The Ohio Statehouse. (Photo by Jodi Jacobson / Getty Images.)
All is not calm, and all is not bright in America. For millions of citizens and non-citizens, the waning December days are filled not with hope but foreboding. The president-elect felon and his billionaire cronies have already begun to make “the shiny city on a hill” go dark with chaos, cruelty and endemic corruption.
But Ohio beat them to it. Gerrymandered Republican supermajorities in the Statehouse hold forth in perpetuity. Republican statewide officials toe the party line and the partisan majority on the state supreme court is a GOP rubberstamp. Taken together, Ohio’s overlords define corrupt and don’t care. Like the next president, state Republicans have absolute power to do as they please with impunity.
Remember, the same connivers were knee deep in the largest political corruption scheme in state history — a legislative pay-to-play bribery scandal with a deep-pocketed utility angling for a billion-dollar taxpayer bailout. To this day, the GOP-controlled legislature refuses to fully excise the notorious House Bill 6, enacted on behalf of FirstEnergy, from the Ohio Revised Code. Parts of the shady law — that sent a former GOP House Speaker to the federal pen for 20 years — has taxpayers still bailing out two hyper-polluting coal plants and the state still gutting renewable energy and energy efficiency standards.
But Ohioans paying higher utility bills and living with more pollution aren’t the constituents ruling Republicans answer to, especially not at Christmas. The GOP-version of a special interest Santa Claus just wrapped a bow on the lame duck session and predictably handed out lumps of coal to the marginalized and candy to the influential. Statehouse Santa dished up cruel, disguised as parental rights, to further ostracize LGBTQ+ kids and put them even more at risk.
Lawmakers passed a bill that mandates schools and counselors out queer students and eviscerate trusted confidences between students and teachers. House Bill 8, another MAGA-manufactured solution in search of a problem, also limits the mention of gender identity in classrooms (don’t say gay) and restricts how so-called “sexuality content” (undefined, of course) can be taught in schools.
Folded into the right-wing invention of state Reps. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, and Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, was an unrelated amendment that mandates local schools discharge students for religious instruction during the middle of the school day. The provision was a gift to a lobbyist running a multi-state Christian nationalist program disguised as Bible study for “unchurched” K-12 public school kids.
Forcing secular state education systems to permit school day disruptions for questionable off-campus religious activity upends the whole concept of church-state separation. But so does public funding of private Christian school tuition with billion-dollar giveaways (vouchers) or forking over millions from the state’s Capital Budget to religious schools for construction. Unprecedented fusion of church and state in Ohio that sure seems unconstitutional.
Yet that’s what state Republicans in high places do for their friends/donors. Doesn’t matter whether a favored constituency is synonymous with fraud like FirstEnergy, or pollutes state parks for profit with a fracking boom, or is on a religious right mission to convert public school students but only during the school day, or is a powerful diocesan lobby that banks on the voucher gravy train to get church schools back in the black. It’s manna from Matt Huffman.
The former state senate president and incoming speaker of the Ohio House prioritized passage of universal vouchers (regardless of income) last year in his ongoing quest to defund public schools and privatize education in the state. Huffman’s massive voucher expansion — to many affluent private school families who could afford the tuition tab of their enrolled children without state handouts — siphoned nearly $970 million from the state education budget in its first year that could have benefited the public schools a majority of Ohio students (88.6%) attend.
Another voucher bill, sponsored by two House Republicans, passed out of committee last month but without the minimum transparency and accountability standards proposed for how public education money (in the billions) is being spent on private education and to what academic end. Taxpayers don’t have to know. They just have to foot the bill.
Senate Republicans, nudged on by Huffman, added a parting middle finger to voters trying to get citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. The legislation, slipped into an unrelated House bill and passed, gave Republican Attorney General Dave Yost new power to reject citizen initiatives over the title alone. The state supreme court ruled earlier that Yost did not have the authority to nix a ballot initiative because he didn’t like the title. Now, thanks to Huffman & Co., he does.
The least productive General Assembly in more than 40 years ran out of time to pat itself on the back for doing less with a nice, fat, tone-deaf pay raise. But the new year is nigh. The GOP trifecta in state government will do as it pleases in 2025 as crosses the Rubicon again with the corruption and cruelty that made Ohio go dark way ahead of the Trumpian curve.
Yes, all is not calm or bright this Christmas, but all is not lost, either. As long as decency, empathy and compassion exist, believe in better days ahead. Then plan to get there. Even in a small way. Where you live. On a silent night this week, find the faith.
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