“As Far As We Can.” After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Mike DeWine almost immediately signed an Executive Order permitting the Ohio Department of Health to implement a six-week abortion bill. It’s only the latest attack in a long record of anti-choice extremism from DeWine, one of the most radical politicians in the country when it comes to attacking reproductive rights. And it’s only the beginning. DeWine has indicated that he would sign a trigger ban law that doesn’t make exceptions for rape or incest and has promised to “go as far as we can” to restrict reproductive rights in Ohio.
“Loaded with Potential Conflicts of Interest.” The six-figure salary Jon Husted makes as lieutenant governor is apparently not enough for Husted as he looks for new ways to line his own pockets as working Ohioans struggle to make ends meet. The Cleveland.com Editorial Board recently slammed Husted for taking a paid side gig on a corporate bank board and called on him to resign that position. Husted has refused to say how much he’s raking in with his new paid gig, and has refused to answer several questions about the bank job.
Thanks for catching up with us, that’s all the Mike Check we’ve got for this week. If you have questions my email is ckeir@ohiodems.org. Have a great week!
Vance, DeWine, and Yost want to strip women of their freedom
Since the fall of Roe by a Trump-packed Supreme Court on Friday, it’s now up to the states to protect a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom.
But Ohio Republicans have been clear on just how backward their positions are on a woman’s right to choose.
Governor Mike DeWine signed an executive order hours after the Supreme Court ruling that would ban abortions in Ohio at just six weeks – with zero exceptions for rape or incest.
Senate nominee JD Vance called making abortion illegal an “amazing victory” and considers rape to be “inconvenient” but an “opportunity” for women.
Attorney General Dave Yost said he would like to press charges against women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them.
Ohio – the stakes this November are huge. Vance, DeWine, and Yost don’t have what it takes to move our state forward – only backward.
Cleveland.com Editorial Board Rips LaRose for Political Attack Toward Ohio Supreme Court
In case you missed it, the Cleveland.com Editorial Board took Frank LaRose to task for criticizing the Ohio Supreme Court for doing the job he failed to do. In another political stunt meant to appease Republican voters who don’t trust him, LaRose went after Supreme Court Justices last week for correctly allowing qualifying candidates on the ballot ahead of the upcoming primary.
The Cleveland.com editorial points out that had LaRose chosen to follow the will of Ohio voters and create a map with bipartisan support in the first place, these candidates wouldn’t have had to go to the Court to sue to get their names on the ballot and voters wouldn’t face a multi-million dollar bill for the chaos and confusion created by the Redistricting Commission’s failure to do its job.
But LaRose is more concerned about losing a Senate race in 2024 than anything else, so he’s going to continue placating extremists in his own party and fail to do the job he was elected to do in the process.
“In intemperately blasting Ohio’s Supreme Court in a Sunday night statement for (correctly) ruling that six Democrats LaRose had refused to allow on Ohio’s Aug. 2 primary ballot had met Ohio’s legal deadline for candidate filings, LaRose helped expose his own partisan maneuverings. The blatant politicking over elections LaRose is supposed to be overseeing is deeply troubling,” writes the Cleveland.com Editorial Board.
Read more from Cleveland.com HERE and below:
- In his partisan and impolitic zeal to wrest GOP advantage in upcoming elections, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Ohio’s chief elections officer, has shown exactly how far he’s strayed from proper stewardship of the state’s elections and its election laws.
- In intemperately blasting Ohio’s Supreme Court in a Sunday night statement for (correctly) ruling that six Democrats LaRose had refused to allow on Ohio’s Aug. 2 primary ballot had met Ohio’s legal deadline for candidate filings, LaRose helped expose his own partisan maneuverings. The blatant politicking over elections LaRose is supposed to be overseeing is deeply troubling.
- LaRose’s harsh words — that the Ohio Supreme Court justices who ruled 4-3 against him “are either ignorant of election law and administration or indifferent to the confusion they continue to create” — reveal just how low LaRose is willing to go to achieve GOP advantage in upcoming votes. That applies not just in the Aug. 2 state legislative primary, but also in all-important Ohio Supreme Court contests in November where partisan control of the court is on the line.
- The irony in LaRose’s diatribe is, of course, that had he been acting responsibly, properly and according to the law in supervising Ohio elections, and in serving on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, Ohio might have achieved fair 10-year redistricting maps long ago and there would have been no need to bifurcate the state’s primaries, at multimillion-dollar cost, into a May 3 and an Aug. 2 primary.
- Nor would there have been a need for the latest Ohio Supreme Court ruling on ballot access, because LaRose would have recognized that Ohio law retains primacy over his own partisan wish list on who belongs on the ballot.
- But thanks to the partisan intransigence of the GOP-run state Redistricting Commission – on which LaRose sits -– the Supreme Court repeatedly rejected districts the commission drew, forcing state legislative races off the May 3 ballot to a later date. Eventually, a panel of federal judges, in a 2-1 ruling, chose one of the rejected state legislative maps, and ordered a primary for General Assembly and state central committee members be held Aug. 2. Applying the 90-day deadline to the Aug. 2 date made the filing deadlines May 4 and May 23 for write-ins, the Supreme Court majority found – and it ruled that six Democrats met those deadlines for Aug. 2′s ballot.
- Yet, if LaRose had fairly overseen ballot access based on what Ohio law actually requires, there would have been no need for the Ohio Supreme Court to step in.
- The four-justice majority did just what conservatives say all judges should do – they followed the law’s plain English. That amounts to plain justice — not chaos, or politicking.