Matt Huffman wants to scam libraries, too

The House Republican budget pits schools vs. libraries vs. affordable housing. It doesn't have to be this way.

I spent a large swath of my time on Capitol Square this weekend observing the House Finance Committee’s budget hearings. They’re not for the weak of heart.

I watched professionals from across the state slog to Columbus to beg for peanuts in front of largely unmoved Republicans who would still offer words of pity like they were regular people on the street, lying to a homeless person about not having any cash on them.

Rep. Tom Young (R-Centerville) was particularly animated at times on Wednesday and Thursday, asking educators where, exactly, they would take from the state budget to fill their impending budget shortfalls.

Pitting educators against social workers against librarians is all downwind of the Legislature’s philosophy that society functions better when the rich don’t have to pay anywhere close to their fair share of taxes.

The witnesses can’t return the sauce due to the power imbalance. But all the Republican crocodile tears about budgetary constraints ignore the fact that the Legislature could—and I’m just spitballing here—raise a billion dollars almost overnight by closing the LLC tax loophole that primarily benefits the top 10 percent of income earners.

But you might as well be asking the Legislature to pass a law granting protected class status to pedophiles.

Led by Speaker Matt Huffman, who, in my opinion, should be serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary for his career in domestic terrorism, the Legislature is ultimately striving toward gutting social services to abolish the income tax in a couple years—something on which that the notorious conman and GOP gubernatorial frontrunner Vivek Ramaswamy is currently campaigning.

This week, we’ve covered how the Ohio House budget proposes a historic slashing of public school funding as well as clawing back money from the rainy day funds of fiscally conservative districts.

But the Legislature is also playing games with the funding of our renowned library system, which is ostensibly enshrined in the State Constitution.

House Republicans are using what has become their trademark trick this cycle by proposing a one-year “increase” in funding (which, in reality, doesn’t cover the cost of inflation) to justify unhooking libraries from a guaranteed slice of income from the state budget in perpetuity.

From the Ohio Library Council, the Republican budget would:

• Eliminate the requirement that a percentage of the state General Revenue Fund (GRF) be dedicated to the Public Library Fund.

• Reduce state funding for Ohio’s public libraries by more than $100 million over the biennium as compared to the Governor’s proposal.

• Create a new distribution formula that would cut funding to public libraries in 39 counties on July 1. There are 93 library systems in these 39 counties of which 20 do not have a local levy.

Libraries have become a favorite topic of right-wing extremists. For example, State Rep. Rodney Creech (R-West Alexandria) spent his Valentine’s Day getting mad online about a tampon dispenser in his district's men’s room at a Dayton Metro Library. He then carried on a public feud with that library’s administrator.

But this budget also propagates the right-wing gender war upon libraries by requiring public libraries to place material related to sexual orientation or gender identity/expression in a portion of the public library that is “not primarily open to the view of persons under the age of 18.”

Unhooking libraries from a guaranteed slice of the pie (read: a measly 1.7 percent of the state budget) would turn libraries into just another social service that needs to play nice with the legislators who don’t respect their work.

It’s the Republicans way of taking control of an insitutiton that they view ultimately serves the kind of people that the Republican Party must routinely shit on to satisfy their bitter voters.

Just because they wear suits to work doesn’t make it anything less than thuggery.

The Republicans also want you to know they hate affordable housing, too

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

House Republicans have proposed a budget almost as weird as it is cruel.