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Tag: MARILOU JOHANEK

  • House budget document will hurt Ohioans

    House budget document will hurt Ohioans

    Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman. (Photo by Morgan Trau, WEWS.)

    by Marilou Johanek – Ohio Capital Journal

    Just as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was never really about improving government efficiency – quite the opposite, in fact – the 5,000-plus page biennial budget rewrite the Ohio House slapped together and sent to the Ohio Senate was never really about improving the common good of everyday Ohioans.

    It was about advancing the hard-right priorities of powerful politicians who answer to big money – not constituents in gerrymandered voting districts.   

    Yet even for the supremely arrogant kingpin of state government, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, the budget bill passed out of the General Assembly’s lower chamber on April 9 was beyond the pale in cruelty and cunning.

    It is the Ohio version of Project 2025 with all the unsparing, exacting hallmarks of the Trumpian blueprint, recklessly destroying federal institutions and agencies that, however imperfectly, protect, serve and promote the welfare of we, the people.

    But that’s the MAGA nihilistic way and Ohio Republicans are doing their part in tearing down what made Ohio great. Huffman, the Lima Republican who runs the state under the one party rule he rigged with unconstitutional redistricting, is in the catbird seat calling the shots. The speaker (and former Ohio Senate president) lords over the GOP supermajority in the Ohio House while his political protégé, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, accommodates the boss.

    Huffman, who once said the quiet part out loud about GOP gerrymandering (“We can kind of do what we want”), now has a straight runway to enact his blueprint on Ohioans whether they like it or not. I suspect his budget proposal will survive, largely intact, with the House caucus he controls and the one he led with an iron fist for four years in the Senate.

    Local public schools, public libraries, clean drinking initiatives, lead poisoning prevention, pediatric cancer funding, home visits for new mothers, food assistance programs and health care coverage for the poor are all on the chopping block in Huffman’s House Bill 96.

    What wasn’t on his slash-and-burn budget list were government handouts (taxpayer-funded vouchers) to upper-income private school families. But doling out unlimited government subsidies to the affluent, whose darlings are already attending and affording elite high schools and religious institutions, is Huffman’s thing.

    He is on a crusade to shower hundreds of millions of public education dollars on unaccountable private and predominantly religious schools – despite clear prohibitions against such a diversion of public money in the Ohio Constitution.

    “No religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state,” the state constitution reads.

    But Huffman has defied the state constitution before with impunity (on gerrymandering) and did so again by ramrodding his universal voucher bonanza through the legislature for everyone, regardless of income. Never mind that the giant state giveaway – to offset private school costs for the well-off – blew a $1 billion dollar hole in the general revenue budget its first year.

    Never mind that public schools in the state, forever cash-strapped and dependent on tapped out property owners, labored under an unequal, inadequate school funding formula (ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court) for 26 years before a bipartisan coalition agreed to a phased-in funding solution over six years. The final two-year phase was expected to be fully funded in the current biennial budget negotiations.

    Not under Huffman. Not in a state where the Republican lock on power is absolute and the Statehouse heavyweight has free, unchecked rein to flout the law and grossly defund the public schools that educate the vast majority of Ohio students (approximately 1.6 million) while greatly expanding appropriations for private school tuitions, homeschooling expenses and even unchartered, nonpublic schools with deeply held religious beliefs that are virtually unregulated by the state!

    Funding for the “thorough and efficient system of common schools” state government is constitutionally obligated to secure – and that would have been secured under the Fair School Funding Plan from 2021 – shrank by over $400 million. House Republicans added insult to injury by robbing fiscally prudent school districts of surplus revenue for future planning to give uneven, one-time property tax relief in some districts and not others. They also ensured that property tax owners will face more school levies from local districts forced to deplete that surplus operating revenue. Sound policymaking (or genuine property tax relief) this is not.

    But it is a gut punch to public schools, just as a $100 million reduction in funding to Ohio’s public libraries is, or cutting over $22 million from the Help Me Grow program is for in-home visits to newborn babies to mitigate the state’s infant mortality problem. But Matt Huffman’s Ohio-centric Project 2025 is also a kick in the teeth to democratic self-governance.

    Last budget go-around Republican lawmakers stripped the Ohio Board of Education of most of its power and gave it to the governor. This two-year budget proposes cutting all 11 elected members of the board and shrinking the gubernatorial appointments from nine to five. This is Matt Huffman removing voters entirely from state education policy as he engineers total opaque privatization of Ohio schools.

    How is silencing the electorate improving the common good?

    Marilou Johanek

    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

    MORE FROM AUTHOR

  • Ohio’s new U.S. Senator Jon Husted has a history of connections to energy and charter scandals

    Ohio’s new U.S. Senator Jon Husted has a history of connections to energy and charter scandals

    Ohio’s next U.S. Senator, Jon Husted. (Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)

    Commentary

    The same day Jon Husted was tapped to be Ohio’s next U.S. Senator, former FirstEnergy executives were indicted on federal racketeering charges

    Marilou Johanek
    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

    “No comment.” That’s all Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said and walked away. Only at the tail end of DeWine’s press conference last Friday, to announce Lt. Gov. Jon Husted as his pick to replace J.D. Vance in the U.S. Senate, was the elephant in the room even acknowledged. What was the governor’s response to the federal indictments handed down (the same day) against two former FirstEnergy executives tied to the biggest public corruption scandal in state history?

    DeWine’s response was no response. His briefing was about Husted’s promotion not the stain of malfeasance on their watch that the federal indictments underscored. Both men revert to a predictable default setting when it comes to questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the FirstEnergy scheme to bribe lawmakers into giving it a massive state subsidy. Deny. Deflect. Dismiss. No comment.

