David Dewitt, Ohio Capital Journal

The reality remains that Ohio Republicans — the very same people who tried to do this to you — still control our executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In a normal political epoch, they would learn a lesson from all of this. But we are not in a normal political epoch, so my best advice is to expect them to have learned nothing. If their flailing on Wednesday is any indication, that advice appears to be sound.

They claim you were confused. They claim they didn’t have enough time to plan a campaign for an issue that they forced Ohioans to consider, where they picked the election date and timeline. They claim that Ohio voters protecting the Ohio Constitution from their attempts to rig it against voters, is just more evidence that the Ohio Constitution is too vulnerable to manipulation.

In defeat, instead of accepting loss as a natural part of life with grace and humility, they are dripping with condescension, and plotting for retribution. It’s an ugly look. So just remember that you protected your power, and all of the power in our beautiful state still ultimately rests with you.

If you noticed, I only ever shared my own opinion on Issue 1, and never once told you how to vote. So I won’t tell you now what to do with your powers of democracy that you’ve successfully defended.

But I do have some advice for how we all might be wise to approach our very troubled political times, where politicians ignore the will of the people, ignore the results of elections, ignore the rule of law, and spread fear, lies, hate, and deception.

My family taught me well that in our day-to-day lives, respect is earned. Trust is earned. Honor is earned. We form societies based on these things. Humans are social by nature. We’ve built extraordinary civilizations around our capacity to earn each other’s trust and to cooperate with one another to accomplish astounding things.

Those who cheat, lie, steal, con, and manipulate as part of their lust for control over others, have abandoned that social contract. They worship only at the throne of power. They’ve embraced a fundamentally anti-social posture, and wield it like a knife slitting the fabric of society. Beware.

Too often it seems to me these days, we tolerate a debasement in our politics that most of us would never tolerate in our personal lives. I submit that this is a disastrous mistake.

In our constitutional republic, our elected public servants are meant to look out for the people, all of the people, not just themselves.

It takes a tremendous amount of strength, patience, tolerance, thoughtfulness and understanding to truly look beyond the narrow confines of self-interest toward the higher-minded ideals of the ultimate public good. It takes compassion and empathy, but above all, it takes character.

Abraham Lincoln said, “Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

Shadows can be deceptive, and they can be manipulated to create false impressions.

If America wants to escape Plato’s cave, we simply must start focusing on character, and demanding our public leaders have a high amount of it.

We must agree that the values of honesty, fair-dealing, prudence, charity, and justice, are not just virtues we strive toward personally, but community values that we strive toward collectively, as a society.

We must abandon the shadows on the wall, and insist on the real thing.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Issue 1 is about powerful Republican politicians and lobbyists not trusting Ohioans. They don’t want a majority of voters to do anything they don’t like. They don’t want a majority of voters to be able to hold them accountable. And that is the only reason they are trying to rig the game with Issue 1 on Aug. 8.

They are trying to rig the game against voters by asking a majority of Ohio voters to rig the game for them against ourselves. They are asking us to change the rules so future amendments need 60% voter approval for passage.

More than that, Issue 1 would make it nearly impossible for citizen groups to propose any initiatives ever again, by changing signature requirements from 44 to all 88 counties, some of which only have a fraction of a percent of Ohio’s population.

So on Issue 1, they trust a majority of voters, but after this, nothing else. That’s what they’re saying. Up until Aug. 8, a majority of Ohio voters are full of wisdom. After that, it’s the cold shoulder for the 50-59 percenters. Ohio voters have to cover a 20-point spread.

As Bob Taft said, if they really believed this would protect the Ohio Constitution they would be requiring 60% for Issue 1 to pass.

Instead, they’re desperately using every fear tactic in the book to try to scare Ohio voters into going into the voting booth on Aug. 8 and stripping ourselves of our own power.

But the truth is, if Issue 1 is voted down, everything stays as it has been for 111 years, with a majority of Ohio voters deciding what happens with our Ohio Constitution.

Ohio citizens have proposed 71 amendments and voters have passed 19. That’s a 27% passage rate. Ohio voters are responsible.

Ohio Republican lawmakers and lobbyists are not. Captured by radical special interests, charter school and payday lending grifters, and corrupt utilities, Ohio Republicans in charge of state government have overseen scandal after scandal this past decade, costing Ohioans billions of dollars while raking in millions for themselves in campaign donations. They’re selling us all out for pennies on the dollar.

Meanwhile, they have kicked third parties off the ballot, gerrymandered our maps against the constitution, enacted some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country, and imposed a radical abortion ban that: forces 10-year-old rape victims to flee the state for care; forces cancer patients to be denied abortions while also being denied cancer treatment because they’re pregnant; and forces mothers carrying a fetus with severe abnormalities to give birth only to watch it quickly die.

This extremist abortion ban that caused all of these heartbreaking scenarios for a few months in Ohio after the Dobbs decision has been temporarily blocked by a Hamilton County court pending litigation.

In a debate Tuesday night however, the chief cheerleaders for the historic Issue 1 attack on Ohio voters — our own chief elections officer, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, and an anti-abortion lobbyist named Mike Gonidakis — made it sound as though if a majority of voters strikes down Issue 1 and approves a November abortion rights proposal, Ohio will descend into a hellish madhouse of Q-Anon paranoias come to life.

And they want us to believe this while Ohio Republicans currently enjoy total unchecked power over our state’s legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

What would Ohio actually look like if Issue 1 goes down and the abortion rights amendment passes?

Pretty much exactly how it looks right now.

With right-wing Ohio Republicans controlling the Ohio Supreme Court after the forced-retirement of swing-vote Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, it’s hard to say precisely how they might interpret the November amendment, if it passes and comes before them, but we can game it out.

They already have a case before them over Ohio’s extreme abortion ban that has no exceptions for rape or incest, so such an abortion rights amendment would, in any rational world, be a game-changer on that.

It seems reasonable to suspect that law would stay blocked or appealed to federal court if the state high court Republicans decided to flout the new amendment. Ohio’s current law with abortion legal until 22 weeks gestation could well be found to meet the standards in the amendment.

The November amendment does say “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability,” except if necessary to save the mother’s life, and viability is right around 23 weeks.

