David DeWitt

Ohio voter power has been assaulted for half a decade because politicians won’t admit Trump lost

A November ballot measure would add photo ID rules without free ID access and signal lawmakers can eliminate early voting beyond Election Day polling places.

At 250, America’s broken social contract, moral rot, and open betrayal of basic decency and humanity

America's 250th birthday reveals a nation betraying its founding ideals through corruption, racism, and leaders serving greed over the public good.

Ohio taxpayers deserve accountability and oversight of $2.5 billion being sent to private schools

A bipartisan bill would audit voucher spending and require private schools to report attendance, graduation rates, and test scores—but House Speaker Huffman opposes it.

Ohio gerrymandering set the stage for this shameful travesty and betrayal across America

In the much bandied aphorism, “A society grows great when men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.” What happens to a society when selfish, short-sighted, narrow-minded, egomaniacal, power-obsessed men cut down every tree in sight? And future generations will never know their shade? History will recognize this generation of America as the one that rolled back the Civil Rights era. Our time will be known to posterity as a generation that did not plant trees of liberty and justice for all, but struck them down. It’s shameful. It’s pathetic. And all of us, individually and collectively, must reckon with that. And if we are ever to recover from this vicious injustice on future generations, we will have to spend the rest of our lives fixing the damage and rebuilding something better. We have a long way to go. The destruction process is ongoing, and there’s no telling how much longer the destruction will last or how much worse it will get. The U.S. Supreme Court in just the last 16 years has gutted campaign finance regulations, gutted regulation against gerrymandering, and gutted the Voting Rights Act, to name a select few and fundamental. If you were setting out a plan to rob American voters of power and destroy representative democracy so that elections can be rigged, bought, and sold, and politicians run amok without consequence or accountability, you couldn’t do better. If we can’t regulate obscene amounts of money buying elections, and we can’t regulate politicians from open partisan gerrymandering, and we can’t have the basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, American democracy is effectively neutered in favor of a rigged game. Rich people and corporations spend unlimited money to buy candidates and elections. The politicians rig election outcomes with gerrymandering and eliminate competition. States and cities, town and country, carved into fiefdoms for political machines. Shameless propaganda propagated: At best, conditioning; at the least, mass confusion. The politicized courts a rubber stamp on the system. And representative democracy dies. No individual policy or issue can overcome the primary injustice of rigged districts and bought-and-sold elections. The pillars of the Republic are corrupted beyond legitimate function. The “Republic” becomes in-name-only, a veneer masking corruption, oligarchy, lawlessness. As I have long written, gerrymandering and the campaign finance/public corruption loop are the two central poisons in the bloodstream of America’s body politic. If legislative outcomes are predetermined by gerrymandering, and all other races are tainted by the unlimited spending of hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money by nefarious backroom actors, true representation of the people’s interest becomes a quaint ideal, instead of a foundational value that can never be compromised. Faithful and honest representation of the people becomes the central lie instead of the central promise of our social contract. Cynicism, corruption, backsliding, misrepresentation, abuse, carelessness, recklessness, deprivation, degradation, division, ignorance, hatefulness, these become our cultural and political masters. The U.S. Supreme Court has unleashed a cascade of gerrymandering across the nation: Brazen public corruption of our elections in a rush of unprecedented scale and fury. We are in a frenzy of blatantly cheating millions upon millions upon millions of voters out of fair elections in America. Tens of millions, twenties of millions? Thirties of millions? Hundreds? It turns out that Ohio’s experience in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 with open unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering was not just a horribly embarrassing episode of cynical, feckless Ohio politicians debasing themselves in their lust for power, it was a trial run for the entire nation doing the same. Ohio was a primer to measure how degraded politicians could get and get away with it. Now they’re going hog wild, in some cases bringing voters along as accomplice, and in others politically assaulting and insulting voters outright. Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, California, Washington; it’s actually almost difficult right now to keep track of how many of our nation’s state leaders have willfully fallen to prostrate themselves and crawl through the moral muck and patriotic treachery of cheating voters with gerrymandering. But alas, in existence the only constant is change, and one day this destruction too will end. We will eventually, collectively have to deal with the damage done. One can only hope that some semblance of our constitutional Republic can be saved from the poisons and the depravity of our lawmakers and elected officials. This generation of America has squandered our birthright. At 250 years of age, we’ve turned the world’s oldest democracy into a jalopy for the next generation. We’ve forsaken those who came before us, and the blood and tears they shed to win us the rights and freedoms that we now betray. While the short-sighted cynics, the ignorant, and the debased celebrate, the rest will have to spend the rest of our lives trying to scrub away this awful stain, seeking solemnly to establish something somehow more just and honest and true than it’s ever been before. Either we will, or some future generation — at likely great cost — will surely be forced. This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Ohio Republican state lawmakers still want to rob Ohio voters of fundamental Constitutional power

