Late in June, Senate-House budget disagreements will be ... negotiated ... in a harum-scarum conference committee. And that should frighten taxpayers.
Reason: A Statehouse conference committee supposedly isn’t allowed to slip into a budget things that neither the House nor the Senate initially proposed. So, yes, joint Senate-House rules adopted in 2007 said conferees “may ... include in [proposed compromises] any amendments pertinent to the bill ... provided amendments relate exclusively to the original matters of difference between the two houses.” (Emphasis added.)
But those rules have expired and never been replaced. So, if Huffman and McColley’s budget conferees say up is down, or east is west, their GOP caucuses may shrug, but they’ll go along.
And there’s precedent for conference committees doing what a skittish House or Senate won’t do. In a 1989 caper, a conference tinkering with Ohio’s 1989-91 highway budget slipped into its “compromise” a gas-tax increase that neither the Senate nor House had originally passed: There was no Senate-House difference to “compromise.”
Didn’t matter: Conferees boosted Ohio’s gas tax – then 14.8 cents a gallon – by 3.2 cents in mid-1989, then by 2 cents more in mid-1990, making the total tax 20 cents a gallon (it’s 38.5 cents today). And the GOP-run Senate and Democrat-run House quietly went along despite the eloquent objections of a leading GOP conservative, the late Rep. William Batchelder, of Medina.
Conference committees’ antics in legislatures prompted the renowned Nebraska Republican progressive, Sen. George W. Norris (Ohio-born, in 1861, near Sandusky County’s Clyde) to persuade Nebraska voters to transform their two-chamber legislature into a one-chamber (unicameral) body. Key Norris argument: In two-chamber legislatures – e.g., Ohio’s – a conference committee is in “reality a third house, and ... [the] most powerful one of the three.”
A brief push in the 1930s to make Ohio’s General Assembly unicameral fizzled, but looks wiser and wiser today, with billions of Ohioans’ dollars at stake on Capitol Square.
Lest we forget: Fifty-five years ago yesterday, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard, ultimately answerable to Republican then-Gov. James A Rhodes, killed four Kent State University students and wounded nine others during protests over then-President Richard M. Nixon’s unconstitutional, illegal and strategically stupid invasion of Cambodia. (Among other disasters, Nixon’s move helped spawn the genocidal reign of the murderous Khmer Rouge).
The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Nixon appointees chaired by Republican William W. Scranton, a former Pennsylvania governor, ruled that “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.”
The Kent State students Ohio National Guard gunfire killed were Cleveland-born Allison Krause, age 19, who’d attended high school in Maryland; Jeffrey Miller, age 20, of Plainview, N.Y.; Sandra L. Scheuer, age 20, of suburban Youngstown’s Boardman; and William K. Schroeder, age 19, a Lorain High School graduate. The National Guard wounded nine other students, paralyzing one, Dean Kahler, from the waist down, for life.
“Although a number of investigating commissions and court trials followed over many years, no one was ever found guilty of the murder or manslaughter of the four students,” the BBC reported last year.
Of course not. This is Ohio.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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