Republicans Sue To Protect The Ballot From Voters

Because no one wants these filthy abortion bans.

Photo credit: Larissa Puro via Creative Commons

If there’s one thing Republicans hate, it’s voters. And this month, conservatives are making their distrust of the voters pellucidly clear by fighting like hell to ensure that they can’t cast ballots protecting the right to abortion.

Perhaps this is because Republicans know that Americans broadly support the right to an abortion through viability, or about 24 weeks gestation. And they know it because every time we put it to a vote, from Kansas to Kentucky, Americans come to the polls and say, Yes! Get rid of those draconian abortion bans you lunatics rammed through the legislature! Stop that immediately!

So Republicans are doing their damnedest to make sure that voters never get to answer the question. Everywhere that abortion is on the ballot, they throw a bunch of crazy obstacles in the way to yank it off. That fight is coming to a head in several different courts, as Republican officials and private litigants wage a pitched battle to keep abortion off the ballot this November.

As goes Missouri …

Missouri Attorney General Jay Ashcroft has already gotten slapped around with respect to the abortion ballot referendum, with Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem repeatedly blocking him from using false, incendiary language in official communications, including a claim that it would “allow for dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth.”

But in a different case where Ashcroft is the putative defendant, Judge Christopher Limbaugh, also of Cole County Circuit Court, is poised to knock the initiative off the ballot entirely on Tuesday if no higher court intervenes. According to Rush Limbaugh’s cousin (yes for real), Ashcroft approved the language of the proposed constitutional amendment enshrining a right to abortion in law despite the fact that it omits the magic words “this amendment will repeal the state’s abortion ban,” ipso facto it’s unlegal.