Mike DeWine thinks you’re a sucker.
Last week Governor Mike DeWine demonstrated his contempt for Ohio voters and his belief in their gullibility. As Citizens Not Politicians, the constitutional amendment to change how legislative and congressional districts are drawn by replacing elected officials with a stake in how the maps are drawn with a nonpartisan citizens commission, barrels toward the November election, DeWine is jumping up and down in a panic, yelling “Stop! Stop!”
The issue was developed in response to the redistricting travesty that happened in 2021. Ohio voters passed legislative redistricting reform in 2015 and congressional redistricting reform in 2018. Initially, fair elections activists had proposed to take elected officials out of the process of drawing their own districts. When the legislature substituted its own amendment that kept politicians in charge but with strong guidelines to assure fairness, they sighed and said, “It’s not ideal, but ok.”
The problem is that they trusted the politicians to follow the guidelines. Instead they made a mockery of them, running roughshod over the state constitution and the Ohio Supreme Court which found their maps to be unconstitutional over and over and over. One of the members of the panel drawing the unconstitutional maps, who voted for them while sighing about how they probably weren’t fair or legal, was …Mike DeWine. And one of the justices of the Supreme Court who voted against the majority and said the maps were just fine was …Mike DeWine’s son.
A few weeks ago, Citizens Not Politicians was certified to be on the ballot this November after gathering one of the largest numbers of signatures of any ballot issue in Ohio ever. That was followed by rumors out of Columbus that the legislature might call a special session to put a competing issue on the ballot, much as the tobacco companies did back in 2006 when they responded to Smoke Free Ohio ban on smoking in indoor establishments with “Smoke Less Ohio,” a much looser ban. (Voters saw through that and passed the stronger ban.)
That special session didn’t happen. But now Governor DeWine is proposing something even more egregious and laughable. He’s promising voters that if they vote AGAINST an issue that thousands of people worked for more than six months to qualify for the ballot, collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures, that next year they’ll put something even better on the ballot. One thinks of the famous image of Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip pulling the football away from Charlie Brown as he goes to kick it.
No one should believe this ploy, no matter what “something better” he proposed. But what’s he’s suggesting is truly insulting: it would let the public submit maps, but the same group of politicians protecting their own fiefdoms would choose which maps to accept. And if they didn’t like any of them, they could make changes. But if they ignored the guidelines in 2021, there’s no reason they wouldn’t do so in the future. In fact, it’s virtually certain they would.
What DeWine is proposing is just another way for Republican to lock in their outsized control of Ohio’s government so that they can continue to elect extremists who ignore the concerns of citizens. DeWine should be ashamed. With his 50-year career in politics coming to an end when his current term expires in 2027, he apparently wants to go out in a blaze of ignominy, known as an advocate for rigged elections and government that is not representative of the voters.