As others have eloquently reported, perhaps no General Assembly in decades has been less productive than the one now in session. Part of that is structural. Although the House is composed of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats, Democrats have clout out of proportion to their numbers.
Reason: Because of split among the 67 Republican between intra-GOP-caucus foes and allies of Republican Speaker Jason Stephens, of Lawrence County’s Kitts Hill, who won the House’s gavel with the help of House Democrats’ votes. And to keep the gavel, and to avoid riling his de facto Democratic allies, Stephens, it appears, has reined in House Republicans’ extreme-right faction, a noisy group that isn’t enthused about much of anything but the past.
Meanwhile, the Senate, led by President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, has tended to be more conservative, its Republicans for the most part united, what Matt Huffman wants, Matt Huffman often seems to get, a fact not lost on the Statehouse’s teeming corporate lobbies, who prefer results to promises, when it comes to legislation in Columbus.
(That’s so in a state whose per capita personal income last matched the nation’s in 1969 and, as noted here before, has been declining ever since.)
And now Senate President Huffman, who’s being term-limited out of the Senate, will be returning to the House in January, vying to wrest its speakership from fellow Republican Stephens. And anti-Stephens House Republicans have gained control of the House GOP caucus’s campaign fund, what there is of it, in a legal fight the House’s anti-faction Stephens faction won, and which he lost.
If you’re Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, with 30 months left in your governorship, you can expect to be navigating in at best choppy waters in the state Senate and Ohio’s House in 2025 and 2026, no matter how the Huffman-Stephens contest turns out. At the same time, intra-party clawing and knifing over the 2026 statewide Ohio tickets of both the Republican and Democratic parties, will distract Statehouse attention from issues that continue to demand attention – school funding, property taxes and utility rates, gerrymandering of General Assembly districts – and sensation-of-the-day “issues” and policy gimmicks.
As things stand today on Capitol Square, even the most jaded Statehouse bystander likely longs for the era when the aim of the game was to get things done, not just score points to win headlines and attract talk-show invites.
Not to worry, though, before it went home, the General Assembly gave Ohio’s voters billions of dollars in gifts in the form of local construction projects – “gifts” the recipients, not the donors, will pay for long after today’s General Assembly has retired with nice pensions, and no regrets.
On the eve of Independence Day 2024, and what’s likely to be the most momentous presidential election since Lincoln’s in 1860, that’s the wonderful world of Ohio politics today: Nostalgia for the past, indifference about the future, and devotion to the status quo. It’s a great life – if you know the right people.
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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