Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal

It might seem like ancient history in Ohio. But it was only two years ago that Republican leaders were trying to make it almost impossible for voters in the highly gerrymandered state to amend the Ohio Constitution.

They issued dire warnings that wealthy “out-of-state special interests” would take control of the Ohio government if the state didn’t make it a lot harder to get amendments, such as those guaranteeing abortion and marijuana rights, into the founding document. The attempt went down in flames, and possibly down the memory hole.

Just two years later, Republican supermajorities in the Ohio legislature passed — and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed — a budget that gives the out-of-state billionaires who own the poorly run Cleveland Browns $600 million for a new stadium.

The budget DeWine signed on June 30 gives the Haslam Sports Group $600 million from the state’s unclaimed property fund. It pays the Browns owners to abandon their current downtown location and build a new stadium 16 miles away in Brook Park.

Famously burned once by a wealthy owner abandoning the city, Cleveland’s city government is in court fighting the move. And Ohioans with unclaimed property are suing to block the funding method DeWine approved.

Republican officials face a backlash over lavishing money on a team run so ineptly that in 2022 it guaranteed $230 million and traded three first-round draft picks to obtain DeShaun Watson — a quarterback facing numerous accusations of sexual misconduct. Watson served an 11-game suspension with the Browns, and when he finally did take the field, he sucked.

Last year, the team performed abysmally, winning just three games. And its owners, Dee and Jimmy Haslam, seem not to be doing their Republican benefactors any favors with the public.

Just three days after after receiving their controversial $600 million gift from the state, the Haslams bought a $25 million mansion in North Palm Beach, Fla., the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer on Monday reported that it truly is a gift that the Tennessee truck-stop moguls are getting. The family — which is worth an estimated $14.4 billion — doesn’t have to repay a dime of the money it will receive from Ohio’s unclaimed funds, the paper reported.

Haslam Sports Group didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The gift to the Tennessee billionaires came as part of an Ohio budget that is seen as generally favoring the wealthy in a state where more than a quarter of the populace — 3 million people — are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

DeWine’s press secretary was asked about the message the Haslams sent with their purchase of a 5,600 square-foot mansion just 72 hours after receiving a $600 million gift from the taxpayers of Ohio. Had the governor effectively allowed out-of-state billionaires to use Ohioans’ money to buy a waterfront palace 1,000 miles from the nearest point in the state?

“We will not be offering comment on this,” Dan Tierney, DeWine’s press secretary, responded. “As you know, this issue is in active litigation.”

Just two years ago, Republican leaders were saying that Ohio’s government needed to be protected from such powerful, out-of-state interests.

They were pushing an amendment to the state constitution that would have raised the minimum share of votes to pass future amendments from 50% to 60% — a huge additional burden. It would also have raised the signature-gathering requirements just to get an amendment on the ballot so high as to make it all but impossible, critics said.

The proposed amendment contained a provision that sounded technical, but was logistically daunting. Instead of having to gather verified signatures of 5% or registered voters in half of Ohio counties, they would have had to gather them in all 88, no matter how remote and spread out their populations were.

Making voter-initiated amendments virtually impossible would have concentrated even more power in the hands of Ohio’s gerrymandered legislature, which would have been able to pass laws and initiate amendments the way it always had.

Critics said that would only make a bad thing worse. In recent years, the gerrymandered body has had an impressive track record when it comes to corruption, some of it the centerpiece of a major new HBO documentary about the corrupting influence of dark money on American politics.

Undeterred, Republican leaders called a special election for August 2023 in which the public would vote on a measure that would effectively lock them out of the state constitution.

Abortion-rights and marijuana-legalization amendments were likely to be on the November ballot. But Secretary of State Frank LaRose claimed the August measure wasn’t aimed at blocking them.

“This is about empowering the people of Ohio to protect their constitution from out-of-state special interests that want to try to buy their way into our state’s founding document,” he said in July 2023.

LaRose’s office didn’t respond when asked whether the secretary had any objection to giving the Haslams — out-of-state-billionaires — $600 million in public money just as they bought a Florida mansion.

As it happened, campaigns on both sides of the amendment issue were mostly funded by out-of-state sources.

The effort to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution failed by a 14-point margin. The abortion-rights and recreational-marijuana amendments passed by similar margins three months later.

The Haslams were hoping for a different outcome. In June 2023, the Knoxville, Tenn., family gave $50,000 to Protect Our Constitution, according to records at the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. That was a group aimed at making citizen-led amendments much more difficult, if not impossible.

The Haslams were also among the biggest contributors to a separate effort aimed at keeping the current crop of Ohio Republicans in power, regardless of what voters want.

Highly gerrymandered Republican supermajorities in the General Assembly have been accused of ignoring voters’ wishes. For example in 2019, they passed harsh abortion restrictions that took effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. The following year, Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment outlawing the restrictions by nearly a 15-point margin.

There are two anti-gerrymandering amendments in the Ohio Constitution. But, refusing to give up their gerrymandered supermajorities, DeWine, LaRose and other Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored seven orders from a bipartisan majority of the Ohio Supreme Court to draw more equitable maps.

The idea behind such amendments is to draw congressional and state legislative districts that are competitive. That way, candidates have to listen to voters at least as much as they do party leaders and their wealthy donors.

After she aged off of the court last year, former Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor led an effort to pass an anti-gerrymandering amendment that she said couldn’t be ignored.

The Haslams were against it. They contributed $100,000 to Ohio Works, a group dedicated to stopping O’Connor’s anti-gerrymandering effort.

Their side won by seven percentage points on a night when Republican Donald Trump won Ohio by 11. Anti-gerrymandering advocates were sent back to the drawing board.

Then, perhaps not coincidentally, the Haslams contributed $120,000 to Ohio’s Republican legislative leaders in the months before they voted to give the out-of-state billionaires a $600 million gift of the state’s money.

The office of Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted has deleted a social media post after being asked about the message it sent. The post on X claimed that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a “pro-family” bill” for “working class families.”

The law will take health insurance and food support away from thousands of low-income, working Ohioans. The post touting it pictured Husted laughing it up with two men who appear to be prominent special-interest lobbyists.

Husted’s office hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Gov. Mike DeWine earlier this year appointed Husted — who was then lieutenant governor — to fill the Senate seat vacated by JD Vance when Vance became Trump’s vice president.

Husted, who will run next year in a special election, has since supported Trump’s appointments and his legislative agenda.

That includes Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a controversial piece of legislation that squeaked through with Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, and Vance casting a tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate.

On Thursday in a 9:10 a.m. post on X, Husted lauded the bill and attacked Democrats who opposed it.

