What are they afraid of?

That's the question that Missourians, Ohioans and Americans everywhere should be asking themselves about Republican politicians who demonstrated this week — not for the first time — how plainly terrified they are at the prospect of allowing the people to decide the urgent issue of abortion rights for themselves.

Wasn't that the core of the conservative argument for overturning Roe v. Wade last year? That rather than letting federal judges decide this contentious issue, it should be left to the people, at the state level, through the democratic process?

Yet now that the people are attempting to make themselves heard on this deeply personal topic, Republican leaders from Jefferson City to Columbus, Ohio, are using every procedural weapon in their arsenals to ensure that doesn't happen.

The quest to restore abortion rights in Missouri saw a significant setback this week with the filing of a cynical lawsuit clearly designed to further stall an abortion-rights referendum that has already been brazenly sabotaged by top state Republicans.

But over in Ohio, voters issued a stinging rebuke to a state GOP power structure that attempted to push back the goalposts of an abortion-rights referendum this fall. Missouri's Republican-held Legislature — which has attempted a similar stunt — should take notice.

In Missouri, the lawsuit filed Monday by two Republican state legislators appears to have little chance of winning in court. No matter. It's clear the point is to further stall an effort by abortion-rights advocates to get a referendum on the statewide ballot next year.

The referendum would ask voters to unwind the Draconian abortion ban Missouri enacted last year after the fall of Roe. It outlaws all abortions from conception, including in cases of rape or incest, with a sole, vague exception for medical emergencies. Doctors who violate it can face 15 years in prison.

The suit asks the court to toss out a Missouri auditor's conclusion that passage of an abortion-rights referendum wouldn't create a fiscal cost for the state. A summary of potential fiscal costs is a requirement for slating a referendum, and the plaintiffs want it to say it would cost billions of dollars in lost tax revenue from unborn future Missourians. That bizarre logic, of course, has no basis in standard auditing practices.

The audit itself was overseen by state Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick, himself an anti-abortion Republican, so it's not as if there was some hidden agenda in the audit. The plaintiffs simply hope to continue stalling the referendum process to make it more difficult for organizers to gather the required signatures to get it on the ballot — a process that can't start until these and other legal distractions are settled.

If the lawsuit's wacky math sounds familiar, that's because it's the same argument Missouri's Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, made recently to explain his refusal to approve the audit. The state Supreme Court rightly ruled that Bailey had no authority to do that.

Other litigation still surrounds Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's proposed ballot language, which would tell voters the referendum will "allow for dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions." This is not only inaccurate, but it's a blatant violation of Ashcroft's statutory duty to craft an unbiased description of the referendum.

Note what these maneuvers all have in common: Rather than facing the abortion debate head-on, putting it before the voters and making their best argument, these tax-paid public servants are doing all that they can to ensure that there is no public debate.

What are they afraid of?

Perhaps they're afraid of the fact that, of the six states in which the issue has been put on a statewide ballot since the fall of Roe — including in conservative Kansas and Kentucky — abortion rights has prevailed in all six.

Make that seven.

In Ohio, voters in Tuesday's referendum weren't technically being asked for an up-or-down vote on abortion rights, but rather on a proposal to make future referendums harder for voters to pass.

But no one in or outside of the Buckeye State had any doubt about what future referendum it was that Republicans had in mind when they tried to raise the threshold for passage: Ohio's voters will again go to the polls, in November, to vote on whether to guarantee abortion rights in the state's constitution.

Tuesday's vote was "100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution," Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said beforehand. It was essentially confirmation that conservatives are willing to trash the very concept of majority-rules democracy to guard their new-found authority over women's uteruses.

With that in mind, the state's voters defeated Tuesday's measure by a landslide of about 15 percentage points. So much for raising the threshold on democracy.

Had Tuesday's referendum passed, November's abortion-rights referendum would have had to win 60% of the Ohio statewide vote to pass. But since Tuesday's referendum failed, the November referendum on abortion rights can pass with just 50% (plus one) support from Ohio voters — who, again, knew perfectly well the groundwork they were laying by defeating Tuesday's anti-democracy measure. Kansas and Kentucky, move over.

Missouri, like some other red states, has lately been pushing similar ideas to make it harder for the public to overrule their state legislatures. It isn't difficult to see why. In Missouri, as around America, poll after poll after poll shows that regular people are moderate on abortion rights: not supportive of completely unrestricted abortion, but certainly not supportive of the kinds of laws that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee Ohio, or that endanger the lives of Missouri women who find themselves with non-viable pregnancies.

That would seem to demonstrate the need for moderation in state abortion laws. Instead, Republicans in Missouri, Ohio and elsewhere are scrambling to silence voters in any way they can.

What are they afraid of? Democracy, that's what.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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