Lasting damage
Columnist Ted Decker offers his take on Larry Householder’s actions,
Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder seethed with lawabidin’ bluster during an interview last month with the Ohio Christian Alliance.
If the city of Columbus did not have the stomach to punish the vandals who had defiled the Statehouse during recent protests, he said, perhaps the Statehouse grounds should secede from the city and seek justice another way.
“It’s just horrific what’s going on in Downtown Columbus,” he preached. He likened the vandals to petulant children given free passes to misbehave by spineless adults.
“If I just let them do whatever they wanted to do, it would get worse and worse and worse.”
Did it ever.
Fourteen years after leaving the House speaker’s office under the cloud of an ethics investigation that closed without charges, the rural Perry County legislator returned to the Statehouse in January 2017 with an eye on his old job.
If the FBI has things right — and the widespread mention of wiretaps in an 82-page indictment suggests they have done their homework — the speaker had his eye on much more this second time around.
Charges unveiled against Householder on Tuesday are stunning, detailing a criminal conspiracy almost too big to be believed. He and four others are charged in a $60 million racketeering conspiracy that the FBI says hinged on “Team Householder” ramming the state’s $1 billion nuclear plant bailout down Ohioans’ throats.
Householder has long been known as a force of nature. Fred Strahorn, the former House minority leader who advised against Householder as speaker in 2018, acknowledged Householder’s relentlessness back then.
The conspiracy was carried out on so grand a scale that, in walking the media through the charges, U.S. Attorney Dave Devillers at times seemed on the verge of laughing at the sheer audacity and corruption of it all. The indictment charges that more than $400,000 went to stuff Householder’s bulging pockets, but one co-conspirator was caught saying that their source of money was “unlimited.”
“That guy stays up at night thinking of ways to beat you,” Strahorn said at the time.
Beat. Cheat. Same thing.
The conspiracy was carried out on so grand a scale that, in walking the media through the charges, U.S. Attorney Dave Devillers at times seemed on the verge of laughing at the sheer audacity and corruption of it all. The indictment charges that more than $400,000 went to stuff Householder’s bulging pockets, but one co-conspirator was caught saying that their source of money was “unlimited.”
It is hard not to laugh at such vulgarity, especially knowing that Householder pretended a few short weeks ago that a few bricks and cans of spray paint were a dire threat to the future of Ohio.
“This is purely just an attack on our government and our way of life and the things we believe in,” he said in the Ohio Christian Alliance interview, while miraculously not being struck by lightning.
And so Householder promised that the Statehouse vandals would be brought to justice, even if that meant leaving the city of Columbus and become its own city-state to do so.
“We owe that to the people of this state, and I won’t rest until we make certain that the people of Ohio are taken care of,” he said.
Federal investigators say they are still deep in their accounting of what Householder owes to the people of this state. But if he defiled the Statehouse in the manner now alleged, that defilement has a permanence that spray paint and broken glass do not touch.
Damage on this scale cannot be repaired.