“Democrats want this president to fail,” it said. “And, if that means Americans fail, too, Democrats are OK with that. That’s not acceptable. Republicans just led by passing a pro-family, pro-business, pro-growth, pro-America bill for working-class families.”

One of the reasons that the bill is so controversial is that it provides giant tax cuts that will increase deficits by $3.8 trillion, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation reports.

Husted’s office didn’t respond when asked whether he agreed with that estimate and to explain how ballooning the national debt was pro-business, pro-America, or pro-growth.

Of the tax cuts in the bill, $1 trillion will go to the richest 1% of Americans over the next decade, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Meanwhile, it will cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

In sum, the Yale Budget Lab concluded, the bill will give the richest 1% — about 3 million Americans — $30,000 more a year on average. Meanwhile, the poorest 20% — 68 million Americans — will get $700 less, the analysis said.

The legislation delayed the deepest pain from the cuts until the beginning of 2027 — just after the 2026 midterm elections in which Husted must run.

Ohio food bank officials said that when the food cuts take effect, they’ll be overwhelmed.

And emergency doctors say the Medicaid cuts will explode wait times and degrade care for all Ohioans. That’s because the cuts threaten to take health coverage away from hundreds of thousands of Ohioans and swamp providers with patients who can’t pay.

Husted’s office also didn’t respond to questions asking how those policies are pro-family or good for the working class.

And it took down the post on X after being asked by the Capital Journal about the men Husted was pictured with in it.

They weren’t identified in the post, but one appears to be Tom Balzer, CEO of the Ohio Trucking Association. His web bio boasts “significant legislative wins. Including a 1,400% increase in assets, greater transparency and membership engagement, increased donations to the Political Action Committee and a heightened presence in Ohio politics.”

He’s listed as an agent for the Trucking Association and the Ohio Chapter of International Warehouse and Logistics Association on a database maintained by the Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee.

The other man pictured laughing with Husted appears to be Victor Hipsley of the Governmental Policy Group. He’s registered as lobbying for dozens of special interests, including the Ohio Coal Association, Koch Government Affairs, and Duke Energy Business Services.

Neither lobbyist responded when asked whether they agreed with Husted’s support for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

A raft of proposals coming from Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. and Columbus will slash health care and other vital programs for the poor in rural Ohio and in its cities, recent analyses say.

An advocacy group is trying to pressure the state’s Republican U.S. senators to vote against it.

Republican lawmakers in D.C. and Columbus are hashing out budgets. As they do, they’re looking for ways to cut spending to finance tax cuts weighted heavily toward the wealthy.

The reconciliation bill — President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would cut taxes by more than $3 trillion and give 70% of the money to the richest 10% according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

At the state level, Policy Matters Ohio said that a flat-tax proposal passed by the Ohio Senate would cost the state $1.1 billion a year and give 96% of the benefit to the state’s top 20% of income earners.

Some Republicans at both levels also have plans to make deep cuts to the social safety net.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute last week published an issue brief saying that cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplace would result in a $1 trillion loss in health spending for poor and working people. Ohio alone would lose $31 billion as part of that, the analysis said.

The Medicaid cuts would cost Ohio’s hospitals $9.5 billion — and they’d have to shoulder more uncompensated care as more Ohioans would become uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would create 16 million more uninsured Americans by 2034.

Study: Ohio among hardest hit if Congress, Trump cut Medicaid

“The Medicaid cuts Congress is considering would be the largest funding reduction in the program’s history, and it is hard to overstate just how devastating the impacts would be,” Katherine Hempstead of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation said in a written statement. “Such drastic changes to Medicaid financing would have ripple effects that go well beyond people covered by the program, further squeezing hospitals, limiting access to care for entire communities, and destabilizing state and local economies.”

Significant federal funding cuts to Medicaid would be particularly hard on Ohioans. Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed budget has a provision that would end the state’s 11-year-old Medicaid expansion. That would cost 770,000 Ohioans — most of whom are working — their health coverage.

The analysis is particularly striking because Ohio is Vice President JD Vance's home town, and he shot to fame after writing "Hillbilly Elegy," a memoir of his upbringing in a poor Appalachian community.

The Commonwealth Fund in May said the Buckeye State would be one of the five hardest hit by the proposed cuts. And they would come at a critical time, the organization said in a report released Wednesday.

Ohio ranked 30th overall for health system performance. It scored particularly badly in terms of infant mortality, preventable hospitalizations, and mortality disparities between Black and other Ohioans.

Not only would Republican spending proposals slash health funding for lower-income Americans, it would decimate food assistance for the poorest.

“The House-passed Republican reconciliation plan would cut nearly $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through 2034, based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates — by far the largest cut to SNAP in history,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote in May.

“As a result of these cuts and other policies in the legislation — which are being used to pay partly for trillions in tax cuts skewed to the wealthy — millions of people would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries, when many low-income households are struggling to afford the high cost of food and other basic needs.”

If those proposed cuts become reality, Ohio’s foodbanks won’t able to ameliorate the hunger they create, the executive director of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks said earlier this month.

Tax cuts weighted toward the wealthiest and cuts in benefits to the most vulnerable have the group Families Over Billionaires trying to put pressure on Republican senators to vote no on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. As part of a seven-state, $5 million buy, a commercial went up in Ohio this week.

“We sent Senators (Bernie) Moreno and (Jon) Husted to Washington to lower costs,” the narrator says. “So now that they’re in charge, what are they doing about it? They’re kicking 16 million people off of health care, taking food from 18 million kids, and driving costs through the roof for 80 million families. All to give the super-rich a $250,000 tax cut while your costs go up. They pay less and you pay more. That’s the billionaire tax scam. Tell your senators to vote no.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 16 million would lose health coverage under the Republican plan. The Urban Institute estimates that 18.3 million children would lose food assistance. Economists widely expect Trump’s tariffs — taxes on imports — to cause significant inflation. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the 1% of wealthiest households would get an average annual tax cut of $250,000.

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — Roughly 500 gathered at Springfield City Hall Saturday to protest the administration of President Donald Trump. But even though Trump last year highlighted the city’s 15,000 residents from Haiti, many have been been scared into the shadows, protestors said.

“I really believe that most people don’t want what’s happening right now,” said Jessica Shafer, a mental health therapist who works with vulnerable children in Springfield. “I come to things like this because I think it’s incumbent on people who can to come to these things and stand up and show people it’s OK to make your voice heard.”

The rally in Springfield was one of more than 1,000 across the country that drew more than a million “No Kings” protestors against Trump on Saturday.

