Partying at the Statehouse like it’s primary season
Ohio’s Republican majority in Columbus spent their week trying to restrict abortion access, ban drag shows, weaken vaccination laws in schools and slash capital gains taxes for investors.
It’s primary season in Ohio.
Elections are May 5. Military and overseas absentee voting has already begun, with more widespread voter windows opening April 7.
So it’s the season of politicians offering up policy wins or at least viral clips to their voters. And primary politics tend to tilt toward the parties’ most ardent supporters.
First, the drag show ban. House lawmakers Wednesday passed House Bill 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act.” The bill prohibits public performances from those who “exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s biological sex using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts.”
“Today is about letting kids be kids,” said state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, an Erie County Republican.
The bill is a vestige of a trend from the Biden years, where Republican states pushed different kinds of legal restrictions on the rights and legal recognition of transgender Americans.
House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, a Cincinnati Democrat, called the bill a distraction from more pressing issues. During floor speeches, other Democrats called the measure dehumanizing to a marginalized group of people.
“The majority of the legislature is focused on drag shows, while Ohioans are worried about how to pay the bills,” he said.
House Speaker Matt Huffman said the legislature is capable of multitasking.
“We deal with many, many issues. We deal with criminal justice, we deal with utility issues, agriculture.… We can’t just deal with one thing at a time. These are the issues that people bring to us, and we have to deal with them,” Huffman said.
There’s also abortion. Under the shadow of a new constitutional guarantee of abortion access without any burden from the state, Republicans are trying to establish new hurdles for women seeking an abortion.
House Republicans passed a bill Wednesday that would revive a a 24-hour waiting period on women seeking abortions. The measure is a tweak version of a state law that recently was struck down by a Franklin County judge.
And in a press conference Tuesday, Cincinnati Republican Rep. Jennifer Gross read aloud from a statement that her legislation would require doctors to read to women seeking the two-pill regimen known as “the abortion pill.”
“If you have started a chemical abortion but now regret it, you’re not alone,” Gross, alongside representatives of the Center for Christian Virtue, said to reporters, making claims that physician associations have deemed spurious. “It may not be too late to save your pregnancy. Abortion pill reversal is safe and effective, and this process gives your baby a second chance at life.”
And vaccines. The House Health Committee held its third hearing Wednesday on legislation designed to make it easier for parents to sidestep vaccination requirements for public school enrollment.
Ohio’s laws are already comparatively lax in that they allow students to avoid vaccine requirements if they have “philosophical” objections. The bill would essentially require schools to affirmatively remind students of their right to not receive vaccines, even as Ohio wrestles with once-eradicated disease outbreaks like measles.
Finally, there’s taxes. Rep. Tom Young, a Montgomery County Republican, held a press conference Tuesday promoting his bill to eliminate Ohio taxes on capital gains. The change would cost the state budget around $650 million a year, although Young asserted his proposal’s economic benefits would help offset some of that.
“If we want entrepreneurs to build here, if we want retirees to stay here and we want capital flowing into our communities and our state, then we need to act,” Young said.
The proposal is similar to one backed by Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP frontrunner in this year’s governor’s race, although Ramaswamy wants to eliminate the entire state income tax, with capital gains taxes disappearing as part of that broader plan.
Ohio pushes to avoid major SNAP cuts
Ohio is facing a potential tripling in the cost of its food stamps program under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, unless it can reduce administrative errors in the program.
The cuts hinge on whether Ohio can reduce what’s known as its “error rate” – a federal measure of how often households are found to have received more or less benefits than they should have after an audit.
The deadline to lower the error rate below 6% is the end of September, although the cuts themselves wouldn’t take effect until October 2027.
Ohio’s error rate last was below 6% in 2017, according to federal data. In the most recent year for which data is available, it was just above 9%, ranking 21st of 55 U.S. states and territories.
“I’m hopeful it can be done,” said Jon Honeck, executive director of the Ohio Job and Family Services Directors’ Association. “We’re going to see how difficult that is.”
In the meantime, the legislature is grappling with an initial round of federal cuts.
Last Thursday, Republican state lawmakers finalized a bill giving $12.5 million to county governments to help make up for $70 million in previous federal cuts. The spending was part of a larger budget corrections bill, which rarely generate controversy.
But many Democrats voted against the bill after objecting to how Republicans split the $12.5 million. The GOP majority decided to give $226,486 to each of Ohio’s 25 largest counties. That means Cuyahoga County, which lost $7.2 million under the federal bill, will get the same makeup amount as Erie County, which lost about $235,700.
The remaining counties’ federal cuts were less than $226,486 and had their costs completely covered.
Read more from Andrew here.
Ohio regulators killed a $98 million solar farm
“This is no longer a good business proposition. We’re not starting any new projects in Ohio.”
That’s what Craig Adair, Open Road Renewables’ vice president of development, told Jake after the Ohio Power Siting Board rejected the company’s application to build Crossroad Solar in Morrow County.
This is the seventh utility-scale project state officials have rejected since 2020. In all cases, the regulators have found no fault with the engineering, economics or environmental impacts. Rather, it’s opposition from township trustees, county commissioners and some (but not all) neighbors that spurred their demise.
The locals have no such power at the OPSB to stop construction of a data center, a fracking rig or a coal-fired power station. But they can kill wind and solar.
Adair said that, until Ohio laws change, Open Road Renewables – whose eight operational farms in the state meant $1 billion in capital investments – won’t seek more projects here.
An update from Akron
In a written question to Summit County Common Pleas Judge Susan Baker Ross, the 12 jurors in the FirstEnergy bribery trial raised the specter that they might not be able to agree on whether to convict in what prosecutors have called the biggest public corruption scandal in state history.
“If we cannot agree on the charge of bribery, do we evaluate the other charges?” they wrote on Monday afternoon, their fourth full day of deliberations.
Jake is up in Akron, waiting it out. The jury left around 4 p.m. Wednesday, ending their fifth full day of deliberations.
State to rename a park after Trump
An Ohio man named Charles O. Trump donated his acreage to the state, now named the “Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area.”
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources proposed, by administrative rule – a bureaucratic process by which agencies propose the nitty-gritty details to implement state law – granting an additional and acceptable name for the park.
Karina Cheung, an ODNR spokeswoman, described the change to add the option to call the property the Trump Wildlife Preserve.
“We will continue to refer to it as the Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area,” she said.
So why make the change? Is this about pleasing the president? Brevity?
“I’ll refer you back to the previous statement,” Cheung said.
In the news
Last week, Andrew Tobias reported on why the effort to repeal the intoxicating hemp bill fell short. The law also rolls back some of the original rules in recreational marijuana approved by Ohio voters in 2023, and it includes additional restrictions. Signal Cleveland’s Frank W. Lewis breaks down the changes.
Statehouse News Bureau: Ban on gender-affirming care for minors to be decided by Ohio Supreme Court
Also, you might remember Jake wrote last week about Cincinnati-area freshman Rep. David Taylor, who has emerged as one of the most prolific stock traders in Congress. Our friends at NOTUS followed up on new disclosures filed by Taylor showing he sold off shares of several oil majors as their stock price boomed over the war in Iran.