With unending petulance, gerrymandered Ohio Republicans decline simple Biden ballot solution

Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, oversees a Senate session. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal. Republish photo only with original story.)

What a joke. In a pique of partisan petulance, the gerrymandered-for-life Republican supermajorities in the Ohio Statehouse have visited yet another national embarrassment on the state. “I think we’ve officially sunk lower than Alabama at this point,” Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo, D-Upper Arlington, dryly observed about the state’s descent into autocratic hell. The latest humiliation from Columbus making headlines was entirely self-inflicted by MAGA-pandering pols. 

Our lovely legislative overlords torpedoed what should have been an easy bipartisan fix to a ballot scheduling snafu that still threatens to keep President Joe Biden off the general election ballot in Ohio. Ballot adjustment in a presidential election year is a non-issue. But Republican lawmakers decided to make it one by picking a fight and stomping their feet when things didn’t go their way. Like toddlers who need a nap. 

The straightforward legislation the GOP-controlled Ohio Senate and Ohio House blew up (for no good reason) would have remedied a problem with candidate filing deadlines in state election law that has come up before in presidential election years with Democrats and Republicans. It has typically been resolved as a bipartisan matter without incident. Until now. (Hence the Russo observation).

Apparently, the task of passing a clean, standalone bill to temporarily or permanently change a state deadline for certifying presidential candidates (and ensure Biden makes the fall ballot) is too much to ask of the kiddos running the General Assembly. Instead, they inserted an unrelated, partisan-driven proposal into the bill adjusting ballot deadlines knowing full well their poison pill would sink it. And it did. 

That kind of rank partisanship didn’t rear its ugly head in Ohio when the same ballot obstacle came up in 2012 and 2020. Legislators did the right thing. They ensured ballot access for the presumptive presidential nominees even though both major parties’ national conventions were held after Ohio’s filing cutoff (90 days before an election) for presidential candidates to be certified for the ballot. Lawmakers passed temporary fixes to relax pre-convention deadlines for candidate certification and called it a day. 

This year, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Biden will be formally nominated, starts 12 days after Ohio’s August 7 candidate deadline to appear on the general election ballot. Other states with early filing dates for presidential tickets similar to Ohio’s, including (believe it or not) Alabama, have already enacted exceptions to their election rules to accommodate the DNC. 

The Republican-dominated Alabama legislature recently approved the changes without a dissenting vote to guarantee Biden access to the ballot. As a matter of principle. “This is nothing new,” said the Alabama Republican House speaker. “We just needed to fix this so the president can be on the ballot, like our nominee can be on the ballot.” Nothing so honorable for the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature. Right-wingers preferred to go low and leverage Biden’s ballot predicament in the state for partisan gain. 

Senate Republicans were more inclined to extract political paybacks from Democrats than to serve the greater good of the electorate. Senate President Matt Huffman conspired to get even with the winning sides in last year’s two statewide initiatives with a spurious last-minute rider to an agreed upon ballot adjustment bill that would ban foreign money from state ballot campaigns. Stick with me.  

The GOP rush to enact the ban was a disingenuous political maneuver from the start. State Republicans discovered a Swiss billionaire living in Wyoming who has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to progressive, nonprofit organizations that back liberal causes. The billionaire gave money to one group which in turn gave money to the pro-Issue 1 campaign in Ohio that successfully enshrined abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution. Bingo.

Foreign nationals are already banned from contributing to candidates but state Republicans made the Swiss billionaire their new boogeyman because his contributions may have indirectly helped pass ballot issues in Ohio that protected reproductive freedoms and majority voting rights — opposed by the senators demanding the ban. Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, summed up the transparent charade of Republicans perfectly.

“I think it’s a ‘sore loser bill’ because they lost a couple of times at the ballot this past year,” said Antonio. “It was, frankly, a dirty trick and we didn’t take the bait.” Huffman made a partisan ploy the price Democrats would have to pay to ensure ballot access for their presidential candidate. 

Outrageous.

The Senate leader went so far as to suggest that GOP lawmakers in both the state Senate and House required an incentive to vote for accommodating the president’s nominating convention schedule with a deadline exception. Does it escape him that Biden won 87% of the vote in Ohio’s Democratic primary? Don’t Democratic voters in Ohio count as an incentive for the legislature to do the right thing? 

Not to Huffman. He was willing to deny those Ohioans a vote for their candidate by gumming up a previously apolitical process to change ballot deadlines for presidential candidates of both parties. Republican House Speaker Jason Stephens, mired in a ridiculously fractious caucus, just threw in the towel. He adjourned session without voting on a bill or delivering on promises made with Huffman to solve an easy problem. What a joke.

A national embarrassment. Again.

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