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In 1992, Pat Buchanan made a campaign stop at the San DiegoTijuana border. As a few white-power activists who had tagged along milled in the background, he called for the United States to build a walla 200-mile-long physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. At the time, Buchanan was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency, the first of two consecutive efforts that were rebuffed by party voters and leaders alike. Buchanan and his politics seemed to be on the verge of being drummed out of the GOP altogether. (When he made one last try for the White House, in 2000, he ran on the Reform Party ticket.) From the start of the 1990s, his hostility toward free trade and NATO, his extremist proposals on immigration, and his jeremiads against cultural decline marked him as an outlier. Communism was over, the stock market was rising, Silicon Valley was just taking off, and few were interested in Buchanans grim vision of a looming illegal invasion.

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Three decades later, Buchanans ideas may still seem fringe, but they are no longer marginal. His call for a barrier at the border has become a staple of Republican platforms, as have his denunciations of cultural decadence, his skepticism about free trade, and his warnings about the dangers of the global elite and of immigrant incursions. As the midterms approach, Donald Trumps conspiracy-laced version of those views shows no sign of flaming out, which forces the question: Is this ethno-nationalism and pugnacious stance toward cultural elites going to be the signature of the Republican Party from now on? And if so, what happened? Not all that long ago, the GOP was the party of Big Business, free markets, traditional family values, and anti-communism. Now it has become the party of election denial and the Wall.

When Trump first surfaced as a 2016 presidential candidate, his dizzying ascendance, seemingly out of nowhere, fueled the sense that he was hijacking a GOP theretofore rooted in the confident optimism that had come out of the Reagan era. Historians have considered Ronald Reagans presidency, and the adoption by the Democratic Party (especially under Bill Clinton) of Reagans end-of-big-government-and-big-labor-and-high-taxes ideology, as the formative development of the last quarter of the 20th centurythe vision that laid out the parameters for American politics in the new millennium.

Yet the recent trajectory of the Republican Party, and its turn against many of the key precepts of Reaganism, calls for a reassessment of this perspective. That is precisely what the historian Nicole Hemmer offers in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She is joined in rethinking the evolution of conservatism by two journalists who approach the subject from different places on the political spectrum. Dana Milbank, the author of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is a liberal Washington Post columnist. Matthew Continetti, the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, arrived at The Weekly Standard as a 22-year-old in 2003 and is now a Never Trumper at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review. All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before Trumps emergence. Their goal is to explain why the current incarnation of the GOP shouldnt come as a surprise. In showing the deep roots of our present crisis, their analyses also suggest the limits of any politics focused on a dream of salvaging the Republican Party.

The consensus among political historians of the postWorld War II years is that the conservative movement of the period was driven by two connected concerns: the desire to constrain the welfare state and the labor unions that had been created during the New Deal, and the imperative to fight international communism. In pursuit of both goals, conservatives embraced the ideology of the free marketas articulated, most notably, by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedmanand rejected the isolationism and America First mentality that had prevailed among many on the right prior to the war. This was, as Continetti argues, a major political shift: In the 1920s, the American right had been split between open elitists in the intellectual world, such as the journalist H. L. Mencken, who warned in a 1919 essay that all government is a conspiracy against the superior man, and the grassroots mobilization of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which strove through mass rallies and political campaigns to maintain the purity of the old pioneer stock.

During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the fight against the New Deal and the Soviet Union gave the right a new energy. Under the broad umbrella of opposing socialism and communism and defending freedom, all kinds of policies that might otherwise have appeared narrowly self-interestedfree-market economics, anti-tax measures, opposition to unions, an aggressive interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhereacquired an idealistic gloss. Even the ugliest aspects of postwar conservatism, such as its opposition to the civil-rights movement, could be portrayed as a principled defense of localism, or even as part of the anti-communist project: Some conservatives suspected that key advisers of Martin Luther King Jr. were secretly in league with Moscow, and that the entire civil-rights movement was riddled with communist sympathizers.

