Yost’s action came the same day the high court declined to stay a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, which sided with the measure’s backers that their First Amendment rights to free speech had likely been violated.
With Ohio’s nearly century-old ballot initiative process at risk of being permanently declared unconstitutional, Yost moved immediately to dismiss the appeal he had filed in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Yost had repeatedly rejected proposed summary language for the measure as not being a fair and accurate representation of what the measure would do.
Unless I read it wrong, Ohioans are planning to propose a state constitution amendment to end police qualified immunity. This rolling says, yeah you can do that. It still needs to get on the ballot and be voted on before anything changes.
Who is on the side of ending qualified immunity: pretty much anyone who isn’t a cop or authoritarian. QI is basically legal armor for cops to do anything they want as long as it can be read as (waves hands) “following protocol”.
As much as the votes on reproductive rights and cannabis gave me hope, the legislature’s responses on both left me cold, as some of these scumbags are not above ignoring the will of the electorate, and with the way the winds are blowing now, I’d not put it past them to move forward now to do just that.
I think there’s potential of the issue passing—as with the aforementioned reproductive rights and cannabis measures—but I fully expect a ballot issue on abolishing QI to meet a whole bunch of rigging and disenfranchisement fuckery, plus I fear that people may be intimidated or otherwise discouraged from voting altogether.