Mary Ellen Klas: Republicans don't trust voters on abortion

Over a decade ago, when political parties didn’t treat their rivals as mortal enemies, the Republican president of the Florida Senate, Jeff Atwater, would remind his colleagues: “Don’t fear the debate.”

I remember them as simple words uttered as tensions mounted during particularly contentious partisan disagreements. But anyone with a reasonable understanding of American history recognized in his message the wisdom of the nation’s founders, who encountered acrimonious differences and frustrating deadlocks and yet hammered out an American Constitution in a sweltering convention hall in Philadelphia 237 years ago by talking it out.

Now would be a good time for Republican officials in states with abortion amendments on the November ballot to follow the founders’ example and trust the debate. Rather than debating the merits of their positions, however, there is an orchestrated effort by these politicians to undermine the will of the people and deny voters the opportunity to decide the issue.

Donald Trump and his supporters have been boasting for two years that it was his Supreme Court appointees who overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the abortion issue to states — where they say it belongs. But when voters in eight states followed the prescribed process for putting abortion-rights amendments on the ballot, Trump and his allies went back on their word.

Instead of letting the debate play out in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota, Republicans employed their same old tricks to try to kick the amendments off the ballot or raise doubts about their legitimacy.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis sent his election police to knock on the doors of voters who signed the petition to put a measure on the ballot that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. In a state with a large population of immigrants and people of color, many of whom rightfully fear police, the tactic was meant to intimidate.

Sending an officer to a residence to question whether a person signed a petition isn’t aimed at rooting out fraud. County election officials had already validated the signatures. The visits were intended to scare voters — just as Black Americans in the Jim Crow South were threatened — including with lynching — for attempting to exercise their right to vote.

DeSantis is also using taxpayer-funded state agencies to spread misinformation about the ballot question. Officials at the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates the state’s 49 abortion clinics, recently launched a website that makes unsubstantiated and false claims about what the ballot initiative will do, including that it “threatens women’s safety.”

Efforts are also underway in other Republican-led states to sabotage similar ballot questions instead of allowing debate to flourish. Republican officials in Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, for example, have launched legal challenges to knock such amendments off their ballots.

In Missouri, Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft caved to pressure from anti-abortion lawmakers this month and agreed to decertify an amendment that would establish the constitutional right to an abortion up until fetal viability and grant constitutional protections for reproductive health care, such as birth control. Less than three hours before a constitutional deadline to finalize the ballot, the Missouri Supreme Court overruled him and ordered the amendment on the ballot.

In Montana, Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen attempted to block a voter-backed initiative, claiming the language was unclear. The state Supreme Court rejected his argument.

And in South Dakota, a ballot amendment that could overturn that state’s abortion ban remains in limbo. A lawsuit challenging the validity of petition signatures has the support of Republican lawmakers and goes to trial later this month — after early voting has started.

In Trump’s world of “let the states decide,” voters in Nebraska should have the purest choice with two voter-initiated proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot. One would expand abortion access until fetal viability and the other would enshrine Nebraska's current 12-week ban. But Republicans there tried to keep the expanded access amendment off the ballot. A court ruled that it would remain.

In each of these states, Republicans have near-total control of government at a time when public opinion on abortion is soundly against the policies lawmakers have enacted. According to Pew Research, 63% of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, yet 22 states have enacted bans on the procedure.

Americans understand the stakes in this debate. We lived with a constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years and are now living with the consequences of states controlling the decision. A robust debate would focus on the pros and cons of abortion, the risks of banning the procedure, its impact on women and families, the moral implications and the effectiveness and impact of alternatives. In such a debate, we might hear that about 12% of Democrats nationally consider themselves “pro-life” or that 23% of Republicans consider themselves “pro-choice.” That debate would be focused on facts, not demagoguery and misinformation.

Instead, Republicans have shown they don’t trust voters to make up their own minds. They have deluded themselves into thinking they know best and they’ll prevail by taking away voters’ choices. It’s an authoritarian move, and it’s undemocratic.

We’ll know soon enough what voters think. But one thing is certain: When Trump and other Republicans say they want states to decide, they don’t really mean it.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.