It’s ridiculous to imagine Ohio’s right-wing Republican Supreme Court would somehow have a more liberal interpretation than that, much less allow any of the other wild-eyed claims supporters of Issue 1 are making.

So odds on, where would it all leave us? Basically the status quo: Abortion is legal and protected in Ohio, up to a point.

And that’s what makes all the hysterical, hyperbolic, hypocritical fear-mongering about some nightmarish dark future that LaRose and Gonidakis tried to perform Tuesday night pretty silly.

Nothing would happen to parental consent, just like nothing happened to parental consent in Michigan when they passed a similar amendment last year. Things stay essentially how they are right now in Ohio. Other issues come and a majority decides, as we have for more than 100 years.

But on that note, here is what they truly fear: further anti-gerrymandering reform kicking politicians out of the redistricting process and bringing representative maps with proportional safe seats and maximized competitive seats. That would make a corrupt, misrepresentative state government actually accountable and representative.

And that’s what this is all about. It’s politicians and lobbyists trying to swindle voters so they can have everything, however they want it, and keep misrepresenting a majority of Ohioans without any accountability.

In the end, Issue 1 is a radical big government power play by extremist lobbyists and politicians to protect their own control over Ohio government, and to rob a majority of voters of our own ultimate authority to put them in check.

They work for us, but with Issue 1, they’re asking to rule us. With Issue 1, they want us to crown them.

Just moments after I watched Ohio Senate Republicans pass a resolution for 41% minority rule over the Ohio Constitution on Wednesday, I walked past a field trip of Ohio children touring the Statehouse.

Seeing those kids’ faces as their eyes explored the beautiful Ohio Statehouse Rotunda, a sharp, stabbing pain of shame for our once-great state pierced into me, knowing what the unscrupulous, morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt GOP lawmakers and Senate President Matt Huffman in the nearby chamber just did.

Ohio Republicans are in a full-court press on their attempt to make it harder for voters to amend our Ohio Constitution by raising the threshold for passage from 50% to 60%.

On Wednesday, the Ohio Senate passed their version of the resolution and made way to put the question to voters on a special August ballot. These same lawmakers just eliminated August special elections months ago, but they need to put it on the ballot in August in an attempt to undermine an abortion-rights amendment slated for November. Abortion-rights amendments were passed in 2022 by voters in Kentucky with 52.3%, Montana with 52.5%, Michigan with 56.6%, and Kansas with 59%.

Ohio Republicans eliminated the August elections originally, they said, because it’s expensive with low turnout. The August 2022 election cost $20 million and had 8% turnout.

That low turnout has now become not a concern, but part of their strategy, as they know their best shot at asking voters to bow down and kneel in subservience to them by relinquishing our democratic powers is for as few voters as possible to participate in that decision.

Over on the Ohio House side, Republicans on one committee passed their version of the proposal in a 7-6 vote and referred it to another in preparation for making a push to put it on the House floor.

Alongside the Senate’s passage of their version, everything now still hinges on the decisions of Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens, who will face enormous pressure from all sides.

“If I bring it to the floor, I’m going to vote for it,” Stephens reportedly said Wednesday.

The House version is sponsored by Republican state Rep. Brian Stewart and was conceived in coordination with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose with the support of the religious fanatics at the extraordinarily influential special interest group, the Center for Christian Virtue.

LaRose denied that he wanted to block abortion protections or anti-gerrymandering measures when he announced plans to overhaul the direct democracy over our constitution that Ohioans have enjoyed responsibly since 1912. But in a letter to Ohio House colleagues in December, Stewart listed only two reasons for Republican lawmakers to support attacking voters’ ability to amend our constitution: abortion and gerrymandering.

In the Ohio Senate chamber Wednesday, Republican Senators made clear they share Stewart’s priorities: Proposed amendments to increase Ohio’s minimum wage and protect abortion rights, as well as the prospect of further anti-gerrymandering reform, were all cited by the GOP lawmakers attacking the power of Ohio voters.

Preposterously, these gerrymandered lawmakers — who won their seats by running under unconstitutional maps that they forced onto voters — claim they want to protect Ohio from special interests.

Ohio has a government that has been captured by massive utility company special interests robbing ratepayers of hundreds of millions of dollars; charter school scam artists ripping off taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars; drug companies that admitted defrauding Ohioans by tens of millions of dollars; predatory payday lenders skirting accountability to fleece vulnerable Ohioans; a nursing home industry peddling campaign donations and influence for sweetheart lawmaking, special interest groups writing legislation; lobbyists writing lawmakers’ testimony, and lawmakers creating standards that benefit their privately-owned businesses.

And they want to warn us about the influence of special interests? They get led around by special interests like dogs on a leash.

Ohio Republicans have now: Gerrymandered the legislature; used their gerrymandered legislature to indulge all manner of corruption and criminality; attacked a majority of Ohio voters’ ability to hold that gerrymandered legislature accountable; claimed that accountability is available through unconstitutionally gerrymandered elections; stacked the courts to sanction gerrymandering as well as extremist laws; if one court didn’t play ball, shopped cases to friendly judges who would; and fear-mongered about dark money, out-of-state special interests while working in concert with dark money, out-of-state special interests.

Meanwhile, amid the rampant corruption of the billion-dollar bailout, money laundering, political bribery, and racketeering scandal that netted federal felony jury trial convictions of the former Ohio Republican House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party chair Matt Borges, many of these same Ohio Republican lawmakers have stood silent, or even voted to protect Householder from expulsion out of the chamber.

Now they want us Ohioans to trust them and protect ourselves from special interests… by attacking ourselves.

Trust politicians who ignored 75% of voters and seven bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court rulings so they could force Ohio to vote under unconstitutionally gerrymandered maps, who now say they want to protect us from special interests, after they stood silent during a billion-dollar bribery scandal?

Trust these people who have been flagrantly abusing our government, our constitution, and our rule of law to give away billions of dollars in our money to their campaign donor special interests?

You know what would be a great protection from special interests buying Ohio politicians for pennies on the dollar?

Having representative government and fair elections instead of illegal, unconstitutional gerrymandering that keeps corrupt lawmakers in power and unaccountable.

You know what would be the opposite of protecting Ohio voters from corrupt special interests?