    The pair insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that they knew nothing about anything corrupt in the legislation written by and for FirstEnergy that they were instrumental in passing and signing into law. DeWine and his LG maintain they conducted themselves properly and did right by Ohio with energy policy that just happened to include an extravagant gift from the state to a utility that donated richly to their campaigns.

    They either outright refute the logged meetings, phone calls, emails and text messages shared with FirstEnergy brass before, during, and after the company’s billion-dollar nuclear plant bailout was enacted — or feign amnesia about their chumminess with generous GOP donors even as FirstEnergy’s devious pay-to-play arrangement was underway to enrich investors and hose ratepayers.

    But as court documents indicate — in the state and federal trials of defendants who got caught up in the nuclear bailout scam — DeWine, and especially Husted, had their fingerprints all over the dodgy FirstEnergy legislation while it was being created and passed through the legislature to benefit the utility and Republican sugar daddy. Like many Ohio Republicans, DeWine and Husted had lengthy relationships and intricate business dealings over the years with the head honchos at FirstEnergy.

    Their coziness with ex-FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and Senior VP Mike Dowling appeared to reach its peak in 2019 with passage of House Bill 6 to prop up the utility’s two aging and uncompetitive nuclear power plants in Ohio. So when federal prosecutors announced that Jones and Dowling — at the center of a $60 million bribery plot to buy off state officials for a $1.2 billion bailout — had been slapped with federal racketeering charges, the top state officials who made that bailout happen must have squirmed.

    Their political patrons, already facing related charges on the state level, could well implicate the guv and his Senate-appointee in the developing federal cases. No wonder Husted is hightailing it out of Ohio before the boom lowers. But the senator-to-be, who has managed to skate around his deep entanglements in some of the state’s biggest scandals, (e.g., the notorious ECOT online charter school he championed without accountability that ripped-off a ton of taxpayer money for phantom students) may not be able to slide so deftly around his role as a pivotal player in the FirstEnergy scandal.

    Publicly released court records suggest Husted, in close contact with FirstEnergy execs, was leading the behind-the-scenes efforts to push the tainted HB6 through the legislature and onto the governor desk ASAP. Detailed evidence contains a slew of FirstEnergy texts referencing “State Official 2,” confirmed as Husted, that show how involved the LG was in not only lobbying for arguably the most corrupt piece of state energy legislation ever, but for making the nuclear bailout bill even beefier by extending the FirstEnergy payouts in the legislation a few extra years.

    Although Husted had to trim his sails on that front, FirstEnergy leaders chortled in text messages that the LG was in their corner “fighting to the end” to give the company everything it wanted and more. Who cared if Ohio ratepayers were on the hook for hundreds of millions in new monthly surcharges on their electricity bills? Husted wasn’t working for them. He was helping FirstEnergy boost its profit margin in an unprecedented bribery and money laundering fraud perpetrated on everyday Ohioans.

    Of course, Husted defaults to denial about any knowledge of the corruptness that permeated FirstEnergy’s bid for bloated state subsidies from the very beginning. It’s a dance he and DeWine do whenever pervasive state scandal threatens to puncture the governor’s folksy persona or the LG’s image as the telegenic GOP Golden Boy who checks off every box that matters to deep-pocketed powerbrokers lining up to make a killing on custom-made government policy.

    As Husted heads to Washington he takes a political skills set honed in shameless service to: an unscrupulous utility that tried to buy a gravy train ticket from the state with secretly-funded legislation, to a crooked for-profit charter that bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, to a billion-dollar voucher boondoggle funding private religious schools in a scandal waiting to explode, to the fossil fuel industry’s anti-wind and anti-solar propaganda machine after publicly supporting renewable energy.

    Husted will fit right in with the Republican Senate majority carrying water for the highest bidder waving a campaign check, capitulating to the tyrant trashing the Constitution with impunity, and brushing aside telling stains of gathering malfeasance with “no comment.”

     

  • Ohio Republicans start the year by throwing public education under the school bus

    Ohio Republicans start the year by throwing public education under the school bus

    Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gets off a school bus as part of the first Ohio School Bus Safety Working Group meeting at the Ohio Department of Public Safety Atrium on Sept. 11, 2023. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

    Commentary

    by Marilou Johanek – Ohio Capital Journal

    It didn’t take long. The new legislative session began in Columbus with Republican chieftains in the state throwing the future of public education in Ohio under the school bus.

    First it was the billion-dollar voucher king, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, to hedge his bets on giving Ohio’s 611 school districts what they need to provide a quality education to the 1.7 million students they serve.

    Then it was Huffman’s patsy in the executive branch, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who added his two cents worth of wishy-washy about how a leaner state budget ahead means something’s gotta give — like fully funding the education system used by the vast majority of Ohio families and their children. “Sometimes these are very, very difficult, difficult choices,” said the gutless wonder. What leadership.

    Educating future generations of Ohioans with high-quality public schools is your job, governor. It’s the No. 1 responsibility of the state to ensure a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. ‘Says so right in the Ohio Constitution. It also says, “no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, control of, any part of the school funds of this state.” But DeWine and his puppet master in the Ohio House ignored that part years ago when the state began diverting hundreds of millions of education funds to private and mostly religious schools.

    Clearly, the politicians calling the shots in state government have no regard for the state constitution. Adhering to the rule of law is optional when political power is absolute. Huffman, who thumbed his nose at the Ohio Constitution on fair redistricting (to pull off even more egregious gerrymandering in legislative and congressional districts) is doing the same thing on adequately funding public education.

    He’s looking to cut revenue to public schools while spending a ton of tax dollars on private school vouchers — with aspirations to fund more private school facilities to increase demand for those vouchers. Call it the Great GOP Phase-out of Public Education. Last week, Huffman dropped a calculated bombshell to prepare Ohio’s public-school districts for another financial hit from the state.

    YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.

