Bloodbath Ohio

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

As my editor, John Light, and I planned out our coverage of the Ohio special election results on Tuesday, we made allowances for a late night. If the tallying stretched past the point of human endurance (I, a sloth, thrive best on a cool 9-10 hours a night), we’d make an early morning contingency plan.

No such sleep sacrifice was required (thank God). The Associated Press called the race at 9 p.m. ET, just 90 minutes after polls closed in the Buckeye State.

The measure, which would have raised the threshold on citizen-initiated ballot proposals to 60 percent, fell handily, with 57 percent of voters giving it a thumbs down.

It was an embarrassment for Republicans who had scheduled the election for sleepy August, crossing their fingers for low turnout (only to later complain about lacking enough time to campaign) and who had bet so hopefully on voters’ willingness to disempower themselves.

It was perhaps most embarrassing for Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had bafflingly made himself the posterboy of the issue. He issued a statement, savoring strongly of bitterness, after the loss, referring to a proposed police-related initiative: “If only we had a requirement that would ensure a broad, bipartisan consensus of Ohioans before something like this gets jammed into our state constitution. We’ve got a radical abortion amendment coming in November, job-killing wage mandates on small businesses aimed at next year’s ballot, and now an anti-police amendment that’s just been filed. The attempt to turn Ohio into California is officially underway.”

Most importantly, and less schadenfraudly, the election was yet another extremely high profile loss for the anti-abortion movement. This initiative was widely understood to be connected to the coming proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the Ohio constitution this November. Once again, abortion on the ballot spurred enthusiasm and high turnout rates. Polls show that the majority’s anger after Dobbs has not abated, that a full 84 percent of those polled by CNN said they’d pay close attention to a candidate’s stance on abortion while deciding how to vote.

Abortion rights groups across the country are planning similar efforts to Ohio’s: both Florida and Arizona will likely have abortion protection initiatives on the ballot in 2024.

Republicans are sounding the alarm, predicting more electoral shellackings if they can’t find a position on abortion that’s less repellant to majorities even in red states. For a party that’s been feteing its Christian Right for decades, that’s a hard needle to thread.

Read more about Republicans’ abortion pickle here. 

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Chesebro Gets The Recognition He Wanted

When I spoke with Ken Chesebro last year across several interviews, one thing was clear: He saw himself as an elite appellate lawyer and needed recognition.

It came through subtly. Chesebro, who subsequently became known as “Co-Conspirator 5” in Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 indictment of Trump, speaks carefully, always emphasizing that he was simply there to support the particular needs of a client.

For Chesebro, that long-sought recognition may finally be arriving — but in the worst way: He is facing the possibility of criminal charges in the alleged conspiracy for which Trump has already been indicted. The New York Times published a Dec. 6, 2020 memo this week written by Chesebro in which he laid out his view for what he saw as Trump’s best legal chance at reversing his 2020 loss. Politico wrote in response that Chesebro’s work may in fact have been “more instrumental” than that of John Eastman, who was long seen as the mastermind of Trump’s legal efforts to remain in power after losing.

Head  to read more of my piece on who the mastermind of Stop the Steal really was.

— Josh Kovensky

Joe Biden, Mob Boss

At oral arguments this week over an appeal of a lower court decision that banned many government officials from flagging misinformation to social media companies, the panel of 5th Circuit judges didn’t take long to show their cards.

“I’m certainly not equating the federal government to this, but this is an analogy — probably an inapt analogy so if you’ll excuse me,” Judge Jennifer Elrod began promisingly. “In these movies that we see with the mob or something — they don’t say and spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships. They never actually say ‘go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence’ but everybody just knows.”

“I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal, organized crime,” she added hastily. “But there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘or else.’”

She was referring to the government officials’ conversations with employees at companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Judge Don Willett, equally committed to just calling balls and strikes, jumped in.

“Here you have government in secret, in private, out of the public eye, relying on, as Judge Elrod described, fairly unsubtle strong-arming and veiled or not-so-veiled threats,” Judge Willett followed up. “‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there — it’d be a shame something were to happen to it.’”

Barring some drastic turnaround, the panel seems primed to uphold Trump district judge Terry Doughty’s truly bonkers ruling. So this case, with its “mobs,” its “Orwellian Ministry of Truth,” its “strong-arming” and its “secret meetings,” is likely headed to the Supreme Court. 

— Kate Riga

“This is corruption on the highest level. And it can not be ignored. … This comes down to consumers like a single mom who can’t afford to buy cereal and bread because the price of grain has gone up so much with this war in Ukraine .. And this is why we have to do everything we can to impeach Joe Biden.”

That’s the conspiracy theory enthusiast congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) during a TV interview this week. I’m hardly ever impressed by MAGA Republicans’ highly active imaginations connecting one unrelated matter to another. But I have to admit this one was impressively convoluted.

I’m not sure how the war in Ukraine and inflation have anything to do with an impeachment. But someone please let me know if the increase in the price of Froot Loops is now considered a part of high crimes and misdemeanors.

— Emine Yücel