Attacking voters’ ability to have final authority over our constitution, and our ability to implement meaningful anti-gerrymandering reform after they flagrantly and unconstitutionally violated voters’ last efforts.

What makes sense to try to stop corrupt special interest from controlling Ohio government?

Campaign finance reform; Ending gerrymandering; Strengthening ethics and disclosure laws; Stopping regulatory capture.

What doesn’t make sense?

Attacking voters and the power of voters.

These lawmakers who indulge and tolerate all manner of corruption, bribery, sweetheart lawmaking, and nepotistic hiring and appointments, are just oozing condescension out of every pore when they point their fingers at Ohio voters as the ones who can’t be trusted to protect ourselves from special interests.

This is a naked power grab to remove any last vestige of accountability for them to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, no matter the consequences, a majority of voters be damned.

As the Ohio House committee voted forward Stewart’s proposal Wednesday, the many dozens of Ohioans who showed up from across the state to testify against it chanted “shame” at them.

No other word fits quite so well.

These people are the shame of Ohio, and they represent the most feckless, irresponsible, corrupt, contemptible, rigged, un-American, anti-science, anti-fact, anti-intelligence, anti-democracy, anti-voter, and anti-Ohioan general assembly I’ve seen in my lifetime. Which is really saying something.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Vance continues to push against any American role in defending the assaulted democratic ally a full year after Russia’s invasion. Meanwhile, as the anniversary comes Feb. 24, Ukrainian civilians are suffering a shocking level of barbarism that the world can not turn its back upon, as Vance seems to want.

“They were my happiness. They were my everything,” weeped Ukraine’s Oleksandr Chekmariov to 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley. “I wish I could bring everything back.”

Chekmariov and his wife Rita tried to flee Bucha, Ukraine with their 4-year-old and 9-year-old sons before the Russian slaughtering of civilians began. But as they tried to escape, they ran into a Russian armored vehicle.

“We stopped. Rita yelled for me to make a u-turn and drive back. I heard shots. I turned to the back seat and Rita shouted, ‘I’m hit!’ Rita and my children were dead. I was so in shock I didn’t notice that my leg was hanging on by only a piece of skin. I didn’t even feel the pain. I got down behind the car, and then the car burst into flames.”

Chekmariov was rescued by firemen, and watched his family burn.

In the segment, Chekmariov holds up photos of one of his sons and breaks down, “It doesn’t make any sense. Why did he have to die? For what? It doesn’t make any sense. Why? It doesn’t make any sense in any world to kill them. Why? What was he killed for? How can I go on living? Just to keep crying and keep breathing? What should I do? What else can I do? He’s not here anymore. I can not hug him. I can not kiss him. I can not do anything. They were the meaning of my life. How can I live with this? How? Just hold on and endure to just endure? To fight everything inside myself? What should I do next? I don’t know how to live.”

Mediocre memoirist turned millionaire venture capitalist turned Republican Ohio U.S. Senator J.D. Vance appears to be unmoved by such heartbreaking stories coming daily out of Ukraine, the country subject of the largest violent military land invasion on a peaceful democracy in Europe since World War II.

Women and children massacred by Vladimir Putin’s godless military thugs? No problem, Vance apparently thinks, preferring instead to attack American President Joe Biden about the southern border at a time where the U.S. — under Biden — is setting new records for apprehensions at the southern border.

Not even two months after taking office to represent Ohioans in the U.S. Senate, Vance’s most prominent actions so far have been questioning help and relief provided by America to Ukraine.

After the Biden administration agreed to send M1 Abrams tanks made in Lima, Ohio to Ukraine, Vance told a Cleveland station it was a “ultimately not in our national security interest.”

Meanwhile, Vance won the GOP nomination for his Senate seat after receiving the endorsement of the first American president to try to violently overturn the results of a free and fair election in order to return himself to power, like a tin pot dictator.

After being on the wrong political end of the MAGA movement in 2016, likening Donald Trump to “America’s Hitler,” J.D. Vance has become one of the foremost apologists for the would-be dictator attempting to tear down the pillars of American democracy in order to serve his own ego.

Donald Trump is an anti-American traitor, and J.D. Vance carries his water like a pitiful little toady, already announcing his endorsement of Trump for president in 2024.

This should come as no surprise, as Vance has espoused openly authoritarian beliefs, such as that Trump should seize control of all levels of federal bureaucracy and the defense department to install his own sycophants, and if the courts try to stop him, he should ignore the courts, Vanity Fair reported:

“Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine — that our system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.”

Vance apparently sees America as in late-stage democracy, and he seems to want to hasten the demise of democracy in America by supporting an openly authoritarian candidate for president.

Putin would also like to see democracy in America fall, and standing with Vance and Putin is the other frontrunner for the Republican 2024 nomination for president: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Earlier this week, DeSantis blamed the invasion not on Vladimir Putin but on Joe Biden. Also this week, China pointed blame at the United States, not Putin, for the war. China’s head diplomat also made a sweetheart visit to Putin amid war crimes such as Ukrainian civilians getting shot in the back when they bike to the store.

Chinese companies have already been providing non-lethal support for Putin’s illegal war, but many fear China is poised to begin providing lethal support as well. And J.D. Vance seemingly wants America to tuck tail and run away.

Meanwhile, Biden flew into the war zone this week in a powerful statement of support for democracy just as Putin ramped up an anniversary offensive.

So on one hand, you have Putin committing crimes against humanity, with China, Trump, DeSantis, and J.D. Vance providing political cover.

On the other hand, you have the rest of the Western world, led by Ukraine — and Americans who still believe in democracy — fighting for the ideals that have defined Western civilization for nearly 80 years.

Vance wants to paint this as a zero-sum game: That somehow the United States is incapable of taking care of our own problems while also still standing up to murderous dictators and authoritarians abroad.

This is a false choice. We can do both.

In the past year — while supporting Ukraine’s efforts — the U.S. has passed sweeping climate, health, and tax legislation with the Inflation Reduction Act; put in place major protections of our democracy in the Electoral Count Reform Act; enacted the toughest new gun violence prevention law in nearly 30 years; passed the CHIPS and Science Act to improve U.S. competition with China; and took a significant step toward marriage equality with the Respect for Marriage Act.