No Kings protests around the nation denounce Trump’s actions

Trump put Springfield’s Haitian community in the crosshairs last year when, during a presidential debate, he repeated the racist lie that the immigrants were stealing their neighbors’ pets and eating them. Then a senator from Ohio, now-Vice President J.D. Vance repeated the lie about his own constituents — even though his staff knew the allegations were untrue.

In the wake of the untruths, dozens of bomb threats were made to Springfield schools and other public buildings and its Haitian residents came in for even greater harassment.

“They’re terrified. Rightfully so,” Shafer said of her Haitian neighbors. “I can’t tell them anything. I wish I had answers, but I don’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t have any way to relieve their anxieties.”

Trump is now revoking temporary protected status for a half-million immigrants, including those from Haiti. That condemns thousands of Haitians in Springfield to return to a place where anarchy and gang violence reign, said Carl Ruby, a pastor who has many of the immigrants in his congregation.

“They go back and forth between somehow thinking it’s going to work out to being terrified,” he said. “What people need to understand about them is what they’ve already been through in Haiti. So this does not scare them as much as it scares us.”

He added, “But they are good people and they’re in danger. There are people at my church who are on lifesaving medications they can’t get in Haiti. They’ll die if they get deported. There is one person whose children are still in Haiti and the gangs beheaded a 12-year-old girl on the street that runs in front of their house. People don’t understand what they’re sending Haitians back to.”

Shafer said that the things that Trump and his allies in Congress want to do would be devastating to everybody in Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat — not just the Haitians.

About 770,000 Ohioans stand to lose health coverage under Medicaid if the U.S. House budget — Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — becomes law. Hundreds of thousands in the state are also likely to go hungry if cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in the legislation become reality.

“I know what’s going to happen if we cut Medicaid,” Shafer said. “Forty four percent of Clark County is on Medicaid. I work with youth. Seventy seven percent of Springfield’s school district rely on SNAP funds to provide free and reduced lunches. We have roughly 17,000 households that rely on SNAP benefits in our county. And they’re talking about cutting all of that.”

Sherry Schaaf, who lives in Clark County outside of Springfield, said she turned out because she thinks Trump is tearing at the foundations of democracy. For example, she said, Trump deployed the National Guard and the Marines to quell protests in Los Angeles even though the governor and the mayor didn’t want them.

“It’s treasonous,” Schaaf said. “It’s all for political theater.”

She said she felt a duty to stand publicly against such conduct.

“It is time for us to stand up against the administration and the illegal things that they are doing,” Schaaf said. “If we don’t stand up we’re going to end up like Germany did.”

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) wanted to slip a sweeping measure into a spending bill that would gut the Federal Trade Commission. Critics say it’s no coincidence that the FTC is suing mammoth health care conglomerates and tech giants like Amazon.

Jordan is chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. Last week, it released a version of a bill that included tax cuts, federal spending cuts and more spending at the border.

It also contained provisions that would give Trumpsweeping new powers to gut government regulations. It would also transfer funds and personnel currently controlled by the FTC to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department — without the FTC’s unique enforcement authority going with them.

The measure was abruptly nixed, but it would have effectively killed antitrust powers Congress created more than a century ago.

The FTC history

Amid abuses to consumers by big corporations, the Federal Trade Commission Act was passed in 1914. Antitrust enforcement by the Department of Justice dates back further, to 1903.

But the Justice Department is overseen by the attorney general, a presidential appointee. Attorneys general traditionally have had a high degree of independence, but Trump is said to be politicizing the Justice Department at a breakneck pace.

The FTC was created in part to be more independent. It’s governed by commissioners from both parties who are appointed to fixed terms that can be renewed.

Earlier this year, Trump tried to fire the two Democratic commissioners, but they say the move was illegal, and they’re fighting it in court. Antitrust advocates said Trump was doing that as a favor to his billionaire supporters such as Elon Musk.

The two Democratic commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, acted to block the Kroger-Albertson’s mega-merger, and they voted to sue Amazon, saying it is “illegally maintaining monopoly power.”

Under Jordan’s leadership, the Judiciary Committee in 2023 attacked the FTC on behalf of Musk. He’s the world’s richest man, whom Trump is allowing to make deep cuts to federal programs for the elderly, veterans, the poor, and agencies that promote science and health.

“THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: AN AGENCY’S OVERREACH TO HARASS ELON MUSK’S TWITTER,” read the all-caps title of the Jordan-led committee’s report.

A year earlier, the FTC had charged Twitter with using deceptively gathered data from users to target ads at them. If true, it would be added to the fact that an unofficial, Musk-run entity is now collecting much more sensitive government data. It’s raised concerns among several federal judges who said such collections invite abuse and likely violate the law.

“One of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency) isn’t supposed to have,” NPR reported earlier this month.

The proposal from Jordan to gut the FTC could have halted major initiatives to regulate giant health conglomerates that own powerful pharmacy middlemen, said Bedoya, one of the commissioners Trump is trying to fire.

Jordan’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story.

PBMs

Each of the three conglomerates — UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and Cigna-Express Scripts — is among the 15 largest corporations in the United States. Each owns a top-ten health insurer and each owns a pharmacy middleman known as a pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM.

Combined, the PBMs control nearly 80% of the insured drug transactions in the United States. They decide which drugs are covered and use that power to extract rebates from drugmakers. They also determine varying reimbursements to pharmacies — including ones owned by their parent companies as well as the pharmacies with which they compete. Critics — including four-fifths of state attorneys general — say they have a conflict of interest under the arrangement, and that they abuse it.

Last October, the FTC sued the conglomerates, saying they used their dominance in multiple parts of the marketplace to illegally jack up the price of insulin — a drug millions of diabetics need to survive.

The lawsuit comes after the agency in 2022 undertook a major investigation of the health conglomerates. In January, it released an interim report accusing the PBMs of using their dominance to instigate wild price hikes and possibly steer business to affiliated pharmacies.

Politico recently reported that Jordan said his move to consolidate the FTC into the Justice Department was meant to “address the cost of over-regulation.”

“Part of our jurisdiction in Judiciary deals with regulatory concerns and so we are looking at … spending and costs associated with certain regulations. That’s why that language is written the way it was,” Politico reported him as saying.

Many businesses facing regulation — and their advocates in government — have long focused only on the costs. But government regulation can also protect health, safety, the environment, economic stability and competition. Some researchers have said regulation can always be smarter, but its benefits far outweigh the costs.

In a social media post last week, Bedoya, the FTC commissioner, said Jordan’s proposed changes to the agency served another agenda.

