Why do Ohio Republicans keep making insulting comments?
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. [email protected]
This election season’s campaigners have devised a new strategy for winning Ohioans’ support: Insult their intelligence. Then ask for their votes.
Republican entrepreneur Bernie Moreno, who is challenging the re-election of U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Cleveland Democrat, recently offered a textbook example. Here’s what Moreno said at a campaign event in Warren County:
“Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but – especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
Amid the resulting firestorm, a Moreno spokesman said the candidate “was clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Sherrod Brown and members of the left-wing media like to pretend that the only issue that matters to women voters is abortion … Bernie’s view is that women voters care just as much about the economy, rising prices, crime, and our open southern border as male voters do.”
It might also occur to Moreno that women voters, regardless of their perspective on abortion, also care about respect.
Another example: The baldfaced distortions propagated by Statehouse Republicans, notably Secretary of State Frank LaRose, of Upper Arlington, about November’s statewide ballot issue, Issue 1.
If voters approve, Issue 1 would forbid gerrymandering – political rigging – of Ohio’s congressional and General Assembly districts. Gerrymandering has produced a legislature in which Republicans hold 68% of the Ohio House’s seats, and 78% of the Ohio Senate’s, in a state that cast 53% of its 2020 presidential vote for Donald Trump.
GOP insiders, with the help of the Ohio Supreme Court’s Republican majority, have the gall to claim Issue 1 is somehow pro-gerrymandering. That’s a brazen lie. And it’s being spread by the very Republicans who used gerrymandering to cement their power in Ohio’s laughing-stock legislature, a playground for big business and Capitol Square busybodies obsessed with Ohioans’ sex lives.
As noted, the state Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice in the antics of LaRose and GOP legislators who cherish the status quo in Columbus.
For instance, with the high court’s OK, LaRose slanted Issue 1’s official ballot language to try to flim-flam Ohio voters into voting against it. Term-limited LaRose is desperate to land a 2026 statewide GOP ballot slot. Evidently there’s no line he won’t cross to reach that goal, as he showed by pathetically groveling earlier this year to woo Trump’s endorsement for the Senate, an endorsement Trump instead gave to Moreno.
Another view: Media keeps flipping LaRose off. Issue 1 a con to enshrine gerrymandering in constitution.
Three Supreme Court seats are on November’s ballot. Democratic Justices Michael P. Donnelly and Melody J. Stewart are seeking re-election. Democratic Judge Lisa Forbes, of the Ohio Court of Appeals (8th District) is seeking an open Supreme Court seat. Republican candidates are:
Ohio voters’ approval of Issue 1, the anti-gerrymandering reform, and election of a balanced state Supreme Court that doesn’t march in lockstep with the legislature’s GOP clique, are the best hope for moving Ohio forward. Otherwise, the Statehouse will remain a backwater of yesterday’s ideas and undisguised bias against law-abiding Ohioans who dare to be themselves.
Whether positive change can happen in Columbus is a function of which Ohioans, and how many, turn out to vote. Early in-person voting starts Oct. 8. Election Day is Nov. 5.
If you need encouragement to vote this year, keep this in mind: The powers on Capitol Square, lolling in their state-supplied hammocks, really wish you wouldn’t. Things are fine just as they are. For them.
Thomas Suddes
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. [email protected]
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: Issue 1 and a balanced supreme court critical for Ohio
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