Amp It Up
By Margaret Henoch
In October of last year, we wrote an article about the most effective response to the Alito-driven opinion in the Dobbs case and the subsequent Republican onslaught against women’s reproductive rights across this country. The only way to defeat Republican efforts to limit rights was to step up and vote against the amendments, resolutions, judges, and candidates who supported restricting women’s reproductive health care. Over the past year, we have seen in red and purple states, from Kansas to Ohio, to Wisconsin to Michigan, these resolutions and candidates defeated by significant majorities, when people stepped up to vote. It is time to resist, refute, renounce and defeat the multiple other Republican assaults on rights and on democracy itself. It’s time to amp up our response.
Progress in reproductive (or other) rights begins with defeating measures such as amendments or statutes limiting those rights. However, the next step is to protect those hard-won amendments or protections. That is only done if elected representatives who support limiting rights are booted out of office. If you want your reproductive rights to stay in place, do not support anyone who doesn’t defend reproductive rights - with no caveats. Once you have elected a judge in Wisconsin or defeated a ballot amendment like Issue 1 in Ohio, you still have work to do. You must choose state and federal officials who agree with you on that particular issue. You can’t just step up once, you have to step up over and over: you have to amp it up.
Voting rights are under threat nationwide; roughly 400 new bills have been introduced to make it more difficult for qualified Americans to vote. 400. Those bills include efforts to reduce the number of polling places, to reduce the numbers of days you can vote, and to make voting more onerous and difficult for particular Americans. In Georgia, and other purple or red states, people wait in line for hours to vote; the length of those lines are the direct result of Republican state officials making sure that there are fewer easily accessible places to vote. Limiting voting rights threatens every American who values and believes in democracy. Amp it up.
The Republican response to the free and fair election of 2020 showed us that while many of us may have an easier path to voting, we all have to be concerned that our votes will not count. To state the incredibly obvious, if our votes don’t matter, our democracy isn’t working, and only one party is threatening not to count all votes. Amp it up.
The right to be safe from military-style weapons is also under attack. Children are not guaranteed the right to live through a school day, and their families are not guaranteed to know that those same children will come home at the end of a school day. The Declaration of Independence guarantees ALL of us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Republican refusal to support simple gun safety, much less the ban on assault weapons, endangers of our our rights to life - liberty and happiness notwithstanding. Amp it up.
It is time to amp up the step up. It is time to expand how we look at candidates and their proposals. It is time to look closely at how our government works and take all of that into account each time we vote. If you think that particular rights, reproductive, voting, or democracy writ large, are under threat, and you vote to ensure those rights in special elections, you must follow through and vote for candidates who will advance and protect those rights at every inflection point in every election cycle. You have to amp it up. No party is going to meet you at each and every detail or even each and every issue. Still, you cannot support reproductive rights, voting rights, democracy, gun safety or other rights and give power to the party trying to overturn all those rights. You must amp it up.