The thinking that went into this week's cartoon involved not just Texas Governor Greg Abbott's razor wire flotilla in the Rio Grande, but also Anne Applebaum's article from The Atlantic about how having complete power of all the branches of government in a state is never enough for today's Republicans.
Her column on Republican totalitarianism discusses the Tennessee legislature's ejection of Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for having the temerity to bring a megaphone to the statehouse — a move made because Republicans routinely shut off Democrats' microphones. Republicans there have divided Nashville among three majority-rural congressional districts, thus depriving the citizens of the state's largest city of any true representation in Congress.
Seeking to prevent passage of a state constitutional amendment by popular vote protecting abortion rights, Ohio Republicans put a measure on the ballot this past Tuesday requiring popular constitutional amendments to pass by a 60% supermajority. The legislature didn't pick that percentage at random: polling shows abortion rights are supported by 58% of the Ohio electorate. If support had polled at 62%, Republicans would have required passage by a 2/3 supermajority.
Republicans had to act fast to get this "Issue 1" onto a special August 8 ballot; the abortion rights amendment comes up for popular vote in November.
Republican supermajority lawmakers couldn't get their 60% voter approval idea onto the state's May primary ballot, so in February they came up with a new plan — an August special election.
There was just one problem: Republicans had voted to eliminate most August special elections in a law they passed in December. [Ohio Secretary of State Frank] LaRose, who testified in support of that law, said it shouldn't be an issue.
And to keep amendment referenda Republicans don't like from getting onto future ballots in the first place, "Issue 1" would have required citizen groups to get voter signatures in each of Ohio's 88 counties, up from 44 required previously.
Happily, Ohio voters rejected Issue 1 — albeit by a majority that would have been insufficient to repeal the 60% threshold if it had already been in effect.
In Florida, several school districts announced that they would no longer offer Advanced Placement Psychology courses for college-bound high school students, thanks to repressive legislation by Gov. Ron DesAntis and his minions in his state legislature.
These decisions came after the College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program, announced that the state had “effectively banned” AP Psychology because state legislation, commonly referred to as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, doesn’t permit instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity, which the College Board considers essential for completing the course.Well, if there's anything Republicans love these days, it's censoring educational materials. Especially if they can keep LGBTQ+ people out of sight, and therefore out of impressionable teenage minds. We'll tell you what you can teach, the totalitarian Republicans say to those meddlesome academics. Just teach our Officially Approved curriculum!
Florida officials have countered that AP Psychology hasn’t been banned, but rather that the College Board is playing politics by telling school districts they can’t offer the course unless it’s taught in full.
In a similar vein, Arkansas Republicans passed a law under which librarians and booksellers could be criminally charged for providing "harmful materials" to minors. A U.S. District Court Judge has temporarily suspended that law, but it's flabbergasting to realize that they find nothing wrong with providing guns to minors, but are scared spitless at the prospect of a kid finding Heather Has Two Mommies on a bookshelf.
In "red" states around the country, legislatures' attacks on transgender citizens have included requiring state-issued ID's to identify everyone by the gender assigned to them at birth. This is sure to hamper transgender voting every time a poll worker is handed an identification card that doesn't appear to match the person handing it to them.
Which will have the added bonus (as Republicans see it) of slowing down those long voter lines in urban areas where many Democrats live. If they only disenfranchise transgender people, that's a win for them. Bogging down those urban polling places is just gravy.
If they make voting enough of a hassle, they might not even need that 60% threshold business anyway.
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