'You're not here!' 1.4K Ohioans jeer no-show senators at town hall

An enthusiastic crowd of about 1,400 Ohioans on Saturday packed the Valley Dale Ballroom to say their federal officials aren’t representing them — and that they’re not standing up to President Donald Trump as he allows the world’s richest man to slash federal programs.

The event, staged by Indivisible Central Ohio, was facetiously called a town hall.

Chairs were placed on the stage for U.S. Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, both Republicans. They sat empty, and organizers said the senators’ offices didn’t even bother to say they wouldn’t be coming.

Instead, organizers asked the questions they would have put to the senators to the AI program Chat GPT. The program said that the massive layoffs and cuts to federal programs would cost Ohio jobs, harm university research and stunt the biomedical sector.

Mia Lewis, an organizer, urged the crowd to turn out regularly to protest what’s happening.

“This is an unprecedented moment in our country. This s--t is not normal,” she said of an administration that regularly attacks the judiciary, and allows an unelected, unconfirmed Elon Musk hack wildly at the federal government. “Just two people standing on a highway is not the same thing as 50 people being there every day.”

Members of the audience held signs that said things like “Nobody elected Putin,” “Nobody elected Musk,” and other things that aren’t publishable by a general-audiences news organization.

Moreno and Husted weren’t the only ones to be mocked for their absence. Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and longtime congresswoman from Columbus, begged off, citing a “prior commitment.” An unfortunate constituent was regularly heckled as she tried to read in first person a letter Beatty had sent.

When the constituent read a passage implying Beatty was present, a man yelled out, “You’re not here!” The crowd laughed.

Arnold Scott summed up the general tenor.

“As an ex-federal employee and a union member, I’m mad as hell,” he said. “How about these billionaires pay their taxes? When they cut employees at the various agencies, actually what they’re doing is cutting the services that the taxpayers are paying for. When they cut the VA, they’re cutting veterans. You stand there and say you support the veterans, but then you cut the veterans. When you cut them, that translates into it taking longer for them to receive the services that they’re entitled to.”

Scott said an Ohio federal worker lost her job and complained to one of the Ohio senators. “What do you want me to do?” Scott claimed the senator responded.

Then Scott turned to the two empty chairs and said, “Mr. Senator, what we want you to do… we want you to do your job.”

That brought the crowd to its feet to chant “Do your job!”

Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is cutting resources the VA, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Park Service and much more.

Catherine Duffy told the crowd that buried in that list is a cut that is deeply damaging to Ohio’s poor and its farmers. Musk’s supposed agency axed $1 billion nationally for overstressed food banks to buy directly from farmers.

“Every dollar we don’t have is produce we don’t grow,” Duffy said.