Ohio GOP invents one weird trick to gut part of the constitution they don't like

By this point, it’s a familiar tune: Progressives achieve a victory at the ballot box in a state with a Republican legislature, and the legislature attempts to undo the victory after the fact. When Democrats were elected to the governorships in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin in recent years, Republicans moved to strip them of their powers. When Janet Protasiewicz won the high-profile election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year, state legislators threatened to impeach her.

And now, after Ohioans overwhelmingly voted to amend their state constitution to include explicit protections for abortion rights—only the fourth state in the country to do so—Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly are eager to completely neuter the amendment with one weird trick. The workaround that they’ve identified is simple: Just don’t let the courts interpret the amendment.

Several Republican members of the state House recently issued a press release that claimed that “[f]oreign billionaires”—antisemitic code for “George Soros”—were responsible for the passage of Issue 1, which they characterized as “foreign election interference.” They also announced that they would “consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative.”

Yet, despite that the trial balloon they floated quickly crashed and burned, with widespread condemnation of its blatant disregard for voters, they followed it up with a proposed bill.