ALERT: Poison Pills Added to Bill To Put Biden on the Ohio Ballot

Urgent: Need YOU To Help Stop Another Sneak Attack on Democracy

QUESTION: Why is the behind-the-scenes leader of last August’s Issue 1 effort (the Center for Christian Virtue’s Aaron Baer, whom I wrote about here) to kill Ohio’s direct democracy, who was also the leader to stop Ohio’s Reproductive Freedom Amendment last November—suddenly so excited with Governor Mike DeWine?

Hmmm.

And why is JD Vance taking a break from Trump’s trial to suddenly chime in with praise for DeWine (who the far right often calls a RINO)?

And remember this guy, the official author of last August’s Issue 1? Why is he so pleased with DeWine all of a sudden?

Hint: when these three line up, the reason is not going to be a good one.

And in this case, as with the Issue 1’s last year, it’s actually bad. Bad for Ohio, bad for democracy, and bad for reproductive freedom.

READ this to find out why…then take action…

The Backdrop: Will Ohio Be Part of the Presidential Election?

Forty-nine states managed to pull it off. Including Alabama a few weeks ago.

And Ohio always managed to pull it off before.

What task am I talking about?

The basic task of having a qualified presidential candidate (in this case, the president himself) placed on your state’s ballot—and if a state deadline needs to be extended to allow that to happen (because of the timing of the formal nominating convention), you just do it. Simple.

Ohio always did, without a moment of controversy, for whichever candidate needed an extension (I was party chair at one of those times, and it hardly registered as a blip on the radar). Just as Alabama did a few weeks back.

Because, you know. This is America.

(Heck, the US Supreme Court ruled a few months ago that a state can’t even keep a candidate off the ballot for engaging in an insurrection, even when the Constitution declares that such a person is disqualified.)

But as with everything else in government these days, the deeply broken State of Ohio just can’t get it done.

Even worse, we are now witnessing leaders of the State, including the Governor himself, insisting that in exchange for putting the President of the United States on Ohio’s ballot (again, always a routine act in the past), other concessions must be made. Concessions which risk undermining core elements of Ohio’s democracy, and newly won reproductive freedom. And concessions which would set a terrible precedent.

Which is why the cast of characters I mentioned above are suddenly excited to get Biden on the ballot. And praising DeWine for his plan to do so.

What are they hoping to gain? Read on….

Dueling Bills in Columbus

To cut to the chase, Columbus politicians have been pursuing two avenues to extend the ballot deadline so Biden can appear on Ohio’s ballot after a mid-August DNC nomination process.

On the positive side, a bipartisan bill sits in the Ohio House. It’s what legislators call a “clean bill”—extending the deadline to get on Ohio’s ballot without any strings attached. Again, as Ohio has always done. And as other states, including Alabama, have done. Because—we live in America. And we vote in presidential elections. You shouldn't have to pay a price for doing so.

But the Senate? Under President Matt ("We can kind of do what we want") Huffman? Sadly, as always seems to be the case, they can’t do something as simple and straightforward.

No—Huffman and crew are insisting that the usually routine extension of the ballot deadline can only happen if it’s combined with other things they want to do.

What are those changes?

Pills of the highly poisonous variety.

Targeting Ballot Initiatives—The One Check on Their Power

You’ll get the impression from their tweets above that what they want in exchange for the ballot extension is getting “foreign money” out of Ohio elections.

If only.

First, it should alarm all of us that the only changes they are proposing in the most corrupt state in the nation are to campaigns involving ballot initiatives. No coincidence, these citizen-led initiatives are the vehicles that provide the most formidable check on their power, and which dealt them embarrassing defeats last year. They want to “reform,” yet again, the citizens’ power, not their’s. Especially after last year’s losses, those are the rules they are eager to change in their favor.

It should also alarm us that the very leaders who led the effort to kill direct democracy last year (like Rep. Brian Stewart, the legislative champion of the August Issue 1) through misleading and discredited arguments, are the very people most excited about this new set of changes (and tying the reform to the Biden ballot issue). You should also know that a core part of ALEC’s agenda is to weaken the ability of citizens to wage ballot campaigns:

As I write in my book Laboratories of Autocracy, these red-state statehouse are always learning from their failures (and Brian Stewart indeed suffered an epic failure), and then shifting the rules and laws to avoid future failures. (Think drop boxes, early vote attacks, new rules on how we elect Supreme Court justices, attacking organized labor, and the like).

