BREAKING NEWS: Ohio is just as Republican (and f*cked) as you thought it was, House Edition
The only thing that makes it seem like it isn't is the popular vote, which they've systematically undermined with militarized gerrymandering and voter ID laws
Rarely in OH politics do members of the General Assembly do more than survive on the public dime in exchange for what amounts to babysitting with extra steps. But with right-wing extremism surging across state legislatures, armed with their family values and corruption scandals, it should come as no surprise that the OH General Assembly has followed suit in the worst of ways possible. Let’s just hope their incompetence gets the best of them once again.
HB 151 (2021-2): OH’s hellish future
House Rep Jena Powell (R) from District 80 just north of Dayton made headlines last year for her Save Women’s Sports Act. You know, the one that requires schools to discriminate against trans girls, allows parents to initiate highly invasive and disturbing investigations1 into students’ sex if they think they’re secretly trans, and gives “aggrieved” parents cause of action to sue anyone and everyone they think has wronged them for … letting trans girls play sports.
Well Jena and others are back, and last year’s HB 151 gives us all a glimpse into what the future of OH under a GOP regime will look like moving forward.
HB 151 (2021-2) began as a bill specifically about OH’s teacher residency program. Now to be clear, the original bill was a hellscape of deregulation and “local control,” but what it became was far worse. HB 151 passed both the House and Senate in various forms as the OH GOP’s omnibus bill to push through their insane agenda. And because OH is a horrifyingly corrupt, gerrymandered, and voter-suppressed state, this bill had everything: give the governor full control over state education, give the General Assembly power to override the governor’s control over state education if they don’t like what he does, prohibit schools from mandating COVID vaccinations.2
The list, unfortunately, covers everything you don’t want it to. Fortunately, the final version of the bill was never passed in the Senate after revisions by the House.3 But it never should’ve gotten to that point to begin with.
Well it’s all back, and things aren’t great
Undeterred by their failure to bring HB 151 into law before their 2023-4 session, the OH General Assembly is at it again, and all the parts of HB 151 have been introduced as their own, independent pieces of legislation.
Knowing the OH GOP fully backs everything that was in HB 151, bolstered by their outright disregard for their unconstitutional gerrymandering, and knowing that they’ll never face the consequences of their actions under this current regime, it’s important that we take the time to discuss what these new bills entail and what should be done about them.
HB 1: Establish a Flat Income Tax
HB 1 by Adam Matthews (R) from District 56 just north of Cincinnati proposes to eliminate progressive taxation in the State of OH in place of a flat 2.75% tax. This shift would Thanos-snap $1.2 billion from funding towards schools and local governments.4
At a time when education and local government are both under attack in general, it’s not reassuring that a freshman politician is looking to make waves by gutting what is already a gutted system. It’s also telling that the OH GOP is even letting Matthews propose this bill in the first place, showing how little they have to lose from pursuing their agenda in this state at all costs.
HB 4: End Public BDS and ESG
HB 4 by Tom Young (R) from District 37 just south of Dayton and Angela King (R) from District 84 just southwest of Lima declares the General Assembly’s intent to pass legislation “regarding financial institutions and other businesses that conduct economic boycotts or discriminate against certain companies or customers based on certain factors” as well as address access to capital.
As if it needed to be said, this is just a thinly-veiled attempt to wipe out the BDS movement levied against the apartheid government of the State of Israel5 by Boycotting Israeli products, Divesting from Israeli properties, and Sanctioning Israeli companies. This bill would also eliminate public institutions’ ability to support social investing and would damage the ESG movement.
While ESG and social investing are fraught with problems and in no way are a solution to the problems of the present day, they’re not bad and should be supported as a means to gain ground where ground can be gained. HB 4 is just another of countless examples of the OH GOP’s eagerness to cowtow to corporate and colonial interests that oppose the will of the people.
HB 6: Separate-but-Equal Sports
This is the infamous OH trans sports bill, except this time, Jena nixed the part about violating the bodies of children accused of being trans. Discrimination is discrimination, and segregation is segregation. Trans people exist, and the OH GOP knows and resents this. HB 6 should only be seen as one step towards separate-but-equal for trans people. This country is founded upon and has progressed beyond genocide after genocide—let’s not propagate another.
HB 8: Parental Control of Sex Ed
HB 8 by DJ Swearingen (R) from Sandusky’s District 89 and Sara Carruthers (R) from Oxford’s District 47 is a classic DeSantis-style piece of legislation that gives parents absolute control over every aspect of their children’s lives. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with this concept, but even the wording here belies the real issue: control.
Sex ed is not sexually explicit, and the OH GOP’s attempts to construe the two as the same only reveals their own troubled minds. Parents are the guardians of their children, but to say you control them is a disgusting overreach of bounds, though the language might be technically correct. It is the role of public institutions, including schools, to raise our children into the future citizenry of our state, not to support their indoctrination into their parents’ beliefs. If you don’t like what the public schools teach, homeschool your child. Otherwise, tough luck.
