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Report Details a Doubling of GOP-Led Attacks on Democracy in 2025
"While citizens are rightfully focused on the horror unfolding in Washington, extremist politicians are taking advantage of the moment," said the head of the Fairness Project.
Sep 10, 2025
As Missouri House Republicans on Tuesday advanced a congressional map rigged for the GOP and new limits for citizen initiative petitions, an advocacy group that promotes progressive policies via direct democracy revealed that "extremist" legislators across the United States "escalated their efforts to dismantle the ballot measure process in 2025 by 95%."
The Fairness Project has "won 39 ballot measures to raise wages, protect abortion rights, stop predatory payday lenders, expand healthcare access, secure more paid time off, and other life-changing policies for more than 23 million people." The group's new report, Direct Democracy Under Assault, details recent GOP moves to thwart such progress.
"During the 2023 legislative session, 76 bills were introduced that would restrict or undermine the ballot initiative process, which was until then the highest number on record," according to the report. "For further perspective, only 33 ballot measure attack bills were tracked in 2017, and a grand total of 377 bills attacking ballot measure processes were proposed by state legislatures in the 23-year span between 2000 and 2023. To see 148 in a single year, 2025, is an extreme acceleration."
"Lawmakers have not just been toying with the idea of undermining ballot measure processes; they've been passing these attacks into law," the publication emphasizes. "As of June 2025, 51 bills altering the ballot measure process had already passed state houses. For comparison, the annual average of enacted attacks on direct democracy between 2018 and 2023 was 34 enacted bills. Once again, 2025 is a troubling outlier."
"The erosion of our democracy isn't just happening in the Oval Office; it's happening in our home states when politicians attack the ballot measure process."
This year's GOP-led efforts to limit direct democracy at the state level come as Republican US President Donald Trump has returned to power and swiftly engaged in various attacks on democracy, from gutting the federal government—including the voting rights unit at the Department of Justice—to issuing a series of unconstitutional executive orders.
"While citizens are rightfully focused on the horror unfolding in Washington, extremist politicians are taking advantage of the moment and attacking the most powerful tools voters have at their disposal to make their voices heard," said Kelly Hall, the Fairness Project's executive director. "The erosion of our democracy isn't just happening in the Oval Office; it's happening in our home states when politicians attack the ballot measure process and replace the will of the voters with their own political agendas."
State legislators have pursued a range of attacks on the ballot measure process. The report notes that "one common tactic—used in states like Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas—is raising the threshold for passage to a supermajority, making it harder for citizen-led initiatives to succeed."
"Other strategies include increasing signature requirements, imposing strict rules on how and where signatures can be gathered, limiting what issues a ballot measure can address, and imposing high costs on advocates attempting to use their direct democracy rights," the document continues.
Hall stressed that "this isn't reform; it's a calculated effort to strip voters of their constitutional right to shape policy."
While the project tracked bills across 15 states, the report gives special attention to eight "where especially aggressive efforts threaten to significantly erode voters' access to direct democracy." They are Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah.
In Arkansas, for example, during the 2025 legislative session alone, state lawmakers imposed burdensome rules on local initiatives, "criminalized small mistakes," passed restrictions on ballot language, gave the attorney general veto power over petitions, and more. The report says that "taken together, these laws represent a coordinated and deeply undemocratic
effort to strip power from Arkansas voters and insulate elected officials from direct public accountability."
The League of Women Voters of Arkansas is fighting back, and in April filed a federal lawsuit against eight new laws that David Couch, the plaintiffs' lead attorney, said "weaponize bureaucracy to suppress citizen participation and violate the fundamental rights guaranteed by both the Arkansas and US Constitutions."
There's also litigation in Florida and Oklahoma, while in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah, voters will decide next year whether to raise the threshold for future constitutional amendments or citizen-initiated ballot measures from a simple majority to 60%.
"Every voter should be alarmed that politicians are systematically taking away our rights to make change through the ballot," said Hall. "This isn't a time to back down—in fact, these cowardly attacks only underscore the urgent need to defend ballot measures and, by extension, defend our democracy."
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GOP AGs Urge Congress to Crack Down on Shield Laws and Telehealth Abortions
The Republican coalition targeted California and New York, both home to doctors who have been targeted by legal cases for allegedly providing abortion pills to patients in states with strict bans.
Jul 30, 2025
While a recently filed lawsuit in Texas jeopardizes the future of telehealth abortions, some Republican state attorneys general don't want the GOP-controlled Congress to wait for the results of that case, and this week urged leaders on Capitol Hill to consider passing federal legislation that would restrict doctors from shipping pills to patients to end their pregnancies.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority ended nationwide abortion rights with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization three years ago, anti-choice state lawmakers have ramped up efforts to restrict reproductive freedom. At the same time, some Democratic officials have enacted "shield laws" to protect in-state providers and traveling patients.
Led by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, 16 state AGs on Tuesday wrote to top congressional leaders from both parties, calling on them to "assess the constitutional authority it may have to preempt shield laws."
Griffin also sent cease-and-desist letters to two entities shipping abortion medication within the United States and two website companies that provide services to LifeOnEasyPills.org. Reporting on the AG's press conference, South Carolina Daily Gazette noted that "if the entities don't cease advertising abortion pills in Arkansas, Griffin said his office may bring a lawsuit against them for violating the state's deceptive trade practices law."
While Griffin also "said he believes what he is asking lawmakers to do is different from a federal abortion ban that the closely divided Congress has seemed hesitant to tackle," according to the Daily Gazette, advocates for reproductive rights disagreed.
