Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose he claimed that a proposal to make it much more challenging to pass citizen-submitted amendments to the Ohio Constitution would prevent one aspect of the biggest corruption scandal in the state’s history.
But LaRose, who announced his candidacy for the US Senate on Monday declined to discuss his role in the scandal. And there is reason to believe that, despite his claims, Issue 1 could make Ohio state government even more corrupt than it already is.
That’s because the measure would make it harder — if not impossible — for voters to pass stronger anti-gerrymandering amendments. It would likely perpetuate one-party rule in Ohio, which has been linked to public corruption everywhere, an expert told the Capital Journal.
“There’s a strong correlation between single-party rule and political corruption,” said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. “Part of that is that once you have power, you can manipulate the levers of power to keep it.”
The measure, advocated by LaRose, would undo the good-government reforms advocated in 1912 by the former President Theodore Roosevelt. This is intended to give voters direct power in the face of a state government that can be ““a tool for protecting privileges and acquired wrongs” while ignoring the will of the voters.
The current measure sets a high bar for voters to get their proposed amendment before voters. For example, supporters of the abortion rights measure, which is likely to be on the November ballot, had to collect more than 400,000 verified voter signatures, a portion of which had to come from each of the 44 counties. Once enough signatures are verified, the measure will be put on the ballot and, if it receives a plain majority, will become part of the Ohio Constitution.
The measure, pushed by LaRose and the Republican supermajorities in the Ohio Legislature, would make it much harder and more pricey — critics say nearly impossible — for voters to put an amendment on the ballot by requiring a portion of the signatures to come from each of Ohio’s 88 counties, no matter how rural. Meanwhile, the state’s gerrymandered Legislature would have no additional burden on getting the amendments it wants on the ballot.
Regardless of how the proposed amendment lands on the ballot, Issue 1 would escalate the percentage of votes needed to pass it from 50% to 60%. But the measure, which LaRose and House Republicans put on the Aug. 8 ballot, would only need 50% to become part of the Ohio Constitution.
Corrupt contract
LaRose and his allies argue that Issue 1 is needed to keep powerful interests from meddling in the Ohio Constitution. But that implies that the Legislature is somehow less susceptible to those forces than the voters. That claim seems to be contradicted by the fact that the “yes” side in the fight for Issue 1 received $1M from Illinois billionaire who denied election.
Issue 1 would give Ohio’s gerrymandered legislature more power over voters. But its vulnerability to special interests was laid out in painful detail earlier this year in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati. During the trial, Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, R-Glenford, and former GOP Chairman Matt Borges were convicted of extortion and sentenced to 20 years and five years in federal prison, respectively.
The two companies helped run a scheme in which FirstEnergy and other Ohio utilities paid more than $60 million through 501(c)(4) groups — first to elect warm Republicans in 2018 to become House Speakers in early 2019, then to pass an unpopular $1.3 billion taxpayer bailout that benefited the utilities, and then to wage a brutal, dishonest campaign to overturn a citizen-initiated repeal. And because the funding came from obscure money, the public had no way of knowing where it came from.
LaRose argues that if Issue 1 had been implemented, it would have put an end to one aspect of the Householder conspiracy.
In early 2020 — after surviving a corrupt bailout and before his arrest — Householder raised millions from Ohio utilities for a obscure money group. The plan was to put an amendment on the ballot that would change Ohio’s term limits so that Householder could theoretically remain speaker for another 16 years.
“Just remember that Larry Householder and FirstEnergy almost got away with changing our Constitution and keeping control of the State Capitol for another 16 years. Imagine what they could do,” LaRose wrote in Columbus Dispatch in April.
But that ignores the fact that, as Speaker of Matter 1, it would be much easier for Householder to push the proposed amendment through a supermajority of gerrymandered legislation than it would be for a group of voters to collect and verify nearly half a million signatures — including a share from each of Ohio’s 88 counties. And because Householder likely has tens of millions of dollars in secret utility funds supporting his efforts, he would have a better chance of clearing the 60 percent hurdle to get the amendment through on Election Day.