HB 11: Vouchers, Vouchers, and More Vouchers
HB 11 by Riordan McClain (R) from District 87 squarely between Findley, Columbus, and Wooster and Marilyn John (R) from Mansfield’s District 76 funds a $5,500 scholarship for grades K-8 and $7,500 scholarship for grades 9-12 for every student in the State of OH that follows them as opposed to being allocated to the district they live in.
The Backpack Bill is proudly sponsored by the Ohio Christian Education Network, a group that wants to indoctrinate children into “Gospel-centered principles,” which is organized by the Center for Christian Virtue, which is an anti-abortion, anti-drug, anti-porn organization that supports “public policy that reflects the truth of the Gospel,” including nuclear marriage and free speech absolutism.
It’s 2023. If you’re a Christian, good on you, live your truth. But you don’t get to legislate your religion; the US is not a theocratic state. This bill replaces secular public policy with a particular flavor of Christian thought by creatively masking the issue as one of “school choice,” which is simply part of an OH GOP cabal to dismantle public education from within and replace it with state-funded Christian schools. It’s bad all around.
HB 12: Make Education Authoritarian Again
HB 12 by Don Jones (R) from District 95 just east of Zaynesville and Dave Dobos (R) from District 10 in southwest Columbus is a real doozy. HB 12 reorganizes the Department of Education into the Department of Education and Workforce, moves control of the Department under a director directly appointed by the Governor, and strips the State Board of Education of its real powers, leaving it as little more than a licensing and districting body.
Akin to HBs 8 and 11, HB 12 is all about control, this time moving control from everyday Ohioans to the Governor. This would allow the Governor to impose whatever absent-minded curricular and funding decisions upon our public education system that they desire without any need to consult the public in any meaningful capacity. Public education serves the people, not the interests of the Governor and their party line. In a state this gerrymandered, any attack on popular control of government is an attack against Ohioans themselves.
HB 15: The Scare-the-Shit-out-of-Women-seeking-an-Abortion Law
HB 15 by Jennifer Gross (R) from District 45 south of Oxford and Beth Lear (R) from District 61 north of Columbus and just west of Mount Vernon is one more law that makes abortion scarcer and doctors more scrutinized. This bill adds extra conditions to the informed consent laws already in place for women seeking an abortion and inserts the state directly into your doctor’s office by heavily scrutinizing physician records to ensure compliance.
Not only is this a gross overreach of doctor-patient confidentiality, but this only serves as another attempt to make abortion effectively illegal in this state. The reality is, abortion is a non-partisan issue that the vast majority of people support having access to. Scaring women into not having abortions is something only feckless cowards who are unable to win the game by the rules would do. This bill has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with control.
HB 16: Reforming Lobbying Ethics by Eliminating Ethics from Lobbying
HB 16 by Derek Merrin (R) from District 42 southwest of Toledo obfuscates lobbying ethics and introduces nuance to existing ethics regulations and oversight to ensure that certain forms of lobbying most commonly employed by the GOP and other right-wing and far-right PACs and interest groups fly well under the radar of the ethics commission. That’s it. There’s no joke. It’s just de-regulating ethics so lobbyists can remain unknown to the public. With the amount of lawsuits and corruption scandals in this state, it’s quite clear why this exists.
(Totally unrelated, but District 42 looks like a stone plinth holding up Toledo. It’s adorable and my new favorite thing. If gerrymandering ever did anyone good, this is definitely one of those times. Don’t believe me? Ok.)
So what’s to be done?
First and foremost, we as the collective left (liberals included) must work to prevent the OH GOP from overthrowing what little protections exist within our state and local governments against their style of autocratic control. Popular elections still hold sway, and ballot issues as well as constitutional amendments can still be put forward by average, everyday citizens. The more we assert pressure on the OH GOP through popular means, the more aggressively they’ll work to prevent us from doing so in the future; however, we must do what needs to be done in the present to even have a future worth living.
Second but no less urgent, we must work to counteract, mitigate, and hedge past, present, and future radicalization by right-wing and far-right media outlets and politicians, bolstered by powerful corporate interests and mainstream media complacency. The right thrives off ignorance, distrust, phobias, and isms. We as everyday Ohioans, however, understand that these are fabricated realities spun before us to move us ever closer towards their dystopian hellscape. Fabricating consent for discriminatory, oppressive, and colonial laws by means of personal radicalization is a complex, multi-part challenge that requires an equally multi-part solution. We must then bridge our own identities and unite against those who would do us all harm.
And finally, we must take decisive, collective action, now and in the future.
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For a summary, check out Anna Staver’s The Columbus Dispatch article (2022), https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/06/07/bill-transgender-athletes-could-require-genital-checks-girls/7529718001/
Based on information in Anna Staver’s The Columbus Dispatch article (2022), https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/15/ohio-senate-puts-limits-on-transgender-athletes-overhauls-education/69725342007/
See Footnote 2
As per a WCBE 90.5 FM article by Karen Kasler (2023) from the Statehouse News Bureau, https://www.wcbe.org/wcbe-news/2023-03-02/ohio-house-bill-that-would-cut-taxes-and-cost-local-governments-and-schools-gets-first-hearing
For a closer look at the actions of the government of the State of Israel against Palestinians in occupied territories, check out this Amnesty International piece from early 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/