     

    The Lima Republican said the state couldn’t afford to fully fund public schools or finally fix a school funding formula ruled unconstitutional nearly three decades ago. The Ohio Supreme Court’s 1997 ruling said the state’s failure to provide and distribute sufficient resources for public education and its over-reliance on local property taxes to cover that shortcoming violated the law.

    Yet Ohio lawmakers never remedied the problem. School districts had to keep going back to voters just to maintain and operate local schools. Homeowners carried the weight of school funding, not the state. They were/are understandably tapped out on school levies, especially as changes in property evaluations jack up tax bills.

    But in 2021, after years of collaboration between former Republican Ohio House Speaker Bob Cupp, former Democratic state Rep. John Patterson and scores of public education stakeholders, Ohio came close to meeting its constitutional obligation of ensuring a thorough and efficient system of funding for public schools. “What we really wanted to do was figure out what it really costs to educate a student and then what a district can really do to support its fair share, and then the state would compensate with the rest,” said Patterson.

    The Cupp-Patterson spending formula, known as the Fair School Funding Plan, was enacted as part of the 2021-23 state budget. The new system weighed a district’s expenses to come up with the base per-pupil funding amount — instead of a blanket amount of state funding for all schools — and changed the way the local community’s share was measured depending on property tax value and the income of local residents.

    That was a big deal and a significant step forward to address the long-running inequities of an unconstitutional school funding system that had failed generations of K-12 students. The quality of their education often depended on where they lived. Wealthy school districts in Ohio had every advantage over high poverty districts that struggled to pay for even basics in the classroom.

    The Fair School Funding Plan initiated a level of fairness and reliability in state support that past spending programs lacked. Complete state funding of the FSFP (around $2 billion altogether) was to be phased in over a six-year period through two-year budget cycles. The goal was to continue expanding state funding for districts in successive biennial state budgets until the Fair School Funding Plan was fully funded.

    The last installation, or third phase, was to be paid in full in the upcoming 2026-2027 operating budget. But that expectation hit a wall when Huffman nixed increased spending to public schools as “unsustainable.”

    His excuses for not making good on fully funding Cupp-Patterson — less state revenue to work with, less federal pandemic relief money, more scrutiny needed for school money already allocate — don’t apply to his expansive voucher outlays to religious schools that reached $966.2 million for the 2023-2024 school year. Enough to fully fund Fair School Funding Plan.

    But Huffman is laying the ground to shave more off the FSFP and showing his utter indifference to the acute financial challenges facing countless districts. Tough luck for the nearly 90% of Ohio students who attend public schools with slashed opportunities. It didn’t take long.

    GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.

    __________
    Marilou Johanek
    Marilou Johanek

    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

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  • Ohio voters face critical choices in 2024. No one is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us.

    Ohio voters face critical choices in 2024. No one is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us.

    Getty Image

    Commentary

    Verify that you are a registered voter in Ohio before you go to the polls on Vote.gov.

    by Marilou Johanek – Ohio Capital Journal

    And so, it begins. In-person early voting and absentee voting by mail — from Tuesday, Oct. 8 through Sunday, Nov. 3 — is now officially underway in Ohio. Even before closing arguments are made in the 2024 election, registered Ohio voters (roughly 8 million) can start casting their ballots at their county board of elections before Election Day. Check location and times for your county board of elections.

    If you haven’t voted since the last presidential election in 2020, you could be in for a rude awakening when you get to the polls. Many Ohioans (not obsessively preoccupied with politics, like yours truly) are unaware that Republican lawmakers in Columbus enacted one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country in 2023 — despite no evidence of significant voter fraud, by impersonation or otherwise.

    Voting restrictions (in GOP-controlled legislatures) to address nonexistent problems of pervasive voting fraud were turbocharged in the wake of Donald Trump’s fraudulent efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (This is usually when I have to breathe deeply). Since then, some 28 states, including Ohio, have passed new laws making it harder to vote in order to “combat concerns” generated by false Republican claims about widespread voting scams.

    Ohio Republicans dove into more voter suppression at the front-end last year with legislated hurdles to ballot access that caught surprised voters off guard. Thousands who had voted uneventfully for years with previously acceptable IDs (i.e., utility bills, bank statements) were suddenly prevented from voting under new, stringent rules rolled out right before the May 2023 primary.

    Those who showed up without the proper, government-issued photo ID could fill out a provisional ballot and double-back to their board of elections with the right credentials in a fast clip (four days, reduced from 10) to hopefully have their vote counted. Tough luck if voters lacked the resources or transportation to obtain the newly prescribed documentation in time.

    The number of provisional ballots thrown out for failure to produce the right paperwork rose tenfold after the Republican law went into effect, according to one report that raised the specter of historic levels of rejected ballots in Ohio’s 2024 presidential election. The Madison Township Republican who sponsored the bill that erected the additional obstacles to voting, state Rep. Thomas Hall, told cleveland.com (ludicrously) that disenfranchising so many voters, particularly the Democratic-leaning kind, was never his intention.

    He could have followed up with, “If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for any ubiquitous outreach by state Republicans to broadly educate the voting public on all the legal changes and requirements (impediments?) that could affect how and whether Ohioans have a voice in the upcoming election. So, do your homework. Share what you know with other would-be voters in your life.

    Verify that you are a registered voter in Ohio before you go to the polls on Vote.gov. Be sure you have not been wrongly purged by Ohio’s desperately partisan and mistake-prone Secretary of State Frank LaRose — who has notoriously swept eligible voters off the rolls in removal practices deemed among the worst in the nation.

    Make a plan to vote. I know that sounds almost cliché, but when you plan to vote you actually have to think through the how, when and where of getting it done. That’s important. So is the choice you make between now and Nov. 5 to either engage in your most fundamental voting right (upon which all our civil liberties rest) or to live with the consequences of not voting.

