Ohio Republicans preach family values. When power is at stake, they abandon them.

The Republican Party used to introduce itself. Law and order. Family values. The party of Lincoln. The rule of law. It printed those words on everything, the way a business prints its mission statement on the lobby wall, and for a long time it dared you to say the words didn’t fit.

Say them out loud now. In Ohio. See how they land.

Law and order.

Start with Rep. Max Miller of Rocky River, a former Trump White House aide who was married at Mar-a-Lago with a toast from the president himself. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno — the daughter of Ohio’s own Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — has told police and courts that during their marriage Miller threw a pan of hot water on her after she said she was leaving, threw her against a wall, and once held a gun to her head. Miller categorically denies all of it, was never charged, and has sued her for defamation, calling the accusations a campaign to ruin him.

Those are allegations. Hold them as allegations. Then notice who does not hold them lightly: her father, a sitting Republican senator, says Miller “should not serve in the House.” When the accuser’s own father, of your own party, says the accused is unfit to hold the seat, the party has a decision to make.

Miller is running for reelection. He says he’s winning in November.

Family values.

Now West Alexandria, and state Rep. Rodney Creech. A minor female relative accused him, in records compiled by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, of climbing into her bed while erect and wearing only his underwear. Creech told investigators he had gotten into bed with her in his underwear but denied the rest, and calls the allegations “demonstrably false.” No charges were filed.

Read the reason no charges were filed, because it matters. The local sheriff and prosecutor, both personal acquaintances of Creech, recused themselves — and the investigation didn’t begin for four months. The special prosecutor brought in from Clark County, Daniel Driscoll, a Republican, wrote that Creech’s behavior was “concerning and suspicious,” that he found the accuser’s statements persuasive, but that the evidence fell short of the threshold to prosecute.

Concerning and suspicious. That’s the prosecutor talking. Not me.

Speaker Matt Huffman read the same file, stripped Creech of all four committee assignments, and asked him to resign. Then, nine months later, Huffman put him back on his committees and signed a letter asking the Ohio Republican Party to endorse him for reelection. The party obliged. Creech won his primary 58-42.

And Creech’s name stayed on Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign website the entire time, in a press release the would-be governor uses to advertise his support among Ohio House Republicans. When your endorsement page becomes a problem, you fix the page. Ramaswamy left it.

That is the party of family values, restoring a man to a committee it removed him from, because he kept toeing the line and resigning would have cost a seat.

The rule of law.

To Washington, and Sen. Jon Husted. On Sept. 10, 2025, Husted joined all but two Senate Republicans and voted to block a Democratic amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, the dead sex trafficker. Two months later, when a standalone transparency bill passed by unanimous consent, Husted didn’t object — so he can, and does, say he voted to release them. Both things are true. His campaign only mentions the second one.

Here’s the part his campaign mentions never. TiffinOhio.net’s review of campaign finance records found Husted has taken more than $116,000 since 2001 from Ohio billionaire Les Wexner — the former Victoria’s Secret chief whose name was redacted, then unredacted, from the Epstein files, and who appeared on a list of alleged co-conspirators. Wexner denies any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has never been charged. Husted took $3,500 from him in July. He voted to keep the files sealed in September.

I’m not going to tell you the money bought the vote. I don’t have to. I’m going to tell you the party that spent a generation calling itself the guardian of children and the enemy of coastal degeneracy had, sitting in an Ohio Senate seat, a member who took the sex trafficker’s associate’s money and voted to keep the sex trafficker’s files in the dark. And nobody in the party treated that as a problem.

The party of Lincoln.

You knew this one was coming. In August 2017, after neo-Nazis and white nationalists marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and a woman was killed, the Republican president of the United States stood in Trump Tower and said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

It means the leader of the party of Lincoln looked at a white supremacist rally that ended in a killing and reached, first, for “both sides.” Two years later, given the chance to take it back, he said he’d answered “perfectly.”

Lincoln freed the slaves. His party’s standard-bearer found fine people at a rally held to keep a Confederate general on his pedestal. Square that up yourself.

The party of balanced budgets.

This is the one they may miss the most, and it’s the easiest to prove. The Congressional Budget Office, which does not take sides, reported this year that the Republican tax-and-spending law — the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — adds roughly $3.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and that federal debt is headed from 101% of the economy to 120%, past its all-time high. The tariffs the party now cheers are projected to raise revenue, yes — by functioning as a tax on everything Americans import, paid at the register by the same families the party promised to protect.

The party of fiscal discipline wrote the bill that breaks the record. The party of the small businessman wrote the tax that his customers pay. The party of the farmer wrote the trade war his soybeans lose.

Somewhere the mission statement is still on the lobby wall. Law and order. Family values. The party of Lincoln. Fiscal responsibility.

In Ohio you can read it right off the ballot — Miller, Creech, Husted, Ramaswamy — and then you can read what the party actually did when the words were put to the test.

It kept them all.