DeWine’s nonexistent amendment campaign
During a July 2024 news conference, Gov. Mike DeWine said if voters defeated a redistricting reform amendment on that year’s ballot, he’d fight for his plan to fix how Ohio draws its political maps.
His Plan A was to lobby the legislature. But if that didn’t work?
DeWine pledged to bypass them by spearheading a signature gathering campaign to get his proposal before voters. “I will do everything I can to get it on the ballot by initiative,” DeWine said.
Voters did their part, defeating the amendment in last November’s election.
But a year later, DeWine still hasn’t followed through.
DeWine told reporters Wednesday that he still hopes the legislature – which has the power to propose changes to Ohio’s redistricting system – will take up the cause of redistricting reform. DeWine’s proposal involves putting the state legislature’s nonpartisan research arm in charge of map drawing. Currently, the state legislature and a panel of statewide elected officials split redistricting duties.
There’s no time to overhaul redistricting this year, though, DeWine said, since the deadline for 2025 constitutional amendments has passed.
“But in the long run, I would hope that once we get beyond this one, the legislature, when there’s no great pressure on anyone, no one’s looking at an immediate election, that we could come to an agreement,” DeWine said.
So the governor is keeping the dream alive that Republican lawmakers might voluntarily give up their redistricting pen. But it sounds like he’s given up on the idea of a costly citizen initiative.
“I don’t know if I can raise the money to do that after I’ve looked at it, frankly,” he said.
On guard
DeWine also made the case on Wednesday that sending in the National Guard isn’t the best way to fight violent crime in the state’s big cities.
While doing so, he was careful to avoid commenting on anything President Donald Trump has done or might do.
DeWine shared his views after a reporter asked DeWine if he might agree to send the Ohio National Guard to a state not invited by its governor. Trump recently seemed to threaten to do so in Democratic-controlled Illinois.
DeWine pivoted. He described sending the Guard to Ohio’s Democratic-controlled cities when local mayors have requested help. He said he doesn’t anticipate ever doing so just to fight crime rates.
“The Guard can certainly come in, and we can deploy them in Cleveland and Columbus at the request of local mayors to deal with bigger problems including crowds and unruliness, all kinds of demonstrations,” DeWine said. “So there’s a role for the Guard. But when you’re talking about violent crime, it needs to be very pinpointed.”
Donald Trump who?
Trump has used a heavy hand as he’s openly pushed GOP lawmakers in other states to redraw congressional lines to help Republicans pick up extra seats in Congress.
But one of Ohio’s top Republican redistricting honchos said Wednesday that he’s yet to hear from the president.
House Speaker Matt Huffman, of Lima, told reporters the only people he answers to on redistricting are the 115,000 constituents who live in his House district, and the 64 other House Republicans who picked him as House speaker.
With that in mind, Huffman said “a lot of people” have called him with redistricting requests. He said it only stands to reason that any president – be it Joe Biden or Donald Trump – would rather have more members of their own party in Congress.
“But there are so many specifics to this. Constitutional mandates, that’s what’s going to guide us here,” Huffman said.
Huffman also criticized Ohio Democrats, who have rallied with Democrats in Texas and Missouri – two states that have heeded Trump’s gerrymandering call – as overly concerned with national politics.
“This is absolutely not a national issue, except for the people who are providing the resources and the funds, who come from outside the states to do this,” Huffman said.
So what’s next? An initial redistricting deadline falls at the end of the month, but passing a map by then requires Democratic votes.
Huffman did say a special joint legislative committee, featuring House and Senate representatives, will hold meetings at the end of September.
But it doesn’t sound like a map proposal is coming any time soon.
“Do I think we’re going to submit a map by the end of September that says, ‘Here’s the Republican map’? No, because that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing right now. What we’re supposed to be doing is negotiating with Democrats,” Huffman said.
Democrats’ map is dead on arrival
Ohio Democrats unveiled their congressional map proposal on Tuesday. It contains eight Republican-leaning districts and seven Democratic-leaning ones – a net reduction of two GOP seats from the current map.
The proposal seems politically dead on arrival. And Republicans don’t seem to be in a hurry to take it up. The GOP-controlled House Rules Committee, which decides which bills get committee hearings and floor votes and which don’t, opted not to refer it to a committee on Wednesday.
One reason why the rent is too damned high in Ohio? Wall Street
The Federal Reserve of Cleveland shined a light on an accelerating trend over the past two decades: Well-heeled investors are buying up the affordable single-family homes.
In Ohio’s biggest counties, the Fed found, those investors are making about half the purchases and own about one-third of the housing stock.
Jake sent the report around to some housing policy experts who have warned about this dynamic for years, though without such clear, authoritative, and multi-county data to back them up.
The takeaway? If you want to buy a house in Ohio’s poor and working class neighborhoods, your competition is increasingly out-of-state capital that waives home inspections and pays in cash.
Can a dead coal bailout live again?
If you’ve spent some time in the Statehouse over the last decade, you’ve heard about the Ohio Valley Electric Corp, the coal bailout that has cost Ohio’s electric customers more than $600 million on their bills. And it played a prominent, co-starring role in what federal prosecutors called the biggest public corruption scandal in state history.
Lawmakers, after increasing bipartisan pressure, repealed the subsidies for OVEC earlier this year, which until then flowed every month to American Electric Power, Duke Energy and AES Ohio.
Regardless, AEP is asking state regulators for an “accounting deferral” that would send another $35 million, paid through Ohioans’ electric bills, its way. As Jake writes, now it’s for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio to decide.