Responding to the letter to Congress on social media, the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All shared a petition opposing a national abortion ban. It says that Republican President Donald Trump "has proven time and time again that he is out of touch with the 8 in 10 Americans who support protecting abortion rights."
"On the campaign trail he spewed whatever lies he could to get him reelected. Now he'll use the Project 2025 playbook to further restrict our right to access abortion, contraception, fertility treatments, and more," the petition warns. "We must stop him."
Yesterday, 16 Republican attorneys general sent a letter to congressional leadership urging them to override state telemedicine abortion shield laws.Sign the petition below to stand up to Republican lawmakers!act.reproductivefreedomforall.org/a/no-nationa...
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— Reproductive Freedom for All (@reproductivefreedomforall.org) July 30, 2025 at 3:48 PM
In addition to Griffin, the Tuesday letter is signed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The GOP coalition targeted two states, arguing that "when New York or California refuses to respect a criminal prosecution or a civil judgment against an individual who is accused of violating the abortion laws of another state, they are refusing to give full faith and credit to that state's judicial proceedings."
Last December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against a provider in New York. He sued Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, co-founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT), for providing two drugs used in medication abortions—mifepristone and misoprostol—to a 20-year-old resident of Collin County.
In February, on the same day that Texas State District Judge Bryan Gantt ordered Carpenter to pay over $100,000 in fines and fees, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sought to extradite the ACT doctor. Her state classifies mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous controlled substances.
While Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the extradition warrant sought by Murrill and the district attorney, New York is one of nearly two dozen states with shield laws for reproductive healthcare, and its Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said that "I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana—not now, not ever."
On Monday, Paxton took legal action against Taylor Brucka, the clerk in Ulster County, New York, for refusing to make Carpenter pay the $100,000 penalty. Bruck told The Guardian that "it's really unprecedented for a clerk to be in this position" and "I'm just proud to live in a state that has something like the shield law here to protect our healthcare providers from out-of-state proceedings like this."
Meanwhile, another case involving a California doctor emerged in Texas earlier this month: A man filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Dr. Rémy Coeytaux for allegedly mailing to Galveston County medication that his girlfriend used to end her pregnancy. His lawyer is Jonathan Mitchell, an "anti-abortion legal terrorist" who previously served as the state's solicitor general and was the chief architect of its law that entices anti-choice vigilantes with $10,000 bounties to enforce a six-week ban.
Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis, recently told Mother Jones that "the whole game for Jonathan Mitchell is to get into federal court... both because he wants to shut down doctors in shield law states, like everyone in the anti-abortion movement, and because he wants a federal court to weigh in on the Comstock Act," a dormant 1873 law that criminalized the shipping of "obscene" materials, including abortifacients.
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Trump Cabinet Members Regurgitate Lies About Work Requirements
"Washington politicians are ignoring clear data and forcing reporting requirements on working Americans as a cynical ploy to kick working people off their healthcare."
May 14, 2025
Top Trump administration officials took to the pages of The New York Times on Wednesday to champion the idea of work requirements as Republican lawmakers attempt to impose such mandates on recipients of Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance—an effort that could result in millions losing benefits.
The new op-ed was authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner.
The Cabinet members endorsed "efforts to require able-bodied adults (defined as adults who have not been certified as physically or mentally unfit to work), with some exceptions, to get jobs" and urged Congress to "enact common-sense reforms into law."
Alarmingly, the Trump administration officials pointed to Clinton-era welfare reform as a model for "successful" policy change. They neglect to mention that extreme poverty more than doubled in the wake of the 1996 overhaul.
"The good news is that history shows us that work requirements work," the officials wrote.
Research and state-level experiments with work requirements belie that claim. Journalist Bryce Covert noted in response to the administration officials' op-ed that "there have been many, many studies on the impacts of work requirements—both in the 90s and today—and the clear consensus is that they deprive people of benefits without increasing employment."
Kennedy's net worth: $15 million. Oz's net worth: $315 million. Telling the poor they have to work harder for food, housing, and healthcare. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...
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— Bryce Covert (@brycecovert.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 8:45 AM
One study of Arkansas' brief implementation of Medicaid work requirements during the first Trump administration found "no evidence that the policy succeeded in its stated goal of promoting work and instead found substantial evidence of harm to healthcare coverage and access."
A recent review of the literature on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) work requirements similarly concluded that "the best evidence shows they do not increase employment."
That didn't stop congressional Republicans from making work requirements a centerpiece of their proposed cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The GOP's proposed work requirements for Medicaid recipients—most of whom already work if they are able to—account for over $300 billion of the bill's projected spending cuts to the program over the next decade.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said Tuesday that the Republican plans for SNAP and Medicaid would put millions of people at risk of losing benefits, in large part due to the administrative red tape that work requirements and reporting mandates inevitably bring.
The group cited research showing that "many people who lose SNAP are working or should have qualified for an exemption, but the bureaucratic red tape made documenting their employment or proving their exemption too difficult."
On Wednesday, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) released a report examining the impacts of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas and Georgia.
"These two case studies are a cautionary tale," the report found. "They show that work reporting requirements are not effective. Instead of getting more people working, they simply kick people off their healthcare, many of whom were already working full-time."
In a statement, Warnock said research "shows that the best way to create jobs and grow the economy is to remove bureaucratic red tape that keeps working people from accessing healthcare."
"Instead, Washington politicians are ignoring clear data and forcing reporting requirements on working Americans as a cynical ploy to kick working people off their healthcare," said Warnock. "All of this so they can fund a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy."
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