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Tag: Ohio Capital Journal

Anti-LGBTQ discrimination bill with bipartisan support introduced again in Ohio House committee

A LGBTQ+ rights demonstration. Photo by Susan J. Demas, Michigan Advance, States Newsroom.

BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

State Rep. Michael Skindell, D-Lakewood, set off Tuesday on his 20th year leading the charge to provide anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ Ohioans.

With the introduction of HB 208 in the Ohio House Commerce & Labor Committee, Skindell and his Republican co-sponsor, state Rep. Brett Hillyer, said they have more bipartisan support than they’ve ever had in the past, though the uphill battle of the GOP supermajority isn’t without its challenges.

The bill before the committee now, also called the Ohio Fairness Act, has been awaiting consideration since March 2021. It would change any part of the Ohio Revised Code regarding discrimination to include not just “sex,” but also “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression.”

Existing religious exemptions would still be a part of law if the bill is passed.

The earliest iterations of the bill didn’t have the support of businesses across the state, which Skindell said was a barrier to passage for the previous versions.

Now, the sponsors say businesses are behind the bill, and employment laws that are inclusive to LGBTQ individuals are part of the “scoring” Hillyer said companies use to decide locations for expansion and job creation.

Ohio Business Competes, a coalition in support non-discrimination policies for LGBTQ Ohioans, has seen its membership triple to more than 1,000 businesses, according to Skindell.

“It is also important to mention that the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Ohio Manufacturing Association, Greater Cleveland Partnership, Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce support this pro-business, non-discrimination legislation,” Skindell told the committee on Tuesday.

Along with business support, 37 cities in the state have passed their own local ordinances against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in categories like housing and employment.

While Hillyer acknowledges the bipartisan support isn’t overwhelming for the bill, he expects to see more GOP backing based on the party’s desire to keep Ohio economically competitive.

“Unfortunately, this particular issue, the issue that is in front of us, divides us,” Hillyer said. “It hurts our caucus, it hurts Ohioans when you start talking about what do we stand for as representatives and people.”

To truly be business friendly, Hillyer said the party, and the legislature as a whole, has to “get back down to supply economics” and not fight anti-discrimination measures.

“Let’s go fight our real battles that we want to argue about and hit each other over the head with all day, but let’s leave this issue off the table and make Ohio open for business,” Hillyer said.

Nov 30, 2022
Legislative effort to support pregnancy doulas has bipartisan support

BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

Maternal and infant health advocates and certified doulas alike expressed their support Monday for a bill currently awaiting consideration by the Ohio Senate to bring doula services into the state’s Medicaid program.

Participants in a meeting of the Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus met with organizations employing and promoting the use of doulas as part of the childbirth process in Ohio, before, during and after a baby is born.

Caucus co-vice chair, state Rep. Susan Manchester, R-Waynesville, brought up a 2022 March of Dimes report card which gave Ohio a D+ in the area of preterm birth. Ohio has a 10.6% preterm birth rate, according to the report.

“Further opportunities to ensure access to appropriate health care services before, during, and after childbirth cannot be left on the table when the 134th General Assembly ends,” Manchester told the caucus at their Monday meeting.

Doulas are individuals with non-medical training, who are there to act as educators, resource coordinators, and advocates for their patients as they go through pregnancy and postpartum life. They work alongside a medical team, including a midwife, the medical professional who serves as complement to a doula.

Doulas are there to provide everything from sex education to postpartum depression screening, and everything in between, to provide emotional and physical support.

“We’re attending appointments with them, and then we’re going to review what the clinicians have said to them to make sure they’re actually understanding what they heard, and that they’re not just being spoken at,” said Jazmin Long, CEO of Birthing Beautiful Communities, a Cleveland and Akron-based non-profit.

Doulas go through rigorous training, with BBC providing an 80-hour training program, with the requirement that participants score 90% or higher on the certification exam to move forward with the organization. Long said BBC’s perinatal doulas are paid between $500 and $800 per birth.

With proper training, doulas are a “vital person in the care team,” according to Meredith Strayhorn, a certified doula who is also a student midwife and financial and operations director for the Cincinnati-based collective Blaq Birth Circle. The collective partners with Cradle Cincinnati and Caresource to provide doula services in the area.

“It’s especially important navigating through the hospital system, where we know there is a lot of systemic racism, there are a lot of providers who do not listen to clients, and I have actually seen that happen several times, which is really heartbreaking,” Strayhorn said.

Doulas can increase positive birth outcomes, which can mean less spending on health care. Strayhorn said research shows continuous doula support during and after pregnancy can decrease risk of cesarean sections and the use of pain medications, and increases patient satisfaction.

As part of the effort to make doulas more accessible to more Ohioans, Long and Strayhorn said House Bill 142 would be a good start, as it would establish five-year coverage programs for doula services for the state’s Medicaid program and within the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

The ODRC program would allow doula services to “inmates participating in any prison nursery program,” according to an analysis of the bill conducted by the Legislative Service Commission.

“From what I’m hearing, everyone’s been supportive,” said state Rep. Tom Brinkman, R-Mt. Lookout, who created the bill along with former Democratic state Rep. Erica Crawley.