Before Putin’s war, the U.S. also passed a major infrastructure bill under Biden that Trump only made promises on and never delivered. In fact, despite mountains of empty promises, the only thing Trump actually accomplished legislatively was a massive redistribution of wealth upward to the richest people and corporations in the country, including himself.

While Ukrainians are witnessing their families being openly murdered under Putin’s war crimes, J.D. Vance is playing the most cynical kind of manipulative politics.

Vance is a shameless apologist for insurrectionist coups against free and fair elections here in America, and for authoritarian military assaults on democracy abroad.

J.D. Vance is an absolute embarrassment of a U.S. Senator, bringing shame upon Ohioans every single day as he stands athwart our most-basic American values.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Fat cat politicians and lobbyists jet-setting on private corporate planes to D.C. to wine and dine at expensive steakhouses with other fat cat corporate executives. I imagine glasses of Scotch and bourbon being sloshed around as cigars are snipped and lit in celebration of a scheme to siphon more than a billion dollars from everyday Ohioans.

As FirstEnergy was drowning in losses from its uncompetitive nuclear and coal generators amid the rise of natural gas, executives dined in D.C. with lobbyist Jeff Longstreth and Householder in early 2017, who was at the time plotting his return to the Ohio House speakership.

Within weeks, FirstEnergy money was flowing into Householder’s political machine. In fact, federal prosecutors say, the same day that Longstreth opened a bank account for that 501(c)(4) “dark money” group called Generation Now that was also eventually indicted, he asked the then-vice president of FirstEnergy for money.

Soon, FirstEnergy was making quarterly $250,000 payments to the account, and at the start of 2018, Householder had $1 million to start recruiting people for “Team Householder” — Republican candidates for the Ohio House who were likely to vote to make Householder speaker, OCJ’s Marty Schladen reported prosecutors saying in opening arguments.

Longstreth and Generation Now subsequently pleaded guilty to their roles in the case, and in a deferred prosecution agreement, FirstEnergy admitted to its role in the scheme.

Another lobbyist, Juan Cespedes, was also indicted and pleaded guilty in the case, while a third — longtime right-wing Ohio lobbyist Neil Clark — died by suicide in March 2021 wearing a “DeWine for Governor” t-shirt.

Now Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges are on trial in what prosecutors call the biggest bribery and money laundering scandal in the state’s 217-year history.

After the creation of Generation Now, other groups with names like Partners for Progress and Hardworking Ohioans were receiving big dollars — mostly from FirstEnergy — in Householder’s successful effort to get many of his candidates elected, prosecutors said. On two occasions, Householder drove to FirstEnergy’s Akron headquarters to get additional money, they said.

The money eventually totaled $61 million. Householder got the House speaker gavel in 2019 and quickly rammed through a $1.3 billion bailout that mostly benefited FirstEnergy in the form of House Bill 6, a package of measures that included $1 billion to prop up nuclear power plants in Northern Ohio, a $102-million-a-year subsidy to FirstEnergy, and rules that gutted renewable energy standards.

Gov. Mike DeWine signed it the same day it was passed.

Former FirstEnergy CEO Charles “Chuck” Jones. Source: FirstEnergy, via Flickr

The bill also included subsidies for two 66-year-old coal plants — including one that isn’t even in Ohio. While the rest of the package was eventually repealed, those coal subsidies remain on the books and are costing Ohioans $233,000 a day.

Prosecutors say that Householder corruptly engineered the scheme to put himself in a position of power and to pay himself more than $500,000 for personal things such as paying off credit card debt and repairing his Florida house.

Householder’s defense?

The money was just a loan and he was just being a good public servant trying to save jobs by procuring the bailout for FirstEnergy. That “loan,” by the way, Householder never bothered to disclose in state ethics forms.

In a perverse way, Householder probably believes that taking a private corporate jet to eat $80 Roseda bone-on Black Angus ribeye is him performing a “public service.”

And that’s exactly the problem. It’s the arrogance that comes from a total lack of accountability.

Decades of rampant pay-to-play political corruption in Ohio has summoned a breed of public officials who treat state government like a personal playground of private profiteering for themselves and their moneyed friends.

And just because Householder is gone, doesn’t mean Ohio’s good old boys club is gone, too.

Householder’s impact remains strong at the Ohio Statehouse.

Current Republican Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens was a member of “Team Householder” and recently selected as caucus policy director Megan Fitzmartin, who worked closely with Householder and Longstreth.

And the problem doesn’t get better just because the party is fractured right now.

Stephens’ main GOP antagonist, Derek Merrin, voted against expelling Householder from the House after he was arrested, as did Stephens.

So, they agreed on that: Protecting Householder and trying to keep him in office after he was charged with racketeering for robbing Ohioans blind in a millions-on-the-billions political bribery grift. What does that tell you about their combined sense of ethics?

Meanwhile, voters just reelected Gov. DeWine, who has never even pretended to be outraged by any of this.

At least this is likely honest of DeWine; after 40 years in Ohio politics he’s so accustomed to swimming in these dark corruption waters they don’t even register a blink.

I imagine if anything’s upset him at all, it’s the sloppiness with which it was carried out — not the open bribery and large-scale robbery of the public. After all, he signed the legislation the same day it was passed, a resounding stamp of personal approval that almost never happens.

DeWine has been keeping his head down after the case revealed that he appointed a FirstEnergy consultant to regulate utilities in Ohio that the company admits bribing $4.3 million to do their bidding.

“Everybody knew,” DeWine said of his chosen utility regulator’s connections to FirstEnergy.

Maybe in their good old boys club everybody knew, but I assure you, the public did not. The public did not widely know their governor appointed an electricity corporation stooge as the state’s head watchdog over electricity corporations.

It has since been revealed that text messages show FirstEnergy executives describing an open line with the administration on the selection and inside support from DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted.

In one text, a FirstEnergy executive credits DeWine and Husted with performing “battlefield triage” to save their bribed regulator’s appointment before a key vote.

And remember Partners for Progress? Another one of the dark money groups receiving funding primarily from FirstEnergy?

It was started by a senior DeWine aide while he was still a FirstEnergy lobbyist, the company’s deferred prosecution agreement showed.

Despite the damning revelations, DeWine stood by his ho-hum innocence act, stood by the aide who has since resigned, and has refused to explain anything about his administration’s role in the bailout scandal.

