To paraphrase Cicero, how long, O’ gerrymandered Ohio lawmakers, will you continue abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us?
Ohio Statehouse Republicans stand determined to make a lurid, revolting example of themselves on just how toxic, misrepresentative, and destructive gerrymandering can be.
In our top three stories in the Ohio Capital Journal on Wednesday, Ohio Statehouse Republican politicians are 1.) refusing to put the sitting President of the United States on the ballot in Ohio, 2.) proposing to make teachers and librarians felons under a vague “obscenity” law, and 3.) Advocating suffocating prisoners to death with a method veterinarians won’t use on animals.
To take the last of these first, a bipartisan majority of Ohioans support repealing the death penalty, and as much as I’ve kept out a sharp and discerning eye, I’ve seen no large-scale popular movement encouraging the state to find creative new ways to execute people.
Meanwhile, Ohio teachers are facing massive layoffs and funding cuts while watching our state government redirect $1 billion worth of public resources to serve 10% of students at private schools. Also, Ohio libraries and librarians are facing funding cuts of their own, and cutting back library hours.
But instead of trying to help Ohio teachers and librarians succeed and thrive, Ohio lawmakers are exploring their options in manifesting a culture of fear and paranoia in our centers of learning, perpetuating a national right-wing extremist propaganda campaign against educators of all types.
It began with critical race theory hysteria, then became anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans hysteria, then became anti-DEI hysteria and anti-university hysteria. And now it’s just a bubbling cauldron of seething, frothing resentment, scapegoating, lying, gaslighting, fear-mongering, and victim-blaming in all directions.
Nobody else can ever be a victim, you see, because they are always the real victims.
Allowing LGBTQ+ equal citizenship and civil and health care rights? That’s, somehow, an attack on them, they cry.
Being honest about the rampant racism that’s motivated vast swaths of American history, and reverberates in the wildly disparate public outcomes of systemic racism today? That’s reverse racism against them, they shriek.
Acknowledging the facts of empirical data and reality and expertise? That’s woke mind virus, they pull their hair and fall on knees wailing.
But worse than being content to soak in the dirty bathwater of their own ignorance, they seek to force the rest of us into it as well.
They design to use the hammer of law to attack teachers, universities, libraries, unions, and minority communities. They maneuver to create a chilling effect on free speech and expression that flies against everything for which America has traditionally stood.
They appear to live in fear of knowledge and loathing for the beauty in humankind’s diversity, and for that I pity them: What a small and narrow worldview they freely cage their own minds in.
Unfortunately, discontent to sit by themselves in their self-made cages, they seek to compel the public at-large to be forced to sit in their cages as well.
The number of public school book bans across the country increased by 33% in the 2022-23 school year compared to the 2021-22 school year, according to a September PEN America report. Since PEN America started tracking public school book bans in July 2021, the organization has recorded nearly 6,000 instances of banned books.
Even more immediately dangerous than their disdain and antipathy toward expertise and acquired knowledge and freedom of thought and expression, however, is their open resentment of representative democracy.
In Ohio, Republican politicians ignored seven anti-gerrymandering rulings from a bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court, thereby forcing Ohioans to participate in more gerrymandered elections in 2022, awarding them the continued supermajorities in which they now sit.
They enacted one of the most restrictive anti-voters laws in the country, and they made a national disgrace of themselves last August trying to attack the constitutional power of Ohio voters.
And in their latest flourish, Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered Republican supermajority General Assembly is abdicating their responsibility to perform the simplest duties of good governance, spitting in the face of 2.6 million Ohio voters who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 by refusing to put him on the ballot for reelection. Even Alabama was able to quickly address and fix their similar situation. Not Ohio.
Gerrymandered Ohio lawmakers apparently only know how to operate under an ethos of political extortion and quid pro quo corruption.
The idea of public service and good governance for its own sake — whether in promotion of free and fair elections or even the noble pursuit of promoting the people’s best interests — appears to baffle and confound them.
All of this is interconnected: The extremism, the irresponsibility, the misrepresentation and abuse of the public, the wanton corruption, the arrogance and expectation of never being held accountable.
As I have said many times, gerrymandering poisons everything.
It pushes politicians to extremes, denies voters their voice, opens the door to corruption, perpetuates misrepresentation, radicalizes discourse, kills compromise, and disintegrates democracy.
So, to answer our paraphrased Cicero, how long is this madness still to mock us?
Until we say, “Enough.”
This commentary was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and republished here with permission.