Under the bill, doulas would have to hold a certificate from the Ohio Board of Nursing, and a “valid provider agreement.”

A registry of doulas would also be created by HB 142 within the Board of Nursing, along with a “doula advisory board” within the board, specifically for those serving the Medicaid program.

The board is to be made up of at least 13 members, all appointed by the Board of Nursing, with the requirement that at least three be members “representing communities most impacted by negative maternal and fetal health outcomes,” and at least six members who are currently certified doulas.

HB 142 passed the Ohio House, proving bipartisan support with a GOP supermajority present in the House. The Senate has a GOP supermajority as well, and Brinkman said he is hopeful the support will continue.

“The funding is there, and I think that once we do it … I think the insurance plans that provide private care will see that this is a savings in the number of C-sections and prescription medicine and epidurals,” Brinkman said.

As the legislation goes forward, the Ohio Department of Medicaid announced their own plan to implement doula services as part of a Maternal and Infant Support program, with the doula program to roll out at the end of a 2-3 year phase-in, announced in 2021.

The ODM doesn’t cover doula care as a billable service currently, but provided $1 million in Ohio Equity Institute grants to groups in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Lucas counties for such services between 2020 and 2021, according to the department.

The bill is not up for a hearing this week, but Brinkman said he is set to meet with Senate Health Committee chairman Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, this week to discuss next steps for the bill.

Nov 29, 2022
LaRose wants to make it harder for voters to amend constitution but evidence of a problem is lacking

Secretary of State Frank LaRose (speaking) alongside Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, introducing a constitutional amendment requiring a 60% supermajority for all future citizen-led ballot amendments. (Photo by Nick Evans, OCJ.)

BY: MARTY SCHLADEN – Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose denied that he wanted to block abortion protections or anti-gerrymandering measures when he announced that he wanted to hustle through a measure that would make it harder for voters to amend the Ohio Constitution.

But he’s failed to point to a single amendment in the Constitution as an example of what he’s trying to protect against by changing rules that have been in place for more than a century.

LaRose is proposing that — after advocates clear the already high hurdles to get proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot — they also be required to get at least 60% of the vote instead of the 50% plus one vote that’s currently needed.

Meanwhile, amendments initiated by Ohio’s gerrymandered legislature would continue to need only 50% of the popular vote to make their way into the state Constitution. Ironically, the amendment LaRose wants that would make it harder to pass voter-initiated amendments falls into that latter, easier-to-pass category.

LaRose’s stated reason why citizens should lose some of their ability to change the Ohio Constitution: It’s badly needed to protect against wealthy interest groups that want to insert self-serving measures into what LaRose called “the state’s founding document.”

“If someone is a special interest and they want to create a monopoly for themselves let’s say, or to try to do something that narrowly benefits their own interest, maybe it will make them think twice before they try to amend the Constitution,” LaRose said during a press conference on Nov. 17.

So how many times have such powerful special interests actually succeeded in initiating a harmful constitutional amendment?

LaRose didn’t cite any during his press conference. Instead, he said that of the 16 citizen-initiated amendments proposed in the past 22 years, just five have passed. And in response to a question, the secretary of state conceded that of the ones that passed, just two failed to get less than 60% of the vote.

LaRose’s office didn’t respond when asked for an example of a problematic amendment in the Ohio Constitution that his proposal would have prevented — or to other questions for this story. But while he and his staff didn’t cite any such examples, there are some citizen-initiated amendments coming that LaRose and the state’s other Republican leaders may well oppose.

One is a measure that would amend the Ohio Constitution to protect abortion rights.

When the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v Wade, a 2019 law signed by Gov. Mike DeWine took effect. It outlawed the vast majority of abortions months earlier than they had been and almost immediately, horror stories started to pile up.

They include a 10-year-old and two other under-18 rape victims who couldn’t get abortions in Ohio; women with cancer who couldn’t get abortions in order to start chemotherapy; women whose fetuses couldn’t survive but still had to continue their pregnancies. The list goes on.

This month’s elections showed that in states where abortion was on the ballot, it proved to be a powerful motivator for supporters of abortion rights. And, with the Republican dominated legislature expected to pass even stricter restrictions, abortion-rights groups are planning to seek a voter-initiated amendment to protect those rights.

At the same time, LaRose’s fellow Republicans in 2021 and 2022 ignored voter-initiated amendments against gerrymandering that passed with more than 70% of the popular vote. The Republican-dominated Redistricting Commission drew state legislative maps that were rejected five times by the Ohio Supreme Court as unconstitutionally gerrymandered. LaRose sits on the commission and voted for each of the maps that have been declared unconstitutional by a bipartisan court majority.

GOP members of the commission complained that the changes the court was demanding were unconstitutional. That ignores the fact that it’s the job of the Supreme Court to decide what is or is not constitutional — not members of the executive and the legislative branches who were litigating a dispute before it.

In April, LaRose told a group of Union County Republicans that he’d “be fine with” impeaching Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor for voting with the court’s three Democrats to strike down the Republican-drawn maps. LaRose claimed O’Connor had violated her oath of office in ruling against his party.

