According to Plan
Things are going swimmingly for Ohio Republicans, fair maps be damned.
“We organize discontent,” political consultant Howard Phillips explained in Reaganland, the story of how the Republican Party shed its country club image to attract working class voters that had been sold out by their donors.
Statehouse Republicans learned the lesson well. Their party has flooded the zone with culture war nonsense like total abortion bans, attacks on transgender teenagers and criminalizing peaceful protests. Just to name a few planks of their assault.
The legislation is part of their plot to organize the discontent found in rural Ohio where voters have their entire existence subsidized by big cities yet consider themselves “forgotten” or “left behind.” And make no mistake, racism, classicism, and homophobia sell well in our cities, too.
The bullshit is window dressing for the true goal of their grand experiment—ensuring the ultra-wealthy never pay their fair share of taxes as wealth continues to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Would you believe that grand experiment is all going according to a plan that started in 2005 when the state moved away from the income tax?
From Jo Ingles of wosu.org:
When Guille Bervejillo took a look at how Ohio’s tax policy change has affected people with different incomes, he found the tax bill for lower to lower-middle-income Ohioans has actually increased.
“So the bottom 60% of tax filers have increased their tax shares over the past 17 years since Governor Taft’s 2005 budget bill and the top 1% of Ohio’s tax filers are getting an extra $51,000 that they are taking home every year which is the price of a luxury car while the top 20% of households is taking roughly $5,500 home,” said Bervejillo.
Bervejillo said Ohioans who thought they'd be in better shape with flatter taxes are finding the opposite is true.
This stuff used to fill me with rage. Now it’s just generally depressing to see how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of people who are actively getting fucked by those in power (and not in the good way, either).
Along the way Republicans decided they should be above reproach, even in Democratic wave years like in 2007-2008 when Ohio had the audacity to elect a Democratic governor, a Democratic State House of Representatives, and a Democratic gay muslim terrorist as President of the United States.
At the next opportunity in 2010, Republicans went to work carving up the state with laser precision to entrench their power, and they haven’t looked back. Under the current maps, Ohio never elected a Democrat to statewide office. Democrats never enjoyed anything more than a super-minority caucus in either chamber of the Legislature. And our Congressional delegation was never anything but 12 Republicans and four Democrats, just as the map had originally ordained.
Unfortunately for Republicans, Ohioans enshrined the right to nonpartisan legislative maps into our Constitution in 2018.
But unfortunately for little folk, we are not as wise as our Republican leaders. Also, we goofed by not putting any enforcement mechanism into that amendment.
Now Republican leaders like House Speaker Bobb Cupp are openly laughing at Ohio Supreme Court-mandated deadlines to produce fair maps:
Keep in mind that Cupp used to sit on the Ohio Supreme Court, a job I’m sure he took much more seriously when he served than yesterday when glibly shrugging off the court’s interests in its mandated deadlines. Even the shitbird legislative aid standing to his right can hardly contain his mirth at the notion of accountability.
The Ohio Redistricting Committee has until 11:59:59 tonight to produce Constitutional maps. But considering Cupp couldn’t even give a basic itinerary of today’s meetings, I assume they’re going to once again drop gerrymandered maps minutes before the deadline while most Ohioans are asleep since they have to work real jobs in the morning.
My guess is they’re going to keep throwing shit against the wall and ignore deadline after deadline. What’s going to happen to them?
Am I to believe the Ohio Supreme Court will hold the House Speaker or Secretary of State or State Auditor in contempt of court and jail them for their inability to follow the rules? Because I won’t until I see their mugshots on Twitter.
My other guess is we’re going to eventually get so close to a primary date that the Redistricting Commission will say enough is enough and produce another ridiculously gerrymandered map for the election, Supreme Court be damned. That map will enshrine Republican super-majority power, even if all their leaders get caught gang-banging a dead pig on the Ohio Channel.
The good times are rolling for Republicans and their ultra-wealthy donors. And that gravy train isn’t stopping for anybody, least of all some faded parchment like the State Constitution and farcical concepts like “fair maps.”
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