    But understand that real decisions are going to be made by the next president, by the next U.S. senator from Ohio, by the next justices who control the state supreme court, by the next state senator and state representative on your 2024 Ohio general election ballot. What do you want next and who do you believe, based on incontrovertible fact, will deliver on that? Are you willing to show up and be a part of making it happen?

    The outcome of this particular election on the state and federal level will profoundly affect whether and to what degree we ultimately endure as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It is a referendum on the value we place on freedoms once considered inalienable from the freedom of voting and representational equality to the freedom of women to determine their own destiny and the freedom of all Americans to not live in fear of another mass shooting.

    This election in Ohio and nationwide is a referendum on our republic itself and whether, as Benjamin Franklin mused with prescience, we “can keep it.” What’s it worth to you to navigate the exhausting barriers to participate in self-governance, to exercise your birthright franchise defiantly despite massive voter purges and extreme voting laws?

    Think about it. No one is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us. Always has been.

    Marilou Johanek
    Marilou Johanek

    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

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  • JD Vance’s comments and foreword to Project 2025 book show his contempt for women

    JD Vance’s comments and foreword to Project 2025 book show his contempt for women

    VANDALIA, OHIO -Former U.S. President Donald Trump and Ohio Republican U.S. Senator JD Vance. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)

    Marilou Johanek

    It was the kind of juvenile stunt you’d expect from a frat boy being a jerk. But the problem child pulling the bizarre maneuver on an airport tarmac in Wisconsin last week — to stalk Vice President Kamala Harris — was none other than Senator Cringeworthy from Ohio, or J.D. Vance, his latest alias.

    The Republican vice-presidential nominee is seemingly hellbent on reinforcing his odious public image as a weird piece of work from The Handmaid’s Tale. No wonder the Gilead-curious Vance is soaring off the unlikability charts as more voters discover what Ohioans already have about the fringe right-winger with patriarchal fever dreams.

    Like the No. 1 man on the GOP ticket, the No. 2 man apparently has a problem with strong women who wield power. J.D.’s insecurities were on full display as he marched (uninvited) up to Air Force 2 on the tarmac to smugly “check out my future plane” and to “say hello to the vice president and ask her why she refuses to answer questions.”

    Unclear what questions the off-putting frat boy had in mind with his cheeky disrespect and overt menacing of the vice president of the United States. But Vance was oddly pleased with his performative obnoxiousness. “I had a bit of fun,” tittered the floundering running mate of a convicted felon. “Don’t think the vice-president waved at me as she drove away, but I’m glad to have done it.”

    Vance’s puerile ‘bit of fun’ stalking the woman who is now the Democratic presidential nominee backfired. His faux attempt to “confront” Harris was widely seen as both weird and creepy. Mary Trump, the estranged niece of the ex-president, even suggested Vance should be slapped with a restraining order by Secret Service agents “the next time JD tries to get within a mile of the vice-president’s plane.”

    You’d think Trump’s historically unpopular veep pick, whose net favorability rating with voters is under water and getting worse by the day, might course correct. But Vance struts with an invincibility borne of arrogance and a ruthless drive for power. The 40-year-old project of alt right tech billionaire Peter Thiel is deep into delusions of autocratic grandeur.

    Vance — and the anti-democratic Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries of the New Right — long to impose their new world order on the masses (as outlined in the alarming Project 2025 edicts). The Ohio Republican wrote the foreword to an upcoming book by the architect of that GOP manifesto, Kevin Roberts, that concludes, notably, with a call for revolution. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

    And, declared Vance, Roberts’ Christian fundamentalist views of “culture and economics” that recognize “virtue and material progress go hand in hand” will be an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” Interestingly, the release date of the book, including Vance’s prominent affirmation of its dystopic premise, was abruptly changed from September to after the election to squash scrutiny of its burn-it-all-down rage against American democracy.

    Vance appears to be a true disciple of Roberts’ dystopian vision of a homogeneous, hierarchal society of power, status and freedom where cis white men naturally reign supreme. To be sure, the Ohioan bankrolled into fame and fortune by Thiel is as phony as a three-dollar bill, but he owes everything to the rich wingnuts who buttered his bread, bought him a U.S. Senate seat and catapulted him to the Republican presidential ticket.

    So Vance embraces the extreme orthodoxy of his far-right community that would have women return to traditional social roles — homemaking and child-rearing — and surrender social agency and bodily autonomy to the men in charge. The first-term senator’s recently resurfaced comments disparaging “childless cat ladies” and disregarding people with unconventional families were no blunder.

    They reflected the regressive agenda of a wistful patriarchy that wants to weaponize “family” as a cultural imperative and build a society around the white nuclear family with lots of white babies and women who secretly want to be subjugated. Vance derided leading Democrats as inferior because they had no biological children. He ridiculed them as less than childbearing tradwives.

    “You look at Kamala Harris, [transportation secretary] Pete Buttigieg, AOC [congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we’ve turned over our country to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.” Vance was unapologetic about his disparagement of those who don’t measure up to his metrics as proficient breeders.

    Days ago, he again doubled-down in defense of his personal attacks against Harris, (who is a stepmother to two children) Buttigieg, who adopted two children with his husband, Chasten, and Ocasio-Cortez who does not have children — like millions of other Americans. Vance clumsily attempted to defect growing disgust over his rank misogyny by blaming the media that “wants to get offended about a sarcastic remark I made before I even ran for the U.S. Senate.”

    Oh, J.D. It’s not the media you offended when you belittled those without children or weirdly stalked a powerful woman running for president like a self-impressed jerk. It’s the people who will cast a ballot in three months. “Women are paying attention,” warned a Harris spokesperson, “and will use their power at the polls.”