The Republicans succeeded in running out the clock and starting next year, the party’s representatives in the state legislature will continue to be wildly overrepresented compared to the partisan mix of the state as a whole. And they’ll be representing districts that are officially unconstitutional.

The chief justice, who is retiring, has said that citizens need to come up with new citizen-initiated amendments with fewer loopholes if Ohioans want to end extreme gerrymandering.

In his press conference last week, LaRose claimed that he’s not seeking to block amendments supporting abortion rights or ending gerrymandering. Such short-term goals weren’t good reasons for undertaking something as weighty as amending the Ohio Constitution, he said.

“If you’re going to amend the Constitution, you need to be thinking about the long term,” he said. “So anybody who’s thinking about shorter or transient goals in the next year or two or three years, that’s not what this kind of a change should ever be about.”

LaRose added, “If we’re talking about amending the Constitution probably for the rest of our lifetimes, that’s something that should be taken very seriously.”

But among the questions his office wouldn’t answer this week: Why — if this should be such a deliberative process — did he wait until late November to announce that he would try to ram the measure through in a weeks-long, lame-duck session with an eye toward getting it on the ballot in May? Only about five months would elapse between the time the public first learned of the proposal and when it could alter the state Constitution, as LaRose said, “probably for the rest of our lifetimes.”

In his press conference, LaRose denied that he was trying to hurry the measure through.

“I don’t think it’s a rush necessarily,” he said. “It’s an idea whose time has come.”

Ohio Democrats have denounced LaRose’s push as a “power grab.”

But at the same time he was proposing to make it harder for voters to change the Ohio Constitution, LaRose seemed to say he was doing it in support of democracy.

“That’s the beauty of this, is that all the power rests with the people of Ohio,” he said.

Follow Marty Schladen on Twitter.

Nov 29, 2022
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.”

Nov 24, 2022
Ohio Republicans launch effort to make citizen-led amendments harder to pass for voters

Secretary of State Frank LaRose (speaking) alongside Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, introducing a constitutional amendment requiring a 60% supermajority for all future citizen-led ballot amendments. (Photo by Nick Evans, OCJ.)

Legislative Republican leaders also negotiating other changes, nix plan for automated voter registration

BY: NICK EVANS – Ohio Capital Journal

Lawmakers raised two ideas Thursday with massive implications for Ohio voters. One is an initiative requiring citizen-led constitutional amendments gain a 60% supermajority at the ballot for passage, the other is a House bill aimed at rewriting the underlying infrastructure of how the state conducts elections.

The amendment

State Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Ashville, joined Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to introduce their plan to “safeguard Ohio’s constitution from special interests,” by proposing the supermajority for passage.

“We have repeatedly watched as special interests buy their way onto the statewide ballot and then spend millions of dollars drowning the airwaves to secure fundamental changes to our state by a vote margin of 50% plus one vote,” Stewart argued.

Their plan singles out the citizen-led process for amending the state constitution and raises the threshold for passage to 60%. The signature threshold for making the ballot would remain unchanged. LaRose argued lifting that benchmark would give the same interest groups a relative advantage.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Official photo.

“If a special interest group can afford to pay, you know, million dollars to hire people with clipboards,” LaRose reasoned, “they can afford to pay a million and a half dollars to hire more people with more clipboards.”

The stakes are high for any groups whose ideas have fallen on deaf ears in Columbus. The prospects for abortion protection, recreational marijuana, minimum wage increases, gun violence prevention, or further redistricting reform provisions are effectively non-existent in the GOP-controlled Statehouse. LaRose and Stewart’s proposal would move the goal posts for any of those ideas.

The proposal itself, of course, will need to go to voters and get just 50% plus one to alter the Ohio Constitution. It will follow a different process, too. Stewart’s resolution would make the ballot through a General Assembly vote rather than the citizen signature-gathering process.

That lawmaker-led process won’t see any changes in the threshold for passage, either. LaRose and Stewart dismissed any suggestion their approach is unfair. Lawmakers have to meet a supermajority benchmark, too, they argued. It’s on “the front end” where they have to clear a 2/3 supermajority to make the ballot.

Under maps declared to be unconstitutional gerrymandering by a bipartisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court, Ohio Republicans once again won rock-solid supermajorities in the Ohio House and the Ohio Senate last week.

LaRose and Stewart highlighted how 11 of 16 citizen-led amendments have failed since 2000, so it wasn’t clear exactly why they want to raise the bar higher as they also noted of the five measures that passed, three cleared 60% at the ballot box.

The legislation

Republican Ohio House Majority Leader Bill Seitz. Official photo.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Green Township, kicked off Thursday morning by proposing sweeping changes to an already sweeping elections bill. The biggest move involved nixing the automated voter registration language contained in the initial proposal.

Those provisions would’ve leaned heavily on the Bureau of Motor Vehicles to help voters register or update their registration any time they interact with the agency. If voters’ registration is regularly updated, the thinking goes, there will be fewer names to purge. But Seitz said after months of negotiations, the Ohio Senate hasn’t budged.

