Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

In what looks as if it were the final few days of legislating before a long, slow, summer off, the Ohio General Assembly was in a frenzy last week, passing measures, big and small, that by right should have been resolved long ago.

Still, as a pure study of human nature, there’s nothing like watching the legislature try to squeeze what should have been six months of lawmaking into a few frantic late-June sessions timed to end before Independence Day, to allow for state legislators’ appearances in hometown parades.

Ohio passes bills in special session: Ohio Senate passes Biden ballot fix, foreign campaign money ban. Here’s what it means

People have sometimes likened the “process” to sausage-making. That’s grossly unfair to sausage-makers, whose products, unlike the legislature’s, must at least pass inspection.

As others have eloquently reported, perhaps no General Assembly in decades has been less productive than the one now in session.

Reining in the extreme-right – for now

Part of that is structural.

Although the House is composed of 67 Republicans and 32 Democrats, Democrats have clout out of proportion to their numbers.

The Reason: There’s a split among the 67 Republican between intra-GOP-caucus foes and allies of Republican Speaker Jason Stephens, of Lawrence County’s Kitts Hill, who won the House’s gavel with the help of House Democrats’ votes.

And to keep the gavel, and to avoid riling his de facto Democratic allies, Stephens, it appears, has reined in House Republicans’ extreme-right faction, a noisy group that isn’t enthused about much of anything except the past.

Meanwhile, the Senate, led by President Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, has tended to be more conservative, its Republicans are for the most part united, because in the Senate, what Matt Huffman wants, Matt Huffman often seems to get — a fact not lost on the Statehouse’s teeming corporate lobbies, always pushing for bills or amendments to advance private interests, and who prefer results to promises when it comes to legislation in Columbus.

(That’s so in a state whose per capita personal income last matched the nation’s in 1969 and, as noted here before, has been declining ever since.

Voters get distracted from that fact by the General Assembly’s politically convenient practice of pitting Ohioans against once another — on such topics as abortion, sexuality and gender identity.)

And now Huffman, who’s being term-limited out of the Senate, will be returning to the House in January, vying to wrest its speakership from fellow Republican Stephens.

Anti-Stephens House Republicans have gained control of the House GOP caucus’s campaign fund, what there is of it, in a legal fight the House’s anti-faction Stephens faction won, and which he lost.

What is Stephens facing? Judge strips control of campaign funds from Ohio House speaker ahead of November election

If you’re Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, with 30 months left in your governorship, you can expect to be navigating in at best choppy waters in the state Senate and Ohio’s House in 2025 and 2026, no matter how the Huffman-Stephens contest turns out.

Pitting Ohioans against each other instead of tackling real issues

At the same time, intra-party clawing and knifing over the 2026 statewide Ohio tickets of both the Republican and Democratic parties, will distract Statehouse attention from issues that continue to demand attention – school funding, property taxes and utility rates, gerrymandering of General Assembly districts – to sensation-of-the-day “issues” and policy gimmicks.

The creation of an Ohio culture war: Ohio lawmaker waging nasty war on educators, librarians and drag queens despite real problems

As things stand today on Capitol Square, even the most jaded Statehouse bystander likely longs for the era when the aim of the game was to get things done, not just score points to win headlines and attract talk-show invites.

Not to worry, though, before it went home, the General Assembly was preparing to give Ohio’s voters billions of dollars in gifts in the form of local construction projects – “gifts” the recipients, not the donors, will pay for long after today’s General Assembly has retired with nice pensions and no regrets.

On the eve of Independence Day 2024, and what’s likely to be the most momentous presidential election since Lincoln’s in 1860, that’s the wonderful world of Ohio politics today: Nostalgia for the past, indifference to the future and devotion to the status quo.

It’s a great life – if you know the right people.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

CINCINNATI (WXIX) – As of 8:31 p.m., more than 8,000 Duke Energy customers are without power.

At 8:00 p.m., more than 9,000 were reported.

Most of the outages were reported in Butler, Hamilton, Warren and Clermont counties following the storms.

According to Duke’s website, repairs and assessments are underway.

There is not an estimation of what time power will be restored in these areas.

To report an outage, call 800-543-5599.

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They still watch movies as a team the night before they play, but with technological advances, they no longer need to head out to a theater and can watch something in the team hotel.

For decades, however, that’s exactly what they’d do. One coach would be in charge of finding a movie for the players to watch, the staff would make arrangements with the theater – whether it be the State Theatre on campus or the RKO Theater in downtown Columbus – and the team would go to the movies to think about something other than football for a few hours as kickoff inched near.

In 1969, Ohio State’s “movie coach” was Earle Bruce, who also happened to be in charge of coaching the interior of the defending national champion’s offensive line. But we’re going to focus on his duties as the movie coach and one hilarious choice he made that season.

“Woody only had two rules about our movies,” star middle guard Jim Stillwagon told the Columbus Dispatch in 1996. “We weren’t supposed to see any love scenes, and we were never allowed to see any hippies. We couldn’t see any sex, but violence was okay. I think Coach Hayes thought that was something that could fire you up.”

“If you could find a John Wayne movie, you were doing pretty good,” former OSU assistant Bill Conley told the Dispatch. “He liked those shoot’em-ups. Now Earle, he was a Clint
Eastwood fan.”

In later years, Woody’s teams saw plenty of Patton, starring George C. Scott as General George Patton. But this was 1969 and Patton had not been released yet, and the team was evidently tired of seeing John Wayne movies.

Earle had to pick a movie and thought he was picking an action movie about motorcycles for the team. From Michael Rosenberg’s classic War as They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest:

Oops.

“We were sitting there watching these guys up on the screen smoking grass, and we’re saying, ‘This is great!’” Stillwagon said. “Earle was so upset. He got us out of that theater so fast you wouldn’t believe it. He about lost his job when Woody found out.”

Mind you, this is 1969. The country was involved in an unpopular war in Vietnam, and protests were gripping campuses nationwide. Woody, very much a pro-Vietnam War guy in that day, had no time for hippies or what they stood for. You can only imagine how livid he was when he found out about the team’s choice of movie ahead of that Minnesota game.

And that’s the story of how Earle Bruce’s career as the movie coach at Ohio State came to a screeching halt.