But this brand of conservative politicswhile garnering substantial support, especially from midsize-business owners and prosperous suburbanites, as well as southernersfailed to gain enough traction to win national elections in the 50s and 60s. Victories came only in the 70s, as postwar economic growth faltered and the conservative coalition expanded. Now it included working-class white voters in the North and South animated by resentment, fear, and racism in the aftermath of civil-rights successes. The movement also tapped into a new wave of organizing among evangelical churches, which were able to make common cause with anti-government conservatives in opposing such policies as the IRS denial of tax-exempt status for Christian schools found to be racially discriminatory. For their part, conservatives signed on to much of the evangelicals cultural crusade against abortion access and gay rights.

Read: How the GOP surrendered to extremism

Yet these new recruits and the business-oriented conservative establishment, all three authors argue, never fully merged. The New Right, which gathered momentum in the 70s, remained at arms length from the elite intellectual organizations of conservatism, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the libertarian Cato Institute. Its key activists lacked the establishments intense focus on economic issues, and were angry that their own zealous focus on cultural issues (strictly limiting abortion, banning gay teachers from public schools) wasnt shared. The schism and the fractious extremism at the core of the party, in tone as well as policies, were masked, however, by Reagans cheerful personathat of an avuncular, old-school movie-star gentleman whose politics embraced, Hemmer writes, flexibility and optimism, making movement conservatism genuinely popular for the first time in the Cold War era.

Not that Reagan, despite the unifying power of his presidency, was a moderate. He had a long history of warning against the encroaching control of the liberal state, and his administrations harsh attacks on welfare policies, unions, and busing were extreme; so was his support for his Star Wars defense initiative and for violent anti-communists in Central America. But anti-communist internationalism on the right also helps explain Reagans comparatively genial stance on immigration. As he put it during his 1980 campaign, You dont build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations. An early draft of the speech went further still: We cannot erect a Berlin Wall across the southern border.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of communism in the early 90s shook the political world of the right. Suddenly, the lack of common ground between religious and cultural conservatives on the one hand and the libertarian-leaning establishment on the other was exposed. Already, anti-communist hard-liners had denounced Reagan for meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and evangelicals had been chafing at his failure to do more to outlaw abortion. In the 1988 presidential race, Hemmer reminds us, the television host Pat Robertson had challenged George H. W. Bush in a campaign that tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with Reagan.

Despite the apparent triumph of capitalism in the Cold War, many conservatives in the 1980s and early 90s were gripped by what Continetti calls a deep-seated pessimism. They had managed to take control of the White House for eight years, yet were unable to shrink the state, had trouble holding Congress, and felt unwelcome in Hollywood and academia. A gloomy, bitter conservatism began to spread, from above and from below. Its rhetoric was tinged with loss and preoccupied with themes of masculinity, race, and immigration, a far cry from Reagans upbeat invocations of freedom and morning in America. The journalist Peter Brimelows 1995 best seller, Alien Nation, for example, opened with the suggestion that the country had been defined by a specific ethnic core that has always been whiteand was now in danger of being replaced.

From the March 2018 issue: Boycott the Republican Party

The transformation on the right was stylistic as well as substantive. Its hard to imagine Reagan leading cheers of Lock her up! or inventing Trump-style nicknames for his enemies. But this jeering patois would have been familiar to followers of Rush Limbaugh, whose nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio program started broadcasting on AM stations in 1988. Limbaugh was a college dropout who had read Pat Buchanans newspaper columns when he was growing up in Missouri and then found his way to radio, getting his break when Morton Downey Jr. was fired for using openly racist language on the air. Limbaugh immediately began to develop his own style, one that anticipated the bullying sarcasm of Twitter: Rather than harangue his audience or engage in high-minded exegeses of Friedrich Hayek or other conservative thinkers, he set out to ridicule the left, as Hemmer puts it. Limbaugh routinely insulted Democratic politiciansTed Kennedy was The Swimmer; Robert Byrd was Sheets (referring to his Ku Klux Klan past)and when critics phoned in to his show, he would cut them off with what he referred to as a caller abortion (a loud vacuum-cleaner noise followed by a scream before the line went dead).