“If we’re going to get anything done,” Sietz said, “we’ve got to have an agreement between two chambers, and the Senate does not yet feel comfortable with automated voter registration, even though I am comfortable with it.”

“But it takes two to tango as they say,” he added with a wry chuckle.

Among other changes, voters would be able to request absentee ballots online, but they’d have to submit paper requests on a specific form. The deadline for requesting one would be seven days before an election. The bill trims the deadline for absentee ballots to arrive post-election to seven days as well.

Drop boxes would be available for the duration of early voting, but they’d be restricted — no more than three, all on board of elections premises and under 24/7 video surveillance.

The bill eliminates the final day of early voting but distributes those hours in the week prior by extending weekday hours.

Seitz also dropped a number of ID provisions from the original bill. He noted Senate legislation plans to offer free photo-ID to anyone — not just poor Ohioans as his bill envisioned.

“They can be, you know, Leslie Wexner or Carlin Lindner III and they could still get a free photo ID,” he quipped referencing the founder of The Limited and the co-CEO of American Financial Group.

Pushback

A slew of press releases were released Thursday afternoon from good government groups and voters rights organizations slamming the Stewart and LaRose proposal to increase the passage threshold for citizen-initiated amendments.

As for the Seitz proposal, voting rights advocates applauded the inclusion of online ballot requests and funding for electronic poll books. But League of Women Voters of Ohio Director Jen Miller warned the proposal would make elections “more complicated, expensive and inefficient.”

She urged lawmakers to expand in person voting hours during the final weekend of early voting. Miller argued boards will get more bang for their buck expanding weekend voting compared to tacking on extra early morning hours during the week.

Miller also pushed them to reconsider the automated voter registration they’d just removed. She argued 22 other states have similar policies including West Virginia, Georgia and Michigan.

“It removes barriers to registration, but it also helps every voter because the accuracy of voter rolls are improved and it can reduce administrative costs for the boards of elections,” Miller explained. “And we reduce our provisional ballot counts which are typically very high in Ohio.”

Miller returned to the idea of excessive provisional ballots in a discussion of stricter voter ID requirements.

“When someone votes provisionally, which of course we support, that actually takes away all workers from the process,” Miller explained. “It increases lines, and it also increases a lot of post-election work for boards of elections. So we think that the system as is works.”

Speaking afterward, Seitz rejected out of hand the idea that more stringent voter ID requirements could increase the number of provisional ballots cast.

“I don’t buy that at all, that’s crap,” he said, “look at everything you need a photo ID for in life, okay?”

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

Nov 22, 2022
Biden student debt relief plan thrown out by Texas judge; new applications halted

BY: ARIANA FIGUEROA – Ohio Capital Journal

WASHINGTON — Late Thursday a federal judge in Texas struck down the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan, ruling that the program is unlawful, in a blow to 16 million student debt borrowers already approved for relief.

The U.S. Department of Education now is no longer accepting applications for the program, according to the student aid federal website.

“Courts have issued orders blocking our student debt relief program,” according to the website. “As a result, at this time, we are not accepting applications. We are seeking to overturn those orders. If you’ve already applied, we’ll hold your application.”

In Fort Worth, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, in his 26-page judgment called the program an “unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power” and ruled in favor of two borrowers, backed by a conservative advocacy group, who brought the challenge.

The Department of Justice has already filed an appeal of the ruling, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

“The President and this Administration are determined to help working and middle-class Americans get back on their feet, while our opponents — backed by extreme Republican special interests — sued to block millions of Americans from getting much-needed relief,” Jean-Pierre said.

She added that the Department of Education will continue to hold onto the information of student debt borrowers who applied for the program — about 26 million — so the department “can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court.”

Of those 26 million borrowers who applied for the program that launched in October, 16 million have been approved, she said.

The debt relief program was initially halted by an appeals court in late October following an emergency request from six Republican-led states who argued that the president does not have the authority to wipe out debt, and it should be left to Congress to make that decision. The court is considering the request by the states for an injunction.

That lawsuit was filed on behalf of Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, and by Republican attorneys general in Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina and Kansas.

Legal barrage

Since the White House’s announcement of the program last month, there have been multiple challenges to it.

The plaintiffs in Thursday’s case argued that the Biden administration did not follow the proper rule making procedure and was unlawful.

The conservative advocacy group that backed the plaintiffs is the Job Creators Network Foundation, which was founded by billionaire Bernie Marcus, who also co-founded Home Depot.

Elaine Parker, the president of Job Creators Network Foundation, said in a statement that Thursday’s ruling “protects the rule of law which requires all Americans to have their voices heard by their federal government.”

“This attempted illegal student loan bailout would have done nothing to address the root cause of unaffordable tuition: greedy and bloated colleges that raise tuition far more than inflation year after year while sitting on $700 billion in endowments,” Parker said. “We hope that the court’s decision today will lay the groundwork for real solutions to the student loan crisis.”

One of the two plaintiffs, Myra Brown, had a business loan forgiven through the Biden administration’s Paycheck Protection Program. She owns the Texas business Desert Star Enterprises Inc, which was granted a $48,000 loan, where $47,996 was forgiven on April 27, 2022.