    Marilou Johanek
    Marilou Johanek

    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

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  • Ohio Capital Journal wins seven more Society of Professional Journalists awards

    Ohio Capital Journal wins seven more Society of Professional Journalists awards

    EDITORIAL

    David Miller is the Managing Editor of Loveland Magazine

    David Miller

    Loveland, Ohio – Because the Ohio Capital Journal is such a vital part of our reporting to the Greater Loveland Area, we are thrilled that we can share that in the “Ohio’s Best Journalism Contest” from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Ohio Capital Journal won seven awards last week, including three first place finishes and four in second place. The contest covered stories and editorial from 2023.

    Because of the Journal, Loveland Magazine equals any news outlet in the Greater Cincinnati Area in the number of reports from the Ohio Statehouse; and certainly the quality of the stories we are so fortunate to be able to publish is second to none.

    Ohio Capital Journal Editor-in-Chief and Opinion Columnist David DeWitt

    In announcing the awards, Ohio Capital Journal Editor-in-Chief and Opinion Columnist David DeWitt said, “We are incredibly honored and grateful for this recognition from our fellow journalists. We are also humbled by and grateful for all of the support we receive from our readers and Ohioans across the state.”

    That includes you, our Loveland Magazine faithful readers.

    Congratulations Journal! We are certainly very grateful for your devoted work and dedication.

    ________________

    The Ohio Capital Journal is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to connecting Ohioans to their state government and its impact on their lives. The Capital Journal combines Ohio state government coverage with incisive investigative journalism, reporting on the consequences of policy, political insight and principled commentary. They are part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

    ________________

    The latest awards come after the Ohio Capital Journal won seven SPJ awards last year, and five the year before. Overall, the Ohio Capital Journal has won 19 Ohio Society of Professional Journalists awards in the last three years.

    In digital media categories, Capital Journal Senior Reporter Marty Schladen won first place for best government/political reporting; reporter Megan Henry won first place for best education reporting; and Editor/Columnist David DeWitt and Columnist Marilou Johanek won first place for best overall commentary/opinion blog section.

    Reporter Susan Tebben won second place for best education reporting; OCJ/WEWS reporter Morgan Trau won second place for best government/political reporting; reporter Susan Tebben won second place for best medical/science/health care reporting, and the Ohio Capital Journal won second place for best general news site.

    Below we are sharing the award-winning entries.

    Marty Schladen

    Best Government/Political Reporting — First Place — Marty Schladen

    Ohio utility regulator front and center in massive bailout scandal

    Analysis: Bribery scandal shows how Ohio politics is polluted with dark money

    Money paid, favors done. Messages detail relationship between Ohio regulator and energy executives

    Megan Henry

    Best Education Issues Reporting — First Place — Megan Henry

    A look inside classes at an Ohio prison

    “Reading is a basic right.” Ohio parents of dyslexic students see benefits of science of reading

    22 Ohio school districts have staff members authorized to carry weapons on school grounds

    David DeWitt and Marilou Johanek

    Best Overall Commentary/Opinion blog section — First Place — David DeWitt and Marilou Johanek

    The shame of Ohio: Corrupt, gerrymandered Statehouse Republicans assault voters, again

    Gerrymandered Ohio GOP lawmakers launch tyrannical assault on 170 years of majority voter authority

    Ohio Issue 1 isn’t about any one issue — It’s about every issue and the power Ohio voters have

    Morgan Trau

    Best Government/Political Reporting — Second Place — Morgan Trau

    Ohio Sec. of State LaRose admits making constitution harder to amend is ‘100% about… abortion’

    Six transgender girls play sports in Ohio, but GOP wants them out

    How Ohio’s Issue 1 could affect the rest of the country

    Former Ohio House Speaker Householder sentenced to 20 years for state’s largest bribery scheme

    Statehouse ‘coup’ — Ohio GOP bitterly divided by deal with Democrats to elect House Speaker

    Susan Tebben

    Best Education Issues Reporting — Second Place — Susan Tebben

    Ohio homeschooling group head: Nazi curriculum ‘a sick parenting issue’ 

    Schools districts plead for universal lunch amid budget talks

    Student hunger is pervasive in Ohio

    Susan Tebben

    Best Medical/Science/Health Care Reporting — Second Place — Susan Tebben

    Ohio Issue 1’s reproductive rights amendment and protection of access to contraception

    Access to expensive fertility treatment in Ohio varies but the Issue 1 amendment seeks to protect it

    Ohio IVF patients feel attacked by abortion ban law, fear more pain coming for their families

    Best General News Site — Second Place — Ohio Capital Journal

    If you’d like to support the Journal’s work, please follow the Journal on Facebook and X, subscribe and share their free newsletter subscription with family and friends, and please consider making a tax-deductible donation.

  • LaRose pushes unfair, inaccurate language for voters on November Ohio reproductive rights amendment

    LaRose pushes unfair, inaccurate language for voters on November Ohio reproductive rights amendment

    COMMENTARY

    by Marilou Johanek

    Play fair or play dirty. Issue 1 showed Ohio voters how state Republicans play when they can’t persuade. Extremists know most Ohioans support the right to abortion within limits. The outright ban on abortion gerrymandered pols seek is wildly unpopular. Convincing rational minds otherwise is pointless. So Ohio’s GOP overlords cheat to win.

    Lawmakers rushed a game-changing ballot amendment to an August election (in violation of state law) to sabotage the abortion rights amendment in November. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose spearheaded the shady maneuver to cancel self-governance by majority vote — just to keep a majority of Ohio voters from having their say on abortion access as a constitutional right.

    The state’s elections chief actively campaigned to end the only enduring recourse of ordinary citizens to circumvent a crooked government because he didn’t want an abortion rights amendment to pass. Sit with that for a minute. The guy who administers the electoral system in Ohio tried to undercut the electorate.