A similar shift took place on Capitol Hill, where a program of tax cuts and deregulation was supplemented by constant hyperbolic invective. Newt Gingrichs crusade to rally congressional Republicans to build their base by explicitly embracing political language that demeaned their political opponents is well known. Even so, the intensity of some of this rhetoricand the ways in which it foreshadowed the style on the right todayremains surprising. Milbank describes the 1990 memo that Gingrichs political-action committee circulated to Republican candidates. Titled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, it instructed them in how to speak like Newt, using words such as sick, corrupt, bizarre, pathetic, destroy, and decay when characterizing Democrats. Gingrich himself deployed this strategy incessantly, describing Democratic politicians as the enemy of normal Americans and calling for a war against the left to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories acquired new salience in the movement, having long proliferated in less public ways on the right. (The John Birch Society, for example, specialized in anti-communist paranoia and continued to attract members well after it was repudiated by William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1960s.) Stoking doubts about whether Vince Foster, who had been deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, had really died by suicide in 1993 proved popular. Helen Chenoweth, the three-term Idaho representative in the 90s, catered to militia supporters and the far right with claims that the United Nations was secretly plotting to institute a one world government, a mission enabled by federal agents in black helicopters flying over Idaho.

Hemmer and Continetti make the case that the Republican establishment still held sway as late as the George W. Bush years. Hemmer calls Bush the last Reaganite, intent on pursuing free-trade agreements and tax cuts, while Continetti describes Bush as adopting a principled freedom agenda in the War on Terror and notes his efforts at immigration reform. Milbank, by contrast, sees the entire Republican establishment lurching to the right over those same Bush years. In his account, gerrymandering, campaign-finance scandals, and the Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida after the 2000 election (in which Republican operatives in suits mobbed the office where a recount was taking place, shouting Stop the count! Stop the fraud!) all anticipate the naked power grabs of the contemporary right. Milbank himself became the target of Karl Roves rage after writing a 2002 article headlined For Bush, Facts Are Malleable, about the administrations efforts to stoke support for the Iraq War; after it appeared, Rove telephoned Milbanks boss and requested that he be removed from the White House beat.

As the authors get closer to the present and to Trump-era chaos, the reading experience becomes disorienting. One source of overwrought, outlandish outrage is rapidly overtaken by the next; any given departure from evidence-based rational assessment is topped by another, as denial of Barack Obamas American citizenship is joined by climate-change denial, COVID denial, and 2020 election denial, while the base declares faith in QAnon and ivermectin. Each dispiriting set of characters gives way to a yet more demoralizing array. Glenn Beck is followed by Tucker Carlson; Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin by Elise Stefanik; the Tea Party by the Oath Keepers. One moment Lou Dobbs is insisting that hes just asking questions about Obamas birth certificate; the next, hes been thrown aside for being insufficiently anti-immigrant. Revolutions devour their own children, goes the truism (credited to a skeptic of the French Revolution)but among conservatives today, the journey from hero to apostate seems to happen at warp speed. So, among almost all the Republicans in the legislative branch, did the journey from momentarily denouncing Trump, on January 6, to swearing fealty once again.

Will the Republican Party continue to move ever further to the right? And if so, what does this portend for American politics? Taking the longest view, Continetti sees the current struggles on the right as the latest manifestation of a 100-year battle between the forces of extremism and those who have sought mainstream acceptance for conservative ideasthe establishment wing to which he has devoted his life. One imagines that he is looking for models when he approvingly refers to Senator Margaret Chase Smiths 1950 castigation of Joseph McCarthy, and her warning that certain elements of the Republican Party had chosen to manipulate their way to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.

But reading these books together does not inspire confidence. For one thing, as Continetti is honest enough to admit, the distinctions between the extremists and the respectable right have never been all that clear-cut. The postwar conservative movement was entwined with opposition to the civil-rights movement from the outset. Such luminaries as Buckley used National Review in its early days to argue against federal troops going to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black schoolchildren; he did so on the grounds not only that the Southern dilemma was a matter for local control but that white people remained the advanced race and thus should be able to discriminate. Given this history, which predates the 1990s by decades, resurrecting an American conservatism free of the taint of racismand deeply committed to democratic political engagementis a formidable challenge.

Nor is it so easy to absolve classical liberalism and Reagans free-market policies of responsibility for our current travails. What you wont find in these accounts, focusing as they do on the ideas and programs of conservatives in positions of power in politics and the media, is much sense of the social history of the United States over the past three decades, as the legacies of the Reagan years became clear. The radical tax cuts, hostility toward labor, and deregulation that marked the 1980s facilitated the rapid deindustrialization of American cities and the rise of finance and services as the motors of economic life in the United States. The unionized jobs that had provided meaningful upward mobility for many in the postwar years all but disappeared.

