Columbus, OH – In case you missed it, David DeWitt of the Ohio Capital Journal took statehouse Republicans to task for their latest attack on Ohio voters. This week GOP politicians in Columbus ignored voters and rushed through legislation that would effectively kill the citizen-led ballot initiative in Ohio and create a taxpayer-funded, $20 million special election in August.
It’s just the latest way Ohio Republicans are working to consolidate power for themselves and special interests friends, leaving working Ohioans to pay the price.
“This is a naked power grab to remove any last vestige of accountability for them to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, no matter the consequences, a majority of voters be damned. They have been seduced by the prospect of their own total, unadulterated power, and are scheming to slit the throat of representative government in sacrifice to it,” writes DeWitt.
Read more from the Ohio Capital Journal HERE and below:
- Ohio Republicans are in a full-court press on their attempt to make it harder for voters to amend our Ohio Constitution by raising the threshold for passage from 50% to 60%.
- Ohio Republicans eliminated the August elections originally, they said, because it’s expensive with low turnout. The August 2022 election cost $20 million and had 8% turnout.
- That low turnout has now become not a concern, but part of their strategy, as they know their best shot at asking voters to bow down and kneel in subservience to them by relinquishing our democratic powers is for as few voters as possible to participate in that decision.
- The House version is sponsored by Republican state Rep. Brian Stewart and was conceived in coordination with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose with the support of the religious fanatics at the extraordinarily influential special interest group, the Center for Christian Virtue.
- LaRose denied that he wanted to block abortion protections or anti-gerrymandering measures when he announced plans to overhaul the direct democracy over our constitution that Ohioans have enjoyed responsibly since 1912. But in a letter to Ohio House colleagues in December, Stewart listed only two reasons for Republican lawmakers to support attacking voters’ ability to amend our constitution: abortion and gerrymandering.
- In the Ohio Senate chamber Wednesday, Republican Senators made clear they share Stewart’s priorities: Proposed amendments to increase Ohio’s minimum wage and protect abortion rights, as well as the prospect of further anti-gerrymandering reform, were all cited by the GOP lawmakers attacking the power of Ohio voters.
- Preposterously, these gerrymandered lawmakers — who won their seats by running under unconstitutional maps that they forced onto voters — claim they want to protect Ohio from special interests.
- These lawmakers who indulge and tolerate all manner of corruption, bribery, sweetheart lawmaking, and nepotistic hiring and appointments, are just oozing condescension out of every pore when they point their fingers at Ohio voters as the ones who can’t be trusted to protect ourselves from special interests.
- This is a naked power grab to remove any last vestige of accountability for them to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, no matter the consequences, a majority of voters be damned.
- They have been seduced by the prospect of their own total, unadulterated power, and are scheming to slit the throat of representative government in sacrifice to it.
- These people are the shame of Ohio, and they represent the most feckless, irresponsible, corrupt, contemptible, rigged, un-American, anti-science, anti-fact, anti-intelligence, anti-democracy, anti-voter, and anti-Ohioan general assembly I’ve seen in my lifetime. Which is really saying something.
###