The game is the game
The game is the game
The latest on the Republican anti-reform countermeasures, the Hillbilly Cosplayer gets baptized by fire, the data center hustle, and more.
It’s hard times for the Republican-dominated legislature with Redistricting Reform officially making the General Election ballot in November.
But it’s also hard times for Governor Grandpa Sleepy Tea, who is staring down quite the legacy if legitimate redistricting reform comes to pass:
Would lose the Republican legislative supermajorities his party has enjoyed for roughly the past 15 years.
Enshrined abortion into the State Constitution despite previously signing the Six-Week Abortion Ban into law.
Legalized recreational marijuana despite being a 1980s-styled Drug War dinosaur.
Signed the largest bribery scheme in state history (that we know about into law) with numerous top staff members like former legislative director Dan McCarthy and Chief of Staff Laurel Dawson implicated, if not yet charged, in the scheme.
That’s probably not what DeWine envisioned would happen under his watch when he cut a backroom deal with Jon Husted to prevent a highly expensive Republican gubernatorial primary in 2018.
For guys like DeWine, it’s not enough for his ego that he held basically every elected office possible in Ohio. Guys like him are concerned about how they’ll be remembered through the echoes of history—as if anybody outside his grandchildren and stone-cold history perverts will know his name 25 years after his death.
But given that hog voters ran roughshod over Sleepy Tea to put abortion rights into the constitution and legalize marijuana, it’s no surprise he’s scheming to against the potential dilution of his party’s ill-gotten power, as cleveland.com and Gongwer reported last week.
The plan, as discussed in Friday’s dispatch, revolves around Sleepy Tea calling a special session of the State Legislature where Republicans would put their own “redistricting reform” measure on the ballot.
If both measures were to pass, the one with the higher number of “Yes” votes becomes law.
That’s the benefit of having a rigged state legislature. Our side has to spend millions of dollars to collect hundreds of thousands of valid signatures in 44 counties over the course of several months while their side’s leaders can snap their fingers and have their dutiful stooges fall in line to pass a similar measure over the course of days.
The big question about their scheme, according to both reports, is if Republican legislators can muster enough members for the quorum needed to pass such legislation.
Several Republican legislators who spoke to Gongwer and cleveland.com said they were skeptical that would happen. But as I said on Friday, I’ve seen this porno before!
Republicans throw doubt on their hobgoblin plans in public, only to magically appear in Columbus to push their reactionary agenda a couple days later. The latest example being the Special Session that DeWine called in June to pass a so-called foreign money ban to statewide ballot initiatives in exchange for extending the deadline to put Joe Biden on the ballot.
And wouldn’t you know it? A well-connected Republican reached out last night to advise me “not to be surprised” if the Legislature is back in session “in the next few days” to place a competing redistricting issue on the ballot.
The brave and noble readers of The Rooster won’t be surprised to learn the move plays into the ongoing GOP Civil War between House Speaker Jason Stephens (R-Kitts Hill) and State Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima), who, in my opinion, is a domestic terrorist.
“A movement is afloat,” the well-connected, Huffman-aligned Republican explained. “[It] will totally fuck Stephens because he’s going to be forced to oppose it and will be final nail (not that they needed one) in his coffin.
“You’ll know he has given up if he pushes back. If he goes along with it like he did on [last August’s Special Election], that means he still thinks he has a shot against Huffman, but everything I’m hearing is he’s resigned himself to the fact that he’s fucked.”
I don’t buy that Stephens is resigned to being screwed. I think that part is wishful thinking coming from Huffman’s camp. Huffman has never been short on arrogance, after all.
A Republican aligned with Speaker Stephens pushed back on the notion that Stephens is screwed. They said, as things currently stand, a competitive redistricting proposal doesn’t have the votes to pass the House.
“People are tired of taking dumb votes.”
Would DeWine be foolish enough to call a Special Session when the House doesn’t have the votes to pass the legislation?
“We’ll see,” the Stephens-aligned Republican said. “He doesn’t seem to care about actual vote counts.”
Sleepy Tea knows what’s on the line for Republicans when it comes to Redistricting Reform. As such, I’m moving the threat level of a special session from “elevated” to “high.”
And if the Special Session indeed happens… it will be yet another shining example of why we desperately need Redistricting Reform in the first place. DeWine, Huffman and their ilk can’t be trusted to act honorably. Their power must be taken from them by conquest at the ballot box.
It took one week for Republicans to sour on the Hillbilly Cosplayer