“This will gut the FTC,” Bedoya wrote. “FTC is trying to finish a study that already showed how pharmacy middlemen mark up cancer drugs by up to 4,000%. It’s also suing them for allegedly competing to raise insulin prices. If this passes I have no idea what’ll happen to that study and lawsuit.”

Bedoya added, “Take the lawsuit. The draft bill purports to transfer FTC lawyers and lawsuits to DOJ — but it doesn’t transfer the laws that FTC enforces, or authority to enforce those laws. Look (at) page 98 — employees, assets, funding — but no authorities.”

Bedoya also said that when it created the FTC, Congress meant to augment the government’s antitrust powers. Jordan’s changes would remove the government’s ability to police “unfair methods of competition,” Bedoya said, implying that Jordan was trying to slash the government’s power to police wealthy corporations in an era when the political influence of the mega-rich is exploding and the wealth gap is yawning.

“The purpose behind the FTC’s creation in 1914 was to supplement the existing enforcement mechanism (and enforcement gap created by) the Department of Justice,” Bedoya said on X. “When FTC was created in 1914, it alone was authorized to stop something called ‘unfair methods of competition.’ DOJ did not get this” under Jordan’s proposal.

At least 47 protests of President Donald Trump and his administration are planned in Ohio for on Saturday. They’ll be part of more than 600 events planned nationwide.

The group 50501 is organizing the effort after joining dozens of others in sponsoring massive “Hands Off!” rallies across the country on April 5. It says its mission is to “fight to uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach.”

Since his inauguration, Trump has raised numerous concerns in that regard. He’s ignored court orders, tried to gut the independent federal antitrust watchdog, empowered the world’s richest man to fire tens of thousands from the Social Security and Veterans administrations, the Park Service, and numerous other agencies.

Trump also is trying to unilaterally alter the status of hundreds of thousands of migrants who are legally in the country and force them back to hazardous homelands such as Afghanistan and Haiti. In addition, Trump is trying to use the government to attack law firms that have sued him and his enemies, and go after a state attorney general who successfully sued him in 2023.

Melissa Portala, a leader of Toledo Persist, said that it’s vital for people to exercise their right to protest to protect all their other democratic rights.

“We need people to stand up and show the rest of the public that people are speaking out,” she said. “If they don’t see that, then they feel helpless, and a lot of people do feel helpless until they see other people speaking out… Public protest is the only way that people have to be visible. This is how we can have our voices heard.”

On April 5, millions turned out across the country to protest the actions of Trump and his administration — including tens of thousands across Ohio. In Toledo alone, between 3,000 and 4,000 showed up, according to the estimates of organizers who used clickers, Portala said.

“We started on one side of a bridge,” she said. “It took 45 minutes to walk across it, the crowd was so big.”

Portala said she expected smaller crowds this time around for several reasons.

The group 50501 is the sole national organizer, while dozens of groups were behind the April 5 protests. This one was called with less lead time for local organizers to plan and get the word out. And this Saturday’s protests fall the day before Easter, when many have longstanding family obligations, Portala said.

Details about the 47 Ohio protests can be found here. A national listing can be found here.

Portala said she expects participation in such events to grow in the coming months.

“I think the population is waking up and saying, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re in some deep trouble here, we need to actually take some action,'” she said.

With Republicans pushing a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, new research shows that huge numbers in Ohio and elsewhere lack ready access to such documents.

As with his GOP colleagues in other states, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has failed to show that noncitizen voting is a significant problem in the Buckeye State. Even so, he last year started requiring naturalized citizens to show proof of citizenship when challenged at the polls.

Now national Republicans are poised to go much further.

Next week, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Save American Voter Eligibility (or SAVE) Act. Among its provisions is a requirement that people produce proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

As in Ohio, national Republicans haven’t produced any evidence that noncitizen voting is a substantial problem.

There are severe penalties for noncitizen voting, and they seem to be an effective deterrent. A Brennan Center for Justice study of the 2016 election found noncitizen voting occurred at the vanishingly small rate of 0.0001%.

That’s one-fifth the rate of fraud of all types that LaRose found in the 2020 election — 0.0005%. But those infinitesimal numbers haven’t stopped him from conducting massive voter purges, limiting drop boxes, and otherwise making it harder to vote.

If Republicans are successful in creating a national requirement to prove citizenship, much larger numbers of legitimate voters could be affected. The University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement this week produced an analysis using surveys conducted last year and in 2023.

The analysis said that laws “such as the proposed federal SAVE Act or the numerous proof-of-citizenship bills pending in state legislatures, apply not only to new registrants but also to those already registered to vote if their citizenship status is questioned. Voters who move or wish to update their party preference would also need to re-register and be subject to the (proof-of-citizenship) requirement.”

The numbers affected could be huge.

According to the national survey that was conducted in 2023, more than 9% of voting-age citizens — 21.3 million — lacked ready access to documents that would prove their citizenship. Nearly 2% — 2.8 million — lacked any documents at all.

In Ohio, there are about 9.8 million voting age people, of whom 8.2 million are registered.

The number of registered voters would likely take a big dip if the proof-of-citizenship bill passes. Nearly 900,000 voting-age Ohioans lack ready access to citizenship documents and nearly 200,000 lack them altogether — if the numbers found in the national survey apply here.

The researchers conducted two other surveys, in Texas and Georgia, and found that the political consequences might vary according to where you are.

“More Democrats reported lacking access to (citizenship documents) in our national survey; however, our state-level results suggest that the political impact may vary state by state,” the report said. “In our Texas survey, we found more Republicans than Democrats reported not currently having (proof of citizenship) at all or not being able to easily access (citizenship documents.) In our Georgia study, we found roughly even numbers of Democrats and Republicans were impacted.”

However, all surveys found that younger voters were less likely to have ready access to citizenship papers, and the national and Georgia surveys found that independents were less likely to have it. The Texas survey didn’t address independents.

The biggest upshot is that huge numbers would be inconvenienced or disenfranchised to address a problem that the legislation’s supporters cannot show exists. The report noted that in Georgia, an audit found just nine instances of noncitizen voting in a state with 8.2 million registered voters.

“This means that legislation like the SAVE Act that requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote could burden or disenfranchise nearly 85,000 Georgia citizens for every instance of non-citizen voting observed by the Secretary of State,” the report said. “This extraordinarily low rate of accuracy suggests that policy makers and the public may want to explore more accurate policy approaches that prevent these extremely rare cases of non-citizen voting rather than pursuing blanket policies that inaccurately burden or disenfranchise tens of thousands of eligible voters for every instance of non-citizen voting.”

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.