Ohio Republican lawmakers want to try again to rob voters of our fundamental power over the Ohio Constitution. They haven’t learned. In their phenomenal arrogance, Ohio Republican lawmakers once again want to spit in the face of Ohio voters and try to convince us it’s raining. After cheating voters with flagrant gerrymandering, making it harder and harder to vote with law after law, and overriding voters on the 2023 legal weed law, they want to try to kneecap Ohio voters’ fundamental Constitutional power, again. They tried to do this in 2023 and failed spectacularly. As Ohio voters were gearing up to consider a reproductive rights amendment that year, gerrymandered Ohio Republican lawmakers proposed raising the threshold to pass amendments to the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to a 60% threshold. The gerrymandered Republican lawmaker sponsoring the 2023 effort openly advocated to his colleagues that his proposal was intended to stop the reproductive rights amendment, as well as any further anti-gerrymandering reform. Voters easily saw through their charade and rejected them in humiliating fashion. Now, as voters have launched efforts to ban data centers and eliminate property taxes, the same legislature that has made a mess of things with data centers and property taxes wants voters to give up significant power to do anything about it. Ohio Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino of Kirtland wants to give it another try at convincing Ohio voters to lie down and roll over for politicians who have obnoxiously demonstrated over and over again that they have zero respect for voters. In a personal demonstration of his absolute disregard for the opinions of voters, Cirino was the lawmaker who ignored the heartfelt testimony of 700 Ohioans and thousands of protesters across college campuses throughout Ohio, to force through a new higher education law to gut academic freedom, regulate classroom discussion, destroy diversity efforts, and dismantle the power of unions. The result? Ohio’s college campuses are suffering. High school students said they are leaving the state. Students who’ve stayed say they feel the “bleak” chill of stifled campus speech and classroom discussion. Professors have been robbed of both their academic freedom and their job security, also noting the frigid air in classrooms subjected to the menace of government censorship. Minority students on campus have had their spaces for acceptance and understanding stripped away from them. And 90 programs including economics, physics, and mathematics, have been eliminated from campuses across the state, as Cirino’s generation pulls the ladder up behind them. As voters across the country question the wisdom of data centers, in Ohio, our politicians have showered them with state government candy. While cutting billions from Ohio pubic schools, state lawmakers have handed out billions worth of incentives to data centers. In one notorious case, Ohio gave $4.5 million to a data center project to create just 10 jobs. Regarding property taxes, gerrymandered Ohio lawmakers have repeatedly abused our local communities by making massive cuts to funding for public schools and the local government fund that helps pay for public works jobs and emergency personnel like police officers, paramedics, and firefighters. Facing the devastating loss of local jobs and services, some Ohio communities eat the cuts and lay off employees, while others have rallied to support levies on the local level. But for those communities that pass levies to keep their local jobs and service intact, state officials have taken it as a cue that those communities will fend for themselves, so they cut their funding even more. A vicious cycle perpetuates where local communities are asked to do more and more and more, while state lawmakers do less and less and less. What do Ohio’s state leaders do instead? They give enormous tax handouts and giveaways to unaccountable corporations and the richest people in the state. They give out $12 billion with little to show for it. It’s a cozy little arrangement if you’re a wealthy corporation or sports franchise owner who can buy political influence with campaign donations. But if you’re a regular Ohioan trying to live in a decent community with decent opportunities for your children, your family is getting your lunch eaten by unscrupulous and unaccountable politicians who have insulated themselves from electoral consequences with gerrymandering. They don’t have to really care what destruction they cause, unless some happy day they discover any sense of human shame or conscience. In the meantime, what you can do is join with your fellow citizens and go to enormous lengths, with incredibly high financial and practical barriers, to try to bring change directly to voters for consideration at the ballot box. You could introduce a law — an initiated statute. But Ohio lawmakers showed very clearly with the voter-passed weed law of 2023 that they will not respect voter-passed laws and they will change them however they want, whenever they want, voters be damned. Or you could try to introduce a constitutional amendment, protected from the machinations of unaccountable, gerrymandered lawmakers. Those unaccountable, gerrymandered lawsmakers really, really don’t like that though. How dare you present any check whatsoever on their abuse of power? ‘Can’t have it. Better try to convince you, again, to willingly give up your own power so that they can continue to abuse theirs. To me, the worst part is that they are so arrogant and so condescending that they still think you’re dumb enough to buy it. This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.