Meanwhile, voters should ask if Ohio really needs both a state Senate and House of Representatives. Nebraska has gotten along just dandy with one legislative chamber since the 1930s, when there was a serious debate about Ohio also possibly going “unicameral.”
The 49 states, like Ohio, with two legislative chambers have, in effect, two state capitol tollgates, where something changes hands – from principle on down to pelf – to get anything done. Moreover, the need (as the Ohio Constitution now requires) to coordinate boundaries of state Senate and Ohio House districts makes district-drawing ridiculously complicated: But does it really matter if East Sasquatch is split between two state legislators?
Almost anything would be better than this season’s Statehouse theatrics over new districts. That wasn’t what voters aimed for when they overwhelmingly voted in 2015 and 2018, respectively, for reforms in how Ohio creates legislative and congressional districts.
Members of the General Assembly, like their big league pals at the U.S. Capitol, want to pick their constituents rather than let constituents pick their legislators because democracy at the grass roots is dangerous: Some things might actually change in Ohio. But with redistricting set up as it now is, things can’t change, and the insiders know it.
Meanwhile:
Nothing could be more telling about the prestige of a U.S. Senate seat than the sums of personal wealth (and donations) some Ohio Republicans are mustering for their campaigns. Not for nothing is the Senate known as the world’s most exclusive club.
Given the kind of money that gets thrown around, you have to wonder if it really was a “reform” to have made the Senate a popularly elected body. Until just before World War I, legislatures, not voters, elected a state’s two senators.
The General Assembly last elected a U.S. senator in 1911: It sent Canton Democrat Attlee Pomerene to Washington. Pomerene, a Holmes County native, was re-elected (by voters) in 1916, unsuccessfully sought re-election two more times, then practiced law in Cleveland.
The first U.S. senator Ohio voters elected was Marion Republican Warren G. Harding, in 1914, who was elected president in 1920, besting Dayton’s James M. Cox. Depending on who’s asked, Harding is considered the worst (despite recent competition) president or among the worst presidents in American history.
Still, Harding, publisher of the Marion Star, was the GOP equivalent of a hail fellow, well met – a priceless political gift even if, in journalist H.L. Mencken’s opinion, Harding’s inaugural speech “[reminded Mencken] of a string of wet sponges … of tattered washing on the line … of stale bean-soup … college yells … dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”
That’s not to say the popular election of senators by Ohioans hasn’t sent some sterling men (no women – yet) to Washington, with ex-astronaut John Glenn among the most notable.
When Democratic then-Sen. John F. Kennedy chaired a special committee in the 1950s to name the five most outstanding senators in U.S. history, an Ohioan – the first Robert A. Taft, of Cincinnati (1889-1953), conservatives’ “Mr. Republican” – was among the senators the Kennedy panel chose. Taft was elected by Ohioans in 1938, then re-elected in 1944 and 1950.
Compare Bob Taft with Ohio’s 2022 senatorial field. Then frown. Or weep.
Thomas Suddes is an adjunct assistant professor at Ohio University and the former Statehouse reporter for The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.
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