Once you see that, in the same way, they are fiercely committed to undermining ballot initiatives, it won’t surprise you that the new structures and enforcement mechanisms they are proposing for such campaigns would dramatically undermine the overall viability of grassroots ballot initiatives in Ohio—imposing low contribution limits, amid other changes, that could greatly dry up overall support for such initiatives (not because of foreign dollars, but far less American dollars). Along the way, the bill creates an enforcement scheme that threatens supporters of these measures with the prospect of onerous investigations by GOP officials who (as we learned last year) are happy to use and abuse their offices (remember, they even manipulated the ballot language) to sink ballot initiatives they don’t agree with. In short, the combination of changes could deal a major blow to citizen-led efforts that they so forcefully oppose. And for reasons that have nothing to do with the boogie man rhetoric of foreign money.

And of course, what these politicians’ bills don’t address is the fact the real corruption in Ohio at the moment involves millions of dark money for them, coming from in-state private interests, which helped them all get elected in the first place, led to the biggest bribery scandal in Ohio history, and has led to Ohio being named the most corrupt state in the nation.

Nope, nothing to clean up their own enormous mess. The true corruption holding Ohio back. Just a bill that throws new limits and enforcement schemes and risks on the citizens’ ability to fight back against their corrupt and out-of-touch lawmaking.

And most immediately, these new regulations would hamper this year’s heroic grassroots effort to finally end gerrymandering. Of all the ballot initiatives they lose sleep about, this is the one they are most afraid of. And the one they will do anything they can to stop. Protecting gerrymandering is their holy grail, and this bill is part of their frenzied effort to stop it.

So of course the guys who spent last year fighting for Issue 1 in August and against Issue 1 in November (losing badly in both elections)—and the guys who are scared to death of fair districts—are fired up about the Ohio Senate strategy of tying the ballot extension for Biden to a poison pill kneecapping direct democracy in Ohio.

But that’s' just one set of poison pills.

Yes, it gets worse…

Going After Reproductive Freedom

Just this week, they’ve thrown another toxic pill into the mix. Another sneak attack on both democracy and freedom in Ohio.

It’s a separate bill that passed out of the Senate after some dramatic revision over the past week—where a 15-page bill about modernizing municipal clerks’ offices exploded into a 285-page bill that passed this week.

And tucked onto page 62 of that bill just this Tuesday is a tidy little provision with a gigantic impact on rights in Ohio. The clause addresses what happens when a trial court in Ohio finds that a law violates the Ohio Constitution, and takes the step of “restraining or restricting enforcement” of that law through an injunction or declaratory judgment:

Such decisions, the new bill declares, are now added to the type of order considered to be “final orders.”

Sounds technical? Don’t let the legalese fool you.

What’s the best recent example of such a case?

In recent years, Ohio trial courts enjoined extreme bills coming out of the statehouse banning or regulating abortion in various ways. It was such an injunction (from Hamilton County) that halted Ohio’s six-week abortion ban up until the Issue 1 election last November. In just that way, injunctions often halt enforcement of these anti-abortion (and other) laws for long periods of time as the court reviews the law more fully.

Well, by declaring for the first time that such injunctions are “final orders,” a lot changes. Unlike non-final orders, which must await an entire trial to proceed before they can be appealed, final orders are subject to immediate appeal.

Which means if this bill becomes law, orders striking down anti-abortion laws, or other laws, would be put on a far faster track for ultimate review by the Supreme Court of Ohio. And if you know the makeup of the current (anti-abortion) Supreme Court, you know what that faster review would likely mean in such cases.

I sure do.

And given the new right to reproductive freedom Ohio voters enshrined in our Constitution last November, and the legislature’s hostility to that new right, I can imagine a lot of future cases leading to injunctions at the lower level (where judges are still nonpartisan). Can’t you?

Under this bill, appeals from these injunctions will now proceed far more quickly to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Boy, that sure will make a lot of people who opposed that new right happy—like the folks whose tweets I shared at the beginning of this post.

DeWine Goes with the Senate

So those are several Senate bills, passed this week, now tied up in the Biden ballot conversation. After 2023 especially, Ohio’s far right clearly likes those bills.