When it comes to talking about immigrants, the word “invasion” is both explosive and inaccurate, experts and human rights advocates say. Yet with Donald Trump back in the White House, it’s showing up on official orders and other communications — and it’s being echoed by Ohio politicians.

Just in the waning weeks of January, Trump issued two executive orders using the language — “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

On Thursday, more than 80 civil and human rights organizations sent a letter to congressional leaders calling on them to reject what the groups said was a “false and bigoted conspiracy theory.”

As at times past, numbers of migrants spiked at the U.S.-Mexico border at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and severely strained resources. That led certain politicians on the right — including Trump, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and now-Ohio U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — to claim it was an invasion even though migrants weren’t driving tanks, carrying machine guns, or even functioning as an organized group. They don’t even commit crime at rates as high as native-born Americans

“Immigration policy is an important topic that demands congressional discussion and debate,” the groups’ letter to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders said. “We implore Senate and House leadership not to support or fund efforts that are led by a fictional and dangerous conspiracy theory purporting an ‘invasion.’ Congress should not provide the justification for continued attacks on our democracy.”

In Texas, Abbott has tried to portray what has happened at the border as a military invasion as he seeks to take border-security responsibilities into his own hands. Such powers have traditionally been reserved for the federal government because it would create chaos if each of the 50 states was in charge of its own policy and security when it came to dealing with foreign countries.

Also, the places along the border that Abbott claimed were the site of a military invasion are among the safest communities in the country. So, even when immigrants showed up in large numbers, that didn’t amount to the military invasion Abbott claimed in an attempt to get around federal primacy, a judge ruled last year.

“Contemporary definitions of ‘invasion’ and ‘actually invaded’ as well as common usage of the term in the late Eighteenth Century predominantly referred to an ‘invasion’ as a hostile and organized military force, too powerful to be dealt with by ordinary judicial proceedings,” U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra wrote last year as he blocked Abbott. “This Court could not locate a single contemporaneous use of the term to refer to surges in unauthorized foreign immigration.”

After briefly lifting it, the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year upheld Ezra’s stay and is scheduled to hear Texas’s appeal in July.

Meanwhile, many experts have said false claims of invasion have prompted murderous rampages against vulnerable communities. For example, Patrick Crusius in 2019 drove from Dallas to El Paso, posted a manifesto saying he was stopping an “invasion” at the border and went to a Walmart. There he used an AK-47 to murder 23 and injured 22 more.

Some experts say the fact that such false, incendiary rhetoric can be deadly isn’t just incidental, it’s part of the point. It scares immigrants and others from standing up to those who use it, and that serves the political ends of those who use such rhetoric, those experts say.

Not to fight false claims that we’re being invaded undermines democracy, a program director at one of the groups that signed the letter to congressional leaders said in a statement.

“Depicting migrants and refugees as an ‘invasion’ is not only a dangerous and bigoted attempt to fearmonger, it is now the basis of an authoritarian power grab,” said Liz Yates of the Western States Center.

In their letter, all the groups said the harm will only spread unless those in power stand against claims of an “invasion.”

“This bigoted narrative has already been leveraged to promote policies that have and will continue to have a devastating impact on immigrant communities,” the letter said. “It has also inspired a pattern of white nationalist and antisemitic deadly attacks across the nation. Use of this bigoted conspiracy theory as justification for a policy agenda poses a public safety risk not only to the immigrant communities who are targeted for policy enforcement, but also to Jewish, Black, Brown, Muslim, LGBTQ+, AANHPI, Latinx and many other communities who are implicated in this conspiratorial rhetoric. It also constitutes a direct threat to our democracy.” Congress must refuse to further legitimize this bigotry by sanctioning or funding policies in its name.”

President Donald Trump comes into office vowing to ease environmental regulations on the utility industry. Now companies that own coal-burning plants in Ohio are asking the new administration to excuse them from cleaning up acres of toxic waste that is soaked in groundwater.

They include the owners of what has been called the nation’s deadliest coal plant and a consortium that has gotten hundreds of millions from Ohio ratepayers as a consequence of the biggest political bribery scandal in state history.

A photo of the coal ash pond at the James Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio included in documents to the EPA.

Gavin Power and the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation on Jan. 15 joined eight other utilities in asking Lee Zeldin, now the commissioner of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for broad exemptions from cleanup rules. Among them are requirements that they protect groundwater from coal ash — a byproduct that contains toxins such as arsenic, mercury, lead and even radioactive isotopes.

The EPA in 2015 implemented a rule requiring that utilities make sure such poisons can’t seep out of their coal ash impoundments and into the surrounding water supply. The utilities asking that it be repealed have declared it to be ineffective — and they say they can’t afford to comply with it.

“Recent changes made by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) to air, water, and waste regulations have resulted in significant burdens on the nation’s power sector without tangible benefits,” the utilities’ letter to Zeldin said. “These regulations, individually and collectively, threaten the reliability of the power grid, jeopardize national security, are a drag on economic growth, increase inflation, and hinder the expansion of electric power generation to support the critical development and deployment of artificial intelligence and related technologies.”

The companies didn’t furnish any evidence in their letter to support their claims, but Gavin Kearney, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said they might get a sympathetic hearing from the new administration — even though the coal ash rule is rooted in the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

“We have a lot of concern about what EPA might do, ” he said in an interview Monday. “What’s in the letter is consistent with Trump’s executive orders. They put a premium on what they call ‘permitting efficiency.’ They talk about prioritizing certainty and efficiency over all other considerations. I think there’s a risk that we’re going to sacrifice people’s health for business interests.”

An industry group representing the utilities, the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In their letter to the EPA, the companies said they meet all “federal environmental laws protecting human health and our nation’s clean air and clean water.”

But one, Gavin Power, is said to be the deadliest coal plant in the United States. Modeling wind patterns, a 2023 analysis by the Sierra Club estimated that the plume emitted by the plant’s smokestacks travels to the east and kills 244 people a year.

The plant, located along the Ohio River near Cheshire, also has a 300-acre coal ash impoundment containing 8.2 million cubic yards of the partially toxic stuff.

In other places, such impoundments have failed with disastrous results. The ash is so toxic that more than 50 workers who didn’t have proper protective equipment died after cleaning up a massive 2008 spill at the Kingston Fossil Plant, the Tennessee Lookout reported. Another 150 were sickened.

Gavin, the Earthjustice lawyer, said that while the impoundment at the Gavin Plant has held fast since it was created in 1974, it is intermixing with groundwater that flows into surrounding wells and into the Ohio River. From there water flows downstream and many communities draw drinking water from it.

In court already, Gavin said, the utilities have tried to evade complying with the EPA rule by using a counterintuitive argument — that groundwater doesn’t count as a fluid.

