Arizona and Missouri will join a growing group of states holding ballot measures this November to codify the right to abortion into state law.
On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes certified that advocates had gathered 577,971 signatures in favor of the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, a proposed amendment that would certify the right to abortion into the state’s constitution. On Tuesday, Missouri approved a similar initiative that — if passed in November — would reverse the state’s all-but blanket ban on abortion.
The two states join Nevada, Arkansas, Colorado, South Dakota, Florida, and Maryland in putting abortion referendums in front of voters on Election Day.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, state-level ballot measures seeking to enshrine the right to reproductive choice have been overwhelmingly successful — and have been a driver of Democratic turnout in midterm and off-cycle elections. In California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Vermont, voters have affirmed their right to reproductive freedom.
“This is a huge win for Arizona voters who will now get to vote YES on restoring and protecting the right to access abortion care, free from political interference, once and for all,” Arizona for Abortion Access Coalition Campaign Manager Cheryl Bruce said Monday.
“The decision to have an abortion is personal, private, and must be left up to patients and their families. But here in Missouri, the government is making that decision for us by force,” Margot Riphagen — Vice President of External Affairs, Advocates of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri — said during an online press conference on Tuesday. “This ballot measure is our opportunity to vote for reproductive freedom, and this certification is one step closer to building meaningful abortion access for Missourians. This is an opportunity to put the power back into the hands of the people.”
Dr. Selina Sandoval, Associate Medical Director at Planned Parenthood Great Plains, added that “this moment is not an end point, but a beginning. We must continue to advocate for policies that protect access to care and stand firm against those that seek to undermine it. We have a lot of work ahead, but today is a day we celebrate a crucial step forward.”
Tori Schafer, Deputy Director for Policy and Campaigns of the ACLU of Missouri, indicated that the coalition was prepared to counter any legal challenges to the ballot measure. Given the overwhelming success of past measures in other states, anti-abortion groups have leveled challenges against these sorts of initiatives. In Arizona, Republican lawmakers in the legislature have signaled that they will approve an opposing ballot measure restricting reproductive rights in the state.
The voter referendums on reproductive freedom are not the only way the fight over abortion rights will affect the 2024 election. Republican election conspiracy theorist and failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is locked in an intense fight with Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) for the Senate seat that will be vacated by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), and Gallego has made Lake’s support of hardline anti-abortion policies a central component of his campaign against her. Gallego cheered the news about the abortion initiative on Monday. “YES. One step closer to protecting abortion rights in AZ,” he wrote on X.
In Missouri, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is seeking a second term in Congress. His 2024 Democratic opponent, Lucas Kunce, has hammered Hawley as an anti-abortion zealot who is out of touch with the average voter. Kunce, too, celebrated the news of Missouri’s initiative.
“Democrats, Republicans, and Independents came together across our state to take back power over their lives and bodies from control-freak politicians, thanks to the hard work of Missourians for Constitutional Freedom,” Kunce said in May after the referendum coalition announced it had secured the necessary signatures to submit the ballot measure. “See you in November, Josh Hawley.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”