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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > December > 17
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Editorial: House Dems are slackers on redistricting
Even aside from the budget issue — and the long delay in getting something enacted — the Ohio legislature has been getting a reputation for slowness and inaction.
In defense, Speaker Armond Budish, a Democrat from near Cleveland, points to bills that have passed the House of Representatives, but have failed in, or aren’t being acted on by, the Republican Senate.
His litany starts with a gay rights bill. But there isn’t much else that grabs attention on the list of 38 items.
At any rate, the idea is to get things through both houses.
Toward that end, Speaker Budish should put some energy into the simultaneously arcane and politically juicy matter of redistricting, that is, how legislative districts are drawn.
This is one area in which the Senate has acted, and the House hasn’t. The issue is important because the current system allows the parties to make too many districts unwinnable by one party or the other, thus limiting the power of voters.
Among other things, the current rules foster polarization, because candidates worry more about winning primaries than general elections.
On the initiative of Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, the Senate has passed a bill that would basically do two things: create a nonpartisan commission to draw the districts — as opposed to the winner-draws-all system that prevails; and provide rules to guide the commission.
The House now needs to do the same.
The rules the House proposes would likely be different from those in the Husted bill.
That’s where the discussion becomes arcane.
Speaker Budish says that the Husted bill rules put too much emphasis on honoring county lines. He says that emphasis helps Republicans, because Democratic voters — while as numerous as Republicans — are concentrated in fewer counties.
The Democrats’ experts believe that compact districts — a goal of all reformers, to one degree or another — can be drawn without the restrictions the Husted proposal calls for.
It’s a debate that can wait until the Democrats pass something.
In discussing the current budget impasse, Speaker Budish emphasizes that the Republican Senate hasn’t passed anything. So he and his Democratic colleagues in the House can’t be considered the problem.
Fair point. But it also applies to the House on redistricting.
Truth is, just creating the non-partisan Husted commission, without new rules, would be progress.
(It wouldn’t be ideal, because such a commission might settle for balancing the number of Democratic and Republican districts, rather than seeking districts that could be won be either party. The rules need to encourage competitiveness.)
Any reform adopted by the legislature would have to go before voters, because the constitution would have to be changed. The schedule for doing that keeps slipping. Sen. Husted has hoped for a ballot issue in the spring. Speaker Budish is now looking at next November.
One might think the Democrats would be more eager for reform than the Republicans. After all, if the system is not changed, redistricting of the state legislature will be done after the 2010 Census by whichever party holds two of these positions: governor, secretary of state and state auditor.
The Democrats now hold two, but all three will be contested in 2010 and, as of now, few people see the year as shaping up great for the Democrats.
Furthermore, under the current rules, the Republicans could have complete control over redistricting as it applies to congressional seats. That map is drawn by the legislature and the governor, not by the commission that draws state legislative districts.
(There’s no way the Democrats could have complete control of the congressional districts, because they can’t pick up enough seats to take over the state Senate, now overwhelmingly Republican.)
And yet, enthusiasm has been hard to see on the Democratic side. The House bill doesn’t even reform the process relating to congressional districts. Speaker Budish says he has to limit the scope of the legislation if he is going to get anything passed. Not a good sign.
Somebody needs to light a fire under the Democrats. They have an opportunity do something important, concrete and long-overdue, without — near as anybody can tell — hurting themselves.
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Martin Gottlieb: In wake of conceal/carry, new stats worth a look
“Many states recently adopted looser gun laws,” a headline said this week about an Associated Press review.
“In the last two years, 24 states, mostly in the South and West, have passed 47 new laws loosening gun restrictions,” the story said. “Legislatures have allowed firearms to be carried in cars, made it illegal to ask job candidates whether they own a gun, and (more).”
Says the chief lobbyist of the National Rifle Association, “This is all a coordinated approach.…We’ll rest when all 50 states allow and respect the right of law-abiding people to defend themselves.”
Time was, the gun lobby presented itself primarily as a defensive force. It was a guardian against the allegedly “slippery slope” toward laws that would keep even hunters and collectors from having firearms.
But now the NRA is on the offense.
Ohio passed a law in 2004 allowing people to carry concealed weapons if they pay a fee and pass a safety course. The Republican legislature clearly felt under political pressure to pass it.
By the end of 2008, the state had seen 143,000 permits issued. That’s about 1.6 percent of adult Ohioans. After all that fuss!
The percentage says a lot about the ability of sophisticated political interest groups to generate the impression that a lot more people are, shall we say, up in arms than really are.
Legally concealed weapons haven’t turned Ohio into the Wild West. Nor, on the other hand, have they resulted in any great drop in crime rates.
A debate about their impact continues. Now a national organization called the Violence Policy Center (VPC) brings a new stat into the discussion.
It says, “Concealed handgun permit holders have killed at least nine law enforcement officers and 98 private citizens (including 12 shooters who killed themselves after an attack) since May, 2007.”
Kristen Rand, a VPC spokesman, says, “When the National Rifle Association launched its … campaign … it made this promise: ‘People who get permits… are law-abiding, upstanding community leaders who merely seek to exercise their right to self-defense.’
“To the contrary,” says Rand, “concealed handgun permit holders are killing people over parking spaces, football games and family arguments.”
She says that if people had known in advance about the police fatalities, the conceal-and-carry bills never could have been passed.
The VPC stats don’t indicate that the permit-holders are an exceptionally violent lot, not when you consider the millions across the country who hold permits. The numbers do suggest something about what happens when guns are around.
One shooter in Utah insisted his crime never would have happened if not for the permit. (Also, he was on seven prescription drugs.)
In July, 2008, a police officer in suburban Twinsburg in northern Ohio pulled over one Ashford Thompson for playing loud music. Thompson shot him four times in the head with a “pocket pistol,” killing him. Thompson had a permit.
In 2007, on the Fourth of July, a firefighter with a permit killed three people and wounded two in a dispute over fireworks the three were setting off. The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported the shooter being seen by acquaintances as a “ticking time bomb” before the shootings.
There was a case in Ohio of a 66-year-old man killing himself and his wife; a man killing himself and his girlfriend; and a 5-year-old accidentally killing himself with his father’s gun. (The last one is still pending in court.) All involved permits.
The VPC gathers its numbers from news accounts (and removes cases that result in acquittals). It’s not an ideal way. But nobody keeps such stats officially.
News accounts are far from all-inclusive. Sometimes news outlets look into — and report — whether the shooter had a permit; sometimes they don’t.
(The names of permit holders in Ohio are not released as a group. That’s another fight the gun lobby won. News media can, however, find out if a particular person has a permit.)
Toby Hoover, executive director of Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, a small operation based in Toledo, points out that the VPC numbers are just about fatalities. Nobody seems to have stats on how many non-fatal shootings might involve permits.
The stats coming from the VPC aren’t the last word in the debate about concealed weapons, of course. But they are worth keeping in mind when proposals come up for still more and more liberalization of gun laws.
Permalink | Comments (56) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government, Ohio politics
