Governor buffaloed by GOP Legislature
Statehouse clout in Ohio runs in cycles. Sometimes the General Assembly defers to the governor and sometimes the governor defers to the General Assembly.
For a combination of factors – COVID-19 among the biggest – the General Assembly’s Republican rankand-file, with some success, is buffaloing a fellow Republican, Gov. Mike Dewine.
Constitutionally, Ohio’s governorship is among the nation’s more powerful, but parties and personalities can come into play. During Gov. James A. Rhodes’s second eight years (1975 to 1982), the parties shared control of state government.
But from then into the mid-1990s, Ohio’s Speaker of the House – Scioto County Democrat Vern Riffe – did what he vowed to do when he was sworn in as speaker: Reclaim the clout he said the General Assembly had conceded to the state’s governors.
And did he ever, in large part by mastering his own caucus. Likewise, Republican Speaker Jo Ann Davidson (1995 through 2000), was a partner, not a subordinate, to Republican Govs. George V. Voinovich and Bob Taft.
Then General Assembly term limits – the single best example of Ohio voters self-sabotaging themselves – kicked in fully. And for a time the Legislature conceded more and more power to the governor’s office.
The single best example might have been when Republican Gov. John Kasich (2011 through 2018) – even with five-star GOP conservative William G. Batchelder as House speaker – engineered Medicaid expansion in Ohio courtesy of the Affordable Care Act and Ohio’s ever-pliable Controlling Board.
Kasich did the right thing. But it’s questionable whether even the steel-toed, take-no-prisoners Kasich
could get Medicaid expansion done now, given the mood of today’s General Assembly Republicans.
For that matter, given the General Assembly’s mood, it’s questionable to some extent whether its two leaders, House Speaker Bob Cupp and Senate President Matt Huffman, both Lima Republicans, can steer their caucuses the way Riffe, Davidson – or Republican Senate Presidents of the 1980s and ‘90s, Port Clinton’s Paul Gillmor, Cincinnati’s Stanley Aronoff and Richard Finan – could.
The reason, one shrewd bystander observed, is as much COVID-19 as anything else: The life-saving precautions required or requested of Ohioans – and of Americans generally – are arguably the single biggest governmental intrusions into peoples’ lives since the food rationing of World War II. And intrusion isn’t what Americans want from government (even though anyone carrying a phone is or can be on someone’s radar screen somewhere).
No, Columbus and Washington are supposed to deliver benefits, not burdens, and the people who likely hear all those gripes in person about COVID-19 precautions are Joan and John Legislator when they are back in Tirade Township.
Accordingly, the Legislature has already fettered Dewine’s anti-pandemic powers and is preparing to fetter them further. That is totally understandable if the goal is to shut up hometown loudmouths, but it is inexplicable if the goal is to save Ohioans’ lives. It’s even more baffling if, thanks to Dewine’s management, Ohio’s government overall is in good shape despite the pandemic’s economic disruption.
That public restlessness, which translates into Irritable Blowhard Syndrome, is at the root of other controversies, such as the part race has played and continues to play in American life. Not one person in a thousand knows what Critical Race Theory is – but if no one talks about race, its challenges will disappear, right?
Nope, nor will the pandemic disappear if Dewine stops talking about it. Matter of fact, he is duty-bound to talk about it, to combat it, to protect Ohioans from it. Still, a lot of Ohioans are tired of hearing about it – and a lot of legislators are tired of hearing from those tired Ohioans.
That’s part, but only part, of why the Legislature seems determined to reconfigure the Statehouse troika – executive, judicial, legislative – even though Republicans run the whole stable. Legislative-executive tussles run in cycles and right now the cycle is running against the executive.
But attention spans are as short as fuses at today’s Statehouse. It will be the judicial branch’s turn next – when the state Supreme Court kills the ludicrously pro-republican General Assembly districts that the Gop-run Redistricting Commission just drew.
If you are partial to self-righteous howling, prepare yourself for a Statehouse treat when the justices kick this year’s gerrymander back to its authors.
Thomas Suddes is legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.
tsuddes@gmail.com