Can anyone stop political clowns in Ohio?
Like people trapped in abusive relationships, Ohioans are at the mercy of a bickering, dysfunctional, gerrymandered General Assembly run by Republicans whose antics are enabled in part by Statehouse Democrats’ passivity.
For example, rivalries among and grandstanding by Republicans in the Ohio House and Senate mean that – at this writing – there’s no guarantee presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will appear on Ohio’s November ballot. And – again, at this writing – Statehouse Democrats seem indifferent to what amounts to a down-market coup d’etat, evidently thinking, as did Charles Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, that something will turn up.
True, there was last week’s slap-down of the General Assembly’s repeated violations of the Ohio Constitution’s promise of home rule to cities and villages, dating back to 1912 and a key goal of reformers such as Cleveland’s
Tom L. Johnson and the Rev. Washington Gladden, of the First Congregational Church of Columbus.
A Franklin County Common Pleas judge, Mark Serrott, blocked a law passed by legislators over Republican Gov. Mike Dewine’s veto, Substitute House Bill 513, sponsored by Republican Reps. Jon Cross, of Findlay, and Bill Roemer, of Richfield. The bill, the Legislative Service Commission reported, would have prohibited regulations by cities and villages of tobacco products and alternative nicotine products (i.e., flavored tobacco products).
The now-spiked pre-emption was a bid by General Assembly Republicans, allied with private interests, to force Ohioans to look to the Statehouse – good luck with that – rather than to city and village halls to resolve local problems.
Beginning roughly 20 years ago, the legislature went into high gear handcuffing the rights of municipal voters over local issues, notably in 2004. That’s when that legislative session passed House Bill 278, sponsored by then-rep. Thomas Niehaus, a suburban Cincinnati Republican, later Ohio Senate president
The Niehaus bill denied – and still denies – Ohio’s 900-plus cities and villages any authority over the “permitting, location, and spacing of oil and gas wells.” You don’t fancy a fracking rig in your neighborhood? Don’t bother griping to your mayor; you must complain instead to Columbus, to the state’s oil-and-gas (promoting) bureaucracy. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, in what can only be called a breathtaking risk to Ohio’s parks and preserves, the General Assembly has allowed (and Dewine has implemented) fracking for oil and gas under state parks, something that – to his credit – Republican then-gov. John R. Kasich stymied.
The chronicle of voter misfortune at the Statehouse rolls on and on, in part because publicity, not policy, has priority among legislators, and because of a split among Ohio House Republicans and rivalry between the General Assembly’s two GOP leaders, House Speaker Jason Stephens, of Gallia County’s Kitts Hill, and Senate President Matt Huffman, of Lima. Huffman will be elected to the House in November and wants to grab its gavel from Stephens.
One of the sour fruits of that rivalry: Unwillingness by Huffman’s Senate and Stephens’s House to agree on a bill to make sure Biden will be on Ohio’s November presidential ballot, because of personal rivalry and the
mulish, brainless partisanship of some rank-and-file General Assembly members.
In this era’s General Assembly, special interests and GOP bickering checkmate the public interest practically every time they can. Yes, the HB 6/Firstenergy scandal sent an ex-house speaker (Republican Larry Householder, of Perry County) and former Republican state chair, Matt Borges, of Bexley, to federal prison. The HB 6 affair also likely contributed to the suicides of lobbyist Neil S. Clark and former Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Chair Samuel Randazzo, a Dewine appointee.
But HB 6 still costs Ohioans millions of dollars in extra monthly electricity charges, benefiting AES (Dayton Power and Light), American Electric Power, and Duke Energy, because the legislature won’t fully repeal it. (And HB 6 only became law because nine House Democrats voted for it.)
Bottom line: There’s virtually no chance of curing the General Assembly’s irresponsibility unless Ohioans voters require fairness in how the state’s now-party-rigged legislative districts are drawn. Otherwise, the clowns will keep running the circus – and running Ohio into the ground.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.