See you in Hell, Senator Huffman (R-Lima)

Huffman is using Ohio's most vulnerable residents as pawns for his political ambitions. And the sad part is it just might work!

If the average Ohioan saw State Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) walking down the street, they would think something like, “There goes a casually racist insurance executive who loves the taste of bologna and mayonnaise.”

There is nothing physically remarkable about him. He is an uncharismatic, droopy-shouldered senior citizen from Lima.

Yet, when the State Senate is in session, he sits back in his padded pervert chair with the confidence of Ceaser before his colleagues said, “Fuck that guy” and shanked him right where he stood.

We will never be that lucky!

The State Senate is boring because there is no debate. There is no action. It’s simply Senator Huffman and his lemmings pushing whatever hobgoblin idea Big Business and Holy Roller lobbyists want.

Ohio’s hog voters enacted term limits as a check on politicians exactly like Huffman. Term limits were a short-sighted mistake that only empowered lobbyists. But that’s a topic for another day.

Huffman will be termed out of the Senate at the end of 2024. Most Ohio voters probably think this means he will retire back to Lima with his blood money to work at his law firm that coincidentally looks like it came off a Civil War-era plantation:

Huffman, Kelley & Brock headquarters in Lima, Ohio.

Again, if only we were that lucky!

Huffman plans to return to the House. And he isn’t satisfied by being just another cog in a 99-member chamber and collecting his 68,000 salary with full benefits.

He wants to be the Speaker of the Ohio House, and he has the credentials to have the state’s most powerful lobbying groups back him in that endeavor.

In the current House of Representatives, Huffman backed State Rep. Derek Merrin (R-Monclova) for the Speakership with the idea being Merrin would serve two years as Speaker until he was term-limited from the House.

Well, most readers of The Rooster know what happened to Merrin’s sorry-ass next. That holy rollin’ landlord fell through a trap door into a pit of alligators in front of supporters from across the state who traveled to Columbus to see the nepotism prince’s coronation.

Speaker Jason Stephens (R-Kitts Hill) has six years left in the House, which presents a problem for Huffman’s grand plans. But it was never like Huffman was ever going to accept his fate as an out-of-favor backbencher under the Stephens regime, especially considering Stephens needed a united Democratic caucus to pull the stunning (to some Statehouse observers who don’t subscribe to The Rooster) coupe.

Enter Ohio’s ongoing biannual budget process which is constitutionally mandated to be completed by the end of this month.

The Ohio House passed a bipartisan $88 billion budget at the end of April. It was a Republican-led budget, but it still included things like $10.5 billion for public schools ($1 billion more than requested by Mike DeWine) despite expanding school vouchers.

This was a slap in the face to the Holy Roller contingent, led by State Rep. Merrin.

They want things like universal school vouchers, so wealthy parents already sending their kids to private schools can siphon public money to pay those bills. They claim to be for the unborn yet are the same people who fought House Finance Chairman Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville) over nickels going to food banks.

They see the budget process as a way to enact the totally reactionary agenda they dreamed about before Merrin fumbled the bag at the finish line in the most embarrassing way possible.

Senator Huffman is using the schism between the House Republican Caucus to put the screws to Ohio’s most vulnerable population to appease Merrin’s followers in the House and the lobbyist groups like Americans for Progress and Center for Christian Virtue that fund them.

The idea is to score extreme right-wing victories with the support of Merrin’s crew so Huffman and House leadership can skip the official conference committee.

From Jake Zuckerman of cleveland.com:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio Senate Republicans’ budget proposal released Tuesday would slash several programs designed to feed, house, and cover health care costs of some of the state’s poorest citizens.

Compared to a budget passed by the House, the Senate’s whittles down funding for state food banks, guts a program that funds housing for pregnant women, nixes entirely a $500 million tax credit for developers who build affordable housing, eliminates a proposed free school meals program for poor children, calls for new work requirements for Medicaid and food stamp recipients, and establishes several anti-fraud measures for those seeking public aid.

Those programs and dozens of other differences could be on the table if the two chambers wind up in a conference committee to negotiate over a final two-year budget to send to Gov. Mike DeWine ahead of a June 30 deadline, the end of the state fiscal year. DeWine will have the chance to veto individual pieces, but he can’t add line items back into the budget.

Slashing state funding to food banks is despicable at any time. However, it’s especially cruel considering that food banks are seeing “unprecedented” demand for their services.

From Danae King of dispatch.com:

The Mid-Ohio Food Collective is seeing an "unprecedented" need and record demand across its 680 partner sites in 20 area counties, officials say, with a 40% increase in visits since the same time last year.

From Jan. 1 to May 31, people got food assistance 680,995 times at those sites, according to the collective's data, with 484,400 visits during the same period in 2022.

"We are shocked and concerned," said Mike Hochron, senior vice president of communications at the collective. "When we look at the increase of demand for our services. ... Each time we think we've hit the peak and things will normalize, it goes the other direction."

These aren’t hard times for the state government. Ohio currently has at least $3.5 billion in the Rainy Day Fund, the largest amount ever recorded in state history.

Personally, I believe that citizens pay taxes for services, and it’s absurd to hoard that kind of money when our state constitution (foolishly) mandates a balanced budget in the first place

But to our state leaders, there is no more serious crime than a poor person getting a handout. So you get ideas like this from Ohio Right to Life president (and Petland Puppy Mill lobbyist) Michael Gonidakis:

Gonidakis apparently believes that only unemployed people would bother standing in line to collect food. When in reality, a majority of food bank patrons already have a job.

But having employment isn’t enough in Ohio a lot of the time because guys like Gonidakis have tilted the tax code in a way that ensures most of the wealth goes to those at the top of the economic ladder.

