Again, the GOP doesn't want democracy and have no use for it unless they win. They just want power/control.

Ohio Republicans Want to Make Ballot Measures Harder to Pass, Because Abortion Is Popular https://jezebel.com/ohio-republicans-ballot-measure-abortion-1849800974
#GOPLongs4Autocracy
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPAgainstDemocracy

"After Americans voted in favor of abortion rights in five state ballot measures during the midterm elections—and in another state earlier this year—activists want to put the issue directly in front of even more voters. Last week, Ohio abortion rights advocates told reporters that their goal is to get a measure on the ballot to amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. (Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a six-week abortion ban in 2019 that took effect after Roe v. Wade fell but is currently blocked by courts.)

Kellie Copeland, the executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio, said that “it’s a when, it’s not an if” her organization pursues such a measure, Ohio Capital Journal reported.

On Thursday, in allegedly unrelated news, Ohio Republicans announced that they want to make it harder to pass ballot initiatives. Currently, ballot measures need 50 percent of the vote to pass, but Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Rep. Brian Stewart want to up that to 60 percent. In a press conference, LaRose said the proposed change would make it harder for “special interest groups” to influence changes to the state constitution.

Stewart said he would work to get the proposal through the legislature by the end of this year. If the proposal is successful, voters would still need to approve the change in May. (Yes, that would be a referendum on referendums.)

The Fairness Project, a group that supports ballot measures to advance economic and social justice, slammed the proposal. “Let’s be clear about what this announcement means: Ohio Republicans are planning a power grab next year in order to diminish voters’ power at the ballot box,” Executive Director Kelly Hall said in a statement. “They know voters don’t agree with them on the issues, so they are changing the rules of the game.”

State Rep. Bride Sweeney (D) said in a statement that voters would reject efforts to raise ballot initiative thresholds. “The people will not vote to silence themselves on issues like workers’ rights, voters’ rights, and abortion rights, Sweeney said. “The reckless arrogance of an unchecked GOP supermajority is on full display. It’s difficult to imagine being so afraid of the popular will when they already have such a rigged monopoly on power.”"

Part 2
Why are these conservatives so attracted to autocracy. Do they crave power so much that democracy threatens them?

The Federalist Society owns the Supreme Court, so why can’t they stop whining? - Vox https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23457938/supreme-court-federalist-society-whine-first-amendment
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLongs4Autocracy

"Young people overwhelmingly reject the Federalist Society’s values
In CNN’s exit polls of the 2022 election, voters with college degrees preferred Democrats over Republicans by 10 points. Voters under age 30 preferred Democrats by nearly 30 points. Admittedly, exit polls are often imperfect measures of public preferences, but various polls have shown that young people strongly favor Democrats since at least 2008. And one other indicator backs up the claim that college-educated young people are especially liberal: On many university campuses, Democrats ran up truly astounding margins in the most recent election.
...
So there is a name for the force that is driving Big Law’s culture to the left — and the name of that force is “capitalism.” Successful employers build workplace cultures that will allow them to hire talented people and retain employees who perform well.

What, exactly, does the Federalist Society plan to do about its cultural grievances?
For all of the society’s fears that they are unwelcome in elite legal institutions, they had few ideas that are likely to quell these fears. Sometimes they were quite open about this fact. At the end of his presentation about large law firms, for example, Clement conceded that “I think the problem is pretty glaring,” but “the solutions are much harder to find.”

He’s certainly not wrong about that. What, exactly, would a policy solution to the supposed problem that Clement identifies look like? Should lawyers at large firms be forced to represent clients they find abhorrent, and to make arguments that they believe would deeply harm their country? Should state bar regulators impose quotas on these firms, and mandate that a certain percentage of their partners must have voted for Donald Trump? These are the kinds of solutions that, even if they survived scrutiny under the First Amendment, could only spark even deeper resentment against conservatives.

Similarly, what, exactly, should be done to change law schools? Should professors who teach from a left-leaning perspective be sanctioned or stripped of tenure? Or perhaps, fresh off the Supreme Court’s likely decision ending race-conscious affirmative action programs in university admissions, the Court could then mandate that law schools admit a critical mass of Republicans?
...
That said, there are definitely some figures within the Federalist Society who favor draconian measures to try to shift culture. At last year’s Federalist Society conference, speakers proposed an array of far-right solutions to what they described as the problem of “wokeness” in society — ranging from repealing the ban on discrimination on the basis of “race, sex, religion, and national origin,” to enacting laws requiring social media companies to publish speech they deem offensive, to a vague-but-ominous proposal to “wield in state legislative chambers some degree of power to punish our enemies within the confines of the rule of law.”