Under the Biden administration’s plan, student loan borrowers can qualify for up to $10,000 in loan forgiveness, while the recipients of Pell Grants can apply for up to $20,000 in debt relief. The program is intended to assist borrowers who, in 2021, earned no more than $125,000 per year, and couples who earned up to $250,000 per year.

More than 43 million Americans have student loan debt, and the Federal Reserve estimates that the total U.S. student loan debt is more than $1.76 trillion.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office in September found that as of June, the White House’s debt forgiveness program would eliminate about $430 billion of the $1.6 trillion of student debt. The report in June preceded another increase in the total debt to $1.76 trillion.

The Texas federal judge, Pittman, wrote in his opinion that “[w]hether the Program constitutes good public policy is not the role of this Court to determine.”

He determined that the student loan debt forgiveness program was one of the “the largest exercises of legislative power without congressional authority in the history of the United States.”

Pittman said that the HEROES Act did not grant the approval of the $400 billion student loan forgiveness program. The Biden administration relied on the 2003 HEROES Act while enacting its debt relief program, because that law provides loan assistance to military personnel.

“In this country, we are not ruled by an all-powerful executive with a pen and a phone. Instead, we are ruled by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government,” Pittman wrote.

Legal standing questions

Another lawsuit filed against Biden’s student loan forgiveness program has been dismissed due to lack of standing.

The Brown County Taxpayers Association, a Wisconsin organization that advocates for conservative economic policy on behalf of its members, brought an emergency request to block the program to Justice Amy Coney Barrett — who is assigned to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals — but was denied.

A federal district court in Missouri threw out the case by the six Republican-led states that argued the Biden administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not adhering to the proper rule making process.

U.S. District Judge Henry Autrey, an appointed judge of former President George W. Bush, of the Eastern District of Missouri issued a 19-page ruling that declared those states didn’t have legal standing to sue the Biden administration over its student debt cancellation program, despite the “important and significant challenges” they have raised in the case.

In Autrey’s decision, he seemed to agree with attorneys from the Biden administration that a potential loss of tax revenue in the future did not give the states enough standing to sue.

“It is hard to make a cake if you don’t have a pan to put that cake in,” Autrey said during oral arguments. “That pan is standing. It doesn’t matter if you have all the ingredients.”

But GOP states brought a successful emergency request to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the federal appeals court to block the Biden administration’s plan from rolling out until the court ruled on the emergency request from the GOP state’s legal challenge.

Following the Texas judge’s decision, the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group that focuses on relieving student debt, called on the Biden administration to extend the pause in student loan payments, which is set to end Jan. 1, 2023. The pause was set in place in early 2020 by the Trump administration due to the pandemic.

“The devastating result of this court’s decision today is that tens of millions of student loan borrowers across the country now have their vital debt relief blocked as a result of this farcical and fabricated legal claim,” SBPC deputy executive director and managing counsel Persis Yu said in a statement. “The Biden Administration cannot now resume payments. It must use all of its tools to fight to ensure that borrowers receive the debt relief they need.”

Nov 13, 2022
DeWine appointee, fellow State Board of Ed incumbent unseated in general election

BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

Dr. Jenny Shafer Kilgore, a member of the state Board of Education, speaks in support of a bill to eliminate the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools. Kilgore lost her race for re-election in Tuesday’s general election. Photo from The Ohio Channel

Two incumbents on the Ohio State Board of Education were not reelected in Tuesday’s general election.

One unseated member was part of a movement on the board to rescind an anti-racism resolution that mired the state board in controversy, and the other was a governor-appointed member before he sought election to the board.

Of the 19 members of the board, 11 are elected and the rest are appointed by the governor.

The school board races were also different this year because of a district shuffle caused by statewide redistricting. Though the changes were spurred by changes in the statehouse and congressional voting districts, decisions on what the school board districts looked like were approved solely by the governor.

Incumbent Dr. Jenny Kilgore, an elected board member since 2019, lost her bid for reelection, with challenger Katie Hofmann edging past her in a margin just north of 30,000 votes.

Kilgore was a vocal opponent of an anti-racism resolution passed following the death of George Floyd and social unrest in the country regarding racial issues, though she abstained from the initial vote on the measure. A movement then began to rescind the resolution as conservative outcry for so-called “critical race theory” and “indoctrination” came to a head in Ohio. The resolution was also rescinded amid efforts in the Ohio legislature to put up “divisive concept” bills that would ban discussions of the impact of race on history if it was determined to create “guilt” among white students.

District 4 board member Kilgore also participated in public protests against “critical race theory” in schools, and testified before a legislative committee, saying House Bill 327 “would allow teachers to teach the subject without the distractions of critical race theory… they would have more opportunity to focus on the subject matter.”

Fellow incumbent Tim Miller lost his bid to join the board as an elected member to challenger Tom Jackson. Jackson received 44% of the vote in unofficial results from Tuesday. Miller was more than 50,000 votes behind Jackson, also narrowly falling behind a third challenger, Cierra Lynch Shehorn, by just under 600 votes.