Reagan promoted these shifts, even if they did not originate with him. And as Clintons presidency went on to demonstrate, the laissez-faire economic agenda of the 1980s and 90s became a largely bipartisan one: It promised a vision of a newly dynamic, globally plugged-in America rescued from boom-and-bust economics by low tax rates and the light hand of regulation. Pursued with a blithe insistence that all would be better in this best of all possible worlds, that agenda helped seed the social chaos and despair that have been such fertile ground for the right.

It has also helped create an economic elite with little connection to the rest of American society. Having benefited from low taxes and tax evasion, this elite has also been well served by the weakening of the public sector and the labor movement, and has every interest in the continued erosion of both. Tracing the history that illuminates Trumps success in commanding popular attention and support is important, even if evidence of a wholesale shift of working-class voters to the Republican Party is far from conclusive. Yet more surprising, in certain ways, is watching those factions of the political and economic elite that have thrown in their lot with Trump and the broader agenda he represents. They have been willing to do more than back candidates who are openly skeptical of democracy, and to continue funding election deniers after promising to cut off support. Abandoning traditional corporate imperatives, especially the desire for stability, some in these circles have relied on the least democratic features of our system (the Supreme Court, the filibuster, the Electoral College) to advance their ends, and made this reactionary politics far more dangerous in so doing.

How best to counter the politics of a Republican Party in thrall to Trump is not obvious. Milbank pleads with the republic to vote (presumably for Democrats), suggesting that the Republican project is an antidemocratic one that speaks for a declining rural white minority and will inevitably be defeated. Continetti rallies conservatives not to flee the scene but to stay and fight for the principles of classical liberalism. Only Hemmer proposes that the Democratic Party might also bear some culpability for the transformation of the partisan landscapewhich implies that an overhaul of moral and political vision is crucial.

One of the challenges of our moment is that so many forces seem poised to drive people out of what remains of public life. At some point, arguing with opponents galvanized by a completely different political calculus becomes enervating. It feels like shadowboxing, at a time when the issues our society confrontsthe pandemic, climate change, the international role of the United States, stark economic inequalityhave never been more pressing. The way forward is daunting because it calls for a new kind of politics that can generate the courage and strength to push back against a politics of fear and demonization. With all due respect to Margaret Chase Smith, the path doesnt lie in trying to reconstruct the old order that helped open the door to our current crisis.

*Lead image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Charles O. Cecil / Alamy; Independent Picture Service / Alamy; Grant Peterson / Fairfax Media / Getty; Everett Collection Historical / Alamy; Mark Reinstein / Corbis / Getty; Catechetical Guild; Wally McNamee / Corbis / Getty; Fotosearch / Getty; Interim Archives / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty; Scott Olson / Getty; Jose More / VWPics / Alamy; Ron Galella / Getty.

This article appears in the October 2022 print edition with the headline The Roots of Republican Extremism.

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The Long Unraveling of the Republican Party - The Atlantic

With the midterm elections less than two months away, Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday said the "stakes could not be higher" as both parties wrestle for control of Congress.

Speaking at the Democratic National Committee's summer meeting in Maryland, Harris echoed President Joe Biden's recent attacks on "MAGA" Republican leaders who he says are a threat to the nation.

"We need to speak truth about that," Harris said. "Today, we all by coming together reaffirm that we refuse to let extremist, so-called leaders dismantle our democracy."

The vice president criticized the fallout from the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as one example of such leaders attempting to "take away freedoms." At least 15 states have ceased nearly abortion services since the court's ruling in late June.

Harris warned Republicans could decide to ban abortion nationwide or go after other rights such as contraception or marriage equality if they become the majority in the House and Senate.

"Without a Democratic majority and conference, who knows what other rights they will come after?" she asked.

She condemned Republicans who say issues like abortion rights should be left up to individual states while also "intentionally make it more difficult for people in those states to vote" and called out three states -- Florida, Texas and Georgia -- for restrictive laws targeting abortion rights and the LGBTQ community.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Sept. 9, 2022.

Adam Davis/POOL/EPA via Shutterstock, FILE

Like Biden, she also framed the midterm elections as a stark choice between the Democrats' agenda and that of some of their Republican colleagues.