But why are they now cheering on DeWine in particular? Someone who is often attacked as a RINO, or simply ignored?

Because yesterday, DeWine entered the fray:

He stood before the state’s press corps and declared that he was tired of not having Biden on the ballot (which we all agree with).

He declared it was unacceptable that the legislature hadn't gotten it done. (Hear hear!)

He declared he was calling for a special session to resolve this next week. (You go!)

He even issued a proclamation saying all this.

And the praise started rolling in about what great leadership he was demonstrating. The old moderate reemerging. Senator DeWine reappearing one last time. COVID DeWine was back!

But wait before applauding….because DeWine also made clear that what he’s actually calling for is that Biden be added to Ohio’s ballot on the Senate’s terms. On Huffman’s terms. As one reporter said: DeWine is “taking Senate President Matt Huffman’s side over House Speaker Jason Stephens side that Dems should pay a price (SB215) for getting Joe Biden on the ballot in Ohio.”

So as opposed to the “clean” bipartisan House Bill, DeWine too is saying that Biden should only get on the ballot if Ohio specifically targets citizens’ ability to engage in direct democracy (while not touching the pay-to-play and dark money world politicians like him are occupying). And he’s using the same “foreign money” boogie man to conceal what this bill would really do.

But DeWine went even further than that. In his proclamation calling for the special session, DeWine explicitly calls for the session to take up several Senate bills. Look closely. He lists S.B. No. 215 (the ballot initiative bill)…

But just before that, he also lists Sub. H.B. No. 305.

And that’s the bill that would fast-track appeals from trial court injunctions halting laws that violate Ohio’s Constitution. DeWine, like Huffman, is injecting that bill into the discussion of whether Biden should appear on the ballot. And of course, that has nothing to do with even the “foreign influence” boogieman DeWine uses in the proclamation. Sub. H.B. No. 305 is just thrown in there, with no explanation.

(Ironically, this bill would mean that cases get to his son Pat, the Supreme Court justice, at a faster clip. And wouldn’t you know it, just this week, Pat DeWine wrote an opinion questioning whether it’s “appropriate for one judge in a single county to issue a statewide injunction that goes beyond what is necessary to provide interim relief to the parties in the case?” Well, dad’s big push yesterday will help alleviate some of his son’s concern. What a coincidence!)

So in the end, DeWine could’ve called for a “clean bill.” That call to action would’ve matched his soaring rhetoric. Would have indeed been the act of a statesman.

But instead he embraced the dirtiest of bills.

And that is why leaders of the anti-democracy and anti-abortion forces last year are so thrilled with Mike DeWine right now.

As Cynical as it Gets

Folks, this is as cynical as cynical gets.

From Huffman. And from DeWine. And countless others.

They are trying to extract pounds of flesh from Ohio democracy and freedom in exchange for the basic participation of Ohio voters of all stripes in the presidential elections like 49 other states, and most other Americans.

And in DeWine’s case, he’s trying to appear above the fray at the very moment he’s helping Huffman and Baer do their anti-democracy dirty work with some sneaky anti-abortion dirty work thrown in for good measure.

What to do? Stand up to it!

But we see it, don’t we? Their glee gave their plan away.

Make sure others see it as well.

Spread the word in any way you can.

Share this newsletter, or any other good explanations of what they’re trying to pull off:

Then make calls. Send emails.

Start with Ohio Speaker Stephens: ask that he stick to his guns (to his credit, he has thus far) and support the bipartisan “Clean Bill” to put Biden on the ballot. Not a cynical bill full of anti-democracy and anti-freedom poison pills: Speaker Jason Stephens, (614) 466-1366, Rep93@OhioHouse.gov

And then look up your member in the House, and encourage others to do the same, to demand that they only vote for a “Clean Bill.” It’s a simple message.

You can look up your member HERE. Make sure people you know are calling Republican members too. Not just the Democrats.

Think about it: Ohioans stood up for democracy and freedom last year. We won big!

Do not let those who lost last year win this year through this cynical back door.

And as importantly, do not allow today’s politicians to set a horrible precedent for the future—where we are forced to trade away elements of our democracy and freedom simply to participate in our nation’s presidential election.

That is as anti-democratic a tradeoff as I could imagine. And will only get worse with time if it is allowed to happen right now for the first time.

Do what you can to keep it from happening!