    That’s how amoral LaRose has become as he angles for attention as the greatest MAGA candidate in the U.S. Senate race. Burnishing his anti-abortion bona fides with the pro-Issue 1 crowd, in partnership with a leading anti-abortion lobbyist, was more important than upholding majoritarian democracy. Stumping for minority rule on the hollow pretense of “protecting” the constitution was a new low for LaRose.

    But the integrity-is-overrated elections boss and Republican kingpins in the Statehouse badly mistook the masses for rubes. All the misleading, fear-mongering, coming-after-your-children TV ads (out-of-state money could buy) didn’t fool an overriding majority of ticked-off Ohio voters who showed up in record numbers to beat back an egregious political power grab on Aug. 8.

    The beaten cheerleader for Issue 1 refused to concede the people had spoken (a Trumpian reflex?) and last week rolled out another snow job to derail the abortion rights amendment through ballot language subterfuge. LaRose chairs the Republican-dominated Ohio Ballot Board that voted along party lines Thursday to approve the summary language voters will read on their November ballot about the proposed abortion amendment.

    Under state law, LaRose could have used the full text of the amendment as written, and attorneys for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights urged him to so “there can be no dispute about whether legal standards have been satisfied, or whether the condensed text misleads, deceives, or defrauds voters.” Instead, LaRose recast the amendment to purposely mislead and deceive.

    His draft is slanted with such routinely deployed anti-abortion propaganda it could have been dictated, word for word, by Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis. LaRose’s specious interpretation of the proposed amendment to enshrine reproductive freedom in the state constitution is deliberately deceptive with provocative wording to unfairly prejudice outcome.

    The revisions he engineered on an amendment he campaigned against are so beyond the pale of “fair and accurate,” as the secretary ludicrously declared, that stunned amendment backers filed suit Monday with the state supreme court for fairness and accuracy. LaRose omitted actual provisions of the original amendment.

    He deleted a description of reproductive choices an individual should have the “right to make and carry out” such as “decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one’s own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.” LaRose’s altered the language stipulating an individual right to “one’s own reproductive decisions” to just “a right to one’s own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion.”

    Perhaps most blatant was the secretary of state’s pointed replacement of the medical term “fetus” throughout the amendment with “unborn child,” employing the same weighted rhetoric seeded over decades by the anti-abortion movement. He also curiously substituted “the citizens of the State of Ohio” for amendment prohibitions specifically targeting “The State,” defined in the language “as any governmental entity and political subdivision.”

    So what was originally worded “The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or otherwise discriminate against” Ohioans exercising their reproductive rights became “the citizens of the State of Ohio” prohibited for doing the same. Different meaning. Why?

    Original language allows that “abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability” or when the fetus can survive outside the womb — a standard restriction for decades under Roe. With a six-week ban on hold by the courts, abortion is currently legal in Ohio up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, a measured limitation widely acceptable.

    LaRose flipped that reasonable allowance upside-down with inflammatory assertions that the amendment would “always allow an unborn child to be aborted at any stage of pregnancy, regardless of viability, if, in the treating physician’s determination” the applicable life and health exceptions are met. The glaring prejudicial language and selective editing of the fall abortion amendment to intentionally distort an initiative petition so it fails should infuriate every Ohioan — regardless of their beliefs about abortion.

    Frank LaRose, the public servant responsible for conducting free and fair elections in Ohio is playing dirty to win. It’s wrong. But it’s only the beginning. Issue 1 was a preview of the depths Ohio Republicans will go to when they can’t persuade. They cheat.

    The devious battle to deny abortion access in Ohio, despite the wishes of a majority of voters, will be epic.

    Marilou Johanek
    MARILOU JOHANEK

    Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist.

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  • Ohio Capital Journal wins seven Society of Professional Journalists awards

    Ohio Capital Journal wins seven Society of Professional Journalists awards

     States Newsroom photo

     

    “Congratulation to Loveland Magazine’s invaluable news source that reports from the Ohio Capital for you.” – David and Cassie

    Commentary by David DeWitt

    In the “Ohio’s Best Journalism Contest” from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Ohio Capital Journal won seven awards, including five first place finishes and two in second place. The contest covered stories and editorial from 2022.

    In digital media categories, OCJ Senior Reporter Marty Schladen won first place for best news story; OCJ/WEWS Reporter Morgan Trau won first place for best government/political reporting and first place for best education issues reporting; OCJ Editor David DeWitt won first place for best editorial writing; OCJ Editor David DeWitt and Columnist Marilou Johanek won first place for best overall commentary/opinion blog section; and OCJ Reporter Susan Tebben won second place for best government/political reporting and second place for best education issues reporting.

    We are incredibly honored and grateful for this recognition from our fellow journalists. We are also humbled by and grateful for all of the support we receive from our readers and Ohioans across the state.

    Below we will share the award-winning entries.

    If you’d like to support our work, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter, share our free newsletter subscription with family and friends, and consider making a tax-deductible donation.