Miller was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2021 to fill Sarah Fowler Arthur’s District 10 seat left vacant when she joined the Ohio House.

The outgoing member was instrumental in sending a resolution condemning the Biden administration for changes to anti-discrimination regulations that would include gender identity if accepted on the federal level to executive committee, rather than a full board of ed vote.

Also elected on Tuesday was former state senator and Toledo-area educator Teresa Fedor, who defeated opponent Sarah McGervey with 56% of the unofficial vote totals in the District 2 race.

Hofmann said the elections that happened on Tuesday show the need for a different tack on the board of ed.

“The election of Theresa Fedor, Tom Jackson and (Hofmann) is a clear message that people in Ohio want high quality public schools, not more charters or vouchers,” Hofmann said in a statement to the OCJ. “Ohio public schools must be welcoming, accepting and inclusive where ALL children are respected.”

Though all state board of ed races are considered non-partisan, the changes to the board are encouraging to the Democratic party as a whole and education associations in the state as well, despite “mixed results” in other general election races.

“I think having dedicated candidates who are going to reject some of the extremism we’ve seen on the state board of education … is really going going to help change the dynamic in terms of the issue and hopefully refocus the state board on really what students need,” said Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association.

Elizabeth Walters, chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, praised “taking the majority” on the school board, saying the current school board “has become this dysfunctional show of what happens when we elect people who aren’t focused on the things that parents and students care about most.”

She also said the party worked to bring in candidates, and is prepared to recruit more in the future.

“We worked hard to recruit strong folks for these seats who have strong backgrounds in education and who can be advocates for what teachers and students really need to be successful here in Ohio,” Walters said in a Wednesday press call.

Follow Susan Tebben on Twitter.

Nov 13, 2022
J.D. Vance and Tim Ryan make final appeal to voters from townhall stage

J.D. Vance answering questions on stage at a FOX townhall in Columbus. (photo by Nick Evans)

BY: NICK EVANS – Ohio Capital Journal

In a Fox News townhall one week from election day, Ohio’s U.S. Senate candidates tackled questions from the audience and moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum about energy, the border, abortion, the Paul Pelosi attack, and more.

The event takes the place of the third debate both campaigns have said they wanted but couldn’t ever agree to schedule. The nominees staked out a bit of new ground and clarified some existing positions. But in general, the forum offered a chance for Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan to make one final broad appeal to voters.

Tim Ryan

The townhall format gave each candidate roughly equal time on stage and Ryan got the first crack. The first question came from a Deerfield woman in the audience named Beverley. She pressed Ryan asking him to “look me in the face” and explain how clean energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation.

In a blunt show of honesty, he told her he couldn’t.

Ryan argued as he has previously, for addressing short term inflation through a tax cut. But he went on to defend the broader legislation, too. He argued those subsidies are helping encourage private investment in vehicle, battery and solar manufacturing around the state.

“I want Ohio to be the manufacturing powerhouse of the world,” Ryan argued. “If it’s not us, it’s China. So we have to go all in on these products of the future. But where I think I’m different as a Democrat, I think we go all in on natural gas.”

Most notably, though, Ryan broke with the state party and offered his support for Issue 1. The measure demands judges consider public safety when setting the dollar amount for bail. They can already consider public safety for other conditions, but the state supreme court earlier this year ruled it’s unconstitutional to jack up cash bail in an effort to keep defendants in jail. State law already allows prosecutors to argue for holding dangerous defendants without the opportunity for bail.

Familiar rhetoric from Ryan on avoiding “stupid fights” and restoring Roe v. Wade got strong responses. Sparring with the moderators on the latter, Ryan refused to place a hard cut off on performing the procedure when a mother’s life is in danger. Ignoring the state’s six-week abortion ban currently on hold, Martha MacCallum pressed him on why the 22 weeks Ohio women currently have isn’t enough. (Ohio’s six-week abortion ban is temporarily on hold by a Hamilton County judge while a lawsuit against it proceeds.)

“If there’s a medical problem, you don’t know that until the end,” Ryan argued back. “And here, the point is, this is America. This is a country built on freedom, right? And this is the largest governmental overreach into the private lives of individual citizens in the history of our lifetime.”

“I thought my friends on the other side were, like, against big government, against invasion into the private lives of people,” he added.

In addition to his lines on bipartisanship and abortion, Ryan got a good response to the idea of legalizing marijuana. He didn’t get as far with his argument that investing in border security is necessary, but a wall isn’t always practical and is often too easily circumvented.

Ryan’s biggest negative reaction came to questions about the Jan. 6 insurrection. He acknowledged that his past comments about needing to “confront” and “kill” the MAGA movement were poorly phrased.

“Kill the movement,” Ryan clarified to Baier. “And maybe that wasn’t a great choice of words. Absolutely confront and absolutely stop the extremist movement happening.”

But a moment later Ryan faced a chorus of jeers when he described 140 Capitol Police officers getting injured during the insurrection and one of them getting killed.

“We’ve all seen the tape,” Ryan said.