"If there was any question about whether there's a difference between the parties, well, over the last 18 months, it has become crystal clear," she said. "There is a big difference. We all know that American families have been struggling but while Republican Party leaders have gone on TV to opine about the situation, Democrats actually did something about it."

The vice president went on to tout administrative accomplishments on COVID-19 relief, infrastructure, gun safety and the announcement of student debt cancelation.

Other parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, including child care and voting rights, have stalled in Congress but Harris said if Democrats can pick up two more seats in the Senate more can be done -- specifically highlighting her role as the Senate's tie-breaking vote.

"In our first year in office, some historians here may know, I actually broke John Adams's record of casting the most tie breaking votes in a single term," she said, before adding: "I cannot wait to cast the deciding vote to break the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights."

Biden has called on the Senate to change the filibuster rules to pass voting reforms and to codify Roe but was met with opposition from Republicans and a few members of the Democratic Party.

Republicans, in their midterm messaging, have criticized the Biden administration over inflation, gas prices and crime.

The GOP has been generally favored to win back control of the House and Senate this cycle but recent legislative and electoral wins are signs Democrats' odds may be improving.

Harris celebrated Democrat Mary Peltola's victory over Republican Sarah Palin in Alaska's special election for the state's vacant U.S. House seat, as well as Kansas voters rejecting an anti-abortion ballot measure.

"We've got momentum on our side," she said.

ABC News' Justin Gomez contributed to this report.

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Harris tells Democrats 'stakes could not be higher' as the midterms near - ABC News

Almost 200 Republicans on the ballot this November do not believe that President Biden legitimately won his office. That claim has been disproven over and over again, and theres no way to change the 2020 election results. So why should we care? Here, senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich explains the profound effect that election deniers in office could have in 2024 and beyond.

Nathaniel Rakich: Almost 200 Republicans who are on the ballot in November 2022 believe that President Bidens win in the 2020 election was illegitimate. But the 2020 election is over, it cant be undone so why is this such a big deal? If a Republican thinks the 2020 election was stolen despite multiple investigations finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud, they might not accept the results of the 2024 election, either. And if theyre elected this November, they will be in a position to influence, and potentially overturn, the next presidential election.

In most states, elections are overseen by an office called the secretary of state. And in at least seven states, the Republican candidate for this office believes the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. That includes swing states like Arizona, Michigan and Nevada that could be key in deciding the next president in the event of a close 2024 election.

These secretary of state candidates have proposed some radical changes to election administration that could severely disrupt future elections. Some of them want to get rid of vote-counting machines and count every vote by hand, which would not only take longer but also be less accurate. Some want to completely purge voter rolls and force everyone to re-register to vote. Thats a clear violation of federal law and would almost certainly get tied up in the courts. Still, though, could you imagine the chaos?

Secretaries of state still need to follow the law, of course, but the law often gives them a lot of discretion over administering elections. For example, they can rewrite voter-registration and absentee-ballot-request forms to make them harder to use. They can often decide whether to provide ballot drop boxes to make it easier for absentee voters to return their ballots. And they may even be able to issue guidance on when to count disputed ballots.

But at least seven election deniers are also running for governor this November, and unlike secretaries of state, governors do have the power to change election laws, either through legislation or executive orders. In Pennsylvania, the governor even has the power to appoint the secretary of state.

In addition, both the secretary of state and the governor could simply refuse to certify the final results of an election they believe was rigged. Its unclear what would happen next, but its possible they could attempt to certify a Republican win regardless of the actual results or they could take advantage of the confusion and work with a Republican-controlled legislature to appoint an alternative slate of Electoral College votes. Either way, it would set off a constitutional crisis.

At that point, the courts would need to step in to ensure that the will of the people is respected. But if the election denier doesnt back down, you could end up with two competing slates of electoral votes for the same state. In that case, it would be up to Congress to decide which votes to accept.

Congresss certification of electoral votes, which happens the Jan. 6 after every presidential election year, is usually just a formality. But in 2021, 147 Republican senators and representatives objected to the Democratic electors in Arizona or Pennsylvania. And in the case of another, more disputed race in the future, this could be the final step in overturning the results of a free and fair election.

