Today’s state GOP leaders out of step with voters on reproductive rights
As the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the Texas abortion law this week, Nevadans may have been tempted to think that women in our state are shielded from the type of extreme restrictions imposed by Texas’ legislation.
After all, a 1990 ballot referendum locked abortion protections into state law barring another vote of the people, and polls show that the vast majority of Nevadans support reproductive rights.
But the reproductive rights of Nevada women are not impervious to the Republican Party’s nationwide attack on abortion, which is something to consider when assessing candidates for next year’s elections.
This concern particularly applies to the candidate who could lead the top of the ticket for the Republican Party: Adam Laxalt.
For Laxalt, who is seeking pro-choice Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s seat in the U.S. Senate, abortion has been a central issue throughout his political career. As attorney general from 2014 to 2018, Laxalt signed the state on to several legal efforts by other states to restrict the right to decide and eliminate women’s access to safe procedures. As a failed gubernatorial candidate in 2018, he pledged to “look into” initiating another ballot question aimed at overturning the 1990 referendum that codified abortion protections in Nevada.
Laxalt is out of step with Nevadans, who have shown time and again that we believe the state should not control women’s bodies. That includes the election of pro-choice lawmakers in recent years who strengthened protections, including a 2019 update of state laws to remove outdated criminal penalties for women seeking abortions.
A recent poll of 770 Nevadans — 30% Republican, 34% independents and 35% Democrats — showed that 69% overall leaned pro-choice. Even a majority of the GOP respondents expressed support for abortion rights.
Laxalt appears to know that his extremist stance on the issue could alienate voters in a general-election matchup against Cortez Masto, because he’s tip-toed around the subject thus far in his campaign. While
he’s publicly called himself a pro-life candidate, he said during his campaign kickoff announcement that he wouldn’t comment on Texas’ new abortion law, and he has ducked questions on the subject from media organizations.
But Laxalt has given no indication he would back off of his attack on women’s rights.
Despite Nevada’s current status on the issue, this is a deep concern. Reproductive freedoms are vulnerable here and across the nation.
Should Laxalt win and the Republicans regain control of the U.S. Senate, they would block nominees to the Supreme Court and lower courts who would protect abortion rights. Meanwhile, if the Supreme Court overrules 50 years of precedent to overturn Roe v. Wade, then a Republican Senate majority led by Mitch Mcconnell could easily pass federal legislation curbing abortion.
The best way to keep safeguards in place is to elect leaders who represent Nevada’s
values on reproductive rights. Laxalt does not.
It wasn’t that long ago when Nevada had a Republican Party leader, then-gov. Brian Sandoval, who was in line with the state’s pro-choice views. Now the party is headed by the likes of Laxalt and former Sen. Dean Heller, who’s running for governor and apparently making abortion a key point of his campaign. Heller has said he likes Texas’ law and would work to impose the restrictions on women’s rights, even though he most certainly knows that making substantive changes would require a new ballot referendum that Nevadans would be unlikely to pass given our views on the issue. In other words Heller, with his anti-abortion rhetoric, is merely pandering to GOP extremists.
But with the likes of him and Laxalt poised to possibly become the GOP’S standard-bearer in 2022, the Republicans have come a long way on the issue since Sandoval left office in 2018. Unfortunately, they’ve gone in the wrong direction.