Begun, the Stephens-Huffman War has...
Begun, the Stephens-Huffman War has...
How the impending Republican primary in the 75th Ohio House District sets the stage for the battles to come.
State Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima), a domestic terrorist, thought returning to the Ohio House as Speaker would be much easier back in November.
House Republicans had elected Derek Merrin (R-Monclova), an uncharismatic nepotism baby who once tried to make it easier for landlords to poison children with lead paint, as the next Speaker of the Ohio House.
Merrin, like Huffman, would be termed out of his respective legislative chamber in 2024. Merrin could use the Speakership to draw his desired Congressional seat in a bid to finally unseat longtime Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Toledo), while Huffman could return to the House as the only sensible candidate to pick up where Merrin had left off.
But then, on January 3rd, a united Democratic House Caucus, 22 breakaway Republicans and an insane sewer blogger came together to send Merrin to the pits of Hell in front of supporters from across the state.
Outside of Merrin and his hand-picked pretenders he wanted for House leadership, no politician lost more that day than Huffman.
Unlike Merrin, Speaker Jason Stephens (R-Kittsville) could serve six years as the Speaker of the House.
That math doesn’t work for Huffman, who would probably commit seppuku on The Ohio Channel rather than return to the Ohio House and serve four years earning a $68,000 salary for working 50 days a year as a legislative backbencher.
With Stephens’ ascendency, Huffman would have to earn the Speaker’s Gavel as the incarcerated Larry Householder did before him: By fielding Republican challengers across the state to stuff the lower legislative chamber with as many stooges as possible to make him their leader.
And, like mushrooms in a field of freshly strewn horse shit, those candidates are starting to bubble to the surface before Ohio voters even know what the legislative districts will look like.
One such candidate is Sally Culling, who recently declared her intentions to run in what’s currently known as the Ohio House 75th District against current State Rep. Haraz Ghanbari (R-Ghanbari).
There are three groups against which I gleefully discriminate: Teenagers, people with face tattoos, and the British.
Culling is in that last group.
From Mike Brice of The Toledo Blade:
While this is her first run for elected office in the United States, she won a seat in her birth country of England on the equivalent of Nottingham City Council when she was 22 years old.
Following her time as an elected official, she worked as a staffer for the European Parliament and an analyst for the Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
No, not every person from Pedophile Island is a morally bankrupt person. Just most of them. And that’s even before considering Culling labored in something as cursed as “the Heritage Foundation’s Margeret Thatcher Center for Freedom.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Thatcher, allow this Scottish patriot to sum up my position on the day of Thatcher’s funeral in April 2013:
While Culling doesn’t know what the 75th Ohio District will look like, she certainly has options for addresses to file her petition under.
The Cullings, for some reason known only to them, spent over $1 million to purchase two Perrysburg houses within weeks of each other in August 2021. One, at 234 W. 7th Street, sold for $203,000 and is your standard working-class, single-family home.
But the other, at 1106 Hunting Creek, sold for $882,500 and is currently valued at over a million dollars and more in line with the types of houses usually belonging to the hobgoblin class comprising most of the Ohio Legislature.
The two houses are 4.1 miles apart, which might not sound like a lot, but that distance could make a difference in Ohio's gerrymandered legislative districts.
My first thought was that the Cullings bought one house, likely the smaller, less opulent one, to rent out. And maybe they are doing just that.
However, the Cullings have a tax problem as, for the last two years, they have claimed owner-occupancy tax credits on both properties, according to the Woody County Auditor’s Website:
Why Sally’s husband Joshua, a member of the Ohio Republican Central Committee, is paying his taxes out of an office in an industrial park in suburban Dallas, Texas, is something that is above my humble tax bracket.
But Sally Culling curiously didn’t list an occupation in her Toledo Blade profile since moving to Ohio. Despite her household having enough income to spend over a million dollars on two houses in the same Ohio town within weeks of each other, she’s laughably presenting her campaign on social media as a “grassroots” effort.
According to Statehouse sources, Culling was recruited by the odious State Rep. Joshua “Bum” Williams (R-Sylvania) to enter the race in an effort to primary Rep. Ghanbari.
She has already benefited from the Koch Industries-backed Americans for Prosperity attacking Rep. Ghanbari on multiple fronts:
As a matter of journalistic integrity, The Rooster respects Rep. Ghanbari. I will see him in Hell like the rest of the Republican Caucus, but he’s a straight-shooter who served his country and takes his job seriously in committee. He’s also an avid supporter of public libraries. We would be in a better place as a state if he were the baseline for Republican integrity.
But it’s comical to watch him get tarred by special interest groups as a tax-and-spend liberal all because he had the common sense not to back a vindictive charlatan like Rep. Merrin for Speaker of the House.
But next to the Center for Christian Virtue, no lobbying group lost more than the Americans for Prosperity, which pushed the so-called Backpack Bill to further subsidize private education for wealthy families.
Families, coincidentally enough, just like the Cullings. And wouldn’t you know it? Sally Culling’s big issue is the odious notion of “school choice” despite the Republican-led biannual budget passing universal school choice in July.
Again, from The Blade:
Mrs. Culling said the fight over school choice prompted her to run for office now.
“When I saw that school choice came within a hair’s breadth of failing purely because of some shenanigans in the House, I decided it was my time to go and make my case that school choice is a good thing,” she said.
“There is not, and there should not be, a once-size-fits-all approach to education,” Mrs. Culling said.
Not mentioned in the article, but Culling sends both her kids to private school while also somehow serving on the Perrysburg Public School Strategic Planning Committee.
The Rooster is told she’s a “real pill” on that committee, which isn’t hard to understand considering her desire to destroy public education as it’s currently known in America.
You add it all together, and you can see how nonsensical this “grassroots, mom on a mission” campaign will be. It will be your standard, bog-issued, special interest-financed campaign for a candidate who is as fabulously wealthy as she is politically connected.
But, as we sadly already know, that time-tested formula can absolutely be used to snow the types of low-information voters that generally comprise state legislature elections in Ohio to make the Legislature even more extreme than it already is.
THOSE WMDs. Texas AG Ken Paxton pursued perks beyond impeachment allegations… No OBY-GYNs left in town: What happened after Idaho’s assault on abortion… The Dungeons & Dragons players of death row… Ohioans earn wages far below those of their peers nationwide… Pope Francis calls U.S. Catholic church “reactionary.”