Resolutions the Ohio General Assembly could love
Making New Year’s resolutions dates back maybe 4,000 years, to ancient Babylon, the British magazine The Economist reported. To put 4,000 years in perspective, that’s seems about how long ago the Ohio General Assembly has been talking about reforming school funding.
Surveys show Americans more often break than keep New Year’s resolutions.
That resembles the way candidates make promises they break once elected.
Still, given the antics demonstrated daily at Ohio’s statehouse, perhaps the men and women who rule our state as General Assembly members will resolve to change the way they do, or, more accurately, don’t do, the people’s business.
Some resolutions: Reform school funding. The Bible tells us the entire world and everything in it was created in a week. The General Assembly has had 24 years to fix public school funding. It hasn’t.
Stop kowtowing to public utilities, especially the four electric companies (AEP, DP&L, Duke, FirstEnergy) that reach into the checkbooks and wallets of most Ohioans. The one upside of the House Bill 6 scandal (which led to the federal indictment of former House Speaker Larry Householder and others) is to show how the state government is more the servant than the master of private monopolies. (Keep in mind: Householder is considered innocent unless proven guilty.)
This (to borrow a phrase) would be the triumph of hope over experience: Stop playing pat-acake with handgun manufacturers and peddlers – or subject yourself to the same dangers you make all other Ohioans face: Allow concealed-carry inside the Statehouse.
So: General Assembly Republicans don’t like how Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is using Ohio’s statewide public health laws to fight the COVID19 pandemic. In fairness, Ohio’s public health laws are 101 years old, passed in 1919 after the Spanish flu pandemic.
If legislators want those 1919 laws changed, they should heave themselves out of their hammocks, stop yammering, and get on with it.
Speaking of which: Ohio has 113 local public health districts, the Ohio’s Department of Health reports. In a state with 88 counties, that’s bureaucratic excess. (So are 600-plus school boards, but, hey, some things in Ohio are sacred.) If the General Assembly really does want to reform public health laws, rather than just take shots at Mike DeWine, consolidating public health districts is a place to start.
OK, agreed, this likely won’t happen, but still: Ask Ohioans to repeal General Assembly term-limits.
Term-limits are forcing the departure from the Statehouse of, among others, such gifted legislators as Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Kettering Republican, and Rep. John Patterson, a Jefferson Democrat – both knowledgeable and constructive supporters of K-12 education.
Losing quality legislators because of mindless term-limits is the last thing that Ohio needs.
In leading a Statehouse party caucus, there’s a middle ground, between doing as 20-year Democratic Speaker Vern Riffe did (his way or the highway) or letting the loudest mouths set the agenda.
When the House removed Householder as speaker after his indictment, the House’s GOP caucus picked Lima Republican Robert Cupp to be the House’s new speaker.
Cupp, a former Supreme Court justice, Court of Appeals judge, state senator and Allen County commissioner, is widely respected. Still, perhaps in reaction to Householder’s Git-R-Done style (more like Riffe’s than not), some members of Cupp’s GOP caucus seem to think the crew, not the captain, should steer the ship.
Yet if the ship sinks, who’ll get blamed?
Cupp’s 2021 resolution shouldbetorememberthese words fromAlice inWonderland: “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”