J.D. Vance

Vance took the stage next. And from the boisterous applause as he walked out to the lighter cross examination from the moderators, it’s pretty safe to say he got the friendlier draw.

To blunt Ryan’s attacks that Vance is an “extremist,” he opened with a couple of olive branches. He offered that Democrats were right to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices.

“We absolutely have to work together,” Vance said of governing with a Democratic president. “That’s one of the things Tim talks a lot about, working together. But when Republicans win the majority as I think we do, we have to act like we have the majority, we have to do things not just talk about doing things.”

Vance argued “opening the pipelines and opening up our energy industry” would bring prices down “pretty immediately.” Energy experts meanwhile contend increasing domestic production would have a limited impact when the price of commodities like oil are determined by a global market.

In terms of immigration, a top issue for Vance, he got a strong response from saying he’d back Arkansas Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act. He explained that measure would prioritize immigrants based on skills rather than familial connections.

“I think the immigration policy in the United States should be about what skills and what attributes do you bring to the table,” he said.

“You let people into your country based on merit, not on who they know,” he added.

Vance once again expressed confidence in the integrity of upcoming election and even said he’d support “the guy who wins” even though they’ll disagree on big issues.

He explicitly condemned the attack of Nancy Pelosi’s husband as “disgusting” after Ryan suggested he’d been silent on it. Vance pushed back that he’d condemned it from the outset and that “the effort to turn this into a political issue is actually a real problem here.” In the next breath he went on to argue the attacker is an illegal alien.

“My view very simply is that we need to deport violent illegal aliens, ok?” he said.

He argued the attack — by a man claiming Nancy Pelosi is the “leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party”— is not reflective of Republicans. It’s reflective of people living in the country illegally.

Asked directly whether he ban abortion in Ohio and nationally, Vance said, “Look, I’m pro-life, I am pro-life.”

He went to argue 90% of abortion policy should be set at the state level. But he explained his support for a “minimum national standard” that would ensure we’re not “aborting babies who can feel pain who are fully formed.”

Vance has expressed support for South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham’s 15 week federal abortion ban. Describing the provision as a minimum standard though is misleading. It would limit any state from allowing abortion after 15 weeks, but states would be allowed to set more stringent restrictions.

Vance’s claims that a fetus is “fully formed” or can “feel pain” are similarly dubious. Fetal viability is generally considered to be about 23 or 24 weeks. An American Medical Association policy brief contends “the preponderance of evidence” shows even a 20-week fetus is unable to feel pain, and cites a study putting that benchmark closer to 29 or 30 weeks.

Follow OCJ Reporter Nick Evans on Twitter.

Nov 2, 2022
Doctors call on DeWine to answer questions about abortion laws

BY: MARTY SCHLADEN – Ohio Capital Journal

Days after Gov. Mike DeWine said the medical community will be consulted as Ohio considers future abortion legislation, a group of more than 1,400 doctors implored him to answer questions about a law he’s already signed.

The Ohio medical community has said that to date, DeWine and Republican lawmakers have shown little interest in what doctors have to say when it comes to abortion. Then, late last week, DeWine seemed to reinforce that impression, declining to respond to a list of nine questions that Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights sent him and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Nan Whaley.

The group was formed in the wake of the June 24 U.S. Supreme Court Decision overturning the right to an abortion under Roe v Wade. In Ohio and nationally, medical groups said that decision ignores the health care aspects of abortion.

DeWine’s non-response is unacceptable, said Lauren Beene, a Cleveland-area pediatrician and a director of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights.

“These are very important questions that people need to know his stance on because … this can have a lot of implications on a person’s health and their ability to get medical care,” she said, explaining that Ohio’s abortion restrictions can discourage doctors from living here — or even women worried about having the full range of medical options.

“If you have somebody who’s running for governor who can’t or won’t answer the question of whether or not he supports a bill that would make all abortion illegal except in the most dire of circumstances,” Beene said, “from a medical perspective (that) doesn’t really make any sense. What does that even mean? It’s not good at all.”

She was referring to proposed legislation that would go even further than Senate Bill 23, a law DeWine signed in 2019 and which took effect when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24.

SB 23 outlaws almost all abortions after about five or six weeks of pregnancy and it doesn’t make exceptions for victims of rape and incest. It makes some exceptions to protect the life and health of mothers, but doctors have complained that they’re vague and practitioners are reluctant to risk felony charges for running afoul of them.

Several doctors interviewed by the Capital Journal have said they repeatedly tried to warn DeWine and the legislature of the hazards of SB 23 before it was passed and signed in 2019, but they were ignored. Then, shortly after enforcement began in the summertime, many of the things they warned of came to pass.

Just a week into enforcement, an Indianapolis doctor reported that she aborted the pregnancy of a 10-year-old rape victim from Columbus who couldn’t get one under the Ohio law DeWine had signed. In the following weeks, Ohio doctors told of having to call lawyers first as patients’ lives were fading in front of them — and even then being terrified of the consequences while performing lifesaving terminations.