“They’re basically trying to get EPA to reinterpret the 2015 rule, which the (U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia Circuit) has already said you can’t have your coal ash sitting in groundwater for the obvious reason that the toxic chemicals in coal ash leach into groundwater,” he said. “They get into drinking water, surface water, etc.”

Also seeking to get out of complying with the rule is a group of utilities that operate two aging coal plants that have received huge subsidies as a consequence of the biggest money laundering scandal in Ohio history.

Former House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for his involvement in a 2019 scheme in which Akron-based FirstEnergy paid $61 million in bribes to secure a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants in Northern Ohio.

To attract the support of other Ohio utilities, the law, House Bill 6, also subsidized coal plants that several own jointly as part of the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation, or OVEC.

Despite its benighted history, the coal subsidies in HB 6 remain on the books and Ohio ratepayers so far have subsidized the OVEC plants to the tune of $430 million.

While Ohio ratepayers have been made to subsidize the plants as a consequence of Statehouse corruption, one of the coal plants OVEC owns — Clifty Creek — is in Indiana. Gavin, of Earthjustice, said OVEC has argued that groundwater doesn’t count as a liquid to avoid having to line coal-ash impoundments at that facility.

Are the utilities, in their Jan. 15 letter to the EPA, trying to stick taxpayers with the bill to clean up messes they made and profited from?

“That’s exactly what’s going on here,” Gavin said. “When Gavin Power closed the impoundments — they’re not putting coal ash in it today — they essentially threw a cover over it, said, ‘All right, we closed it and the cover keeps rainwater from getting in and that was all the EPA was talking about when it said ‘liquids.””

He added, “So this whole absurd effort to define liquids as not including groundwater is essentially to prevent them from having to either excavate the coal ash and get it out of the groundwater, or figure out some other measure by which they can prevent groundwater from flowing in and out of the coal ash forever, basically. The motivation is to avoid the cost or accountability for decades of polluting groundwater.”

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday released an interim report saying that powerful drug middlemen marked up drugs for cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other serious maladies far over the going rate — as much as a thousand percent over the going rate in 22% of instances.

The upcharges provided $7.3 billion in additional revenue between 2017 and 2022 to pharmacies owned by the same companies, the report said. Meanwhile, the middlemen usually paid competitor pharmacies less for dispensing the same drugs, it added.

Over that period, costs to commercial plans for the same class of drugs grew by 21%. For Medicare Part D plans, they grew between 14% and 15%, the report said.

The findings are part of an investigation into pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, that was undertaken by the FTC in 2022. Tuesday’s was the second interim report issued in the probe. One issued last July said PBM practices appeared to be raising prices and hurting patients.

The latest interim report looked at the prices of “generic specialty drugs.” The middlemen decide how to categorize drugs, but typically, those are drugs used to treat complex conditions such as cancer, but are not under patent. Specialty drugs of all types tend to be a lot more expensive than other medications.

“FTC staff have found that the big-three PBMs are charging enormous markups on dozens of lifesaving drugs,” Hannah Garden-Monheit, the director of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning, said in a statement. “We also found that this problem is growing at an alarming rate, which means there is an urgent need for policymakers to address it.”

The report was made public just as the FTC met on Tuesday. During the public comment section of the meeting, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a PBM industry group, said he was concerned about how it was done.

“It is rare for the FTC to release an interim… report, and it is unheard of for the FTC to release a second interim report,” the spokesman, Austin Ownbey, said. The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association “is concerned that the second interim report will suffer from the same shortcomings as the first interim report. PCMA has significant concerns that a second interim report regarding specialty drugs is unlikely to be anything other than a piece of advocacy without substantiating evidence.”

The biggest middlemen — CVS Caremark, OptumRx and Express Scripts — are part of huge health conglomerates that also own insurers, pharmacies and providers such as doctors offices.

Their PBMs facilitate drug transactions by negotiating prices with drugmakers, creating pharmacy networks, determining reimbursements and reconciling claims. They work on behalf of insurers — including ones owned by the same corporations — and together, the big-three PBMs control access to nearly 80% of insured patients.

The PBMs say they use that clout to achieve savings for insurers and clients.

“PBMs are the only entities in the supply chain dedicated to lowering the cost of prescription drugs,” Ownbey said.

However, industry critics say the big PBMs use their size and a lack of transparency to extract huge, cost-increasing rebates and fees from drugmakers, and to force pharmacies into contracts on such bad terms that droves are fleeing the business.

In its latest report, the FTC said the PBMs’ parent companies are using the fact that they play a big role in multiple phases of drug transactions to advantage themselves.

The PBMs decide which drugs are covered and which will have the smallest copayments, so patients have a great incentive to buy whichever medicines the PBMs prefer, wherever PBMs want people to buy them.

As part of their “vertical integration,” the big PBMs each own a mail-order specialty pharmacy. The big PBMs often require patients to get expensive specialty drugs at their affiliated mail-order pharmacies if they want to get the lowest copayment. Ownbey said such pharmacies provide better service.

“High-cost medications are often misused or under-utilized without PBM and specialty pharmacy management programs, support systems and monitoring tools,” he said.

But many oncologists and pharmacists say mail-order pharmacies are too unwieldy and error-prone to be a good alternative — especially for complex conditions such as cancer.

For example, Elvin Weir in 2018 told The Columbus Dispatch of weeks-long waits to get his cancer drugs from the mail-order specialty pharmacy he was forced to use. He later died.

“Nobody’s really asking for mandatory mail-order pharmacy,” Chris Hobart, a independent pharmacist in Texas, said during the public comment part of Tuesday’s FTC hearing.

Regardless of whether PBMs’ affiliated mail-order pharmacies provide better or worse care, the FTC’s interim report found that when it came to generic specialty drugs, they’re bringing home big bucks for their parent companies.

Among the findings:

Between 2020 and 2022, the big PBMs’ affiliated pharmacies marked up 63% of the specialty generics they dispensed 100% or more over National Average Drug Acquisition Cost. Twenty two percent were marked up 1,000% or more.The big PBMs “almost always” reimbursed their affiliated pharmacies at higher rates than their competitors, the report said. The disparity was greater in cases where commercial insurance was involved than when Medicare Part D was the payer.Between 2020 and 2022, PBM-affiliated pharmacies dispensed 72% of all drugs marked up by $1,000 or more, while they dispensed just 44% of all generic specialty drugs during that period. “Dispensing patterns suggest that the Big 3 PBMs may be steering highly profitable prescriptions to their own affiliated pharmacies (and away from unaffiliated pharmacies),” the report said.The big three PBMs generated an additional $1.4 billion by charging more for drugs than they paid the pharmacies that dispensed them. Such “spread” pricing ignited a furor in Ohio in 2018, when it was revealed that CVS Caremark and OptumRx billed the state Medicaid system $224 million more for drugs than it paid pharmacies the previous year.Dispensing marked-up drugs from affiliated pharmacies is a key business for their parent companies: UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and Cigna-Express Scripts. Each of those companies are among the 20 largest in the country and sales from their mail-order pharmacies account for a whopping 12% of their operating profit, the FTC report said.

