Let more light in to disinfect Ohio legislating
Most people have heard the old saw that legislating is like making sausage – even though it can result in something marvelous, the process can be distasteful. But what if the sausage makes everyone sick? If no one saw the sausage being made, how do customers know who didn’t wash theirs hands and who added the moldy cuts and which sausage chefs absolutely should be fired?
Thanks to a 20-year-old outrage by the General Assembly, Ohioans find themselves choking on a lot of mystery meat.
In 1999, lawmakers exempted documents of the Legislative Service Commission – the bipartisan body that researches and drafts the bills legislators want to turn into law – from Ohio’s open-records law. That meant Ohioans no longer could find out for themselves that a bill carried and supposedly crafted with care by Lawmaker X actually was written in its entirety by lobbyists – special interests like, say, the National Rifle Association or Planned Parenthood. You know, the folks whose campaign contributions help keep politicians in office.
A bit less than two years later, legislators sealed off the light completely, with a law blocking access to LSC documents even by courts or investigators.
The potential for legislative poisoning was obvious from the start.
House Bill 6, the now-infamous 2019 measure that authorized a $1.3 billion bailout of two nuclear power plants courtesy of Ohio electricity ratepayers, is the rankest bit of legislative butchery in recent memory.
We know this because an informant went to law enforcement authorities and an ongoing investigation by the FBI has laid out a convincing case that the bill was bought and paid for with $60 million from the benefiting company, in a fund alleged to be illegally controlled by former House Speaker Larry Householder, R-glenford.
A number of the bill’s advocates owed their House seats in large part to campaign contributions from Firstenergy Corp., parent company of the entity that owned the power plants.
Firstenergy’s overwhelming monetary influence was always suspected, but might have been provable sooner if the Ohio General Assembly hadn’t acted nearly two decades ago to hide the sausagemaking from view.
More important, if everyone could see what goes into every batch of sausage, Ohioans probably would have sent a lot of other rotten bills straight down the garbage disposal.
With the HB 6 debacle fresh in everyone’s minds, Dispatch Public Affairs Editor Darrel Rowland asked lawmakers who were up for election this year what they thought about keeping LSC documents secret. Happily, most say all correspondence should be public, at least as soon as a bill is introduced.
One bureaucrat disagreed, emailing Rowland that voters should judge bills by their content and not by the reputation of the lobby group that proposes or writes them.
That would be fine, if every voter were a policy professional, well versed in scanning pages of legalese for the important stuff. Most voters are not, and their level of savvy is no match for the obfuscation and spin a skilled lobbying group can give a pending bill.
But knowing that, say, a fossil-fuels lobbyist wrote that bill with the green-sounding title would be an excellent tip-off that the bill needs a closer look. Not to mention what it reveals about the sponsoring lawmaker’s political alliances.
If the General Assembly wants to rehabilitate its reputation, it should repeal HB 6 – and then let the light back into the sausage kitchen.