Smith predicted to be House speaker, and it matters
OThomas Suddes
hio’s House will elect Gallia County Republican Ryan Smith as its new speaker Tuesday, the House’s senior Republican predicted late Friday.
Rep. Kirk Schuring, a suburban Canton Republican who is acting speaker, said the House will meet at 11 a.m. Tuesday. He said Smith has lassoed the necessary 50 votes to become speaker of the 99-seat House. (Republicans hold 65 seats, Democrats 33, and there’s ex-Speaker Clifford Rosenberger’s vacant GOP seat.)
And Schuring said the House will also vote next week on a long-stalled bipartisan payday-lending reform, House Bill 123, sponsored by Reps. Kyle Koehler, a Springfield Republican, and Mike Ashford, a Toledo Democrat. Koehler and Ashford introduced HB 123 early in 2017, but relentless opposition from Statehouse payday-loan lobbyists had kept the bill bottled up for almost 15 months.
If Smith is elected speaker Tuesday, he would succeed Rosenberger, of Clinton County’s Clarksville. In April, the GOP’s Rosenberger resigned from the House after revealing he’s under federal investigation. One thing said to interest federal sleuths is a junket Rosenberger took to London — the one in England. Among those on the London trip: payday-loan lobbyists.
Smith, of Gallia County’s Bidwell, and ex-Speaker Larry Householder, of Perry County’s Glenford, had already been competing to succeed Rosenberger as speaker for the 2019-20 session.
Schuring declined to predict whether Smith would attract more than 50 votes, and, if yes, how many. Householder, asked to comment on Schuring’s prediction of a Smith victory, said that so far as Householder knows, those caucus members opposed to Smith hadn’t changed their minds.
Tuesday, in a closed-door caucus, House Republicans had failed to decide who should serve out the remaining seven months of Rosenberger’s speakership — Smith, or a lame-duck House Republican who’d be term-limited out of the House in December. Arguably, naming Smith speaker for the remainder of 2018 could give him an edge over Householder when the House picks its 2019-20 speaker on Jan. 7 (assuming Republicans keep their House majority in this November’s election).
Smith’s perceived advantage in landing the speakership now could be offset by a Householder advantage for the 201920 session: Almost every Republican candidate Householder backed for open House seats in May 8’s GOP primary won. And those nominees will likely capture those seats (for 2019-20) on Nov. 6. When GOP newcomers arrive at the Statehouse in January, their first vote will be to elect a speaker for the 2019-20 session. And someone may remind them of a favorite Ronald Reagan maxim: A candidate who wins an election should “dance with the one that brung ya.”
The speakership battle may be insider trivia to many Ohioans but for this: If there’s no House speaker, the House can’t pass any bills. The Ohio House’s rules, and the House’s backup rulebook (composed by Wilmington native Edward W. Hughes, a long-time General Assembly parliamentarian who died in 1938), don’t provide for a stand-in speaker when the job is vacant.
True, the 33 Democrats could provide a Republican House faction with enough votes to make that faction’s candidate speaker, but Democrats instead seem to be lolling in their La-Z-Boys and enjoying the show. Can anyone blame them?
Still, time was, during the Depression of the 1930s, when a cross-party coup helped elect an Ohio House speaker. In 1935, rebel Republicans in a Republican-run Ohio House helped elect a Democratic speaker, J. Freer Bittinger, of Ashland. As a trade-off, House Republicans got to keep some House patronage. Example: The House’s Republican journal clerk in 1935 — a young Columbus resident named James A. Rhodes — kept his House patronage job. Even then, the Great Survivor of Ohio politics knew how yesterday’s foe could become tomorrow’s pal.
As for this era, unless and until the Ohio House elects a new speaker, whether it’s Ryan Smith or a sevenmonth placeholder, the House won’t be able to approve legislation. That’d mean, in effect, that Ohio House members would be getting paid for doing nothing. But in fairness, given the record so far of the General Assembly’s 2017-18 session, what’d be new about that?