LaRose’s office, meanwhile, has ignored many questions about his own involvement in the bailout scandal. The secretary of state was named in several communications presented at the extortion trial, including one in which then-FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones said LaRose was giving him “private” information about the status of the repeal effort, which FirstEnergy and a subsidiary had spent more than $40 million to halt.
Late last month, LaRose appeared on a Cincinnati radio station and said everyone knew Householder was involved in the criminal conspiracy. “fraud.” But two days later, in open court, one of the assistant U.S. attorneys in the extortion case said: “It’s interesting that some people are attacking (Householder) after the fact,” he added. “So many people knew what was happening in real time and did nothing about it. Not only did they do nothing about it, they helped facilitate it.”
Culture of corruption
While Householder and Borges were being indicted, that prosecutor and another expressed regret that Ohio’s divided constituencies had failed to repeal the corrupt bailout law, House Bill 6.
Subsidies for the main player, FirstEnergy, have ended. But AEP helped support the program and is the largest player in a consortium that owns two coal-fired plants that will continue to be sustained by hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding from HB 6.
These are just some of the scandals that have recently plagued Ohio lawmakers:
- From 2000 to 2016, Ohio paid Bill Lager more than $1 billion to run an online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Lager, a bankrupt furniture retailer, outlined his plan for Waffle House napkin and sold it to the Ohio Republican Party leaders, for whom it became a major campaign donor. The problem was that ECOT provided the government with a lot of false data doing little more than making sure kids logged onto their computers once a day. The program has since folded and little has been done to help the children of the time who were effectively deprived of an education.
- One of Householder’s predecessors as speaker, Cliff Rosenberger, a Clinton County Republican, resigned in 2018 over the FBI investigation into his lavish spending and travelHe was not arrested or charged.
- Between 2021 and last fall, the Republican-controlled Ohio Redistricting Commission ignored seven state Supreme Court orders to redraw legislative and congressional districts to comply with constitutional amendments against extreme gerrymandering. Both amendments have passed since 2015 with more than 70 percent of the vote. But when former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, voted with three of the court’s Democrats to invalidate the commission’s districts, time ran out, and the districts currently in employ are technically unconstitutional. Instead of complying with the court’s orders, LaRose and other Republicans weighed whether O’Connor should be impeached and they removed her portrait from the Republican Party headquarters in the stateNow that he is no longer in power, O’Connor is advocating recent, more reliable anti-gerrymandering fix —a measure that seems anathema to Issue 1 supporters.
Any party
During the interview, in which LaRose called Householder a fraud, the secretary of state ignored a question about whether one-party rule is a recipe for corruption — regardless of the party in power. Interviewer, 700WLW Scott Sloanhe was right.
In Democratic-dominated El Paso, Texas, the FBI conducted a wide-ranging public corruption investigation that led to the 2014 arrests 39 convictionsincluding those belonging to many public officials.
Blue-run Illinois has long been the butt of jokes about public corruption. Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 of trying sell US Senate seat once occupied by Barack Obama. And former Democratic state House Speaker Michael Madigan, he was accused in a utility scandal similar to the one in Ohio, although much less money is involved.
AND Brown’s Law Review In January, a report was released that found that gerrymandering of voting districts in heavily Democratic Los Angeles was causing “rotting” at the local level.
“The rot that is emerging from city government is a consequence of unfair, biased and opaque local redistricting processes,” the article reads. “Gerrymandering at the local level — whether in city council districts or county commission districts — contributes to corruption and deserves a broader discussion in front of “gerrymandering at the state and federal level.”
Rottinghaus of the University of Houston said it’s not difficult to understand the connection between gerrymandering, single-party rule and corruption. When elections are competitive, parties have a forceful incentive to avoid corruption scandals, he said, because angering voters can cost them votes. Rottinghaus also explained that the founders didn’t anticipate the concentration of power caused by gerrymandering when they wrote the U.S. Constitution.
(*1*) said Rottinghaus, who serves in a state where the chief law enforcement officer is the accused of epic corruption“In Texas, where every branch of government is controlled by one party, there is little hope that you will find any deviation from what the party wants.”