    Best News Story – Marty Schladen – First Place

    Ohio docs say new abortion law has them working against oaths to do no harm

    Affidavits: More pregnant minors who were raped denied Ohio abortions

    While in effect, Ohio’s abortion ban led to chaos, suffering, and worse health care, doctor says

    Best Editorial/Criticism Writing – David DeWitt – First Place

    Ohio redistricting charade continues as GOP again passes more clearly rigged maps

    Campaign finance and pay-to-play corruption is also destroying the American Republic

    In 1912, Ohio voters asserted their democratic authority. Now Ohio Republicans want to rip it away

    Best Overall Commentary/Opinion blog (news organization) – David DeWitt and Marilou Johanek – First Place

    In 1912, Ohio voters asserted their democratic authority. Now Ohio Republicans want to rip it away

    Ohio Republicans’ attempted erasure of a 10-year-old rape victim is incredibly sick and disturbed

    Extremist Ohio legislators created the law forcing child rape victims to give birth

    Best Education Issues Reporting – Morgan Trau – First Place

    Comments about the Holocaust from representative sponsoring ‘divisive concepts’ bill raise concerns

    GOP passes bill aiming to root out ‘suspected’ transgender female athletes with genital inspection

    Former OSU professor begs for job back after ‘manic episode,’ university refuses

    Best Government/Political Reporting – Morgan Trau – First Place

    Comments about the Holocaust from representative sponsoring ‘divisive concepts’ bill raise concerns

    Ohio lawmaker who wrote bill requiring gun training for teachers owns gun training business

    Ohio Rep. behind bill limiting transgender care had never spoken to community

    Best Education Issues Reporting – Susan Tebben – Second Place

    Ohio governor, education groups at odds over board of ed district deadlines

    No changes planned for state board of education districts, despite redistricting changes

    Resolution condemning LGBTQ anti-discrimination language passed by Ohio’s state Board of Education

    Best News Story – Susan Tebben – Second Place

    Ohio Republicans abandon independent mapmakers to pass slightly modified GOP maps

    Deja Vu: Republicans use simple majority to pass 4-year maps

    Redistricting commission punts again, defies court order

    David DeWitt
    DAVID DEWITT

    OCJ Editor-in-Chief and Columnist David DeWitt has been covering government, politics, and policy in Ohio since 2007, including education, health care, crime and courts, poverty, state and local government, business, labor, energy, environment, and social issues. He has worked for the National Journal, The New York Observer, The Athens NEWS, and Plunderbund.com. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and is a board member of the E.W. Scripps Society of Alumni and Friends. He can be found on Twitter @DC_DeWitt

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  • Newly elected state school board member calls GOP plan to gut powers ‘Tornado from hell’

    Newly elected state school board member calls GOP plan to gut powers ‘Tornado from hell’

    Seven of the 11 elected seats are now Democratic, stopping supermajority

    BY: MARILOU JOHANEK – Ohio Capital Journal

    “What you’re going to see in the lame duck session is going to be a tornado from hell.”

    – Former state Sen. and now State School Board Member, Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo.

     Former Ohio state Sen. Teresa Fedor, D-Toledo, who won a seat on the State Board of Education in the Nov. 8, 2022 election. Official Statehouse photo.

    Former state Sen. Teresa Fedor got out of the Statehouse before the last vestiges of democratic governance were flattened by a power-hungry party on steroids.

    She knew a cyclone of destructive GOP legislation, super-charged by an unstoppable Republican juggernaut in the General Assembly, would be devastating. It is already bearing down fast on voting rights, citizen ballot initiatives, transgender protections, and Ohio women. 

    But as Fedor bid a bittersweet farewell to a 22-year legislative career after being elected to the State Board of Education, Republican colleagues sent her a parting gift of disrespect.

    Barely a week after Fedor and two other Democratic candidates won seats on the state school board, ousting incumbent GOP extremists on the ballot, Republicans in the Ohio Senate quickly moved to gut board members’ educational oversight responsibilities to almost nothing. 

    It was an audacious power grab by Republican lawmakers to wrest authority from the state education board on the heels of an election in which voters spoke about what they wanted for their children in education.

    “We’re essentially removing most of the education duties out of the control of the state school board and putting them in the governor’s office,” declared Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, as he unilaterally moved to nullify a democratic election.

    With the super-super Republican majorities Huffman deviously engineered through lawless gerrymandering, he can drop any pretense of honoring the will of the people. Voters don’t matter. Hoarding power does. Sharing power with state board of education members who defeated Republican-backed anti-trans, anti-vax, anti-CRT, anti-anti-racism resolution clowns was nixed even before new members were sworn in. 

    Huffman’s plan is to ram through a bill in the next few weeks that removes all the board’s decision-making on educational matters, from curriculum and textbooks to academic development and planning, and gives that consequential stewardship to a political appointee who answers to the governor who answers to Huffman. See how it works? 

    Senate Bill 178 shrinks the influence of the Ohio Board of Education to a handful of administrative issues outside the classroom. Sponsor state Sen. Bill Reinke, R-Tiffin, stressed the need “for systemic change at the state level (after the Nov. 8 election) to our education system to ensure accountability to taxpayers and for our kids.”

    Fedor rolled her eyes.

    “They’ve been beating that drum for over 30 years. ‘Public schools are failing. We need accountability.’ And where are we on public education? They (Ohio Republicans) have been in control the whole time, except for four years under Strickland. If there’s a failure, it’s a failure on their part,” she said.

    “This is the 25th year of an unconstitutional school funding formula in the state. Republicans failed to the provide equitable and adequate education for the common schools in Ohio for 25 years. They set up a failed charter school system (remember ECOT?) in which tax dollars go into a black hole never to be seen again. They expanded vouchers, the privatization of our public dollars, a bigger black hole. Legally taxpayers don’t have a right to see how that tax money is being spent.”

    Fedor is outraged that Huffman and Co. are subverting the voice of Ohio voters with Senate Bill 178.

    “This just shifts power from the people to an unaccountable cabinet member in the executive branch,” she fumed. “Republicans are creating another level of bureaucracy away from the public” to steamroll their goal of privatizing public institutions without transparency or accountability.

    The incoming state school board member is resigned to what comes next. The Republican storm whipping through the legislature will weaken the Ohio State Board of Education by giving its power to the governor.

    “They’ll have their hearing, maybe two,”Fedor explained. “They may get interested parties into a room and say how can we tweak this so you’ll accept it even if you don’t like it and we can say we worked with you.”

    “They’ll put the language into a substitute bill that no one will see until the last minute before it gets voted on or fold it into a lame duck Christmas tree bill and say they did the public bidding and boast about it. But everyone will know it was a sham. That’s what abuse of power will do.”

    After over two decades in the legislative trenches, Fedor recognizes ruthless. 

    “Ohio Republicans have been waiting in the wings to roll out their extreme agenda because now they have unlimited power in the legislature. Senate Bill 178 cues up the budget debate. If it becomes law, Republicans are then going to pour money into their bureaucratic schemes to privatize public institutions — including the most important one to secure democracy, public education. The select few will benefit but 90% of our children will be left behind.”

    Fedor, who spent 17 years in the classroom, conceded, “I have no power other than my voice and experience and heart.”

    But she is a formidable force in her own right and will fight to be heard over the tornado from hell roaring through the lame duck. 

    “I am never going to give up,” promised the state school board member under siege. “You have to have hope. There’s no other choice.” 

  • DeWine can’t run from energy bailout bribery scandal as dirty laundry keeps piling up

    DeWine can’t run from energy bailout bribery scandal as dirty laundry keeps piling up


    COMMENTARY

    by MARILOU JOHANEK – Ohio Capital Journal

    Follow the money. Its corrupting influence runs through all the great scandals piling up in Ohio under Republican rule. From the biggest online charter school rip-off of tax dollars to the largest public corruption indictment in state history, money has paved the way to epic wrongdoing under GOP management. Find out who in Columbus is greasing palms, funding campaigns and writing public policy for private interests, and you’ll also discover who is standing in line with their hand out willing to reciprocate with public favors.  

    But when people in high places slip on hubris and expose brazen graft at public expense — and they always do — the swarm of politicians who were only too happy to pocket donor checks and look the other way scatter like insects under a rock that’s been lifted. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is one of those spooked bugs racing away from his political entanglement in the blockbuster bribery and money-laundering case that goes to trial this year. Three of the four indicted individuals who will be in court on federal racketeering charges — in connection with a billion-dollar ratepayer bailout of two nuclear power plants to benefit FirstEnergy and its affiliates — donated thousands to DeWine’s gubernatorial campaign. 

    So did the Akron-based energy giant at the heart of the bailout scheme. FirstEnergy has legendary pull with pliable politicians. 

    The state’s largest electric utility pumped $1 million into groups backing DeWine in 2018, according to a Dayton Daily News investigation following the money. The company also pumped big bucks into groups helping his daughter’s failed campaign for county prosecutor. DeWine hired multiple administration staffers and advisors with close ties to FirstEnergy, including a former top aide linked to one of the dark money groups implicated in passage of the bailout legislation (House Bill 6) written for and by the utility. 

    The governor also appointed and steadfastly supported Ohio’s former top utility regulator, now accused of profiting in association with the FirstEnergy scandal. DeWine knew of Sam Randazzo’s deep business relationship with the utility when he chose him at the urging of company executives. In a seemingly flagrant quid pro quo, the governor’s pick for the powerful chair of the state utilities commission pocketed a massive sum of money from FirstEnergy just weeks before his appointment. 

    But even damning disclosures of Randazzo’s $4.3 million utility bribe and his blatant efforts on behalf of FirstEnergy — constructing House Bill 6, delaying a company rate case, lobbying for legislation to save the utility millions — didn’t dissuade DeWine from expressing “great confidence” in his regulator. Even after the FBI raided Randazzo’s home as part of the FirstEnergy bribery probe and he resigned under a cloud of suspicion, DeWine praised him for doing “very, very good work as chair.” 

    Perhaps anticipating incredulity with that assessment, the Republican later suggested he was “open” to reforming the process for choosing state utility regulators. Eighteen months on, the DeWine-appointed nominating council that recommends PUCO candidates to the governor includes members tied to passage of the notorious bailout bill. 

    Even after the FBI arrested former House Speaker Larry Householder, who engineered approval of House Bill 6 and was subsequently charged with taking money to pass it, DeWine rejected an effort to repeal the corruption-ridden legislation. 

    “We need balance in our energy,” was all he could say about a bill passed with more than $60 million in bribe money. DeWine reversed himself but reiterated his support for FirstEnergy’s ultimate bribery goal — giving $1.3 billion in public money to two unprofitable nuke plants with new surcharges paid by everyratepayer in the state. 

    He had put the full weight of the governor’s office behind the nuclear bailout bill and signed the corrupt measure into law the very day it passed. The “energy” legislation championed by DeWine also put ratepayers on the hook to bail out two money-losing, hyper-polluting coal plants (one in Indiana) partially owned by other utilities and two FirstEnergy subsidiaries. Plus, the bailout boondoggle the governor couldn’t sign fast enough thoroughly gutted renewable energy and energy efficiency standards and removed all incentive to build more renewable energy projects in the state. 

    Those utility-written provisions have still not been repealed under a 2019 embarrassment that should have been scrapped outright. But the Republican-controlled legislature, complicit in the worst scandal “ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio,” is content to become synonymous with corruption and fleece Ohioans on their monthly electric bills if that makes utility donors happy. The Ohio Manufacturers Association estimated electricity customers will pay a total of $1.8 billion in coal plant subsidies by 2030 — more than the cost of the nuke bailout — unless integrity intrudes on the General Assembly and House Bill 6 is fully repealed. 

    Don’t hold your breath. But remember, this outrage happened on DeWine’s watch and with his blessing. Ohioans didn’t know how crooked House Bill 6 was or how many politicians, including the governor, were willing to look away until federal prosecutors blew the lid off the alleged criminal enterprise to screw ratepayers in return for boosted political careers. DeWine is understandably trying to put as much distance as possible between his reelection campaign and the biggest open investigation of Statehouse corruption in the country. 

    But it’s hard to escape dirty laundry that keeps piling up when you can’t hide under a rock anymore.