DeWine’s “bury your head and hide” posture has apparently worked so far.

Talk to political strategists and many will raise concerns about how motivating corruption may be as an issue for voters.

“It just doesn’t play very well,” they’ll tell you. “Everybody assumes all politicians are corrupt, and the issues just get lost in voter confusions and partisan back-and-forth accusations.”

Large-scale robbery can also be somewhat incomprehensible, they’ll add. They’ll say that people’s eyes glaze over when confronted with these intricate schemes involving unfathomable sums of money.

There’s a truth in this that I find deeply unsettling.

Petty crime often plays, while billion-dollar grifts get shrugged off as “politics as usual.”

The football coach who steals $5,000 from the local athletic boosters often faces more public scorn and swifter justice than politicians and corporations robbing the public of billions of dollars for decades on end.

Political strategists may not want to say this publicly, but I can: This is insane and these voters are wrong.

Public corruption is not just business as usual and it should never be treated that way.

We must never normalize the public being cheated so viciously, so consistently, over such a long period of time, with zero accountability.

It’s not “the” government, and it sure as hell isn’t their government. This is our government. We’ve established it to serve us, not them.

Public officials who put themselves and their steak dinner, golfing, and drinking buddies ahead of the other 11 million Ohioans who desperately need government to be working for us instead of against us, need to face the wrath of prosecutors and voters alike.

With the Householder and Borges racketeering case, we’re getting a taste of real accountability.

Federal agents and prosecutors appointed from both sides of the aisle are to be greatly thanked and commended.

But this is just a beginning.

Ohioans have decades of work ahead of us to purge our halls of power of these frauds and their next generation offspring, who so shamelessly game and cheat the public.

They’re stealing our money, every day, literally. In myriad ways, but right now, at the very least, $233,000 a day. Just that one theft is on every electric bill people pay.

I swear these people are traipsing through life with a Goodfellas voiceover going on in their minds about how slick they are and how smooth they’ve got it.

They think the public is stupid and easily swindled, and will never do anything to stop them as long as they lie, manipulate, and gaslight enough.

That’s an abuser’s mentality.

Ohio needs a reckoning. Without it, I promise, all of this will just continue. Throw a dart and pick a special interest. This is how Ohio government has operated for a long, long time.

Will we still sit idly by as they continue to rob us all and give away billions in our money and resources to corrupt private interests?

Because that’s what they’re counting on.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

After two years of relentless lies from Donald Trump about the 2020 Election — lies that precipitated a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn a free and fair American election — Ohio’s newly elected U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance says it’s not the traitor Trump’s fault that Republicans failed to create a national red wave in 2022.

No, it’s… small donors? Or something. Anything but Donald Trump’s fault.

Vance’s op-ed in The American Conservative, “Don’t Blame Trump,” gives Ohioans a taste of the shameless, self-debasing sycophancy Vance is willing to indulge as he prostrates himself before Trump in abject servitude.

He’s so desperate to forgive Trump any blame he doesn’t see the blatant contradiction of his argument to increase midterm voter turnout by restricting voter access.

This was Vance’s first major political statement after winning election to the U.S. Senate last Tuesday: licking the boots of a wannabe authoritarian who set about trying to destroy the machinery of America’s elections systems by installing groveling toadies in positions of electoral authority in swing states, and failing miserably.

Donald Trump got smacked by voters across the country in 2018, smacked in 2020, smacked in the 2020 Georgia run-off for control of the Senate, and smacked again in 2022. Announcing presidential candidacy for 2024, Trump promises to continue to suck all the oxygen out of the Republican room for another two years.

If you ignore all of your faculties of intelligence, good judgment, and common sense, Vance’s argument that it’s actually the small-donor game that swung the 2022 elections, and not the reality TV show star attempting to destroy American democracy for his own myopic self-interest, might make sense. But otherwise, it’s just more ass-kissing.

Vance found himself on the wrong end of the MAGA movement in 2016, likening Trump to “America’s Hitler.”

Now, after buckling to Trumpism and shedding himself of any pretense of actual convictions or personal dignity, the national tide is rolling back on Trumpism, and Vance is riding it out to sea.

The spectacle serves as fair warning: This is what happens when you pretend to be what you think others want you to be, instead of being true to yourself. In politics, it doesn’t get more hack than that.

Vance seems to believe that doubling-down on the constant chaos, dysfunction, division, resentment, pettiness, vengeance, grievance, corruption, fraud, waste, abuse, and hate-mongering of Trumpism is the way forward for national Republicans, as long as they increase their ground game and small donor support.

As a game plan, I can’t say it wouldn’t continue to work in Ohio, which is no longer a swing state and no longer politically relevant nationally.

But in the actual swing states and national elections, it’s a good way to make sure to keep being humiliated. When it comes to forces trying to destroy democracy in America, I can’t say I’m opposed to that.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

This is nothing new. Supposedly anti-“Big Government” state leaders slam D.C. politicians for “reckless spending” when D.C. gets things done on health care, education, infrastructure, the environment, stimulus, jobs, the economy.

Then those state politicians turn right around and allocate billions in new funding, installing new federally funded programs and initiatives in their states.

Then they take a victory lap, patting themselves on the back, and giving minimal acknowledgement to where the money originated.

They seem to desire people think it was D. B. Cooper’s loot simply fallen from the sky, and they are doling it out to the public through the magnificent generosity of their own pure hearts.

This happened prominently 10 years ago with President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but what’s happened in the past year and a half with the American Rescue Plan Act passed by Democrats in Congress and signed by President Joe Biden is truly next level.

No Republican House or Senate member supported the bill. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said that had he still been a U.S. Senator, he would not have voted for it.

But DeWine is contorting himself into shapes most often seen in mall pretzel stands as he tries to explain away the gobsmacking hypocrisy of spending billions in ARPA money while running ads against his opponent slamming the ARPA as “reckless spending.”

If the ARPA is reckless spending, Mike DeWine is one person doing a helluva lot of that spending.

The state and local portion of the ARPA delivered $350 billion to state and local governments.

Ohio’s state share is $5.4 billion. Ohio had spent about $3.47 billion of that as of mid-September.

