Do you assume Texas politics are excessive? Proper-wing extremism in Ohio has taken over the state

Don’t fool yourself Radicalism in Texas doesn’t just come to a state near you. It’s been in Ohio for a long time and it’s just getting worse. Understand that the hideous policies that the GOP practices against Texans are being emulated by Republican imitators in Columbus. Keep that thought. The jaws fell when Texas got away with passing an apparently unconstitutional law that effectively banned abortion in the state and asked citizens to abandon other citizens to Nazi Germany.

The Texas ban was designed to, and it did, evade legal challenges. Underhanded Republicans in Austin thought the state government couldn’t be sued over an abortion law it failed to enforce. So they gave the job to private informers who are motivated by money. In As the ultimate denigration of women, Texan lawmakers put a $ 10,000 bounty on their heads and encouraged other Texans to sniff the personal medical choices between a woman and her doctor. The same MAGA conjuring men who roar about individual liberties and physical autonomy when denouncing mandatory masks or vaccinations (during a Pest) happily struck draconian parameters on women’s freedom and physical autonomy.

But instead of upholding the bold Texas scheme, which disregarded four decades of the Supreme Court’s precedent for upholding abortion law, the state’s highest court shrugged and abandoned it. Women across the country – and men – were more than angry. At the very least, the Department of Justice refused to accept such an overt “violation of the Constitution” and sued Texas with an injunction to outlaw enforcement of its lawless, bounty-driven abortion ban.

But the Texan blueprint for shamelessly overturning constitutional rights and kicking women to the curb is the toast of other Republican-led states, including Ohio, which have similarly strict abortion bans became blocked by the courts as unconstitutional. Ohio Republicans applauded Texas law and pondered options to replicate it or, as some have suggested, proactively criminalize abortion if the Roe Supreme Court overturned that deadline and returned authority over a woman’s reproductive rights to the states .

Legislation introduced in the Ohio Senate earlier this year would automatically ban all abortions in the state, including those that are performed before a supposed heartbeat is detected (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said it is imprecise to call these calculations “heartbeat” because the use of the term “heartbeat” does not reflect medical accuracy or clinical understanding. What interprets as “heartbeat” will “in these bills there is actually an electrically induced flicker of part of the fetal tissue that becomes the heart as the embryo develops).

Other proposed bills would criminalize abortion in extreme cases that are next to nonexistent in the state. But none of these political poses about abortion – or any of the other problems of the GOP attacks – are about advancing serious policy making based on reality. Like their radical counterparts in Texas, Ohio Republicans have clearly forbidden the reason to exploit emotions all day long and exploit the feelings of their far-right base. Damn the rest of us.

The party, which controls the General Assembly and every state office in Ohio, is complacent indifferent to what most Ohioans say they want from their state government. Elected Republicans in the state are increasingly ignoring the general electorate to appease a small fraction of the die-hard right who need them to win primaries. Despite polls that consistently show that a majority of Ohioans believe abortion should be legal all or most of the time, Republican lawmakers are determined to ban the procedure entirely.

Despite the overwhelming mandate of Ohio voters to reform the state redistribution process with voter-approved amendments to the Ohio Constitution – after the Ohio Republicans tabled some of the busiest land and congressional maps of 2010 in the nation – the GOP again produced ridiculously distorted maps of the legislature. The draft that the Republicans submitted for the seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate is given by the GOP even more partisan advantage than the egregious maps drawn a decade ago.

“Almost the definition of gerrymandering,” complained a Cincy political scientist. But this is the way Ohio Republicans are trying to fool job security when they can’t win elections the usual way with innovative policies and ideas that make life better.

They plan to lower the vote in the state because too many people voting in elections could lose their influence over one-party rule. After a record turnout in 2020, at least 18 states with Republican lawmakers have passed 30 voting-restriction laws. Republicans looking for an excuse to add annoying and unnecessary barriers to voting found it in the Big Lie. While bragging about remarkably well-run elections in their states, they insisted that more electoral hurdles – based on exposed MAGA lies about voter fraud – would preserve “electoral integrity” (otherwise). highly efficient, impartial and hassle-free elections). Understood?

Disguised as a virtue, GOP voter suppression was pushed to the limit in Texas when Republicans passed a dangerous and far-reaching electoral restriction bill that was designed to make voting difficult with a number of disturbing provisions designed to undermine the process and discourage participation. Republicans in Ohio aspire to be like Texas with their own electoral repression proposals that include reducing early voting, banning ballot boxes and most postal votes, and possibly forensic scrutiny of the 2020 elections for safety – despite solid ones GOP victories.

One of the clearest signs that Texas politics is Ohio politics is the willingness of Republican elected officials to sacrifice the lives of the majority in order to appease a minority of MAGA supporters who refuse to wear masks or want to be vaccinated . The COVID surge in Texas is so dire that the Republican governor, battling mandatory masks and vaccines to stop the surge, is recruiting thousands of medical staff outside of the state to combat the rising cases and deaths. In Ohio, where the daily case numbers of COVID are 20 times higher than in July, Governor Mike DeWine believes mandatory vaccines are a mistake and banning both mandatory masks and (all) vaccines remains a Republican priority of legislation.

If there’s one thing crying out for new political leadership in Ohio, it’s Republican indifference to a pandemic that has killed over 21,000 Ohioans and is still on the rise. But don’t fool yourself. nothing will change if voters don’t wake up to the hideous politics Columbus got away with – and soon.

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