Up to this point, election deniers have spread lies and sown mistrust sometimes with deadly consequences. But after 2022, election deniers could also have the power to turn that rhetoric into political action.

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Republican Nominees In 40 States Think The 2020 Election Was Stolen. Heres Why That Matters. - FiveThirtyEight

The Republican push to regulate ballot measures has escalated in recent years as citizen-led initiatives have been used to legalize marijuana, expand Medicaid, create independent redistricting commissions and raise the minimum wage in purple and red states.

This new tool in our box to protect reproductive rights and liberty is going to give our opposition even more incentive to take that away from us and to make it harder to pass ballot measures.

Corrine Rivera Fowler, director of policy and legal advocacy at the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center

But the tactic is under new scrutiny after deep-red Kansas anti-abortion referendum failed by a wide margin, which gave abortion-rights supporters around the country hope that ballot measures can be a viable way to circumvent GOP-controlled legislatures and restore access to the procedure.

Some progressives worry they could lose one of their last remaining tools to defend or advance abortion rights in a post-Roe country.

Red states know that this is the one lever that reproductive rights advocates still have in many of these states where weve lost both chambers of the legislature, weve lost the gubernatorial seats, and we dont have very much hope in the court system, said Kelly Hall, executive director of the advocacy group The Fairness Project. Ballot measures remain the one true muscle that the people still have to flex.

Conservative groups in North Dakota are expected to try again next year to impose a supermajority vote threshold for ballot initiatives after their signature-gathering attempts to put such a measure on the November ballot fell short earlier this summer. Republican lawmakers in South Dakota are also expected to take another swing at making it harder to approve ballot initiatives after voters rejected one 60 percent vote requirement during the states June primary.

In Florida, a state where proposed constitutional amendments already need 60 percent approval to pass, lawmakers recently imposed limits on fundraising for ballot campaigns, though that policy was blocked by a judge this summer. In Nebraska, legislators this year banned signature-gathering near voting drop boxes as part of an omnibus election bill.

Hannah Joerger, left, Amanda Grosserode, center, and Mara Loughman hug after a Value Them Both watch party after a question involving a constitutional amendment removing abortion protections from the Kansas constitution failed, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022, in Overland Park, Kan.|Charlie Riedel/AP Photo

Lawmakers in Missouri, Oklahoma and Utah are also expected to soon renew their push for other restrictions, such as raising the vote or signature threshold, requiring signatures from a certain number of counties in the state, limiting what topics citizen-initiated ballot measures can address, or dictating what font size canvassers need to use.

The Constitution is supposed to be a framework and then you have laws that operate within that framework. But, increasingly, our Constitution is becoming a law book in and of itself, said Missouri state Rep. Bishop Davidson, who supports limits on the ballot measure process.

Davidson added that the threat of a pro-abortion rights ballot measure something activists are discussing after their victory in neighboring Kansas may persuade more of his Republican colleagues to support reforms to the initiative petition process next session.

I would be shocked if there wasnt a petition circulated from the pro-choice side of this debate, he said. I think it is coming. I am concerned.

Proponents argue these changes, which more states are expected to debate when legislatures reconvene in January, are aimed at preventing out-of-state money from pouring into their states and influencing voters to change laws or amend their constitution.

I know that theres a lot of paid petitioners out there. Is it truly the people who are wanting these things, or is it just groups that are paying for these things? said Oklahoma state Rep. Carl Newton, a Republican.

The pattern extends beyond state legislatures into other parts of government.

In Michigan, Republicans on the states Board of Canvassers voted to block the certification of a sweeping abortion-rights ballot initiative that got far more than the required number of valid signatures over claims the text of the proposed constitutional amendment had spacing and formatting errors. The states Supreme Court overrode their decision on Thursday, meaning voters will have a chance in November to decide whether abortion remains legal.

And last year in Mississippi, a conservative-leaning court struck down the states entire ballot initiative process.

This new tool in our box to protect reproductive rights and liberty is going to give our opposition even more incentive to take that away from us and to make it harder to pass ballot measures, said Corrine Rivera Fowler, director of policy and legal advocacy at the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Of the two dozen states that allow citizen-initiated ballot measures, 11 have laws prohibiting most abortions, though some are temporarily blocked in court.

The efforts to stymie ballot initiatives, however, havent been targeted specifically at abortion.