Gonidakis also tips his racist hand with that last part. Sanctuary Cities don’t allow migrants to “live freely.” Sanctuary cities only promise safety from prosecution for the high crime of coming to America to work. They have bills just like the rest of us, and any “taxpayer-funded benefits” they collect, they would have earned considering they pay taxes on their wages, too!

Unlike the rest of us, they won’t be able to collect Social Security they paid into, either. But guys like Gonidakis would rather pander to racists than accept the fact the American economy would collapse overnight without the labor of “illegal immigrants.”

Another salient benchmark in Senate Republican hypocrisy is gutting a program that funds housing for pregnant women. Nothing says pro-life like making it harder for pregnant women to find adequate housing during one of the most physically vulnerable times of their lives.

There are other attacks on affordable housing, especially in urban areas, too. Here’s how one government lobbyist described the details of Huffman’s current budget to The Rooster:

[Budget] Section E will kill the development of rental housing in community reinvestment areas by requiring a property owner to live in the building for five years before it can receive abatement or TIF.

This single-handedly discriminates against urban areas where affordable housing is desperately needed. It also would only allow it to be for residential-only buildings, so forget about mixed-use.

The lobbyist went on to speculate that Huffman is playing hardball this way to kill the House’s proposed low-income housing credit. Because, again, in his traditional Catholic worldview, poor people are undeserving of subsidized housing or food because they only have themselves to blame for their economic plight.

It’s also a way to ensure Ohio’s major cities can’t build the dense housing they need to climb out of the housing crisis. Making cities as unaffordable as possible is a feature of their policy, not a bug.

Huffman has apparently never contemplated how his life might have been different hadn’t he been born to a wealthy, influential lawyer father in Lima.

In his mind, he alone is responsible for rising to Senate president, and he thinks it’s a feat anyone else could replicate if only they had sacrificed as much as him.

Huffman is also trying to curry favor with the anti-vaccine wing of the House Republican Caucus, most notably led by State Rep. Jennifer Gross, easily the biggest medical kook in the State Legislature despite somehow being a registered nurse.

You might have read that and thought I was talking about the COVID vaccine. I was, but I’m also talking about vaccines that prevent diseases that used to only be found while playing The Oregon Trail in elementary school.

From Jo Ingles of statenews.org:

Some public health officials are alarmed after learning about a measure inserted in the senate version of the state budget bill that would require all public and private universities and colleges in Ohio to allow students to decline vaccines that are currently mandated.

Melissa Wervey Arnold, CEO of the Ohio chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said many colleges now require vaccines for things like meningitis or measles — especially for students who live in dorms.

And she's not aware of any Ohio college that doesn’t allow exemptions for religious or medical reasons. So, she said the provision isn't needed.

Allowing exemptions for “religious reasons” was already a stretch. But now they want to allow unvaccinated students to live in dorms because their mom read a couple of Facebook posts about how vaccines cause autism.

It’s just the latest olive branch offered to the dumbest segments of the population in Ohio because they can be manipulated into being reliable Republican voters that are needed to enforce their wildly unpopular economic agenda.

Kudos to anyone that read as far as this sentence. You are a brave and noble warrior indeed!

Unfortunately, Senator Huffman isn’t done yet! Remember that wildly unpopular August election that Republicans rammed through the legislature—months after they banned August elections—to kneecap the proposed abortion rights amendment that should be on the ballot in November?

That August 8th election was projected to cost $20 million. Huffman previously said that spending $20 million to “save 30,000 [aborted fetuses] a year was a great thing.”

Well, it turns out he’s only willing to spend $15 million.

From Morgan Trau of ohiocapitaljournal.com:

“If you want election integrity and you want solid elections that you can believe in – that costs money,” said Tony Perlatti, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Perlatti has requested $3 million to be able to put it on in Cuyahoga County. Typically, special elections cost the state $20 million.

But when the Senate announced its first draft budget, State. Sen. Kent Smith (D-Euclid) noticed a problem with it.

“What was supposed to be a $20 million election was only funded at $15 million,” Smith said. “I thought, well, this is just the next way they’re doing voter suppression.”

Huffman said he would “probably” add more money to the election budget if it was required. No, he won’t! That’s a lie. Huffman is intentionally underfunding the election.

The Republicans know “Issue 1” is wildly unpopular. Their own strategists already said the approval rate goes down the more that voters learn about what Issue 1 is really about.

Their side wants as few people as possible to vote on August 8th. They want the Board of Elections to work on a threadbare budget. They don’t care if precincts won’t be able to hire enough workers. That will only create longer lines at voting places and drive voters away.

Huffman and his ilk have cheated at every possible turn because they see any opposition to their agenda as illegitimate—even if it’s coming from fellow Republicans!

If Issue 1 passed with a three percent turnout rate, they would wash their hands and say it’s the will of the people! They act like this because they know they can get away with it. And given the streak they’ve been on for the last 20 years, it’s hard to blame them.

In a just world, Huffman would be ostracized from polite society. He would be denied service every time he stepped foot into one of the swanky eateries he frequents while in Columbus. He would be heckled in the grocery store. Hotel maids would refuse to clean his room, lest they suffocate themselves on the scent of sulfur that trails him wherever he goes.

Huffman’s existence is a damning example of how discriminating against one pregnant woman is a crime, but discriminating against thousands of them across the state is a sound Republican policy.

The truth is, the only way to vote against him is in the August 8th election and then passing the subsequent abortion rights amendment. Huffman probably isn’t capable of feeling shame, but at least he would have to live with the Holy Roller kooks blaming him for letting abortion back into Ohio after they worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

I am not sure Hell exists. It’s certainly a nice thought if it exists for people like Huffman. Because if I die and people like him are in control of Heaven, then I’ll gladly roll the dice in Satan’s realm since I’ve already seen the misery of what Huffman’s vision produces in Ohio.

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