In November 2018, Kyrsten Sinema became the first out bisexual member of the US Senate. It was an exciting milestone for all Americans and especially the LGBTQ+ community, which has spent so many generations vastly underrepresented in government and abused by the bigots that have run this country.
Sinema, who once presented herself as leftist anti-war protestor, has disappointed progressives with her stalwart support of Republicans and her enabling of their agenda through her votes, rhetoric, and refusal to end the filibuster. She claims, quite cynically, that she’s pursuing bipartisanship, but what she’s really doing is stabbing her own community in the back.
Here’s a prime example: In 2018, voters in Ohio made it abundantly clear that they sought moderation and bipartisanship. Republican Mike DeWine won the gubernatorial election by three points, Senator Sherrod Brown scored re-election with an eight percent margin, and Democratic state legislative candidates earned an even split of the overall vote total with the Republicans running in those races.
Due to the design of the state’s legislative districts, however, Republican candidates wound up winning 73 of the 116 seats up for grabs that year, a 63% win rate that gave them a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature. The state Senate result was especially disproportionate, with GOP candidates achieving dominance with just 48% of the overall vote share.
Last year, all it took was a modest increase in rural turnout for Republicans to not just overcome the party’s central part in the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the state, but actually expand their lead in both chambers.
The egregiously skewed partisan breakdown in Ohio’s legislature is a direct result of extreme gerrymandering, which has now been fully blessed by the US Supreme Court. With an overwhelming majority and districts designed to guarantee re-election, Ohio Republicans have been able to indulge in their most pernicious and nihilist policy ambitions, limited only by the occasional veto by Gov. DeWine when he fears that a bill might earn too much national attention. Their Congressional district breakdown is just as bad — Democrats also won nearly 50% of the vote in 2018, but lost those districts 12-4. That continues to foment extremism and eats at the Democratic Party in the state, a decay further assisted by the extreme voter suppression there.
The budget passed by the Ohio legislature and signed into law by DeWine last week embodies this miserable, dangerous dynamic. The final product, even after more than a dozen DeWine line-item vetoes, is a testament to uninhibited right-wing control of government, as it both embraces long-time GOP goals and seizes on more recent Fox News obsessions.
Omnibus of Bad Stuff
State budgets are often the biggest single item enacted in a given year because, as must-pass legislation, they become vessels for policies that might not pass on their own. The Ohio budget was a great example of this terrible phenomenon, with provisions that stretched far beyond any kind of financial purview. Here are some of the worst items, based on conversations with conversations with Ohio Democrats and progressives.
1. The “Flat” Tax Cut
Though states were technically barred from using money from the American Rescue Plan to enact tax cuts, Ohio Republicans, like their counterparts in states such as Arizona and Georgia, used an influx of unexpected revenue to fatten the wallets of the state’s richest residents. In this case, the top income tax bracket was outright eliminated, leading to a 16.8% cut on incomes above $221,300 and a 9.6% cut on earnings between that $221,299 and $115,000.
Every other taxpayer in Ohio received a 3% tax cut. Here’s how it all shakes out:
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The top 1% will receive an average $5,400 tax cut
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Those making $42,000 and $65,000 will receive an average a $49 tax cut
Yes, those numbers are accurate.
2. Abortion
The legislature continued its ongoing assault on women’s reproductive freedom this year, using last-minute additions to the budget to make life hell for women in the southwest part of the state.
Some context: Ohio requires clinics that perform abortions to have a transfer agreement with a local hospital, which can create a considerable hurdle for clinics in more rural places. Two Planned Parenthood-operated clinics, the Mount Auburn Health Center and Women's Med Center have had exemptions to that rule, allowing them to substitute a hospital affiliation for a list of four doctors who could treat women in rare emergencies.
Now, doctors that are involved in the transfer agreement must work within 25 miles of the clinic and outright bans physicians who teach at state hospitals and medical schools to be involved in the agreement at all. It just so happens that each of the doctors who have been listed as the physicians for Mount Auburn and Women’s Med are teachers at Wright State and its medical school, both of which are public institutions.
With their physicians no longer ineligible for affiliation, both clinics may be forced to shut down.
3. The “moral” health care sham
If the addition of those vindictive restrictions on abortion considerably weakened the GOP’s cynical argument that the hospital requirements were enacted in the interest of public health, this provision blows the whole thing out of the water.
DeWine signed off on a new “medical conscience clause” that allows doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers to refuse to provide medical treatment if they think it violates their own personal ethics or moral beliefs. Insurance companies, meanwhile, are now permitted to refuse to pay for treatments that violate their beliefs, as if health insurers follow some sacred code. The provision also provides immunity from criminal and civil charges for refusing care.
The whole thing is a pretty transparent permission slip to discriminate against LGBTQ+ residents, and people in the progressive space in Ohio tell me that they’ll be pushing back hard on this new provision. The Supreme Court just refused to hear an appeal by a florist who was successfully sued for their refusal to serve a gay potential client, so expect the lawsuits to fly on this one.
4. An early anti-voter rule
While Ohio’s giant voter suppression bill will have to wait until the legislative session resumes in August, Republicans were able to sneak an early salvo in at the elections process.
The new provision bans public-private partnerships on anything to do with elections. That will end regular civic events such as voter registration drives, which are sponsored by organizations that range in size from local non-profits to the Cleveland Cavaliers. It will also ensure that local governments cannot accept grants for election administration or voter education.
This is a Heritage Foundation special, down to the conspiracy-addled justification offered for the rule: The donations that Mark Zuckerberg made out of guilt to local governments to help them administer a uniquely difficult 2020 election.
“That money was not evenly distributed and was disproportionately spent to boost turnout and to affect the election in the liberal precincts to the exclusion of the conservative precincts,” said Rep. Bill Seitz, somehow unaware of how deeply and infuriatingly ironic that is coming from the chief sponsor of the state’s voter suppression law.
The Heritage Foundation has been behind all of the voter suppression bills this year, which can only be overturned by the For The People Act, a desperately needed measure that Kyrsten Sinema continues to allow to be blocked via the filibuster. Her performative “bipartisanship” and obnoxious lecturing might feel like a parlor game to her, but it’s going to cost a lot of people their lives. And not just in Ohio — these kinds of laws are passing in GOP states nationwide. And when the Supreme Court more or less kills Roe v Wade next year, and the GOP continues to filibuster voting rights and we can’t elect officials who will pass legislative fixes and protections for women, Sinema will have even more blood on her hands.
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