Meanwhile, a few of the Federalist Society’s most powerful supporters openly embrace the kind of censorship and intimidation of liberal voices that our First Amendment forbids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a frequent speaker at the society’s events, recently signed legislation imposing a speech code on public university professors. As a federal judge described the law in a decision striking it down, it “bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints” on various subjects relating to race, gender, and nationality.

Similarly, two of the Federalist Society’s justices, Thomas and Gorsuch, have called for the Court to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), a fundament of American press freedom, and arguably the single most important First Amendment decision in the Court’s history.
...
So the Federalist Society’s most powerful figures have some tools which they could use to force liberal institutions to show more outward respect to conservative ideas. It is certainly possible for an authoritarian government to twist culture into the conservative movement’s preferred shape, and Thomas and Gorsuch have laid out the first step toward doing so: strip the media of its First Amendment protections. After that, maybe they could do the same to law schools and law firms as well.

But if the Federalist Society embraces some of these more aggressive policies, its members should not be surprised that the rest of the legal profession might resent them for it. Nor should they be surprised that so many lawyers, law professors, and law students resent them for what they have already done to American law."

Why are these conservatives so attracted to autocracy. Do they crave power so much that democracy threatens them?

The Federalist Society owns the Supreme Court, so why can’t they stop whining? - Vox https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23457938/supreme-court-federalist-society-whine-first-amendment
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPLongs4Autocracy

"William Pryor is chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. For nearly two decades, he’s ruled on which death row inmates will live and which will die in the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. He’s overruled Cabinet secretaries and reshaped how entire states conduct their elections.

He’s also a very bad standup comedian.

On Thursday, Pryor gave the opening speech at the annual conference of the most powerful legal organization in the United States. But the bulk of the judge’s remarks to the Federalist Society was a Bill O’Reilly-style barrage of insult comedy, largely directed at left-leaning journalists who cover the federal judiciary. Sample joke: “No less an authority than [Slate’s Supreme Court reporter] Mark Joseph Stern — and really, is there less an authority?”

It’s hard to imagine an event that better symbolizes the mix of power and pathos that underlies the Federalist Society than Pryor’s foray into insult comedy. Here is this eminence of the legal profession — a lifetime appointee speaking to an organization whose members dominate the federal judiciary, and especially the nation’s highest Court. And yet he can’t help but obsess over a handful of powerless scribes who write disparagingly about his friends in the society.

Ideas that begin with the Federalist Society frequently become Supreme Court opinions in just a few years. In the past, the society’s annual gathering has foreshadowed the destruction of US gun laws; the strangulation of the federal administrative state; and, in one of its increasingly rare high-profile failures, the attempted death of Obamacare. The five most conservative Supreme Court justices, four of whom attended the society’s annual black-tie dinner this year, are all enthusiastic supporters of the Federalist Society. I try to attend the Federalist Society’s conference every year, largely so that I’ll know what Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch will say in their future judicial opinions.
...
The first conference was largely a retrospective, looking back upon the impressive array of victories the conservative legal movement chalked up in the Supreme Court’s last term. Panels celebrated the death of Roe v. Wade and the gaping hole the Federalist Society’s justices tore into the wall separating church and state. The first day of the conference included three different panels touting the so-called “major questions doctrine,” a judicially created doctrine that gives the Court and its current Republican-appointed majority a virtually limitless veto power over federal regulations that they do not like.
...
The second conference-within-a-conference emphasized the conservative legal movement’s cultural grievances. All four of the conference’s “showcase” panels — large sessions that were scheduled alongside no other events so that everyone could attend them — were a part of this. These four showcase panels emphasized complaints that Federalist Society conservatives often feel out of place at law schools, at large law firms, inside bar associations, and in the legal profession more broadly.
...
There is also a very real tension between these two conferences, though the Federalist Society itself does not seem aware of it. If members of the Federalist Society feel isolated in their jobs or at their schools, they should consider that the policy victories their organization touted in its first conference drive many lawyers and law students to resent Federalist Society colleagues who celebrate those victories.

It is asking a lot, for example, for members of the society to expect to be welcomed with enthusiasm by their women colleagues — after the society’s justices just seized control of those women’s uteruses.

The Federalist Society craves acceptance from elite institutions
The Federalist Society knows how to hold a grudge.
...
Bork was, indeed, one of the conservative legal movement’s greatest intellects. He was one of the most significant — quite possibly the most significant — antitrust scholars in American history. The conservative legal movement sent America its best mind, and the Senate took one look at his conservatism and said “no thanks.”

The fact that the Federalist Society still seethes over this lost political fight, more than three decades later, is a microcosm for the need for respect and acceptance from elite institutions that animates so much of the society’s rhetoric."