In what were the final few days of legislating before a long, slow summer off, the Ohio General Assembly was in a frenzy last week, passing measures, big and small, that should have been resolved long ago.
Still, as a pure study of human nature, there’s nothing like watching the legislature try to squeeze what should have been six months of lawmaking into a frantic late-June marathon. People have sometimes likened the “process” to sausage-making. That’s grossly unfair to sausage-makers, whose products, unlike the legislature’s, must at least pass inspection.
As others have eloquently reported, perhaps no General Assembly in decades has been less productive than the one now in session. Part of that is structural. Although the House is composed of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats, Democrats have clout out of proportion to their numbers.
Reason: A split among the 67 Republicans between intra-GOP-caucus foes and allies of Republican Speaker Jason Stephens, of Lawrence County’s Kitts Hill, who won the House’s gavel with the help of House Democrats’ votes. And to keep the gavel, and avoid riling his de facto Democratic allies, Stephens, it appears, has reined in House Republicans’ extreme-right faction, a noisy group unenthused about much of anything except the past.
Meanwhile, the Senate, led by President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, has tended to be more conservative. In the Senate, anyway, what Matt Huffman wants, Matt Huffman often seems to get, a fact not lost on the Statehouse’s lobbies, always pushing for legislation to advance private interests, and who prefer results to promises when it comes to sweetheart legislation.
That’s so in a state whose per-capita personal income last matched the nation’s in 1969 and, as noted here before, has been declining ever since. Voters get distracted from that fact by the General Assembly’s practice of pitting Ohioans against once another – on such topics as abortion and (see below) sexual and gender identity.
And now Senate President Huffman, who’s being term-limited out of the Senate, will be returning to the House in January, vying to wrest its speakership from fellow Republican Stephens. And anti-Stephens House Republicans have gained control of the House GOP caucus’s campaign fund, what there is of it, in a legal fight the House’s anti-Stephens faction won, and which he lost.
If you’re Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, with 30 months left in your governorship, you can expect to be navigating in at best choppy waters in the state Senate and Ohio’s House in 2025 and 2026, no matter how the Huffman-Stephens contest turns out. At the same time, intra-party clawing and knifing over the 2026 statewide Ohio tickets of both the Republican and Democratic parties will distract Statehouse attention from issues that continue to demand attention – school funding, property taxes and utility rates, gerrymandering of General Assembly districts – to sensation-of-the-day “issues.”
Of course, some legislators couldn’t leave Columbus without taking a swipe at transgender Ohioans. The House amended an unrelated Senate bill so it now would forbid public schools and state colleges to provide nongendered or all-gender restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms or shower rooms. (To become law, the amended bill would require Senate approval later this year.) The only House Republicans present who voted against the anti-transgender bill were Reps. Jamie Callender, of Concord, and Gayle Manning, of North Ridgeville.
As things stand today on Capitol Square, even the most jaded bystander likely longs for the era when the aim of the game was to get things done, not just score points to win headlines and attract talk-show invites.
Still, in customary election year pork-barreling, the Senate and House, before going home, gave voters billions of dollars in gifts in the form of local construction projects – “gifts” the recipients, not the donors, will pay for long after today’s General Assembly has retired with nice pensions and no regrets.
On the eve of Independence Day 2024, and what’s likely to be the most momentous presidential election since Abraham Lincoln’s in 1860, that’s the wonderful world of Ohio politics today: Nostalgia for the past, indifference about the future, and devotion to the status quo. It’s a great life – if you know the right people.
Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.
To reach Thomas Suddes: tsuddes@cleveland.com, 216-408-9474