Can Dewine enact a mask mandate?
Between political opponents and media analysts, the confusion is thick over just what power Gov. Mike Dewine has to issue a health order requiring Ohioans to wear masks due to the persistent COVID-19 pandemic.
Bottom line: Ohio law gives him the authority to issue a mask order via the state health department, which can “make special or standing orders or rules for preventing the spread of contagious or infectious diseases.” But the legislature gave itself the power earlier this year to immediately halt such an order through a concurrent resolution and prohibit him from re-enacting a similar one for 60 days.
The confusion seems to center on whether there’s a 30-day waiting period built into the process. The answer is “no” for such health orders. The legislature can end a state of emergency 30 days after one is declared by the governor, but that action has no direct relation to health orders.
The Dewine administration notes that school districts attended by about 60% of Ohio students have voluntarily enacted mask mandates, up from 35% at the start of September.
Failed deal 15 years ago might have headed off current redistricting fight
Last week’s column item on how Ohio Democrats turned down a proposal to revamp the legislative redistricting process more than a decade ago prompted a follow-up conversation with Lt. Gov. Jon Husted in which he revealed a tidbit of information he’d never made public before.
The upshot: A deal 15 years ago might have averted Ohio’s current political fight over House and Senate district maps that Democrats ardently contend violate voter-approved initiatives enshrined in the state constitution, says the Republican, who became speaker of the House in 2005.
“I truly believe if the vote had gone differently on that day, Ohio politics would have been different now,” he said. “You certainly wouldn’t have had districts with veto-proof majorities. A lot of things that became law that wouldn’t have.”
“That day” was May 25, 2006, a pivotal date in the Ohio General Assembly.
What happened was well chronicled at the time by the late Dispatch reporter Jim Siegel and others. Husted, who along with most other establishment Republicans had successfully campaigned against a Reform Ohio Now ballot measure in November 2005 that would have revamped the redistricting process, pledged to produce an improved version.
But support from House Democrats, who already had introduced their own redistricting plan in March 2005, was needed to get the 60 votes necessary to put the measure on the November 2006 ballot.
What hasn’t been generally known until now: Husted, already suspecting that not enough Democrats would back his plan for purely political reasons, hatched a plot with his House GOP leaders to expose them.
“Going in, I decided that I was going to call everyone’s bluff,” he said. “I had an epiphany that morning that I had a way to show that if they weren’t gonna vote for my resolution, I had a way to prove that it was all political.
“So I met that morning with my leadership team. I told them I had a plan and they just had to trust me, that, if I gave him the signal ... I needed them to change their vote for me from yes to no.
“And then I went before the entire Republican caucus and told them I had a plan. And they just need to trust me and I couldn’t tell them what I want, because if you tell somebody something on cap square then everybody knows.”
Things played out as Husted anticipated. Republicans voted for the Husted plan, Democrats voted against it – leaving the measure a few votes shy of the 60 necessary.
But one of the privileges of being speaker at the time was that you could see the outcome of the vote at the rostrum before it was announced. Once he saw the results, he gave the pre-arranged signal to his team: pointing at them and nodding.
Suddenly, several Republicans announced they were changing their votes on the measure from yes to no. Husted declared the defeat of the GOP measure. But the Republican vote-switchers quickly moved to reconsider the resolution, a move allowed by parliamentary procedure since they were now on the winning side of the vote.
Then they implemented step two of Husted’s plan: Substituting the entire 2005 Democratic plan for the failed GOP one and calling for a vote. Flustered Democrats, realizing they had been outmaneuvered, futilely moved to adjourn. The Democratic sponsor suddenly maintained that his measure had many shortcomings and “hasn’t had any public input,” Siegel reported.
Eventually, the entire Democratic caucus voted against the very plan they all had endorsed. They were betting that in the midst of Coingate and a GOP “culture of corruption” that they would prevail in the 2006 statewide elections, which proved accurate.
However, they badly miscalculated their ability to hold onto those seats in 2010, handing control of the redistricting process to Republicans the following year through 2020.
Husted said, “Ultimately, Ohio became a much more Republican-leaning state during that 10 years. Who knows if they had decided something different that day what we might have had.”
He’s not just blowing smoke. Catherine Turcer, now executive director of Common Cause-ohio, recalls the 2006 vote well.
“I simply couldn’t believe that the Democrats voted against a bill that many of them co-sponsored,” she said.
“In 2006, Ohio House Democrats had the opportunity to rise to the challenge of creating a new system for redistricting. However, even the whiff of a possibility of a change in political fortunes meant that these Democratic legislators voted against their own proposal.
“We don’t know this legislation would have made it through the Ohio Senate, but we are living with the consequences.”
Husted was satisfied that he had ferreted out “one of the great demonstrations of hypocrisy of all time” in Ohio politics, but lamented that reform didn’t occur then. Having more competitive seats brings “a different culture for governing,” one that requires reaching out to the other side.
Perhaps even a culture that would not have given one party so much power it could dictate when a governor of the same party could issue public health orders. drowland@dispatch.com @darreldrowland