Arkansas legislators, for example, acted after liberal groups turned to voters to raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. But these policies may have their greatest impact on abortion rights as lawmakers across the country consider not only whether and when the procedure should be legal but also what punishments to mete out to physicians and patients.

Arkansas Right to Life hasnt taken a position on the proposed supermajority vote requirement. But the groups executive director, Rose Mimms, told POLITICO its passage would help prevent efforts to amend the states Constitution to codify a right to abortion.

The lawmakers pushing for the higher threshold, she said, are very good pro-life people, so Im thinking they had not only [abortion] but other conservative issues in mind when they wanted to protect our Constitution from being changed so easily by making that supermajority a requirement.

Weve seen it here in Arkansas with marijuana, that once you start amending the Constitution, theres no meaning to it, she added.

Opponents of the 60 percent requirement argue it would make it much more difficult to pass progressive policies, including protections for abortion, in a state where Republicans in the Legislature outnumber Democrats 3 to 1.

This is the only tool we have in a state like Arkansas, said Kymara Seals, policy director for the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, one of the groups campaigning against the amendment. Thats why we must fight to protect our access to the ballot because were not going to get it in the legislature.

Groups that oppose the restrictions also argue that the process is already time-consuming and expensive. In Michigan, for example, tens of thousands of canvassers mostly volunteers with some paid staff worked for months to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures to get the abortion rights amendment on the November ballot and planning for the effort began years earlier.

Both SBA Pro-Life America and Students for Life, two national anti-abortion groups that have spent millions on ballot initiative fights in Kansas and other states, told POLITICO they arent getting involved in debates over the ballot process.

Too many state and national leaders are not responsive to what voters really want, so the rise in ballot initiatives as a trend comes from people taking advantage of the course open to them, said Kristi Hamrick, the spokesperson for Students for Life. I hope this isnt about silencing constituents.

Polls show that Roes demise has helped Democrats close the enthusiasm gap and Democratic candidates have benefited from a surge in donations since POLITICO published the draft Supreme Court opinion in May, but progressive groups fear not enough attention is paid to the ballot initiative process.

We are really raising the alarm bell about whats happening this November, Hall said. Because if they succeed in any of these [states], it will be all the more fuel on the fire to say that they should be proposing these restrictions everywhere else.

The Fairness Project was behind a successful Medicaid expansion ballot measure in Oklahoma in 2020, after which lawmakers introduced several bills to make it harder to pass citizen-led ballot initiatives, including a proposal to raise the threshold for approving constitutional amendments to 55 percent.

The legislation failed this year, but Newton said he plans to bring back his bill in the 2024 legislative session.

Newton added that while hes not specifically concerned about an out-of-state group introducing a pro-abortion rights ballot measure in Oklahoma, there is a possibility because there are some groups [like] Planned Parenthood that would want that to be a reality. So they may pick us out as a target state.

Abortion-rights groups within Oklahoma, meanwhile, are contemplating unwinding the states near total ban by putting the question directly to voters. Thats why protecting ballot access is so crucial, said Laura Bellis, executive director of Take Control Oklahoma, which advocates for reproductive health care access.

We have to protect ballot initiatives in general before we can even think about having one to protect abortion rights, she said.

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Republicans look to restrict ballot measures following a string of progressive wins - POLITICO

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Republicans who dismiss former President Trump as a potential 2024 presidential candidate are "lying" or "idiotic," he told the Washington Examiner.

Driving the news: Cruz is a potential Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race but has held off on making any official announcement. He told the Examiner that he has not made a decision about 2024 because he wants to see what Trump plans to do.

What he said: There are a lot of candidates out there feeling their oats and boasting, Im running no matter what. I dont care what Donald Trump says. Anyone who says that is lying. Thats an idiotic statement for someone to make whos actually thinking about running, Cruz said.

Flashback: Cruz told Fox News at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last month that he will "wait and see" if former President Trump decides to run in the next presidential election.

The big picture: Other notable potential GOP candidates for the 2024 election include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, among others.

Go deeper ... Poll: Most voters don't want Biden or Trump on the 2024 ballot

Half of Republicans wouldn't vote for Trump in primary, poll finds

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Ted Cruz: Republicans are "lying" or "idiotic" if they dismiss Trump for 2024 - Axios