends to keep power by any means necessary.

Mississippi - The odds of Mississippi ending up with Democrat Brandon Presley (he’s related to Elvis Presley) in the governor's office instead of scandal burdened incumbent Tate Reeves are slimmer now, thanks to a law allowing more aggressive purges of voters from the rolls.

The NAACP found that over 50,000 voters had been purged in five counties. Since the state has a voter registration deadline 30 days before an election, challenges to improperly purged registrations won’t impact this fall’s election.

Missouri - Republican State Attorney General Andrew Bailey has been doing his damndest to prevent amendments loosening the state’s draconian constitutional restrictions on abortions. He’s threatening to refuse to defend the state should any of the amendments be passed, and saying it will cost taxpayers $21 million to hire outside counsel. 

Bailey was appointed to his post after his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, was elected to the U.S. Senate. He is hoping to be elected in 2024.

From the Kansas City Star editorial board:

• Then again, even properly elected Missouri Republicans have made it quite clear they don’t want the state’s voters — their own constituents — to make their own personal health care choices. A court last month quashed Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s proposed ballot language that said the measures would allow for “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted” abortions. And that came only after conservatives in the General Assembly failed in May to make it much harder for voters to amend the state constitution. 

• Why the obstruction? Why the obstruction and discouraging words? It’s almost certainly because conservatives know that Missourians — like Kansans before them — will likely vote for abortion rights.

Let's go back to Jessica Valenti for a look at developments, besides restricting birth control,  in the post-Roe landscape:

• The activists that decimated abortion rights have quietly rolled out a new initiative to pressure and force American women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. 

• It’s difficult to articulate the scale and cruelty of their vision, but I’ll try: This is a coalition of the most powerful anti-abortion groups in the country, coming together to change legislation, medical norms, patient care and more. They don’t just want to ban abortion in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities—but do away with prenatal testing altogether. It is massive, well-funded and terrifying. And they’ve launched it right under our noses. 

What these abortion reactionary foot soldiers will need to accomplish their goals will be incorporating the anti-science propaganda types used in the COVID deniers cause.

And that brings us back to the Supervisor District 4 contest. 

The Republican candidate for that post is Amy Reichert, who built her political profile by posing as a ‘reasonable’ COVID denier. She wasn’t using the delusional rhetoric of the anti 5G crowd; her cause was about opposing mandatory public health measures. 

Needless to say, to the extent that either faction achieved their goals, the result was the same: more people dying and more people antagonistic to the institutions of governance.

Because 2023 is an “off-year” election, voter turnout will be abysmal. And that’s when fringe candidates can win. Reichert hasn’t made abortion part of her platform, but she’s hanging with the people who will do anything for power, including taking away women’s right to healthcare rooted in science.

Voting this year is more than assuring a victory for Monica Montgomery-Steppe (did I mention that I’ve endorsed her?), it’s also about making a statement, saying no to a reactionary agenda (with soft edges for California voters).

The bigger the margin, the louder our voices will be.

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Wednesday’s Links of Enlightenment

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How Black Moms in Temecula Are Fighting the School Board’s Right-Wing Takeover Via The Nation

• If, by December 8, canvassers collect approximately 4,000 signatures from registered voters in each board member’s district, recall measures for all three will be on the March 5, 2024, primary ballot.

• At stake is not just textbook choice but student safety—and future generations’ collective understandings of both history and contemporary movements. As historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “It would be a mistake to think of the current wave of attacks on ‘critical race theory’ as a culture war. This is a political battle.” It is “part and parcel of the right-wing war on democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities.”

• Temecula, then, reminds us of this—and of a few tasks we may have overlooked this election season: Read about the school board candidates (and who’s endorsing them) in your district. If you can, vote. And if all else fails, organize.

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eXports eXports eXports - The dirtiest word in the climate lexicon by Bill McKibben

• Our status as planet-wrecker is most obvious when it comes to liquefied natural gas. I wrote a few weeks ago about the plans for 20 more massive LNG terminals, mostly along the Gulf of Mexico. The proponents justified them as “cleaner than coal,” arguing that gas would serve as a transition fuel in Asian nations; as I pointed out, the world no longer officially believes in this kind of transition, but instead is committed to net zero policies; the International Energy Agency has called for an end to all such new infrastructure.

• But it turns out that even on those narrow grounds—”better than coal”—American gas exports are absurd. As I reported yesterday in the New Yorker, new data from the dean of methane scientists, Cornell’s Bob Howarth, shows that so much methane excapes from the ships carrying LNG abroad that when all is said and done it’s at least 24 percent worse for the climate than coal.

• This new data perhaps will help persuade the Biden administration to do the right thing—to announce a halt to licensing any new LNG facilities until they have spent a few years doing a careful analysis to figure out what a piece of folly this is. And they can make that announcement with political cover: then as now, polling data shows Americans hate fracking up our nation only to export the results, understanding that it will drive up the cost of energy for Americans.

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Can Britney Spears ever truly be free? Via Lyz at Men Yell At Me

• Like Spears, American women are only valued as girls. Once the cute, sassy, outspoken little girls become women, have women’s bodies, women’s desires, and a woman’s exhaustion, our culture punishes us and seeks to control us, rendering us less free than we were as girls.

• But of course, our cultural projection upon the canvas of Spears’ life has always been the problem. Why can’t we stop?

• Britney Spears is almost exactly one year older than me. We both have December birthdays. I’ve known these facts as long as Spears has been famous. And I’ve charted my life in connection to hers. Early marriages. Children. Divorces. 

• I’ve talked to other women of my generation about this connection too. We all feel it. She is us. We are her and we are all stuck, somewhere in a world that takes everything from us, while demanding we perform ceaselessly.