SUDDES: General Assembly members seem to think the people are supposed to serve legislators

Example: many General Assembly Republicans evidently remain enraged Ohio’s voters had the nerve in 2023 to guarantee – by a “yes” vote of almost 57% – women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions,

But because the reproductive rights amendment is a constitutional amendment, it’s very difficult for legislators to roll it back.

Also in 2023 – but by a voter-petitioned law, not a constitutional amendment – Ohioans, also by a 57% “yes” vote, legalized the use, sale and purchase of marijuana by people age 21 and older.

That was no surprise to anyone with even the slightest awareness of public opinion, but that’s the problem with GOP-gerrymandered legislatures. Its members don’t have to know their neighbors’ opinions. Instead, rigged-district legislators parrot GOP insiders’ codswallop, because with a gerrymander, what voters think doesn’t matter.

General Assembly members shrug off such political contradictions just as they a special 1999-2000 law to lessen the financial impact of the national anti-smoking master settlement agreement on southwest Ohio’s (coincidentally Republican) tobacco counties.

Eligible counties weren’t listed, but Ohio’s leading tobacco-growing counties have been Adams (West Union) and Brown (Georgetown), both wowed by Donald Trump. Maybe the way for marijuana consumers to keep bud flowering in Ohio would be, say, to start a Stoners for Trump lobby.

True, the General Assembly has long ignored voters’ opinions on key issues – that’d require actually taking a stand – as well as some constitutional (i.e., pro-taxpayer) safeguards the Ohio Constitution sets for the legislature.

Examples: Extra pay for members of the Ohio House and state Senate leadership cliques –forbidden by the constitution – as well as payment from Ohio’s treasury of some legislators’ Columbus hotel bills and extra pay also for, say, sitting on the (ironically misnamed) Controlling Board.

Nowhere is the legislature’s “we’re the kings, you’re the serfs” attitude better demonstrated than its relentless drive to undercut the voter-passed 2023 law – not a constitutional amendment – legalizing marijuana in Ohio. The legislature itself had years to write and pass a legalization bill but thumb-twiddled instead, maybe because if was so busy nudging property taxes upward by gutting the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan, named for former Ohio House Speaker Robert Cupp, a Lima Republican, and former state Rep. John Patterson, from Ashtabula County’s Jefferson.

The No. 1 person responsible for blocking Cupp-Patterson is House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, elected to Ohio’s House unopposed last November by 41,369 voters in Allen (Lima) and parts of Auglaize (Wapakoneta) counties.

That is, 41,000 voters chose Ohioans’ second-most powerful officeholder, Huffman, age 65, while it took 2.58 million voters statewide to elect Ohio’s most powerful officeholder, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, now age 78, in 2022. That’s the political New Math “Ohia”-style. Term-limits mean DeWine can’t seek re-election next year; Huffman all but certainly will. Any questions, deal-makers?

Republicans’ antics on marijuana aren’t necessarily a surprise; the Ohio GOP’s seemingly endless marriage to Prohibition fettered the party for generations. As late as 1970, as previously noted, House Republicans lost ten seats because in 1969, narrowly – the House very narrowly, 50-45, with 50 the minimum required “yes” vote – cracked open the door to Sunday liquor sales, enraging the GOP’s Old Guard, though Prohibition ended in 1933.

And in November 1972, Democrats captured the House for 22 years. Great Statehouse defeats from seeming sideshows grow.