Ohio Republican lawmakers want to try again to rob voters of our fundamental power over the Ohio Constitution.
They haven’t learned. In their phenomenal arrogance, Ohio Republican lawmakers once again want to spit in the face of Ohio voters and try to convince us it’s raining.
After cheating voters with flagrant gerrymandering, making it harder and harder to vote with law after law, and overriding voters on the 2023 legal weed law, they want to try to kneecap Ohio voters’ fundamental Constitutional power, again.
They tried to do this in 2023 and failed spectacularly.
As Ohio voters were gearing up to consider a reproductive rights amendment that year, gerrymandered Ohio Republican lawmakers proposed raising the threshold to pass amendments to the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to a 60% threshold.
The gerrymandered Republican lawmaker sponsoring the 2023 effort openly advocated to his colleagues that his proposal was intended to stop the reproductive rights amendment, as well as any further anti-gerrymandering reform.
Voters easily saw through their charade and rejected them in humiliating fashion.
Now, as voters have launched efforts to ban data centers and eliminate property taxes, the same legislature that has made a mess of things with data centers and property taxes wants voters to give up significant power to do anything about it.
Ohio Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino of Kirtland wants to give it another try at convincing Ohio voters to lie down and roll over for politicians who have obnoxiously demonstrated over and over again that they have zero respect for voters.
In a personal demonstration of his absolute disregard for the opinions of voters, Cirino was the lawmaker who ignored the heartfelt testimony of 700 Ohioans and thousands of protesters across college campuses throughout Ohio, to force through a new higher education law to gut academic freedom, regulate classroom discussion, destroy diversity efforts, and dismantle the power of unions.
The result? Ohio’s college campuses are suffering. High school students said they are leaving the state. Students who’ve stayed say they feel the “bleak” chill of stifled campus speech and classroom discussion. Professors have been robbed of both their academic freedom and their job security, also noting the frigid air in classrooms subjected to the menace of government censorship.
Minority students on campus have had their spaces for acceptance and understanding stripped away from them. And 90 programs including economics, physics, and mathematics, have been eliminated from campuses across the state, as Cirino’s generation pulls the ladder up behind them.
As voters across the country question the wisdom of data centers, in Ohio, our politicians have showered them with state government candy.
While cutting billions from Ohio pubic schools, state lawmakers have handed out billions worth of incentives to data centers. In one notorious case, Ohio gave $4.5 million to a data center project to create just 10 jobs.
Regarding property taxes, gerrymandered Ohio lawmakers have repeatedly abused our local communities by making massive cuts to funding for public schools and the local government fund that helps pay for public works jobs and emergency personnel like police officers, paramedics, and firefighters.
Facing the devastating loss of local jobs and services, some Ohio communities eat the cuts and lay off employees, while others have rallied to support levies on the local level.
But for those communities that pass levies to keep their local jobs and service intact, state officials have taken it as a cue that those communities will fend for themselves, so they cut their funding even more.
A vicious cycle perpetuates where local communities are asked to do more and more and more, while state lawmakers do less and less and less.
What do Ohio’s state leaders do instead?
They give enormous tax handouts and giveaways to unaccountable corporations and the richest people in the state. They give out $12 billion with little to show for it.
It’s a cozy little arrangement if you’re a wealthy corporation or sports franchise owner who can buy political influence with campaign donations.
But if you’re a regular Ohioan trying to live in a decent community with decent opportunities for your children, your family is getting your lunch eaten by unscrupulous and unaccountable politicians who have insulated themselves from electoral consequences with gerrymandering.
They don’t have to really care what destruction they cause, unless some happy day they discover any sense of human shame or conscience.
In the meantime, what you can do is join with your fellow citizens and go to enormous lengths, with incredibly high financial and practical barriers, to try to bring change directly to voters for consideration at the ballot box.
You could introduce a law — an initiated statute.
But Ohio lawmakers showed very clearly with the voter-passed weed law of 2023 that they will not respect voter-passed laws and they will change them however they want, whenever they want, voters be damned.
Or you could try to introduce a constitutional amendment, protected from the machinations of unaccountable, gerrymandered lawmakers.
Those unaccountable, gerrymandered lawsmakers really, really don’t like that though.
How dare you present any check whatsoever on their abuse of power?
‘Can’t have it.
Better try to convince you, again, to willingly give up your own power so that they can continue to abuse theirs.
To me, the worst part is that they are so arrogant and so condescending that still think you’re dumb enough to buy it.
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