DeWine signed off on $2.2 billion in spending from the ARPA allocated by the supermajority Republican Ohio General Assembly.

The ARPA got Ohio out of a $1.47 billion unemployment system debt, and has also gone to sewer grants, pediatric behavioral health facilities, crime labs, first responders, meat processing, wastewater and water treatment systems, school security, Appalachian community grants, hunger relief, parks, trails, animal disease laboratories, and local economic recovery efforts.

As Cleveland.com’s Jeremy Pelzer reported, “just hours after DeWine’s campaign unveiled the ad, the governor’s office issued a news release publicizing that DeWine directed another $1.7 million in ARPA funding to help first-responders.”

But don’t believe the evidence of your eyes and ears — or the final paragraph of DeWine’s self-congratulatory press releases, which note all this “reckless spending” money DeWine is throwing around came from the ARPA: This is not hypocrisy. Sure.

“Should he not spend the money that’s already been given to the state?” a DeWine spokesperson asked when pressed by Cleveland.com. “Should he reject that money?”

That is indeed one option.

Former Gov. John Kasich did try to reject Medicaid expansion under Obamacare before being circumvented.

Despite Kasich’s efforts, nearly a million more Ohioans have health care now because of Obamacare.

I may be old fashioned, but a million more of my Ohio sisters and brothers having access to affordable health care seems pretty good to me. Kasich held to his ideological guns and tried to deny them it. Likewise putting ideology over people is indeed one of DeWine’s options.

Here’s the thing though. Rejecting the ARPA money, or accepting it and hypocritically using it to extol his civic virtue while scorching it as reckless, are not DeWine’s only options.

This may be hard for some politicians to wrap their heads around, but honesty is also always an option.

You don’t have to insult everybody’s intelligence.

People are capable of thinking through complex and nuanced situations, as long as their leaders are not lying to them, manipulating them, and confusing them.

If DeWine thinks that these projects that he is funding with this federal money are worthwhile; if he thinks they are important, helping, or perhaps even critical, then he should be grateful that money was allocated to him to give out. He doesn’t even have to praise Biden or ARPA. He could just have a Coke and a smile and keep his mouth shut.

But DeWine wants it both ways, and is willing to sacrifice his honesty to obtain that. He wants to fear-monger over the ARPA while spending billions in ARPA money.

The big hairy truth about the American Rescue Plan is that it is one factor of many, global factors that have caused inflation to spike, but it is also, simultaneously, playing a very significant role in boosting America’s economy, including through the spending DeWine is doing.

But this and various other contradictions are making economists’ heads spin, along with the markets, creating enormous uncertainty right now.

Washington Post finance desk reporter David J. Lynch put it succinctly on Oct. 9: “The political and economic consequences of Biden’s first landmark law will be debated for years. But 18 months later, there is a consensus that the rescue plan was a double-edged sword: Bathing the economy in cash spurred the fastest recovery of any Group of 7 nation, even as the indiscriminate nature of that spending helped ignite the biggest jump in consumer prices in 40 years.”

Lynch’s article, “Biden’s rescue plan made inflation worse but the economy better,” is worth reading in full.

As complex as the truth about the American Rescue Plan, inflation, and the economy is, there is another put-out-of-mind fact decades in the making.

The unspoken truth about federal spending is that federal grant funding, the number of federal grants, and the issuance of federal mandates have steadily increased under both Democratic and Republican Congresses and presidents since the early 1980s, the Congressional Research Service has made clear in extensive analysis.

The rest is rhetoric, platitudes, and politics.

And when people try to game you instead of being honest with you, they are insulting you.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

They were warned. Ohio Republican lawmakers and Gov. Mike DeWine were warned time and again that their abortion ban was cruel and would lead to heartbreaking situations of unimaginable pain and anguish for many people.

They were warned that their abortion ban set a stage of legal nightmares for doctors and personal nightmares for patients. They were warned that pregnancy is complicated and comes with inherent dangers that radical, extremist lawmaking would make infinitely worse.

They were warned of the pain; they were warned of the suffering; they were warned of the torment that some patients would experience if Ohio state government inserted itself into doctor’s offices and emergency rooms to dictate the reproductive health of Ohioans.

They didn’t care. They ignored the warnings, then passed and signed Ohio’s extremist abortion ban anyway.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned national abortion rights in its Dobbs decision, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost rushed to implement Ohio’s heartless, draconian law.

More than two months later, Ohio doctors are sharing stories just as horrifying as any possibility lawmakers and the governor were explicitly warned against.

They are telling of women who have partial deliveries too undeveloped to survive see them stall. In that condition — half-delivered, these patients have had to sign paperwork — and then wait for 24 hours, or for the fetus’s heart to stop, OCJ’s Marty Schladen reported Wednesday.

Women suffering other complications such as a detached umbilical cord have faced similar intrusions just after they were devastated to learn they would lose a child they dearly wanted.

They, too, have had to wait a day or for fetal demise. In one instance, that took 14 hours.

Other women — shattered to learn that the baby they’re carrying lacks vital organs necessary for survival — are being told that in Ohio they have to carry that baby, possibly for months, only to see it be stillborn, or to watch it quickly die.

“Lawmakers didn’t go into this blindly,” Tani Malhotra, a maternal fetal medicine doctor, said. “Physicians provided testimony. We called their offices. We sat with legislators to help educate them and tell them why this is bad policy. The (American Medical Association) and the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology tried to explain to them why this is bad law. They were educated. They knew exactly what these consequences were going to be because we told them.”

What is one to make of people who can hear such testimony from medical experts and doctors — testimony warning of enormous, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking pain that would inevitably be caused by this bad, thoughtless law — and ignore it?

The stridency of ignorance? The unearned confidence of religious zealotry?

The casual disregard of humanity and human empathy in favor of extremist ideology removed from reality? The ignoble placating and pleasing of political special interests over compassionate human interests? All of that?

Yes. All of that.

They call themselves “moral,” yet they would force 10-year-old children to destroy their bodies carrying and delivering pregnancies from their rapists.

Their supporters call themselves “values voters” and their organizations centers of “virtue,” yet the law they advocated and got passed and signed forces women with a half-delivered doomed pregnancy to undergo an onerous bureaucratic process of sneering legal paperwork before the tragedy that has befallen them can be medically addressed.

