How Ohio Republicans ignore voters – and the governor – in power grab to pass laws
In June, 2022, Nick Zingarelli and his family packed their bags and left St Louis.
His daughter had shared with them she was transgender just two years earlier, and Missouri lawmakers were in the midst of passing a raft of antitrans bills, including a ban on genderaffirming care for minors.
They moved to Cincinnati, where the family had lived years before, viewing it as a possible refuge from the legislative attacks. Zingarelli thought Ohio would be “a more moderate place, a more rational and logical place”, with the centrist-leaning Republican governor, Mike DeWine, at the helm. “It seemed like at least leadership was willing to be the rational adults in the room,” he said.
He was half right. DeWine, who had himself in January created some restrictions on trans healthcare in the state, vetoed a bill from Ohio Republicans to ban gender-affirming care for minors last December, saying that many parents of trans kids had told him “their child would be dead today if they had not received the treatment they received from an Ohio children’s hospital”. But it didn’t matter. Using their supermajorities in the state legislature, Republicans voted to override DeWine’s veto last week and banned trans youth from accessing potentially life-saving treatments like hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers.
Their brazen move illustrates just how secure Republicans are in their control of Ohio’s legislature. Democrats and Republicans alike have used gerrymandering to win legislative majorities, but the GOP has perfected the art, pouring money into state redistricting battles across the country in an explicit strategy to remake statehouses to their advantage.
GOP lawmakers can ignore the governor because their severely gerrymandered maps gave them enough seats in the legislature to disregard his objections. With so many safe districts, Republicans “only have to court the support of their party”, said Maria Bruno, the policy director of LGBTQ + rights organization Equality Ohio. “They are prioritizing their legislation not based on their voters or constituents, but on their party’s goals.”
The same day legislators overturned DeWine’s veto on banning gender-affirming healthcare for minors, they also voted to override his veto of a bill that allowed cities to regulate the sale of flavored cigarettes. And they’re already gearing up for more clashes with the governor.
“If we pass legislation in this chamber with the requisite amount of support to have a supermajority, we should always be very mindful, and we should always look at – zealously – our ability to override a veto,” Rob McColley, a rising Republican star in the state legislature, said last week.
Their aggressive posture sets the legislature up for another possible fight with the governor – over a push by Republican lawmakers to eliminate the state’s income tax. DeWine has expressed doubts about the legislation, but has not indicated he would veto it.
It’s also notable who’s driving policy within the statehouse. Republicans shoved DeWine to the side on the trans healthcare ban to pass a bill sponsored by state representative Gary Click, a Baptist pastor who has defended conversion therapy and openly espoused homophobic and transphobic claims, including declaring that Satan makes people trans.
But this kind of gerrymandered dominance wasn’t supposed to be allowed any more in Ohio.
In 2015, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment to limit partisan gerrymandering. Voting rights advocates and elections experts celebrated the measure’s passage as a major win.
But the state’s new redistricting commission still had a GOP majority, and as they drew legislative and congressional maps in 2021, they refused to abide by the constitutional amendment’s guidelines. The state supreme court ruled their maps unconstitutional five different times. But the commission refused to comply, repeatedly submitting to the court maps with minimal changes until the one Republican justice who opposed the gerrymandered maps retired from the court at the end of 2022. The commission made some changes to the maps in 2023 that softened, but did not eliminate, the Republican advantage.
Crafting maps with a partisan advantage is only one of the ways Ohio Republicans have used the electoral process to cement their power in the state. The GOP-controlled state legislature enacted in January 2023 one of the strictest voter identification laws in the country – which voting rights groups have decried as disproportionately affecting poor and disabled voters. They have enacted voter purges, including one in 2019 that mistakenly removed about 40,000 eligible voters from the rolls.
Last year, they tried and failed to make it harder for voters to amend the constitution through a direct vote – attempting to raise the threshold for ballot measures from a simple majority to more than 60%, in an explicit bid to block an abortion rights amendment that voters passed overwhelmingly in November.
Now, Ohio voters are trying again to create a fair redistricting process through a ballot initiative that would create an independent redistricting commission rather than one led by politicians. The coalition has until July to collect more than 400,000 signatures for the question to appear on the November ballot. According to Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause Ohio, which is part of the Citizens Not Politicians coalition, the group has trained about 2,000 volunteers to collect petition signatures.
“It’s clear there’s this disconnect between what it is that ordinary Ohioans want, and what it is that the state legislature chooses to do,” said Turcer. “There is real interest in ensuring that we have accountable government.”
If voters choose to adopt the amendment in the Ohio constitution, an independent commission will draw the state’s electoral maps, with a panel of judges determining members’ eligibility to join the commission. Guardrails will be in place to prevent politicians and lobbyists from sitting on the board, narrowing the possibility of partisan influence on the map-drawing process.
But unless and until those become law, Republican legislators can do just about anything they want.
Zingarelli testified in front of lawmakers during numerous hearings at the Ohio state capitol to try to defend his daughter’s right to access healthcare. He thought his pleas could get through to them. But his faith in the process has been shattered by the gerrymandered supermajority’s veto override.
“My big message has been, up until now, that you need to reach out to your legislators, and you need to let them know how you really feel, with the hope being that they would actually do their job and represent the will of their constituents,” said Zingarelli. “But it’s clear that that’s not something that is on their agenda.”