Douglas Hoey of the National Community Pharmacists Association said employers especially should take note of the FTC’s findings.

“This exploitative behavior is bad for taxpayers who subsidize Medicare prescription coverage, but the FTC report found that commercial employers are getting hosed even worse,” he said in a statement. “It’s no wonder employees are questioning why their employers are listening to insurance brokers who often recommend one of the giant PBMs.”

Environmental activists have been pressing the company buying an Ohio coal plant said to be the nation’s deadliest to retire the facility. But that seems unlikely, given statements it made in a regulatory filing that it provided to the Ohio Capital Journal.

The buyer, Energy Capital Partners, has boasted of helping plants make the transition away from coal. It hasn’t answered questions about its plans for Gavin, but in a Dec. 11 filing before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it expressed no such plans for the Gavin Plant.

“As with any electric generation facility, (Energy Capital Partners) and Javelin expect that the Gavin facility… will continue to operate for so long as they are legally able to do so on an economic basis,” it said.

Energy Capital Partners, or ECP, and Javelin are private-equity firms that are in the process of buying the 50-year-old plant from another private-equity firm, Blackstone. The 2,600 megawatt plant along the Ohio River near Cheshire has stirred controversy for years.

To settle lawsuits in 2002, a former owner, American Electric Power, bought out residents around the plant for more than three times the value of their property.

The generating facility had been dumping toxic coal ash into unlined pits, creating worries that it would contaminate groundwater. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022 ordered it to stop, and now its owners face a $40 million cleanup liability.

And a 2023 analysis by the Sierra Club looked at coal-plant emissions and weather patterns. It concluded that because it sends a plume of toxins over populous areas in the eastern United States, the Gavin plant is the deadliest in the country, killing an estimated 244 people a year.

Many investors have been turning away from fossil fuels — and especially coal — as a method of powering electricity generation. But private-equity investors have been taking up some of the slack, with nearly 80% of their power plant investments being in those fueled by coal or gas.

Private equity has been stigmatized over claims that it practices one of the harshest forms of capitalism. They often buy assets in deals that quickly recoup their investments, then frequently sell off the most valuable parts of an enterprise, and then walk away either by selling or declaring bankruptcy. Whether people needlessly lose jobs or consumers lose choices is not a consideration, critics say.

That has left environmentalists and private-equity critics worried that Gavin’s owners will continue to operate it as a polluting coal plant, then close it, and find a way to stick taxpayers with any cleanup costs.

However, Energy Capital Partners bills itself as a company that helps utilities convert from using coal.

“Energy Capital Partners (ECP) is a leading credit and equity investor across energy transition infrastructure, with a focus on investing in electricity and sustainability infrastructure, providing reliable, affordable clean energy,” its website says.

The company last week declined to respond to questions, other than to send the Dec. 11 filing it made in a FERC proceeding. In it, ECP made several statements that seem to indicate the company plans to keep the Gavin plant operating as it is.

“Notably, the Gavin facility has an existing long-term contract for coal supply with a supplier unaffiliated with Javelin, and ECP and Javelin have no intention of altering those arrangements,” it says.

The filing also said that it’s just speculation that the new owners plan to retire the plant.

“… regarding a secondhand, unnamed source’s speculation regarding plans to retire the Gavin facility, ECP and Javelin confirm that there are no such plans,” it said. “Notably, even the post cited by the Joint Protesters for the proposition that Gavin may be retired ‘in the coming years’ simply states (again, based on an unnamed source) that the facility may close or be converted to run on a different fuel by 2031, which is well outside of the forward-looking view on which the Commission relies in reviewing Section 203 applications.”

A group critical of the practices of private-equity investors asked what it would take to close the Gavin Plant

In a recent survey, a majority of Ohio economists said that mass deportations would harm the state’s economy.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. But some experts have said that the expense, legality and politics of such a move will place some guardrails on what he’s able to do.

And with migrants playing such an important role in the economy, critics say removing them would be calamitous. CNBC on Monday reported that a massive roundup would take an estimated $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion out of the U.S. economy.

In Ohio, the group Policy Matters on Monday reported that the state’s 580,000 immigrants contribute $53 billion in annual economic output. And the state’s economists seem mostly to agree that removing a big chunk of them will cost the state on balance.

Scioto Analysis last week published a survey of 20 economists asking about the effect of mass deportations. When asked if the move would significantly reduce the state’s economic output, 14 said yes, three said no and three were uncertain.

Among those who agreed that fewer immigrant workers would reduce output was Will Georgic of Ohio Wesleyan University. But he said how much of a loss will depend on the scale of the deportations.

“While it is hard to know whether the reduction in state GDP will be significant, and this will largely depend on the scale of the deportations, the effect will be unambiguously negative,” he said in the comment section of the survey. “Deportations represent negative supply shocks as well as negative demand shocks, both suggesting a decrease in real output.”

Among the economists saying that mass deportations won’t significantly harm state GDP was David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati, who said the undocumented don’t make up a big enough share of the state workforce to have much of an impact.

“Not so many workers, and the jobs they have produce lower-value goods,” he said.

Rachel Wilson of Wittenberg University said that the economic harm from a mass deportation would be multifaceted.

“Not only will it be reduced by immigrants’ production but because of their missing demand,” she said. “Immigrants do not come and work in a vacuum. They spend the money they make creating additional demand for goods and services. They often have a high marginal propensity to consume from each dollar they earn.”

The economists were also asked if they thought a mass deportation would reduce the burden on Ohio’s social safety net. Fifteen disagreed, two agreed and three were uncertain.

Jonathan Andreas echoed some of his colleagues in explaining why he thought expelling the undocumented wouldn’t give much relief to the safety net.

“We can only deport people who are not here legally and they are ineligible for social services except kids can get public education and most of the kids of undocumented immigrants are US citizens by birth,” he said. “Furthermore, undocumented workers typically pay payroll taxes even though they don’t get any credit for it, so they subsidize Social Security and Medicare.”

As undocumented immigrants show up at the southern border, many may be fleeing gun violence perpetrated with weapons that originally came from the United States.

