MSNBC's Joe Scarborough lamented the "anti-democracy" course that Republicans have charted under Donald Trump's leadership, but he celebrated the failure of the latest GOP-backed effort to limit voter power.
Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure Tuesday that would have raised the threshold for constitutional referendums to 60 percent, rather than the simple majority currently needed, and would have made it far more difficult to place measures on the ballot.
While talking about the measure on Wednesday morning, the "Morning Joe" host said that effort was part of the ongoing and wide-ranging GOP assault on voter rights.
"Think about Donald Trump's Republican Party," Scarborough said. "One, they tried to take away a presidential election. Two, they line up in support, and I won't name the editorial page again that does it, they line in support of a fake electors conspiracy plot, right, that their own people knew was unconstitutional, that their own people knew would be overturned by the United States Supreme Court. But they were doing it to confuse the issue and to delay a constitutional process, and they wanted to throw out the votes of millions and millions of Americans in seven states."
"Then we go to Tennessee, again, more anti-democracy nonsense," he added. "They actually kick Black members of the Tennessee legislature out, because they dare raise their voices – they let a white woman stay in, by the way. That's interesting. Justice blind? I don't know, Republicans certainly aren't blind. You're a Black legislator in Tennessee and you speak up and speak out, they kick you out, right, and now you go to Ohio and what do we have? You, first of all, have the women of Ohio, have the right to make health care decisions for themselves themselves, are parents of 10-year-old girls that are raped, they have to flee the state so they can make health care decisions for themselves. Republicans take that right away from Ohio women and Ohio families and Ohio doctors. Then they come up with this scheme and say, we'll take away your right to amend the Constitution, and we'll sneak it in in August and you have to get 60 percent to claw back the right we've taken away from Ohio and across America."
That ballot measure, which was aimed at preventing passage of an abortion-rights referendum in November, follows the failure of similar efforts in other Republican-led states, including Arkansas and South Dakota, to raise the voter threshold to amend the Constitution.
"They're not even trying to hide it anymore," Scarborough said. "They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're trying to make these processes more difficult. They're trying to change the rules midstream – they said as much! The anti-abortion groups, the anti-women's right groups said as much, 'We're changing the process or else we're in big trouble.'"
"Guess what?" he added. "If taking the rights of women away to make their own choices over their own bodies puts your organization in big trouble, I think it's safe to say after the past year and a half of election results, those people that want to strip women of their rights, they're in big trouble."
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