The women suffering these tragedies over pregnancies they wanted are shamed for the loss of them out of their control, falsely told they have “options” when they do not.

These are not representative of good human values, and it’s certainly no virtue to subject others to such trauma and cruelty.

The vast majority of Ohioans are not extremist on abortion: They generally believe there should be some restrictions on abortions, but abortion care should not be criminalized and banned such as it is now in Ohio.

This is because most Ohioans understand that the world is complex, and human situations are nuanced and complicated.

This sledgehammer of extremist law inflicts grave injustice unbefitting of such sensitive issues.

But this sledgehammer of injustice is exactly what Ohio Republicans have now taken to these very private, very personal decisions.

They were warned, and they did it anyway.

If this cruelty and suffering is what they wanted, they’ve certainly created a lot of it.

Follow OCJ Editor David DeWitt on Twitter.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

The first and most important thing to recognize right now is that a heinous, violent crime was committed on a 10-year-old Ohio child, and thankfully justice has now found the alleged perpetrator.

A Columbus man was indicted Wednesday in a case that made national and international headlines about a10-year-old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion after Ohio’s abortion ban went into effect following the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

The story is horrifying and tragic. She has experienced enormous trauma. My heart breaks for her, and I’m very grateful to all the hard-working professionals out there providing her and her family assistance in what must be a truly awful time.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and his spokesman responded to the story by ignoring questions about whether children should be forced to have their rapists’ babies. Then DeWine allies contacted members of the press, asking how sure they were that the case of the pregnant 10-year-old even happened.

The Washington Post, the conservative Daily Caller and other media outlets published stories saying that the case was unverified. The Wall Street Journal Editorial page suggested the story was a “fanciful tale.” The National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty referred to the case as “a fictive abortion and a fictive rape.”

Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost went on Fox News Monday to raise further doubts.

Hamilton County Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou on Twitter called the case, “A garbage lie that a simple Google search confirms is debunked.”

State Rep. Brian Stewart tweeted the Washington Post story saying he “wouldn’t trust an abortionist to tell me whether the sky is blue.”

Ohio U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted, “Another lie. Anyone surprised?”

The propaganda erasing this 10-year-old’s existence was so swift it spread out over right-wing social media like a blanket. Those advocating the truth of her story—privately and devastatingly already confirmed for some of us—were subjected to wild-eyed mockery and ridicule.

It’s incredibly disturbing that the default position of so many sick and twisted people—including Ohio’s most prominent Republican elected officials—is to very vocally and very publicly question whether the rape and impregnation of a 10-year-old child ever happened.

This case was never implausible. In 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 52 girls aged 14 and younger had abortions in Ohio, according to the state department of health. A review of just the city of Columbus’ police log since March 15 uncovered 59 reports of sexual assaults of girls 15 and younger that, based on the information available, could have resulted in pregnancy.

Nevertheless, the wheels and integrity of local journalism spun and uncovered the truth, with the Columbus Dispatch breaking the news of confirmation of the case.

But after the confirmation broke Wednesday, DeWine’s spokesman, Dan Tierney, again refused to comment on whether child rape victims should be forced to carry their pregnancies to term.

Ten-year-olds who become pregnant are by definition rape victims. But Ohio’s abortion law signed by DeWine doesn’t make exceptions for rape and incest.

Yost’s office didn’t respond Wednesday when asked whether he believes child rape victims should be forced to carry pregnancies, nor whether it was important to believe stories about sexual violence. Instead he put out a statement applauding the arrest.

Yost offered no correction, no apology, and showed no contrition for going on national television to try to erase the lived experience of a child rape victim.

DeWine, Yost, and other Ohio Republicans hurt a traumatized child once by forcing her to flee the state in order to receive health care; then they hurt her again by peddling propaganda erasing her; now they’re hurting her a third time by refusing to acknowledge and apologize for their actions.

These powerful Ohio Republican politicians have thoroughly and completely shed themselves of any sense of shame or conscience.

They’re disgusting and disgraceful; callous, careless and cruel.

This is a matter of basic human decency, good faith and sensitivity on the most fundamental level of society.

If they are willing to try to erase the trauma of a 10-year-old rape victim, whose pain and suffering will they not try to ignore and erase?

They behave on a base level so repugnant and removed from the general good-heartedness of most Ohioans it’s almost unfathomable.

I honestly don’t know how they sleep at night, or look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Transgender people — especially transgender people of color — have been leading the activist charge toward LGBTQ+ equality since the beginning, literally throwing the first bottles at the Stonewall riots.

And since the beginning, they’ve been the most victimized. They remain so, and Ohio Republicans have devised a savagely creepy, abhorrent way to target and victimize not just trans people, but all female high school and college athletes, by moving legislation with a “verification process” of checking the genitals of those “accused” of being trans.

As many have noted, right-wing extremists who like to accuse others of grooming children are proposing to subject minors to genital inspections at the mere accusation of being transgender.

This is obviously incredibly dangerous, unconstitutional, and flooring in how glaringly stupid and poorly thought out it is.

Nevertheless, the bill was amended into other legislation and passed by the Ohio House 55-28 late Wednesday evening last week, on the first day of Pride Month.

Only one transgender high school athlete who would be impacted by the law is currently registered in Ohio with the state high school athletic association. The association already has a policy in place and opposed the bill as unnecessary.

So one transgender high school athlete in Ohio — one person out of roughly 400,000 young athletes — is being targeted and bullied out of high school sports by Ohio House Republicans.

Now, Republican Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman says his chamber will take up its own trans sports ban proposal that includes that same genital inspection language in lame-duck session after November’s election.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

Nevertheless, that’s what we’re seeing from many Ohio Republican Statehouse politicians confronted with the possibility they may have to finally actually compete in competitive elections.

The childish temper tantrum being thrown by Ohio politicians upset they’ve been stopped from cheating their way into reelection with rigged districts is sadly completely unsurprising.

This is what happens when people who never face accountability are actually held accountable.

Just because the Ohio Supreme Court won’t let them get away with cheating, the politicians who keep trying to cheat don’t get to complain now about election calendar disruptions when they could’ve just acted constitutionally from the beginning.

