Like all Rip-off Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, Ohio Republicans’ ads claim their candidates will do something about crime. In Ohio, that means they will probably be committing more of them.
The other GOP focus tends to be the economy, despite the fact that in Ohio, Republican lawbreaking often comes with a hefty price tag for voters. This latest independent, ad endorsing Democratic candidate Nan Whaley centers on the numerous scandals, ethical failures, and outright lawbreaking of Ohio’s gerrymander majority and tallies the expense racked up.
As part of Nan Whaley’s plan for Ohio to address corruption is outlined as follows:
- Create a new Public Accountability Commission to investigate corruption and shed light on political wrongdoing, taking the power to investigate politicians out of the hands of politicians and giving it back to the people;
- Bolster funding to the agencies tasked with upholding ethics in Ohio, while aggressively seeking to collect penalties owed to taxpayers;
- Hold her administration and all its appointees accountable to the highest ethical standards from Day One of her term;
- Work with the legislature to close dark money loopholes and bring real transparency to political spending.
Republicans in Ohio’s statehouse have a long sordid history of corruption.
Many non-Ohioans may be familiar with the gerrymandering scandal in the state, which has been featured in a number of Daily Kos stories and national articles, like Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece, focusing on the erosion of democracy in states like Ohio. The state’s population leans slightly to the right—56% Republican, 46% Democratic. In 2011, Republicans joined in the REDMAP Project to use the redistricting following the 2010 census to carve the state up into districts mostly favoring Republicans. In 2015, 71% of voters chose to add to Ohio’s constitution a provision setting up a redistricting committee in charge of drawing fair maps. However, the set up for the committee filled it with democracy-hating GOP party loyalists like Governor Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose. In the past year and a half, the committee has redrawn unfair district maps numerous times, thwarted by Ohio’s Republican-led supreme court, which has ruled the maps unconstitutional again and again. A judge then ruled that for the 2022 election, Republicans can use one of the discarded criminally gerrymandered maps, ensuring them 11 districts, with Democrats only being given 2.
The gerrymandering problem, of course, contributes to the level of Republican ethics issues because one-party rule is a precursor and cause of extremism and corruption. If a party’s success isn’t linked directly to support from voters, it will behave in opposition to their interests, as is the case in Ohio. For example, most Ohioans support a woman’s right to choose and gun safety laws, but GOP extremists beholden only to wealthy donors do not.
The ad focuses on the gerrymandering mess as well as the two other prominent scandals bilking taxpayers—the ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) debacle and the more recent First Energy bribery case.
According to Brent Larkin in The Plain Dealer, for 17 years, taxpayer money was diverted from public school districts to fund an online charter school that couldn’t perform as promised and that ended up lying about how many students it had to keep the money rolling in while Republicans, who received thousands of dollars in donations from the company, ignored the problem and let citizens bear the cost. As Larkin puts it,
“Over a 17-year period, state officials reached into your pockets, removed $1 billion, and allowed much of it to be poured down a rat hole formerly known as the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.
“Consider it another way: While state officials were underfunding local school districts, they were sending upwards of $100 million a year to a charter school that will be forever remembered as an epic failure.”
Part of Republican efforts to undermine public schools in favor of less well-regulated charter schools, the school shut down in 2018 and a final audit indicated that ECOT still owes Ohio $117 million.
The First Energy scandal has been named the worst in Ohio’s history and involved over $60 million in bribes to GOP lawmakers to pass HB6, in part to bail out failing nuclear power plants. However, the bill also makes Ohio’s citizens pay out for companies’ losses, which means they continue to pay thousands of dollars in subsidies to coal plants as well. Ohio House Democrats have tried to repeal the bill, an effort blocked, of course, by Republicans. Estimates for the ultimate cost of the bill to taxpayers run from $1.3 to $1.8 billion by 2030. Yet, the GOP still want to complain about gas prices, over which the US government has no control, and inflation driven by the pandemic and corporate greed.
Other ads in this series include the following:
An ad concerning the erasure of African American voters by Ohio GOP lawmakers
An ad about rapists’ rights advocate Gov. Mike DeWine’s refusal to speak out against forcing child rape victims to give birth to their rapists’ children
An ad calling out shady J.D. Vance for stating that abused wives should remain in violent marriages
It’s the last days before the election, but below is a link to a site with a listing of Ohio's Democratic candidates for state government and access to donating to their campaigns.
https://ohiodems.org/our-candidates/