New research shows that nearly half coming across the border had previously been threatened by guns, while earlier research shows that the vast majority of guns in some of those countries originated here.

A report by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado published in the October issue of the peer-reviewed journal Injury Prevention sought to gain some insights into the role the U.S. gun trade might be playing in migrants’ decisions to make the hazardous journey to the southern border.

“Policy-makers have argued that U.S. firearms are fueling violence in these countries and are contributing to migration,” their report said. “The objective of this article is to examine the proportion of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean arriving at the U.S. border who have previously been threatened with a firearm.”

It seems a no-brainer that while many are coming to the United States seeking economic opportunity or reunite with family, many are fleeing violence in their home countries. Indeed, a 2015 survey of migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador by Doctors Without Borders found that “of those interviewed, almost 40% (39.2%) mentioned direct attacks or threats to themselves or their families, extortion or gang-forced recruitment as the main reason for fleeing their countries.”

It’s also known that a huge portion of guns used in such violence originated here. For example, data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms indicate that of the 21,000 firearms recovered in Mexico between 2016 and 2022, nearly 70% had either been made or imported into the United States.

What the most recent report adds is insight into how many migrants reported being personally threatened by guns. To do that, they interviewed 312 people seeking asylum between March 2022 and August 2023 at a shelter in McAllen, Texas.

Nearly half (47.7%) reported having been threatened with a firearm. That’s more than double the 21% of Americans who reported having been so threatened.

The actual percentage of asylum seekers who have had guns pointed at them is likely higher because nearly 80% of respondents to the survey were women, while 66% of the men who participated said they had been threatened in that way. That compares to 39% of women respondents.

The researchers recommended that immigration officials consider the circumstances of immigrants’ gun threats and their effects as they make policy.

“While victims of firearm-related threats reported in this study were likely robbed, extorted or kidnapped, our study highlights other reasons that are under-discussed,” the report said. “For example, people are often threatened not to report a crime or are intimidated by authorities. In this regard, federal agencies monitoring the flow of migration in the U.S.A. should consider these experiences. In particular, those immigrating have elevated rates of firearm violence exposure and also have evidence of mental health symptoms (PTSD) associated with those exposures. Training on identifying these traumas and providing resources to guide people in seeking proper help at entry points is important.”

When Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s latest effort to prosecute voter fraud last week showed once again that voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the Buckeye State — turning up a handful of indictments out of hundreds of case recommendations, representing a minuscule percentage of the millions upon millions of votes cast in recent Ohio elections — he called it a “bogus narrative” on social media.

He’s used that accusation before. In February 2022, the news organization The Hill published a story that accurately said LaRose’s office found possible instances of voter fraud in 0.0005% of ballots cast in the 2020 election. LaRose took to the social media site that was then Twitter to accuse the media of pedaling a false narrative — and to support former President Donald Trump’s lies about that election: “Here they go again,” LaRose tweeted. “Mainstream media trying to minimize voter fraud to suit their narrative.”

In a follow-up tweet, LaRose added, “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem. More to come.”

Trump’s claims of voter fraud were rejected by 60 courts, Fox News had to pay out $787 million over false stories about vote rigging, and Trump incited a mob to attack Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 over bogus claims of a rigged election.

However, true to his word, LaRose has continued to beat the voter-fraud drum.

“It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the integrity of Ohio’s elections is under attack!” he posted on X Friday as he continues to demand citizenship records from the federal government.

But over the past six years, LaRose has failed to make the case that significant levels of voter fraud are happening in Ohio.

Frustrated that county prosecutors weren’t doing more to pursue what his office thought might be cases of fraud, LaRose in September referred more than 600 to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. He made the referral after local prosecutors took up just 12 of the 633 cases he had referred to them.

On Tuesday, Yost announced the result: Just six indictments after a Lorain County grand jury declined to charge an Oberlin College student. And one of those who were indicted turned out to be dead.

The indictments address voting in elections stretching back to 2008. In presidential contests alone, more than 22 million Ohioans have voted since then, so 18 voter fraud charges show that despite LaRose’s aggressive investigation, phony voting just isn’t happening very much.

In announcing the charges, Yost said voter fraud was rare and he took LaRose to task over the quality of some of his referrals.

“I need to have a sit-down with the secretary of state about the value of those cases where there was no voting — I think that we ought to be focusing on the voting,” Yost said.

But that didn’t stop LaRose from claiming there’s actually a lot of voter fraud in Ohio.

“Also look for this bogus narrative: ‘It’s only six out of millions! Election fraud doesn’t exist!'” LaRose said last Tuesday on the social media site that is now called X. “That’s a spurious tactic by leftist operatives and their media allies who either want to ignore clear instances of fraud or outright want to make it easier to cheat.”

The secretary of state’s office didn’t respond when asked how it could be a “bogus narrative” when it was literally true that Yost’s work resulted in just six indictments out of tens of millions of votes cast.

Meanwhile, LaRose and his Republican allies on Capital Square have used the specter of widespread voter fraud to undertake a number of measures that critics say disenfranchise people who tend to vote Democratic:

A voter ID law enacted last year that is estimated to have already blocked more than 8,000 from voting.

Tough restrictions on boxes for voters to drop off absentee ballots. LaRose had already limited the number of such boxes to one per county — regardless whether it has a million residents and tends to vote blue, or just 13,000 and tends to vote red.

Despite the extreme rarity of voter fraud, LaRose also wants to require proof of citizenship in order for people to register. He’s now being sued over those actions. As with voter ID requirements, citizens who lack such documents tend to belong to groups such as people of color who tend to vote for LaRose’s political opponents.

LaRose also has purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, including many because they haven’t cast ballots consistently. Critics say there’s no constitutional requirement that voters must be consistent to be eligible.

In addition to his claims about voter fraud, LaRose has done and said a number of other misleading things concerning elections and voting in Ohio.

For example, last year as he led the drive to make it much more difficult for voters to initiate amendments to the state Constitution, LaRose claimed the effort had nothing to do with blocking an abortion-rights amendment that passed by 14 last November or an anti-gerrymandering amendment that’s on the ballot next week. But then he told a group of Seneca County Republicans that the effort was “100% about” blocking the abortion-rights amendment.

As secretary of state, LaRose heads up the Ohio Ballot Board. That entity this year wrote a ballot summary of the anti-gerrymandering amendment that is on next week’s ballot that critics say is highly misleading.

Even though Ohio’s legislature and congressional delegation are among the most gerrymandered, LaRose’s ballot summary said the proposed reforms would “establish a new taxpayer-funded commission of appointees required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.”

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network 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 X.