Ohio budget bill loaded with controversy

From cincinnati.com editorial

It looks like the bill that will lay out Ohio’s spending and tax priorities for the next two years will go to the governor laden with stuff that has nothing to do with the budget.

For some reason, the Republicans in the GOP-controlled General Assembly think the state budget is the appropriate vehicle to inflame the culture wars anew with a series of restrictions on abortion. The most egregious is a last-minute amendment to require doctors to perform ultrasounds to detect a fetal heartbeat. This is a back-door effort to avoid public debate on a highly controversial issue. It is a watered-down version of last year’s heartbeat bill, which GOP leaders took off the table. Now it’s back, tacked onto the budget bill. It deserves to be deleted or vetoed. Politicians don’t need to meddle in the doctor-patient relationship and legislate medicine.

Republicans also kept in the budget bill a provision that would ban abortion clinics from entering into transfer agreements with public hospitals. This is an unnecessary threat to the health of women. By potentially banning a transfer to a public hospital, precisely at the time when women may need advanced medical care, Republicans are putting women at risk. This should be taken out.

The bill also contains a ban on expanding Medicaid. Gov. John Kasich, himself a conservative Republican, has proposed expanding the Medicaid program using federal dollars. It would mean health insurance, and better health care, for hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who don’t have it. The governor should veto this ban, which unnecessarily ties the legislature’s hands.

A new exemption to Ohio’s open meetings law would let city councils, county boards and other public bodies keep the public out of meetings where economic development agreements are discussed. Local and state governments don’t need any more secrecy, especially when it comes to giving tax dollars and tax breaks to businesses. This, too, should go.

A little-known provision would change the make-up of the boards of vocational schools such as Great Oaks. The boards are now made up of elected school board members. The change would result in business executives being appointed to the vocational boards. It would be a big change in governance, and Great Oaks, the largest career-technical district in the state, and other vocational schools oppose it.

The budget itself appears less controversial, but that’s because the taxing and spending issues have been overshadowed by the irrelevant amendments.

This budget would raise taxes on consumers, through an expansion of the state sales tax, and lower them significantly on businesses. It would raise property taxes in the future by doing away with the long-time homestead exemption. Income taxes would be cut by 10 percent, a cut that is a bigger benefit to high wage earners.

Legislators are passing up an opportunity to raise taxes on the energy companies that are rapidly expanding their drilling operations in eastern Ohio. Ohio’s tax on oil and gas extraction, the severance tax, is one of the lowest in the nation.

Kasich proposed raising it, but the Big Oil companies appear to be winning this round.

The budget process also spotlighted the one-party system that Ohio has turned into. With solid majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans were able to exclude Democrats from any serious budget negotiations.

Legislators should keep the budget bill for budget matters so Ohioans can have the benefit of full, open debate on how their dollars are spent.

Republican law would punish Ohio colleges for helping students vote

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

Republicans in the Ohio state legislature are promoting an amendment to a state budget bill that would punish public universities that provide students with the necessary materials to register to vote. According to Talking Points Memo, the legislators say that they are trying to resolve discrepancies between residency requirements for in-state tuition and voter registration. Democrats accuse the Republicans of attempting to disenfranchise another traditionally Democratic constituency in an important swing state.

“What the bill would do is penalize public universities for providing their students with the documents they need to vote,” said Ohio University professor and election law expert Daniel Tokaji to TPM. “It’s a transparent effort at vote suppression — about the most blatant and shameful we’ve seen in this state, which is saying quite a lot.”

To vote in Ohio elections, a person must be a resident of the state for at least 30 days prior to the election in which they intend to vote. To register to vote, they must present a photo ID, a current utility bill, bank statement, current government check or other government document (besides voter registration acknowledgment) that bears their name and address.

Students living in on-campus housing may not have some of the above items, so universities in Ohio typically supply necessary documents to students wishing to register to vote.

However, for students to qualify for in-state tuition at public universities in the state, they must have attended an Ohio school or have a parent or spouse who lives in the state prior to enrollment.

Republicans say this is a double standard, and the new law would force colleges and universities to charge in-state tuition to students it helps to vote.

“The amendment has the purpose of getting a discussion going on sort of the mismatch that exists in Ohio, where we have one requirement for when a student becomes in-state for tuition purposes and another requirement for voting,” Republican state Rep. Ron Amstutz told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Losing out-of-state tuition would cost state colleges and universities an estimated $272 million. The institutions say they intend to continue to distribute the materials, however.

Democratic Ohio Senate Minority Leader Eric Kearney told the Enquirer that Republicans’ real intent is to nullify an important constituency which helped President Barack Obama carry Ohio in the 2008 election against former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA).

“They’re somehow trying to thwart the strategy that worked to elect President Obama,” he told the newspaper.

Tokaji warned that the strategy could backfire.

“The way that they’ve written this bill makes it clear that its only purpose is to suppress student voting,” he told TPM. “What I’d say to the Republican Party is this is not only a shameful strategy, but it’s a stupid strategy because, you know, the Republican Party already has a signifcant problem with young voters. They’re on the verge of losing a generation of voters. Their path to victory is not to suppress the student vote, but to win the student vote.”

Ohio Republicans and the state’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted ran afoul of the Department of Justice in 2012 when they tried to do away with early voting in the November election. Early voting has historically been an important resource for hourly workers and other people who can’t get to the polls on Election Day.

By eliminating voting, Husted and the Republicans hoped to dilute the African-American vote, an intention made explicit when Franklin County, Ohio Republican Party Chairperson Doug Priessetold the Columbus Dispatch, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.”

Ohio GOP's new voter suppression campaign

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AFTER REFUSING TO TAKE A POSITION ON OHIO’S ANTI-LABOR LAW, ROMNEY IS NOW ’110 PERCENT’ BEHIND IT

From Think Progress

Yesterday, GOP candidate Mitt Romney visited Republican supporters of Ohio’s deeply unpopular anti-workers’ rights law to tell them he “was not endorsing” their position. In a typical display of his political convictions, Romney told Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin Dewine, “I’m not saying anything one way or the other.” But after weathering attacks from his GOPcompetitors, Romney announced today that he “is 110 percent behind” GOP Gov. John Kasich’s (OH) efforts to restrict the collective bargaining rights of teachers, police, and firefighters. He claimed he just wasn’t taking a position on other ballot issues. Watch it: