Even in Summertime, We Can't Lose Focus
Attacks on women's rights continue. We must stay vigilant.
Summertime — and the fight for democracy — is sizzling, especially in the states. Here’s what is happening across the country.
Sudden shakeups in U.S. Senate elections have foisted reproductive rights front and center. The upcoming primary in Maine to replace Graham Platner as the Democratic candidate, combined with deep antipathy voters there have toward Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, is a golden opportunity to elevate abortion in the midterms — especially given Collins’s recent comment that she has no regrets about her pivotal vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In South Carolina, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s unexpected death last weekend has created a surge of public attention and momentum for the Democratic candidate, Dr. Annie Andrews, a pro-choice, pro-science pediatrician (with an A+ Instagram game).
Too often, summer is a season all too ripe for sneak attacks on direct democracy. Ohio Republicans made a case study out of the strategy when they orchestrated a special election in August 2023 to quietly raising the threshold for ballot measures — all in service of attempting to thwart a popular abortion proposal. In the end, voters saw the power grab for what it was and rejected the rules change while turning out in force that November for abortion. Now Kansas is resurrecting the play and will hold an August election to decide how state Supreme Court justices are chosen. If the Republican-backed measure succeeds, the current system, which entails commission-based appointments, would be changed to judicial elections. No surprise, the latter will have massive consequences for abortion, as well as LGBTQ rights, education, and congressional redistricting, all of which are in play in Kansas courts. As the New York Times framed it, “Republicans see this as their best hope to finally overturn a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that recognized a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution, a decision affirmed by voters in 2022 when they declined to overturn it.”
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is also a former secretary of state, and vice-chair of the first Trump administration’s short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and who has long been a purveyor of election conspiracy theories, has begun saying the quiet part out loud: that the real endgame is to circumvent the will of voters. According to the Times article, in 2022, he told anti-abortion activists that judicial elections would be the best way to “slowly and quietly” overturn the 2019 abortion ruling. This time around, he acknowledges the impact goes even deeper: “It’s not just about abortion. It’s about this whole panoply of potential areas where plaintiffs can ask a state supreme court to create a new liberty interest that is far broader than anything created in the U.S. Constitution.”
[The outcome of the Kansas special election also stands to raise the stakes in the billionaire arms race for the judiciary. Recall the 2023 and 2024 Wisconsin Supreme Court elections in which abortion was at the epicenter. Both went on to be the most expensive judicial elections in U.S. history, with $51 million and $100 million spent, respectively.]
New ballot measures are being approved in real time. Voters in Idaho — a state with one of the most restrictive bans in the country — will get to decide in November whether to restore access to abortion. On Monday, Idahoans United for Women and Families announced that the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act, a carve-out for an array of reproductive healthcare protections, including the right to abortion, met the criteria to be on voters’ ballots for the general election.
Voters in Virginia and Nevada, states with some abortion protections, will get to decide whether to go further and enshrine reproductive rights in their respective state constitutions. And in Vermont and Wisconsin voters will get to weigh in on whether to add an equal protection clause to their state constitution.
And then there is Missouri, the first state to undo its abortion ban via constitutional amendment, which has now turned the process inside out: a new measure to resurrect the ban — and also write into the state constitution a ban on gender-affirming care for minors — will be on the ballot this November. Meanwhile, a special election this summer will give Missouri voters the opportunity to strike down politicians’ attempt to curb ballot measures by requiring majorities in every gerrymandered congressional district.
It has been only a few weeks since the end of Supreme Court term, which included a decision upholding states’ ability to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ school sports teams. Since then, Arizona, Colorado, and Washington have put the question on their 2026 ballot; Nebraska is attempting to do so in time for November. In Maine, a measure was also proposed, but Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (one of the potential U.S. Senate candidates) invalidated more than 12,000 signatures on the citizens’ petition that had been forged and/or duplicated: last week a judge upheld blocking the referendum; any appeal will need to be resolved by August 25 for it to appear on the November ballot.
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It is a tough balancing act — the need to revel in lazy, hazy days of summer and grasp the reality that these fights require our constant vigilance. This is where we have to have hold each other up, Contrarians. Please take the time to refresh and rejuvenate, and be ready to come back swinging.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.
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Thanks for all the updates.