Then, in sworn affidavits, doctors and other workers at Ohio abortion clinics reported other horrors under SB 23. They included two more rape victims under 18 who couldn’t get abortions in Ohio; two cancer patients who couldn’t get the abortions they needed to start chemotherapy; and three women whose fetuses had severe abnormalities or other conditions that made a successful pregnancy impossible. Even so, they, too, couldn’t get abortions in Ohio.

SB 23 was in force for 11 weeks before a Cincinnati judge temporarily paused it.

Now DeWine and Attorney General Dave Yost are in court trying to get the stay lifted. But through it all, DeWine has refused to say whether he thinks it’s a good thing that SB 23 makes women and girls have their rapists’ babies — nor has he said much about women facing the medical problems described in the abortion clinics’ affidavits.

DeWine has refused to debate Whaley, but last week in a joint appearance with her before the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board, he gave his most extensive recent comments about abortion in Ohio.

DeWine said policymakers will listen to the medical community as further abortion restrictions are considered. However, he only did so after seeming to repeat Yost’s false assertion that under SB 23, a 10-year-old can get an abortion based on her age alone.

The law mentions no age at which a rape victim is too young to be forced to have that baby. And several obstetricians told the Capital Journal that while pregnancy in a 10-year-old is riskier than the average pregnancy, that’s also the case for the obese, diabetics, older mothers — and women with a host of other conditions that SB 23 makes no exceptions for.

But in the future, DeWine said, medical experts will be heard.

“As we go through debates and discussions, my belief would be that that 10-year-old would have been able to have an abortion in Ohio because of that,” DeWine told Whaley and the editorial board, referring apparently to SB 23’s health exceptions. “If I’m wrong — if I was wrong — and we’re going to hear more from medical professionals, then these are the things that we’ll need to work out, that the legislature will work out as it debates this bill.”

Despite being asked twice by Whaley, DeWine didn’t answer whether he agreed with the provision in SB 23 forcing such young girls to have their rapist’s babies. DeWine also hasn’t said whether he agrees with the law’s requirement that victims of rape and incest must carry their pregnancies to term regardless of their age.

In their written questions, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights asked the governor to state his position on proposals that would go even further, including House Bill 704 “that would declare a fertilized egg, a single cell, to be legally the same as a human being.”

DeWine didn’t respond. When asked about the doctors’ questions, DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney on Tuesday said in an email, “The Governor has no additional comments beyond his previous statements at this time.”

For Beene, one of the directors of the doctors’ group, DeWine’s silence is telling.

“We have doctors in all specialties all across the state,” she said. “And if we have questions and he won’t answer them, what does that say to the public? For us as physicians, we’re very frustrated with him not wanting to answer.”

Follow Marty Schladen on Twitter.

Nov 2, 2022
COVID-denial, election-denial not far apart, OSU researchers found

BY: SUSAN TEBBEN – Ohio Capital Journal

You’ve probably heard of “gateway” drugs, but a group of researchers at Ohio State University say there’s such a thing as a “gateway conspiracy.”

A duo of surveys done by psychology researchers and supported by the National Science Foundation seek to bolster the field of “conspiracy theory research,” which an announcement of the study said “to date has tended to look for traits that predict the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories at a given point in time.”

The “gateway conspiracy” that OSU researchers tested in the surveys “argues that conspiracy theory beliefs prompted by a single event lead to increases in conspiratorial thinking over time.”

One survey asked 501 people questions “assessing their beliefs in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, political ideology” and their affinity for the theories in June 2020.

About 100 of the participants came back in December of the same year and were asked “statements gauging their level of conspiratorial thinking,” including their believe in the false idea that there had been extensive voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Results from the surveys show those that believed false theories about the pandemic were “more likely to later report they believed that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump through widespread voter fraud, which is also not true.”

A possible trigger for these beliefs? A sense of distrust, according to OSU psychology professor Russell Fazio, senior author of the survey study.

“It’s speculative, but it appears that once people adopt one conspiracy belief, it promotes distrust in institutions more generally — it could be government, science, the media, whatever,” Fazio said in announcing the study.

COVID-19 was ripe for conspiracy because individuals felt a lack of control, according to Fazio’s fellow study author, Javier Granados Samayoa.

“With COVID-19, there was this large event that people could not control, so how could they make sense of it? One way is by adhering to conspiracy theories.”

The study also found that the high likelihood of rabbit-hole-opening theories causing negative outcomes for believers and those around the believers spotlights the importance of tamping down COVID-19 conspiracies.

“Not only do COVID-19 conspiracy theories threaten lives and economies in the present, they may also create problems down the road by leading to heightened conspiracist ideation,” the study stated. “Policymakers would be wise to consult the research that has tested strategies by which belief in conspiracy theories can be blunted.”

Those policymakers could include conspiracy theorists, if the November election ends up a certain way. From U.S. Congress, all the way down the general election ballot, there are candidates who questioned the validity of the 2020 election and claimed voter fraud.

One such candidate, Terpsehore “Tore” Maras, independent candidate for secretary of state, asked the Ohio Supreme Court to change the rules when it comes to election observers and allow her to choose her own observers, against the legal mandate that four other candidates also petition for more poll watchers.

That case has yet to be decided.

Oct 29, 2022