Rejoice! The State Legislature can't hurt us until September

But of course, ill-gotten legislative supermajorities aren't enough for these losers. They have to try to seal public records in the dead of night, too.

Photo by Natalia Gusakova on Unsplash

The Friday Dispatch will be the June Mailbag.

You can submit your questions anonymously through my Jotform.

Feel free to ask questions not relating to Ohio politics, too. The eclectic mix of questions is always what makes the mailbag one of the most-read dispatches of the month.

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Yesterday, the Ohio State Legislature passed a 6,000-page, $60 billion biennial budget that no state legislator read in its entirety.

It’s another step in the Legislature’s thousand-mile death march for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. More giveaways to the rich and more regressive taxes on the poor that will starve social services, schools, universities, infrastructure, and rural hospitals.

Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Huffman) further cemented his legacy as a domestic terrorist by immediately leaving Capitol Square to attend a happy hour at the anti-worker PINS Mechanical hosted by Americans for Prosperity, a nationwide reactionary lobbying group entirely funded by the last-surviving billionaire Koch Brother.

Buried in the 6,000-page document that nobody has read in full, in section 101.30 to be exact, is a provision that would ban public records requests for communication between legislators or between legislators and their staffers:

Image via Chris Wetterich of Cincinnati Business First [Twitter]

This nasty bit of business was submitted in the final stage of the process, moments before the Conference Committee passed the budget at roughly 1:30 a.m. Wednesday morning.

Thanks to a long-standing Statehouse policy of allowing legislators to submit budget amendments anonymously, it’s almost as if Santa Claus wrote this nasty bit of business in the dead of night.

You can tell it’s bonkers, even by Republican junta standards, because nobody wants to take credit for their actions—and anytime a politician doesn’t want credit should raise alarm bells in your head.

It’s another reminder to anyone, but especially labor groups, that the Republican junta will never be satisfied with their power.

These guys have ill-gotten supermajorities in both chambers. Nothing short of a total economic collapse would threaten their power at the ballot box. And yet, here they are, moving in the dead of night like petty thieves to further shield themselves from the small semblance of public scrutiny their weasley actions ever face.

Oh hell yes: Something good did happen at the Statehouse yesterday

Last week, I wrote about members of Central Ohio Rank and File Educators (CORE) undertaking an original protest at the Statehouse. The educators crafted a “Burn Book,” as seen in the 2004 motion picture classic Mean Girls, that taught attendees about the various hobgoblins, lizard people, and cold-hearted wenches pillaging public education in Ohio.

Yesterday, I ran into CORE’s chief organizer, Kelsey Gray, a Columbus Public Schools educator who had just attended a picket line in support of Ohio State’s nurses, outside the Statehouse.

Because I spend way too much time on Capitol Square, I have a keen mental reflex for the silhouette of every state legislator. And I noticed four Huffmen henchmen walking toward the Statehouse:

• Assistant Speaker Pro Tempore Phil Plummer (R-Vandalia)

• Majority Floor Leader Marilyn John (R-Shelby)

• Assistant Floor Leader Adam Bird (R-New Richardson)

• Assistant Whip Riordan McClain (R-Upper Sandusky)

“There goes a lot of House leadership,” I said to Gray, who had her back turned to them.

During my time at the Statehouse, I have seen many legislators who are directly responsible for the issues that protestors are protesting walk past the surly crowds in total anonymity. Or they’ll refuse to confront the politicians even if I give them a gentle nudge in that direction.

And that’s fine. I understand that keeping a mental Rolodex of gargoylesque legislators or having the fortitude to confront them on their home turf isn’t for everyone.

But that’s not Gray. She turned around and was on Rep. Bird within seconds, giving him a copy of the Burn Book and letting him know that he had a page dedicated to his actions in attacking public schools.

Gray provided a statement to The Rooster after her encounter:

The Central Ohio Rank and File Educator’s Burn Book brands Matt Huffman as “The dropout king of public accountability,” and Huffman delivered yet another stunning performance in that role Wednesday afternoon.

While he only has one page in this iconic piece of literature, his rap sheet legislative record would fill an entire volume.

We know that contacting legislators and throwing state-sanctioned protests rallies aren't doing a damn thing, which is why CORE organizers spent the earlier part of the afternoon with the OSU Nurses at a public shaming an informational picket (hence the sign) before doing a lit drop at 1 Capitol Square.

We need Ohioans to get more comfortable calling these people out to their faces for what they’re doing: gutting public services, giving our tax dollars to the ultra-rich on a silver platter, merging the state with Christian Nationalism, and tyrannizing marginalized identities whenever they get a spare moment.

Bird, for his part, peddled the myth that the budget “increases” public school funding, which is an increase that barely covers inflationary costs and only helps some schools, while also ignoring the billion dollars siphoned into private and charter schools through the voucher scam.

As Gray said, her actions are no less than what Bird should face every time he steps in public. He’s a former public school teacher and superintendent of the type of rural districts that are the biggest losers when it comes to school vouchers.

He is actively undermining public education in his district to advance his political career and serve the interests of Speaker Huffman, who would privatize education tomorrow if he could do so unilaterally.

We in Columbus have a special responsibility to heckle these clowns, given our proximity to the Statehouse. So, don’t be afraid to exercise your First Amendment rights. Our fellow political travelers in more remote regions of the state will appreciate your efforts.

The conservative case against the Cleveland Browns stadium

State Rep. Ron Ferguson (R-Wintersville) and I disagree on many things. But I have come to admire his willingness to attack public welfare for billionaire sports projects, whether it’s a proposed 30-year, $1 billion bond or a $1.7 billion looting of private property, the latter of which the State Legislature passed yesterday.

I enjoyed talking to Ferguson disparaging the deal as the antithesis of conservatism, even if his analysis of how a billionaire like Haslam (and other sports barons) successfully rammed this piece of unpopular legislation through a Republican-juiced legislature that, at least ostensibly, should have agreed with Ferguson’s position.

This is what Citizens United has done to our political system. It has allowed (in my opinion) incorrigible crooks like Jimmy Haslam to bend our political system to their will. But Ferguson doesn’t have a problem with that, because he equates money with free speech, because guys like Haslam are generally helping guys like Ferguson propagate their wildly unpopular economic agenda.

Politics makes odd bedfellows, as the saying goes. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy working alongside Ferguson to fight this injustice, because in this game, you have to work with those who arrive at correct positions, even if they used muddled or incomplete thinking to get there.

The stakes are too high to operate in any other way. And thankfully, the thought of killing this Brook Park deal before Jimm Haslam croaks isn’t dead yet.

From here, we can only hope that former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann and Attorney General candidate Jeff Crossman are successful in their class action lawsuit to prevent the state from repatriating private property on behalf of the billionaire class.

Anti-abortion freak goes from puppy mill lobbyist to puppy mill franchisee

One upside to Ohio’s hog voters enshrining abortion rights into the State Constitution—other than the obvious—is that it would appear it led to the downfall of a once-prominent anti-abortion freak.