Jason Stephens has the extreme-right reined in. But how choppy will the waters get?

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.

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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.

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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.

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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