Ohio's just-ended lame duck session a shameful display of political logrolling: editorial
By Editorial Board
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The 131st Ohio General Assembly opened in January 2015 by swearing in its new members; it closed this month in a flurry of legislative "lame-duck" votes.
(Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com, File, 2015)
A civics class in need of an example of how a state legislature shouldn't legislate need look no farther than the Ohio General Assembly's just-concluded lame-duck session, which ended in the wee hours of Friday morning.
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When it came to logrolling (trading favors, in this case by pushing unrelated amendments into other bills), the Statehouse rivaled a lumber camp.
Rolling a bunch of unrelated matters into a bill, incidentally, is illegal under the Ohio Constitution, although you'd never know it by the way Ohio lawmakers often operate, with the effective acquiescence of the state Supreme Court.
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Ohio lawmakers and special interest lobbyists love post-election (lame-duck) General Assembly sessions for consequence-free legislating without lots of messy deliberation and transparency. Some lawmakers are true lame ducks, departing Dec. 31, and others won't face voters again for a while.
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But with its overload of last-minute legislating on both long-stalled and surprise measures, this lame duck session was one of the worst.
Fortunately, Gov. John Kasich yesterday line-item vetoed the patently unconstitutional "heartbeat" provisions from an otherwise innocuous bill reforming child-abuse reporting. House Bill 493, which Kasich then signed into law, included $100,000 for adoption services, making it technically a budget bill subject to line-item veto.
The heartbeat provisions Kasich nixed would have made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually around six weeks. The only exception would have been to prevent serious harm or death to the mother.
A veto is likely what many Republicans who affixed their "yeas" to the measure expected Kasich to do anyway, since Ohio's heartbeat bill had virtually no chance of going anywhere except onto the growing list of unconstitutional measures Ohio taxpayers have been forced to waste their money defending. Last year, for instance, Ohioans had to pay out $1.3 million to the lawyers who successfully challenged the state's gay-marriage ban.
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Admittedly, lame-duck sessions can be helpful to close the loop on complicated omnibus bills. This session, laudably, included passage of broadly bipartisan Ohio measures aimed at combating the opioid epidemic and infant mortality, and at improving road safety for bicyclists.
But those were the exceptions, not the rule. Taken as a whole, this year's General Assembly finale looked more like a gift-wrapping counter for the Statehouse's lobbies than a deliberative body representing all Ohioans.
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