First, we need to go over the history. Ohio Republicans have controlled redistricting since the 1990’s, and since the 1990’s they’ve stacked the deck in their favor, more egregiously with each passing decade. In 2015, more than 71% of voters amended the Ohio Constitution to snuff out gerrymandering of state House and Senate districts, and nearly 75% did so again for U.S. Congressional districts in 2018.

Instead, this fall, Ohio Republicans gave voters more supermajority gerrymandering of the Ohio House, more supermajority gerrymandering of the Ohio Senate, and absurdly disproportionate continued gerrymandering of Ohio’s U.S. Congressional districts.

Maps were proposed to the commission that actually represent the 54-46 Republican to Democratic political split of Ohioans, as averaged over 16 partisan statewide elections, directly mirroring the 1.9 million to 1.6 million Republican to Democratic registered voter split of Ohioans.

GOP leaders instead awarded themselves more supermajorities, with a House breakdown of 62 seats to 37 Dems, and 23 to 10 in the Senate, according to their own figures. Dave’s Redistricting App projected a 65-seat GOP supermajority in the House. Meanwhile, Republicans in the state legislature passed a congressional map along party lines that awarded themselves a 11-2 GOP-to-Democratic map with two potential toss-ups.

The Ohio Supreme Court declared these efforts unconstitutional gerrymanders and ordered them to be redrawn.

The Ohio Redistricting Commission returned to work this winter and produced a second map, based on their original gerrymandered map, and once again it passed along partisan lines, this time with Republicans giving themselves a 57 GOP to 42 Dem split in the Ohio House, and a 20 GOP to 13 Dem breakdown in the Senate.

In the House, 12 of the “Democratic leaning” seats in the GOP plan were tossups, with a Dem favor of only 50-51%. All of the GOP-leaning seats favored Republicans by more than 52%.

On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down this second attempt as well.

“The (Ohio Redistricting Commission’s) choice to avoid a more proportional plan for no explicable reason points unavoidably toward an intent to favor the Republican Party,” the 4-3 majority wrote in its ruling.

This is when the childish hysterics began.

Even though the deciding vote came from Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, GOP politicians whined of a “liberal” court, not standing up against gerrymandering, but somehow trying to enforce Democratic gerrymandering.

That might be a line that sells to unthinking rubes, but anybody paying attention knows that at no point did either Democrats or anti-gerrymandering advocates offer a map that would give Democrats a majority in either chamber of the General Assembly or U.S. Congressional districts.

In fact, all maps offered by Democrats and independent groups preserved the GOP’s majority, and the court itself cited the same 54/46 partisan split of Ohioans statewide election results bear out.

The infantile GOP response to the court can be summed up thusly: How dare you hold us accountable for trying to cheat. By not letting us cheat, you’re gerrymandering yourselves!

Fair, competitive maps are not gerrymandering. Acting in bad faith to produce imbalanced maps that maximize every advantage possible for your party and maximize every disadvantage possible for the opposition party, that’s gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering pushes politicians to extremes, denies voters their voice, opens the door to corruption, radicalizes political discourse, kills compromise, and disintegrates democracy. Gerrymandering poisons everything.

Politicians who would gerrymander themselves to victory in rigged districts are not acting in good faith. They’re afraid of competing on a level playing field in a general election. Why? I don’t know.

Maybe they’re more comfortable appealing to their rabid base than they are to the broad general electorate that actually comprises all Ohioans and all of their constituents.

Maybe they’re more comfortable knowing they can get away with doing whatever they want without ever facing any accountability because their primary voters will just keep returning them to positions of public trust no matter what corruption goes down on their watch.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter because Chief Justice O’Connor has stood up for the American Republic despite them. And of course, now she’s facing calls for her impeachment because of it.

Vying to replace her, as she is prevented by age from running for reelection, is Supreme Court Justice Sharon Kennedy who dissented in the rulings and would’ve allowed GOP politicians to cheat voters every four years ad infinitum.

Elections really do have consequences, and this whole spectacle in many ways is Ohio’s last stand for fair elections.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

IN OTHER NEWS: ‘This story is fairly shocking’: WaPo reporter breaks down latest 'bonkers' reports on Trump's final days as president

‘This story is fairly shocking’: WaPo reporter breaks down latest 'bonkers' reports on Trumpwww.youtube.com

Statehouse Republicans introduced a newly drawn map for Ohio's districts in U.S. Congress Monday night that maintains a firm GOP majority.

While amendments are possible, the map is poised to pass out of a Senate committee Tuesday with a full Senate session to follow, and House sessions planned for Wednesday and Thursday.

Data behind the map were not made available Monday evening for full analysis, but it appears to show two safely Democratic seats based in Cleveland and Columbus and a majority of others being solidly Republican or leaning Republican and one district that could be a toss-up.

That district is one of three splitting Cuyahoga County, including the southwestern portions of it in a district with all of Medina County and Akron in Summit County.

Hamilton County is also split into three districts, with all of Republican Warren County connected to the city of Cincinnati and an eastern portion of the county included in a district that stretches east out to Meigs County. The map also takes a chunk out of central Hamilton County for a district that stretches along the western Ohio border from Butler up to Darke County.

While the center of Franklin County in the map would be a safely Democratic seat, outlying areas in a C-shape along the northern, western, and southern portion would be included in a Republican-leaning district that stretches westward to Clark County and southward to include Clinton, Fayette and parts of Ross County.

The map combines Montgomery County with Greene County and the central part of Clark, creates a district that stretches from Trumbull and Mahoning counties down along the Ohio River on the eastern border to Washington County, and puts Toledo and Lucas County in with Defiance, Williams, Henry, Fulton, Ottawa, Sandusky and Erie counties.

Statehouse Republicans claim the map presents seven competitive districts and noted that it keeps seven of eight of Ohio's largest cities whole while dividing only 12 counties.

On Twitter, a number of Statehouse Democrats panned the proposal.

Without bipartisan support, Republican legislators could vote through four-year maps. Any maps will have to be approved by Gov. Mike DeWine. If four-year maps go through, court challenges are likely.

State legislative maps passed in September by the Ohio Redistricting Commission are currently before the Ohio Supreme Court after three lawsuits were filed against them. The court has four Republicans and three Democrats. Republican Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor ruled against Ohio's current maps in 2012, and is considered a possible swing vote.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.