There's still time to oppose these shameless grabs for power

Ohio politicians pressured by an openly corrupt president look to be doubling down on blatantly partisan gerrymandering to help them in the 2026 midterms by manipulating congressional district boundaries in 2025, to silence the voices of opposition.

That’s not normal. Neither is armed troops and tanks in American streets. Neither are unidentifiable, masked federal agents seizing people off the streets because they fit a racial profile.

None of this is normal. Not in a functioning constitutional republic.

But without effective, sustained pushback from fearless pro-democracy leaders and a resolute citizenry determined to keep its inalienable rights, the takeover happening now in Ohio and the country will become the accepted norm by default.

We are not there yet.

There is still time to dissent — loudly — about political dictates from the Ohio Statehouse and the Trump regime.

But the window of opportunity is short.

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, the mastermind behind Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps — who called the rule of law on redistricting reform in the state “aspirational” and basically ignored it — is already signaling that new congressional districts will be drawn by GOP fiat without buy-in from the minority party.

Even before the new joint committee on congressional redistricting was announced by Republican legislative leaders, Huffman judged that chances for a bipartisan deal — on GOP plans to grab at least two more congressional districts through gerrymandering — are “not looking good” for passing a map with Democratic support by Sept. 30.

That means the congressional map that gives unfair advantage to one party over the other (which the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibits) will go the Republican-majority Ohio Redistricting Commission.

If the panel can’t convince the two Democratic commissioners to bless the GOP power grab for more U.S. House seats by the end of October, the process returns to the legislature where Huffman and the Republican supermajority can easily pass their congressional map with a simple majority.

The Speaker — who in 2022 thumbed his nose at the constitutional amendment Ohioans overwhelmingly approved to end congressional gerrymandering — figures he can screw voters again and get away with it by dispensing normalizing assurances to follow the “process voters approved” and “stick to the Constitution and make decisions based on that.”

Huffman presents as conventional and law-abiding as he takes gerrymandering to new extremes in Ohio — like Texas and other red states considering similar steps. But make no mistake: He is razor-focused on undermining the will of Ohio voters so his party can stay in power in Congress regardless of majority opinion.

Gerrymandering disconnects political power from the will of voters by letting the powerful choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. The result is skewed, unrepresentative district maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed.

That is what Huffman has orchestrated repeatedly with Ohio’s congressional redistricting, but he frames it as good faith map-making in accordance with the law to put a sheen on stealing voter power at the ballot box — as if that were normal.

It is only normal in governments who do not answer to the people they claim to represent.

Same goes for the unprovoked, unwarranted military deployment of troops and armaments in a free society to police its citizens.

It is only normal under regimes flexing muscle at the expense of the constitution and the rule of law.

It is a show of force to intimidate the governed into submission. It is also illegal, ruled a federal judge recently in California about Donald Trump’s use of federal troops for domestic policing in Los Angeles this summer.

Yet the president plans to escalate his use of troops in U.S. cities saying he’ll deploy to Memphis next — one of several blue cities run by Black mayors Trump has targeted to “fix like we did in Washington.”

Nearly 2,300 National Guard troops were deployed to patrol the nation’s capital a month ago after Trump declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. — even though violent crime in the federal district was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Trump falsely claimed the city was the most unsafe in the U.S “and perhaps the world” to justify his militarized policing of Washingtonians.

Six red-state governors, including Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, rushed hundreds of extra Guard troops to D.C. to sightsee with tourists and score points with Trump.

Bored soldiers, used as political props, were relegated to picking up trash, raking leaves, laying mulch, and taking selfies with onlookers startled to see soldiers with rifles and armored vehicles loitering outside Union Station.

DeWine could have declined to be complicit in the dress rehearsal of military used against his fellow citizens; others from his party did. But he chose to put more boots on the ground in an American city to support a bogus “emergency” and call it the “right thing to do.”

The governor said his decision to send troops against the wishes of D.C. officials was consistent with past deployments. How on Earth could it be?

Truth is DeWine just wanted Ohioans to think his armed reinforcements to appease a dangerous megalomaniac was normal.

It was not and can never be as long as democracy has breath in America.

• Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist