A TiffinOhio.net review of Federal Election Commission filings shows Havas gave Husted for Senate $4,066.12 between February and August 2025. Two contributions of $1,000 each, in February and April, were earmarked directly to the campaign. The remaining $2,066.12, recorded across July and August, was routed through Team Husted, the senator’s joint fundraising committee. Ohio Secretary of State records show Havas gave another $525 in January 2023 to the DeWine-Husted transition fund. No campaign-finance violation has been alleged in connection with the contributions.

A longer money trail

Havas’s support for Husted stretches back years. Campaign-finance filings show he gave $4,000 to Husted for Ohio, the senator’s campaign committee before his appointment to the Senate, across 2023 and 2024, and added another $1,291.32 to the Senate campaign in June. Counting his earlier contributions to Mike DeWine’s gubernatorial campaign committee — the ticket on which Husted ran as lieutenant governor and served in that office from 2019 until January 2025 — and to the DeWine-Husted transition fund, Havas has given more than $22,000 to committees tied to Husted and the DeWine ticket since 2018. About $9,400 of that went to committees Husted himself controlled.

The case that ended the chair role

Havas resigned after NBC News asked Husted’s campaign about his 2009 guilty plea. According to court records reviewed by NBC News, Havas was originally charged with sexual misconduct with a minor in a case involving a 15-year-old, when he was 22. That charge was later reduced to a single misdemeanor assault count, and he pleaded guilty in 2009 and served jail time. A criminal complaint accused him of being reckless as to the minor’s age.

Husted’s campaign said it had not known about the case. “Mr. Havas did not disclose his history to the campaign,” Amy Natoce, a spokesperson for the campaign, told NBC News. “Upon learning the facts, we immediately accepted his resignation as a campaign volunteer.”

Havas had been named a Franklin County campaign chair in December, one of 112 volunteers the campaign appointed to represent Husted across Ohio’s 88 counties. He also serves as vice chair of the Franklin County Republican Party executive committee and is registered with the state as a lobbying agent. TiffinOhio.net previously reported on Havas’s resignation and on the more than $10,000 his contributions represented to Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign, which faced similar criticism from Democratic nominee Amy Acton.

Democrats renew their attack

The Ohio Democratic Party seized on the donation history. In a statement, spokesperson Tony Wen said: “Andrew Havas’ record of sexual misconduct with a minor was public, but Jon Husted had no problem keeping him as a campaign chair until people started asking questions. Even now, Jon Husted continues to proudly tout two other endorsements from allies who have faced disturbing sexual allegations involving minors. Ohioans deserve to know why Husted keeps embracing predators.”

Wen’s reference to two other allies appears to point to state Reps. Rodney Creech and Gary Click, both of whom have appeared alongside Husted’s campaign. Husted’s campaign listed Creech among its endorsers on a March graphic; in 2023, a minor relative accused Creech of climbing into bed with her, according to Bureau of Criminal Investigation records reported by the Statehouse News Bureau. No charges were filed, a prosecutor who reviewed the case called Creech’s conduct “concerning,” and Creech has denied the allegations, calling them “demonstrably false” and politically motivated. Click, Husted’s Sandusky County campaign chair, drew scrutiny over 2023 committee testimony in which he described talking to young girls about their sex lives; he has not been accused of a crime.

A tight race

Husted was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2025 by DeWine to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. He faces former Sen. Sherrod Brown in the Nov. 3 special election, one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, which will appear on ballots statewide, including in Seneca and Sandusky counties. The Havas contributions add to a broader line of Democratic scrutiny over Husted’s campaign finances heading into the fall.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

AMERICAN TOWNSHIP, Ohio – Over 373 acres of pancake flat, former farmland, Google is building a $500 million data center here, about seven miles northwest of the county seat of Lima. 

The neighbors in American Township, population 14,538, are furious. 

They’ve stuffed public hearings and public comment boxes in a perhaps fruitless effort to block an ongoing construction project pushed by one of the most powerful companies in the world. 

Their problem isn’t any one thing as much as it’s everything: shell companies Google created and the non-disclosure agreements it signed with county commissioners to keep its identity hidden; constant, noisy construction at the site and nearby roadways; reports of private water wells going ominously dry from construction; the hundreds of tons of emissions from the facility when it’s operational; fears of rising electric costs; and the hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local tax incentives Google is getting to build something the locals don’t want.  

“This is all just Google’s land,” said Becky Streeter, a retired nurse practitioner who has lived here for decades, as she drove around the megaproject construction site last month before convening with a group of a dozen neighbors who want to stop it. 

American is but one of the dozens of localities caught in the middle of Ohio’s development boom of roughly 185 current and planned data centers – the technology sector’s thinly staffed digital warehouses, lured here by generous tax credits, plentiful land and cheap electric costs. The data centers, especially such “hyperscale” operations, facilitate the rise of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency systems. 

Residents are pushing back for a mix of provincial reasons and broader criticisms about AI and the extraordinary levels of electricity and, to a lesser extent, water needed to facilitate it. 

Google’s march toward operational status highlights a lopsided power imbalance, where residents who have lived in the area for decades are effectively powerless to stop a project that was lined up in secret for years by the company. Becky Streeter’s husband, Dave, put it another way as he helped her set up the meeting at a local community center last month. 

“It’s the golden rule,” he said. “The one with the gold makes the rules.”

The project site is larger than the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It sticks out not just for the local controversy it stirred, but for its politically powerful neighbor nearby. 

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican who’s among the most politically powerful men in the state, lives just a few miles away from the construction site. At the Statehouse, Huffman has led a so-far unsuccessful charge to impose new rules on data centers and roll back their tax breaks. But he has quietly avoided the fray on Google’s specific project even as it has roiled the community. 

The Americans are mad

Interviews, public meetings and written comments from locals of American and nearby Sugar Creek townships all suggest deep opposition to Google’s data center. This pits them against township and county economic development officials who have welcomed the development.

At a standing-room-only public hearing in March, a long line of citizens urged the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to reject an air permit for the facility to build a fleet of 115 gas-fired generators as a backup mechanism, according to the Lima News. 

Of 325 written comments obtained by records request, only two expressed support. Almost all others (some were ambiguous) opposed development, raising concerns about secrecy around the project, air quality, electric costs and others.

“This was all done in a very secretive manner, with no public input,” said Randy Tooker, who lives a half mile away in Elida. “I moved here for the country setting and wildlife. The noise and pollution will undoubtedly affect all of this.”

In late May, the Ohio EPA granted Bistrozzi its air permit. That allows the data center’s generators to emit 236 tons of nitrogen oxides, 96 tons of carbon dioxide, and about 5 tons of fine particulate matter. The engines can run for a maximum of 500 hours per year.

The Ohio EPA wrote in permitting documents that it issues permits based on air quality standards established by the U.S. EPA. Some commenters’ broader “concerns about community health outcomes, including elevated rates of asthma and cancer” are important but under the purview of state and local health departments.

In interviews, more than 15 American Township residents expressed opposition to the data center and a sense of frustration with their inability to do anything about it. 

Charlene McCoy lives directly east of the project. She filmed over the course of weeks a thick haze of apparent construction dust drifting over the construction site, leaving the air cloudy and smogged. She began experiencing what she believed was an allergic reaction, with inflamed and red skin. Her eyes would swell up.

“My face got burnt, over and over and over again,” she said. 

She provided Signal Statewide with pictures of her face, red and inflamed, taken over time. She paid out of pocket for inconclusive medical tests. By April 17, she checked herself into the hospital, according to paperwork she provided. A test eventually pointed to a contact irritant, which led her to suspect lime kiln dust, which is used to dry soil during production. 

Google declined to comment on her claim. Ohio EPA spokesperson Bryant Somerville said the agency heard reports about the dust and asked the company to reduce and contain its spread. He said OEPA will be on site to monitor, and that lime kiln dust shouldn’t be leaving the property or impacting neighbors. 

“The construction company has since informed Ohio EPA of its plan to control the dust, which includes additional water trucks and monitoring wind conditions during lime kiln application,” he said. 

Lelanna Spencer, 56, who lives a two-minute drive from the development, said the data center was “rammed down our throats” without any real ability to participate. At first, she said, locals were only told the land would be an industrial park. 

The “dewatering” events didn’t help. 

Google distributed a flier, obtained by Signal Statewide, informing locals of reports of residents seeing “sudden changes in water pressure, flow or temporary loss of water.” This can occur from builders temporarily pumping groundwater out from the water table to dig and build in a dry environment, the flier states. 

“If you are currently experiencing any issues with your well water … we want to hear from you directly,” the company said in a flier. “We sincerely apologize for any disruption or concern this may be causing you and your family.”

No one interviewed by Signal Statewide thought they would succeed in stopping the project, though some thought they might be able to push for better terms for neighbors. Joyce Morris, of American, called the development “a ball that’s rolling that you ain’t gonna stop.”

The negative outlook on the facilities isn’t unique to Allen County. April polling from Bowling Green State University found that about 3 in 5 Ohioans have unfavorable views about a data center being built in their hometown, and a similar percentage associate them with higher electric costs and bad environmental outcomes. That number is 7 in 10 nationally, according to Gallup polling. 

“We oppose everything about the Data Center being built at the end of our road, but most of all the lack of transparency that there has been with this entire project,” said Shelly Reiff, of Elida, in a public comment. 

Discreet data center developers, major tax breaks

The earliest known indications of the development trace to 2022, when Bistrozzi LLC, later revealed as a front company for Google, was incorporated in Delaware. 

In 2025, Bistrozzi began acquiring hundreds of acres of land and striking tax deals and a non-disclosure agreement with the county commissioners for what was then only publicly  known as “Project BOSC.”

The three-year non-disclosure agreement, signed May 27, 2025, obligated commissioners to stay mum about private details of the data center while they consider a local tax abatement for it, according to a copy of the agreement obtained in a records request. 

On a state level, Google is already contractually exempt from Ohio’s 5.75% sales tax, plus any local sales taxes (i.e. a 1.1% sales tax in Allen County) on its builds. This exemption lasts until 2058 and is expected to save the company at least $600 million, in an estimate that state officials say is likely an underestimation because the total cost isn’t known until companies submit receipts to the state after the fact. 

In addition, the county in April 2025 established a “community reinvestment area,” abating 75% of the assessed value of the data center when calculating its property taxes. As part of the deal, Bistrozzi agreed to pay $250,000 annually over 15 years to Elida Local Schools.

In August that year, Bistrozzi (and later, “Bistrozzi Additional LLC”) began spending about $45 million on 373 acres of land split between five landowners, county records show. It also won a permit from the Ohio EPA to fill in about 0.7 acres of wetlands to build. The company agreed to offset the wildlife disruption via mitigation and conservation work at a metropark 90 minutes away. 

Then there was the water. In September 2025, the city of Lima agreed to sell between 5 and 10 million gallons of water per day to the facility over 20 years. Water officials say the plant can handle the new demand, but some residents expressed skepticism. Google says the $500 million it’s investing in the area includes $50 million flowing to public works projects, including road construction and updates to Lima’s water system. 

Only after all these pieces fell into place did Google in March of this year reveal itself as the project developer. 

The announcement included a reference to building roundabouts in town to facilitate added traffic. However, the Allen County Port Authority recently delayed construction on those roundabouts “to allow for adjustments in response to public input.”

Several residents said the port authority planned to use eminent domain to seize land without owners’ permission, for property that includes family land or the site of a popular farmstand, according to Streeter. 

An Allen County Port Authority spokesperson declined to respond to inquiries about alleged use of eminent domain, stating the project is still in the design phase, and “efforts are underway to minimize impacts to surrounding property owners.”

None of the three county commissioners responded to an interview request. 

A powerful neighbor

Matt Huffman lives not far from the project site. He’s currently the Ohio House Speaker after having finished a stint as the Senate President, and is considered among the most powerful figures in Ohio Republican politics after nearly 20 years in the Statehouse and 14 years on Lima’s city council. 

While he has positioned himself against data centers at the Statehouse, he has avoided the hyperscaler controversy in Allen County. 

As House Speaker, the de facto leader of the chamber, Huffman controls the agenda and can move or stall bills at his leisure. 

The Ohio House under his leadership has attempted, without success, to impose new regulations on data centers, ban their non-disclosure agreements with local public officials, and end the statewide sales tax exemption, which cost Ohio $2 billion last year in state and local sales tax revenue, with most benefits going to parent companies of Google, Facebook and Amazon. 

House Republicans nearly passed legislation last month that would roughly halve – but not end – data centers’ sales and property tax incentives. It would also require them to secure their own sources of electricity by either building their own power plants or entering long-term electric supply contracts, and adhere to “best industry practices for water conservation and water-use efficiency.”

Huffman and others in his leadership team in June nixed a final vote on sending the bill to Gov. Mike DeWine, late at night on the final lawmaking day until mid-November. He said at the time that members were frustrated that the bill doesn’t zero out data centers’ sales tax credit – several lawmakers have said the rapidly inflating size of the credit was kept secret from them, adding to the frustration. 

But Huffman’s pugilism hasn’t extended to American Township. 

He declined an interview request about the project. When asked after a statehouse press conference in June what he thinks about it, Huffman avoided specifics, noting he only heard about the data center a few months ago and he hopes Google is following the “spirit” of the House legislation in terms of water and electricity. 

“As projects like these move forward, our priorities remain clear: protecting local control over siting, ensuring data centers provide the energy they require, and safeguarding local water resources,” he said in a statement later.

The hands-off approach is a far cry from when he personally intervened at the Ohio Power Siting Board in 2022, asking its commissioners to kill Birch Solar, a massive solar farm planned in Allen County. At the time, he excoriated the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for siding with “out-of-country rent seekers over the Ohioans who would be impacted” by the solar farm. 

“I believe that local officials elected by their neighbors, rather than Columbus-based interest groups, are in the best position to determine what is best for their communities. After all, they are the ones who are actually living in the impacted community,” he wrote.

‘Long-term investments in the people’

Along with the American Township facility, Google has data center campuses in Lancaster and New Albany, collectively totaling $20 billion in investments in Ohio, per the company.

Molly Kocour Boyle, Google’s regional head of data center public affairs, described its data centers as “long-term investments in the people and local economy of the communities we call home.”

She didn’t respond to some specific questions, but described the company as one of the region’s “top taxpayers” and the confidentiality agreements as a common practice in industrial real estate development. 

“We recognize a project of this scale brings changes; as with any construction process, there is some disruption, but we are committed to working closely with local officials, state agencies, and nearby residents to address questions as they arise,” she said. 

“The collaboration we’ve experienced with local leaders has been vital to our progress. We look forward to being a supportive neighbor and ensuring our presence creates lasting, positive opportunities for residents and small businesses alike.”

Cindy Leis, a project supporter who leads both the county’s economic development arm and its port authority, declined an interview request and instead requested written questions, which she didn’t respond to. 

A familiar story for data centers in Ohio

For Becky Streeter, whose retirement has been at least partially overtaken by advocating against the data center, American Township is home. For Google, it’s not even the only rural Ohio operation in the project queue.

“Tilted Gate LLC” in January said it planned to build a 500,000-square-foot data center in Franklin Furnace, in hilly southern Scioto County, for $1 billion. The county commissioners signed non-disclosure agreements with the developers.

From there, according to WSAZ, the commissioners and developers jointly revealed Google’s identity behind the project and approved a 75% property tax abatement for 15 years, partially offset by a $500,000 payment to the local school system.

Citizens voiced broad opposition at public hearings and filed a lawsuit against the county commissioners, alleging violations of state open meetings laws.

Site work on “Project Dazzler,” according to Google, is scheduled to begin this year.

Signal Ohio is a nonprofit news organization covering government, education, health, economy and public safety.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Blanche also said he would consider any new information brought forward to the government about deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of powerful associates. Multiple Epstein abuse survivors attended the Blanche confirmation hearing, some wearing t-shirts depicting the black bar redactions contained within the released files.

Blanche, who previously worked as President Donald Trump’s defense attorney, appeared before a tightly divided Senate Committee on the Judiciary. 

The Republican-led panel is now split 11-10 after the sudden death Saturday of South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. A large bouquet of white roses was placed before his empty seat Wednesday.

Lawmakers volleyed partisan accusations about the weaponization of the Department of Justice under presidents from both parties. Missouri’s GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt called former Biden administration special counsel Jack Smith a “dirt bag” for his involvement in prosecuting Trump over allegations of colluding to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But it was the plan for a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that brought tough questions for Blanche from two committee Republicans whose votes he needs to advance, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. The fund was established in exchange for Trump dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for the 2019 leak of his tax returns.

With a raised voice, Tillis said he wants “to stick a fork in this turkey of a 1776 fund,” referring to the administration’s choice of making the fund exactly $1.776 billion, adding the fund “should never be paid out.”

Confirmation fight

The acting attorney general faces a possible rocky road to confirmation in the narrowly divided full Senate, assuming he is advanced by Judiciary, depending on when Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell is released from hospitalization. Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have previously opposed some items on Trump’s agenda.

Blanche’s confirmation will also be up to a handful of lame duck or retiring Republican senators whose future Senate careers were thwarted by Trump. They include Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Bill Cassidy, R-La. Both recently lost primaries when Trump endorsed their opponents.

Blanche is a former federal prosecutor who switched to private law, eventually starting his own firm and representing Trump. 

Blanche defended Trump during a New York state jury trial on charges that the then-former president falsified business records when he paid adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump was found guilty on 34 felony charges in May 2024. 

Blanche then served as the deputy at DOJ in the second Trump administration, confirmed on a party-line vote, before being named acting AG after the departure in early June of Pam Bondi.

Trump and the Republican-led Senate have elevated the president’s former personal lawyers to high-level positions in the U.S. judicial system during his second term in office. 

In addition to appointing Blanche, the president nominated former defense attorney Emil Bove to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. 

The Senate, in a narrow 50-49 vote, confirmed Bove for the lifetime position in June 2025. Collins and Murkowski broke with Republicans to oppose Bove’s confirmation.

‘Anti-weaponization’ fund

Blanche caught heat from both sides of the aisle during the hourslong hearing for signing off on the “anti-weaponization” fund for claimants he previously described as “victims of lawfare.” 

Critics quickly pounced on what they called a “slush fund” for its likely future payouts to pardoned Jan. 6, 2021 defendants, including those who assaulted police officers during the attack aimed at halting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Blanche maintains the administration scrapped the fund.

The acting attorney general sidestepped questions on whether he approved of Trump’s blanket pardon of roughly 1,600 defendants implicated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“The Constitution gives the president the full power to pardon anybody for any reason,” Blanche said.

“You don’t question his decision?” ranking member Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked.

Blanche repeated his answer.

Cornyn, displaying a blown-up copy of the IRS settlement deal, questioned Blanche on why the Department of Justice has not formally ended the fund.

“Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund?” asked Cornyn.

“No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward. There’s no modification. It’s just, it never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account,” Blanche replied.

“I’m under oath today, and I’ve said it’s dead repeatedly,” Blanche later said to Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat.

Tillis said, “I think that the courts are probably going to deal with it. But why should we waste the court capacity on this issue? If I could walk to the Senate floor with an agreed-to piece of text coming from the administration that just renders this whole thing dead?”

Blanche said the administration does “not object (to) that path.”

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, defended the arrangement to drop Trump’s IRS lawsuit as a “pretty darn good deal” that was settled “without the president receiving a single penny.”

Blanche met with angry Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill May 21 to sell the settlement fund as several protested it by holding out on the passage of a massive immigration funding bill to support Trump’s mass deportation agenda for the remainder of his term.

Blanche told House appropriators during a June 2 hearing that the administration would not move forward with the fund, but said he didn’t know “what that means to sign documents reversing” the fund.

Trump tax immunity

Trump’s settlement to drop his IRS lawsuit also indefinitely absolves him and his two plaintiff sons, Don Jr. and Eric, as well as the private Trump Organization, from government prosecutions and tax enforcement.

Democrats seized on the disparity. “Everyone in this room, all of us on this side, we have to follow the tax laws of the United States, and if we don’t, we can be held responsible for it to the point of even criminal prosecution,” Durbin said. 

“Why did you decide that President Trump and his family and their businesses should be exempt from that same responsibility?” the Illinois Democrat asked.

Blanche said the agreement was “typical” of settlements with the IRS, and that the agreement “included release of any past audits. It does not give any protection to the president, his family, or his organizations for any taxes they file.”

“It’s hard to explain to the American people that no one is above the law when that type of document was signed by you,” Durbin replied.

The Florida federal judge in the IRS case on Monday slammed Trump’s settlement with his own administration as using the presidency to “manipulate” the courts.

Epstein files

As expected, senators questioned the Justice Department’s handling of the legally mandated release of government files on Epstein, a process that critics and victims say fell short of full transparency and protection of victims’ identities.

Blanche defended the department’s “Herculean” effort in reviewing millions of documents related to the government’s federal investigation of Epstein 

“There were mistakes that were made, and so approximately 1% of the redactions had to be fixed after we released the Epstein files,” Blanche said. 

“Whenever we learned that any victim’s name had been improperly not redacted, we immediately took the document down and fixed it as soon as we could. That doesn’t excuse the mistakes of which I take responsibility, but it does mean that we tried to fix them,” Blanche said.

Durbin asked for a commitment that Blanche personally meet in the next month with 10 Epstein victims present at the hearing. Blanche said a sex trafficking prosecutor in his office is willing to meet any time, and that he is precluded from doing so because of ongoing litigation.

“We will never not talk to victims. We will never not do everything we can to prosecute anybody that committed any crimes against any of these women. … Any victim, if they’re here today, I would encourage them or their lawyers to meet with the FBI,” Blanche said.

“I think you ought to be in the room,” Durbin said.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said he was “stunned” at Blanche’s refusal to meet personally with victims.

“But you did meet with Ghislaine Maxwell,” Booker said, referring to Blanche’s July 2025 meeting with the convicted sex trafficker and Epstein co-conspirator shortly before she was moved to a prison with less security.

Epstein survivors submitted six letters to the committee opposing Blanche’s nomination, and Durbin also submitted for the record a letter from 1,200 former career DOJ employees who served for both parties warning against confirming Blanche.

When prompted by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to apologize to victims in the room, Blanche said his “heart breaks for every victim of any sexual crime, whether involving Mr. Epstein or somebody else.”

Pivoting the subject to a campaign refrain of Republicans, Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., said she appreciated Blanche’s “commitment” to the Epstein victims and that she wished Democrats “had that same level of conviction” for “families of those who have lost loved ones at the hands of illegal aliens.”

Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, entered a handful of letters in support of Blanche’s confirmation, including from law enforcement associations.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce approved — nearly along party lines — each of the package’s 10 bills that would permanently transfer several of Education’s functions to other departments. 

The measure, largely reflecting many of the interagency agreements, or IAAs, Education has signed with other agencies, signifies a sweeping effort from Republicans in Congress to carry out the Trump administration’s plan to do away with the 46-year-old department as part of the president’s quest to return education “back to the states.” 

That drive continues, though much of the oversight and funding of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.

But the legislation faces an uncertain fate. Even if passed in the full U.S. House down the line, it would face steep odds in the narrowly GOP-controlled Senate. 

The upper chamber requires at least 60 senators to advance a bill past the filibuster, and Republicans hold just 53 seats.

Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the House panel, lauded the package as the “first step toward ending the Department of Education’s reign over our nation’s education system,” during his panel’s markup. 

The Michigan Republican added that the legislation advances Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s “vision for an education system that empowers families, students, workers and local communities.” 

McMahon said “today marks a major step by Congressional leaders to cement the Trump Administration’s historic reforms to right-size the federal role in education,” in a statement after the package advanced out of the committee. 

Other departments to take over

Under multiple bills, the Department of Labor would manage Education’s programs surrounding elementary and secondary education; postsecondary education; and career, technical and adult education — mirroring earlier IAAs. 

In another piece of legislation, the Treasury Department would manage Education’s federal student aid functions, a nod to a March agreement Education signed with Treasury to take over its responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt.

That agreement marked the first step in a multiphase process toward Treasury taking on Education’s entire roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

Under other bills in the package, the State Department would manage Education’s international education and foreign language studies programs, as well as its foreign gift and contract reporting — also mirroring earlier agreements. 

Reflecting additional IAAs, the Department of Health and Human Services would manage Education’s accreditation for foreign medical schools; functions regarding child care access for low-income parents in postsecondary education; and family engagement programs for elementary and secondary education. 

The Interior Department would also manage tribal education and job training programs under the package. 

Notably, the 10-bill package does not include any efforts to transfer Education’s responsibilities regarding special education programs and civil rights enforcement to other agencies. 

In perhaps the Trump administration’s most far-reaching attempts yet to dismantle the Education Department, the agency in June said HHS will administer programs under the Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, while civil rights enforcement under its Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, will be transferred to the Department of Justice. 

Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the panel, said that the committee’s move to not consider either of the two actions in the package was possibly because “even my colleagues recognize how politically unpalatable such transfers would be.” 

‘Pain and suffering’

Meanwhile, the legislative package drew fierce pushback from congressional Democrats on the committee, who offered up a slew of amendments to the bills in an attempt to block the dismantling. 

Scott, a Virginia Democrat, said “it’s difficult to articulate how impractical these proposals are, to say nothing of the pain and suffering they’ll inflict on students, educators and their communities, if they were to become law.” 

He pointed to the GOP’s objective of stripping down the department as part of its intent to “return education to the states,” saying these proposals “will actually contribute to the creation of miles of bureaucratic red tape, inconsistent education policy and enforcement across the federal government and a significant waste of the taxpayers’ money.” 

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici said the bills under consideration “demonstrate that Republicans in Congress know that the Department of Education lacks the authority to transfer offices and programs to other federal agencies without congressional action, and are now trying to cover for the unlawful actions already taken.” 

The Oregon Democrat, who introduced an impeachment resolution against McMahon in June, added that the secretary “has said that it is her mission to shut down the Department of Education, something she does not have the authority to do, but that is exactly what she is doing, disguised as a series of interagency agreements.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nor was the ranking an evaluation of which state had attracted the most high-quality jobs. It was something less concrete: a measure of which states were best positioned according to the criteria on which states market themselves.

For their part, critics said the rankings don’t pay proper attention to the severe financial difficulties in which millions of now Ohioans find themselves.

Big party

Last Thursday, Ohio Republicans were triumphal about the top ranking.

The CNBC broadcast segment started with Ohio State football legend Archie Griffin declaring, “We have a winning team in Ohio, both on and off the field.” 

It cut to a celebration at the Boathouse at Columbus’s Confluence Park, replete with drone shots of Ohio State cheerleaders and an interview with Gov. Mike DeWine.

Of the many press releases that went out, Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman issued one crediting policies enacted since the start of the GOP’s total legislative and executive rule in 2011.

“I want to congratulate the many members of the Ohio General Assembly who have supported legislation over the last 15 years that led to this accomplishment,” Huffman said in a written statement. 

He went on, “Through responsible policies and investments, including the elimination of Ohio’s estate tax, flattening the personal income tax, business income deductions, regulatory reform, free market energy creation, substantial support for vocational training, tools for state and local economic development, and much more, we have continued to make Ohio the best place to live, work, raise a family, and do business.”

However, the think tank Policy Matters Ohio has said that many of those and other changes since 2005 have favored corporations and the wealthy while cutting $17 billion in state tax revenue. 

Critics said that leaves huge numbers of moderate-income Ohioans facing an affordability crisis with less support from the state — and shouldering more of the burden to pay for services that remain.

“Ohio’s No. 1 ranking may be good news for businesses, but it doesn’t reflect the reality that many of the most common jobs in the state pay too little for even a single person to get by — and far too little to raise a family,” Policy Matters Executive Director Hannah Halbert said in a written statement. “Ohioans still struggle with unaffordable childcare, gaps in health coverage, and wages that have not kept pace with inflation.”

Method and metrics

The stark disagreement over the benefits of GOP economic policies raises an obvious question: When CNBC rated Ohio best for business, what was it seeking to measure?

“We’re looking at this through the lens of somebody who is selecting a site, whatever it is, a plant or a data center, how they’re making their decisions,” Scott Cohn, the CNBC reporter who covered the story, said in an interview. “That’s how this all began back in 2007 — why are companies choosing this state over that state?”

But when the CNBC team did its evaluation, it didn’t attempt an entirely objective look at which states were best for business. Rather, it based its analysis on how states were promoting themselves. 

The study determined what states’ economic-development arms collectively mentioned most in materials promoting their states. Then it sought to measure which states did best in providing those things. 

Year by year, states change how they promote themselves to businesses. The CNBC study assesses the pitches of all 50 states each year to decide what weight to give to each of the 10 criteria on which it ranks individual states.

This year, the top category was infrastructure — adequate roads, bridges, electricity, and “shovel ready” sites on which to build. And, in addition to available water, a major factor in Ohio’s success wasn’t the consequence of any government policy, it was an accident of geography.

“We go through and see how the states are marketing themselves,” Cohn said. “We’re going to their websites and tallying up what they’re mentioning the most, the things that we lump into the category of infrastructure. 

“So for example — and this really helps Ohio — almost every state… says ‘We have X amount of population within a day’s drive. Well, you can measure that, and Ohio has the most. Ohio has 143 million people within a day’s drive, more than any other state. So it gets some points for that within the category of infrastructure.”

Conversely, the rankings de-emphasize other criteria not because they’re unimportant to businesses, but because state marketing materials don’t make a big deal out of them. 

For example, a top-notch public-education system is clearly important to businesses in at least two ways: It trains their future workforce and it’s a big selling point for firms trying to attract talent.

Yet when CNBC weighted its 10 criteria, education was second-to-last, receiving only 4% of the overall ranking. 

“We look at what the states are talking about,” Cohn said. “For whatever reason, some states talk about (education) a lot, and a lot of states talk about, ‘We have a great university system.’ That counts toward a state’s weight. But it’s not what the states are saying in aggregate.”

Whack-a-mole

Cohn explained that good or bad performance on certain criteria can have the opposite effect on others.

“It’s kind of like a game of whack-a-mole, you can lower the business cost,” he said. “That’s great for businesses, but in the process you’re lowering wage costs and you’re doing all sorts of things that affect individuals. And if you have an affordability issue with individuals, well maybe you’re going to have a problem with workforce.”

As Cohn pointed out to DeWine during their interview, Ohio ranks poorly for workforce — 35th. 

“It’s a glaring weak spot,” Cohn told the governor. “Not just because the workers are not here, but because they’re not coming and many are leaving.”

In addition, because weighting depends solely on what states’ marketers think is important, many Ohioans — and maybe some businesses — could disagree with their priorities.

For example, Ohio ranked No. 1 for its low cost of doing business, which as the fifth-highest criterion, made up 11.4% of the ranking. 

Low wages helped Ohio in that regard, but Cohn explained that they hurt states in the cost-of-living category.

“Lower wage costs counts toward the cost of doing business, but maybe it comes back to bite them on cost of living,” he said.

However, because state marketers don’t emphasize it, an affordable cost of living ranked dead last, making up just 2% of the state’s overall rating.

In other words, the rankings don’t say there’s no affordability crisis in Ohio. They say that as a group, state economic marketers don’t consider that a priority when they’re selling their states.

Who wins?

So do the rankings vindicate or repudiate the economic policies Ohio Republicans have implemented since 2011?

“Neither,” Cohn said. “We gather up the data through the lens that I told you about — looking at where is a company going to locate. And if what everybody wants in their politicians is the party that’s going to attract the most business — and that’s a perfectly valid thing to want — then this says a lot about what Ohio is doing in that regard.”

But, he added, “If they’re looking for areas where the state doesn’t do as well, it speaks for itself. It’s not the best state for education. It’s not the top state for workforce. It’s not the top state for quality of life. It’s not bad, but it’s not anywhere near the top. It’s a study of the top states for business. It’s not a study of the top states for workers. But there are areas in there that you can look to, like quality of life or whatever else.”

The November midterm elections are approaching. And Ohio Democrats said that if Republicans want to use the CNBC ranking to say the economy is good for average Ohioans, they’re ignoring reality.

U.S. Sen. “Jon Husted and Ohio Republicans are bragging about the economy while hardworking Ohioans are struggling more than ever,” Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Tony Wen said in an email. “Under their leadership, inflation is up, gas prices have skyrocketed, and more than 160,000 Ohioans have lost their healthcare — but Husted still thinks everything is great. Ohioans know better, and they’ll hold him accountable in November.”

For his part, Husted took to X to tout the CNBC ranking. 

“This did not happen by accident—it has been decades of focus,” he wrote. “We’ve cut taxes, eliminated three business taxes, and invested in infrastructure and our workforce. We also made Ohio the easiest and lowest cost state to do business.”

Asked for a response to Wen’s criticism, Husted Communications Director Amy Natoce didn’t answer — other than to attempt to attack the credibility of the Ohio Capital Journal.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The study shows the percentage of Ohio students not proficient in reading has increased 4% from 2019 and Ohio students not proficient in math has jumped 6% since 2019. 

Despite those increases, Ohio fared better than the rest of the country — 70% of American fourth graders were not proficient in reading and 73% of American eighth graders were not proficient in math, according to the report.

Ohio ranked 27th in the nation overall, 12th in the nation for education, 26th for health, 27th for economic well-being, 27th for child well-being, and 33rd for family and community, according to the study released last month. This is the 37th edition of the foundation’s data book. 

“Our current rankings reveal the urgent need for policies that reduce child poverty, improve educational outcomes, and expand health coverage,” Ohio’s Children’s Defense Fund Director John Stanford said in a statement. 

“We cannot afford to wait—our children’s futures depend on it.” 

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year, one year after the law was enacted through the 2023 state budget.

The science of reading is based on decades of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine often touts the science of reading and lists it among some of the most important work he has done for Ohio’s children.

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level in the 2024-25 school year compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent state report cards that were released in September.

DeWine recently signed an academic interventions bill into law which requires school districts or individual schools to provide academic interventions for free to students who scored at a limited skill level in a state assessment test in math or English language arts, or both.

Ohio high school students not graduating on time declined — going from 18% in 2018-19 to 12% in 2023-24, according to the report. Nationally, 13% of high school students did not graduate on time. 

There were 165,000 Ohio children ages 3 and 4 not in school from 2020-24 — going from 55% from 2015-19 to 59% from 2020-24, the study said. The national rate was 54%. 

The study showed Ohio’s child poverty rate decreased since 2019 — dropping from 18% to 16% in 2024. 

There were 417,000 Ohio children living in poverty in 2024; 661,000 children whose parents lack secure employment, 632,000 children living in households with a high housing cost burden; and 38,000 teenagers not in school and not working, according to the report.  

Nationally, 15% of children were living in poverty.

Health

Nearly 9% of babies in Ohio were born with low birth weight in 2024 — totaling 11,158, according to the study. 

About 152,000 Ohio children (6%) did not have health insurance — a percentage point better from 2019. About 1.4 million Ohio children are enrolled in Medicaid. 

The percentage of Ohio children 10-17 who were overweight or obese dropped from 35% in 2018-19 to 31% in 2023-24, the study says. The national rate was 30%. 

Economic well-being

Nearly 14% of Ohio children are receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, the study says. 

About a third of Ohio children were living in single-parent families — totaling 852,000, according to the study. This is a decrease from 37% in 2019. 

Ten percent of Ohio children lived in high-poverty areas during 2020-24, a decrease from 12% in 2019. 

Nationally, 7% of children were living in high-poverty areas. 

“Every number in this report tells a story about Ohio’s children—stories of resilience, disparities, and potential,” Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio Policy and Research Manager Christian Davis said in a statement. 

“It’s time for Ohio to prioritize investments in early childhood, education, health, and family stability. Our children’s well-being should be a shared responsibility and a top priority for all policymakers.”

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

And yet, Ohio’s leading Republican politicians can never say this. They can never acknowledge this basic fact.

They can never be honest with the public, or in public, about that very simple truth.

“Donald Trump lost the 2020 Election.” They can not say it. They’re too scared, too cowardly, too cynical, and too ethically corrupted to say it.

Every time they refuse to acknowledge the truth, they debase themselves as human beings, they debase America as a functioning democracy, and they disgrace themselves and their family name for all of history.

In those moments, all of their most amoral political instincts take hold. It’s pathetic.

Trump’s claims of voter fraud were rejected by 60 courts, Fox News had to pay out $787 million over false stories about vote rigging. That doesn’t matter. None of it matters. No fact matters. They’ve fully embraced epistemological nihilism.

But many go much further than refusing to admit a clear fact.

They repeat falsehoods. They stoke distrust. They play demagogue and paint fellow Americans as enemies. They fan the flames of wild-eyed conspiracy theories no matter the destruction it’s doing to the American Republic, because they know the manipulation is useful for them politically.

Without evidence, they make outrageous allegations of fraud, and then when they have sufficiently riled up the rubes who believe their lies, they claim the American people are “concerned about the safety of elections.”

Then, due to concerns based on their own lies, they carry out an endless string of vast, sweeping policy changes that make it far more difficult for millions of American citizens to vote.

In November 2020, then-president Donald Trump lost a free and fair election. He spent the next two-and-a-half months losing court cases over it and lying relentlessly to the American people.

The relentless lies culminated in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol attempting to stop constitutional business and overturn the results of the free and fair election.

Trump was impeached by the U.S. House for the second time because of the attempted insurrection and violent transfer of power he instigated, but Republicans in the U.S. Senate refused to convict him for it and he retained his stranglehold over the Republican Party.

Instead of holding Trump accountable for the most egregious betrayal of American democracy ever carried out by a U.S. president, Republican politicians have spent the last six years trying to justify his lies with more lies and punishing voters with new laws restricting their access to the franchise.

In the 2020 Election, Ohio’s own hyperpartisan secretary of state found only 27 possible instances of voter fraud, which represents 0.0005% of ballots cast.

Voter fraud is not a problem in Ohio. The manufactured mass hysteria over the non-existent problem is a cynical political manipulation and nothing more.

What makes it such an absolute betrayal of American democracy is that these overt and blatant lies are being used to attack citizens’ most foundational right in a constitutional republic: the right to vote.

For more than half a decade now, based on lies, Ohio Republican politicians have overhauled elections and voting in Ohio.

They enacted the strictest voter ID law in the country.

They eliminated voters’ ability to use utility bills and bank statements for proof of residency or identification.

They eliminated early voting on the Monday prior to Election Day.

They limited which documents Ohioans could use to register to vote.

They limited curbside voting as strictly as possible so someone has to be disabled to the point they can’t walk into a polling place to use it.

They limited absentee ballot drop-boxes to one per county, and it doesn’t matter if there are 12,000 voters in that county or one million.

They limited who could return an absentee ballot for someone else.

They mandated new paperwork for any family member assisting relatives.

First they changed the grace period for absentee ballots post-marked by Election Day from having 10 days to actually arrive at boards of elections, down to four days. Then they eliminated the grace period entirely.

This summer, Ohio Republican lawmakers passed a bill to require photo ID for mail-in ballots, but it was vetoed by Gov. Mike DeWine, though the gerrymandered Republican supermajority is considering overriding his veto.

And even though they’ve already enacted the strictest voter ID law in the country, Republican lawmakers have put a duplicative constitutional amendment on the ballot this November in an effort to juice GOP turnout based on the election fraud fears Republicans have drummed up that are based on all their relentless lies about the 2020 Election.

The amendment actually goes further than the law by requiring photo ID but failing to include a provision for free ID to those who would need it.

Furthermore, it telegraphs a desire to eliminate early voting opportunities by asserting that lawmakers are not required to provide any opportunity for voting other than in-person at polling places on Election Day.

Eighty Ohioans testified against the proposed amendment and only two spoke for it. That didn’t matter. It never does. It could be 1,000 to zero. They don’t care. They passed it anyway. It will be on the ballot in November.

Maybe you think all these election changes are a good thing. Maybe you don’t. But what I can’t get over is that none of them have been made in good faith.

A problem didn’t exist. It was already very hard to cheat, but now voting in Ohio is much harder because of lies.

All of these restrictions on voters and changes to Ohio elections have been built on a mountain of the most shameless lies.

And all those lies are a direct and open attack on the health and wellbeing of American democracy itself.

It’s all so reprehensible and indicative of the absolute worst in people, I just wonder when this madness in America will end. How much more pain will it take? And what will be left for future generations when it’s finally over?

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

PJM, a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that manages the supply on the largest electricity grid in the nation, announced the results Tuesday of the auction held from late June to mid July. 

The $325-per-megawatt-day price for generating capacity in 2028 and 2029 is at the maximum price under a cap initially negotiated by Pennsylvania’s Shapiro administration last year after the 2024 auction closed at a record price of $269.92 per megawatt-day. 

The cap was extended by PJM at the request of a coalition of PJM-state governors and the Trump administration to cover the latest auction and one to be held in December for 2030 and 2031.

“These auction results show that demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply,” PJM President and CEO David Mills said. “At the same time, PJM recognizes how this supply-and-demand imbalance impacts the reliability of the system and costs for consumers. We are working with government and industry leaders on multiple fronts to restore that balance by bringing on new generation as fast as possible and managing the growth of new load on the grid.”

A combination of retiring fossil fuel power plants, increased electrification of transportation and industry and proposed data center development has caused peak forecasts to increase by 66,000 megawatts by 2036. That’s nearly 80 times the output of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which is set to reopen next year exclusively to power data centers.

“Demand growth is not going away. That is the driving story here,” said Patrick Cicero, the former Pennsylvania consumer advocate who now works with the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project.

PJM also announced Tuesday that the auction fell 6,831 megawatts short of the grid manager’s capacity goal, which is a larger deficit than in last year’s auction.

“Data center load growth is degrading grid reliability, and it’s raising prices to the Governor Shapiro-negotiated cap,” said Robert Routh, Pennsylvania state lead for climate and energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So, unless PJM and states take action, this picture will continue to worsen for the foreseeable future.”

But Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, said the price reflects the competitive electricity generating industry’s willingness to invest to meet the increased demand. Recent year-over-year record lows had discouraged investment in power supply, he said in a statement.  

“Competitive power suppliers are already responding,” Snitchler added. “New supply is coming; the issue now is to address getting it connected to the system as quickly as possible.

Among PJM’s responsibilities is vetting proposals for new power plants, transmission lines and other electric infrastructure and approving their connections to the grid. It has faced intense criticism for allowing a years-long backlog of projects to linger, causing some to drop out of the market. PJM notes it has made significant progress in reducing the backlog by prioritizing shovel-ready projects.

PJM’s primary role in managing the grid is to ensure that each of its 67 million customers has the least expensive electricity available for their location at any given time. But it also must ensure the supply is reliable. 

To do that, it holds auctions for power plant operators to bid to set the price to keep their generators standing by for the peak electricity demand that comes on the hottest and coldest days of the year.

Cicero, who spoke to reporters Tuesday, ahead of PJM’s announcement, said market dynamics indicated this month’s auction would close at or near the cap. 

The last two auctions have added around $16 billion to the cost of ensuring reliability, he said. And any additional generating capacity added in the last year have not been enough to appreciably increase capacity. As a result, the increased cost will remain in place into 2028 and 2029, he said. 

“These are flat prices that are going to remain high. It’s not necessarily another spike, but it’s really, really high prices remaining,” Cicero said.

While the relationship between the auction price and what consumers see on their electric bill is not direct, some Pennsylvania utilities have increased the rate they charge people who don’t shop for their electric rates – some by up to 20%.

“This has cost the average residential consumer in Pennsylvania somewhere in the neighborhood of $220 to $320 per year in additional costs on their bill,” he said.   

In addition to extending the price cap, PJM and its members from the electricity industry have been working on additional steps to isolate residential and small business customers from the demand brought by data centers, Routh said. 

One, sought by the PJM governors and the Trump administration, is another auction to fund increases in capacity and reliability by getting data center operators and other large load customers to purchase long-term commitments for electricity. 

Routh described it as a matchmaking venue for data centers and suppliers to meet and arrange to pay for new power supplies to be built “without raising prices for everyone else.”

That process faces the same challenges blocking new electricity supplies for everyone. Those include supply chain delays, long timelines for building new infrastructure and siting and permitting hurdles. A lack of money is not among the problems, Routh noted. 

“Tech companies, data center customers that have a need for power have deep pockets,” he said. “Any power plant that can get built these days should have no problem finding buyers and arranging financing.”

This story was originally produced by Pennsylvania Capital-Star, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio Secretary of State campaign-finance records show that Michael DeAscentis II and Melanie DeAscentis, both listed at the same New Albany address, each contributed $12,500 to the Ramaswamy campaign on June 5. DeAscentis is the chief executive of Nationwide Energy Partners, a Columbus-area submetering firm, and of the apartment developer Lifestyle Communities.

Submetering companies buy electricity in bulk and resell it to tenants in apartments and condominiums, often adding fees. The arrangement has drawn complaints for years over billing practices and the fact that submetered residents cannot shop for their own power supplier or use state utility-assistance programs.

The contributions to Ramaswamy came the same week DeAscentis directed money to two of the Statehouse’s most powerful figures. Records show he gave $16,615 to House Speaker Matt Huffman on June 5 — a contribution that lists his employer as Nationwide Energy Partners — and $10,000 to Sen. Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, on June 8. Wilkin helped shape the bill’s rate-cap provision and, according to reporting by the Columbus Dispatch and Ohio Capital Journal, chairs the Senate committee that handles utility legislation.

At issue was House Bill 173, sponsored by Rep. David Thomas, R-Jefferson. The bill would have exempted submetering resellers from Ohio’s full definition of a public utility while leaving them under some oversight by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. It followed a unanimous April ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court — written by Justice Patrick DeWine, the governor’s son — that companies buying and reselling power at a profit meet the legal definition of a utility.

Supporters, including Nationwide Energy Partners, argued the bill added consumer protections and capped submetered rates below the standard utility rate. Critics countered that it created a weaker, second tier of regulation for the industry than the court had just required.

DeWine vetoed the bill on Wednesday, June 24, siding with those critics. “While this bill does contain some consumer protections,” he wrote, “the submetering model, itself, is fundamentally flawed.” He objected that submetered customers could not choose their own generation supplier, could not access the state’s Percentage of Income Payment Program for low-income households, and could be billed for electricity used in common areas. “If this bill became law, Ohio, for the first time, would be legitimizing and legalizing this flawed submetering model,” he wrote.

Ramaswamy, whose running mate is Senate President Rob McColley, holds no vote in the legislature and had no formal role in the bill’s passage or veto. There is no indication he took any action on the measure. As governor, however, he would sign or veto legislation like it — and the donations place the head of a company directly affected by the bill among his campaign’s June contributors.

The veto leaves the Supreme Court’s ruling in place, meaning companies that buy and resell electricity at a profit remain regulated as public utilities. The bill’s sponsor has said he intends to keep working on submetering legislation, and lawmakers could attempt an override before the session ends in December.

The dispute lands as electricity costs climb across Ohio. Capacity prices in the regional PJM grid, which feeds northwest Ohio, have set records in back-to-back auctions — rising from about $29 per megawatt-day two years ago to more than $329 — driven largely by surging demand from data centers. Those costs flow through to residential bills, keeping the price of power a central concern for voters heading into the November election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a post to social media, Trump called the practice of federal immigration officers conducting enforcement during traffic stops “one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective” tools. 

The Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign has led to an uptick in people killed by immigration officers, including at traffic stops.  

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal immigration officers to pause vehicle-related enforcement after the killings of 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and 25-year-old Johan Sebastián in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday. 

Both men were stopped in their vehicles when federal immigration officers shot and killed them. Neither was an initial target of immigration enforcement, DHS said.

Monday’s shooting prompted a demand from Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is in the midst of a tight reelection race, for ICE to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

Trump said Democrats wanted the pause on immigration enforcement at traffic stops.

“The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch,” he said. “I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about the president’s directive. White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.

Congress calls for action

Monday’s shooting sparked calls for action among lawmakers, with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus advocating for dismantling of ICE and Maine’s congressional delegation pressing an independent watchdog to conduct an expedited investigation.

“Given the gravity of the situation and the understandable anxiety within the Biddeford community, we urge you to prioritize this investigation,” the Maine delegation wrote to DHS’s Office of Inspector General. 

“Timely and factual answers will be critical to providing closure for the grieving community and ensuring that federal law enforcement operations are conducted safely, lawfully, and in a manner that respects public safety.”

Collins and independent Sen. Angus King also requested the Department of Justice collaborate with state and local law enforcement authorities to investigate the fatal shooting.

International outrage

Sebastián was a Colombian immigrant with legal work authorization. Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had been in the United States for decades and was the father of three U.S. citizen children.

Both of their killings sparked outrage in their communities, as well as from the leaders of Mexico and Colombia.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called Sebastián’s death, “a murder of a Colombian, a Latin American, at the hands of the US government.”

In a social media post written in Spanish, Petro said he expects to hear from Trump about the shooting. 

“They killed him for believing him to be an inferior being without rights, and as a person, he had all the rights conferred on a human being simply for being born, and he was a citizen with rights in the US,” he said. 

He added that “ICE is an organization that must be denounced on a worldwide scale.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Monday that her government will file complaints to the Justice Department relating not only to Salgado Araujo’s death, but in states where Mexican nationals have died in U.S. federal detention centers or during immigration enforcement.

“I don’t think this situation appears acceptable to anyone,” she said, according to the Texas Tribune. “This is an issue for all Mexicans.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 47-page document, once adopted by both chambers, would send instructions to four House committees to draft bills that would be bundled into a roughly $95 billion package. 

• The Administration Committee could provide a maximum of $10 billion that would likely create a grant program for states that institute voter identification requirements.

• The Agriculture Committee would be able to spend no more than $12 billion for farm aid.

• The Armed Services Committee could write a bill that gives the Defense Department a maximum of $60 billion to account for increased costs related to the war with Iran and other military actions taken by the Trump administration. 

• The Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would be able to approve up to $10 billion in new spending.

House floor votes as soon as next week

The House Budget Committee is scheduled to debate and vote on the budget resolution Thursday. It’s possible that is followed by floor debate and a vote to send the resolution to the Senate as soon as next week. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., could hold a floor vote on the budget resolution in that chamber before its lawmakers depart for their August recess, though it wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday whether there is enough support among GOP senators to approve the measure. 

Thune has been skeptical about using for a third time the complex budget reconciliation process the party used to enact its “big, beautiful” law last year and provide $70 billion in additional spending for immigration enforcement earlier this year. 

Senate debate on the budget resolution is significantly different than in the House. It requires a marathon amendment voting session that typically lasts overnight and leads to tough votes for Republican senators facing reelection this November. By contrast, House floor debate likely won’t include votes on any amendments. 

Elections and defense

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., posted to social media shortly after the budget resolution was released that the reconciliation process would provide a way for Congress to change how elections work and appropriate more funding for defense. 

“Safeguarding American elections and strengthening our national defense are the most basic responsibilities of Congress and are supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans,” Johnson wrote, before criticizing Democrats for voting against Republicans’ SAVE America Act.

It’s unlikely Republicans will be able to include the full text of that bill, which would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot, given the rules of the budget reconciliation process. 

Every provision in the package must have an impact on federal spending, revenue, or the debt that isn’t deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian.

House Budget Committee ranking member Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., wrote in a statement he plans “to fight like hell to make sure taxpayer dollars are being used to lower costs and make life better for American families, not to bankroll Trump’s giveaways to billionaires and endless wars overseas.”

“Republicans have already made life worse for American families and added trillions to the national debt,” Boyle wrote. “Now, this ‘America Last’ budget would add tens of billions more to the national debt to fund the most unpopular war in American history.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Cities in Ohio and across the country are debating how they use license plate reader cameras made by Flock Safety – but municipalities aren’t the only powerful institutions using the devices.

Several Ohio universities also partner with the controversial company. That includes two of the state’s largest and most influential colleges: Ohio State University in Columbus and Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. 

Flock cameras snap photos of passing vehicles before storing them in the company’s online database. The company says the cameras’ owners control who can access those images. They may choose to share them with participating law enforcement agencies through Flock’s data-sharing network.

University officials say having the cameras on campus helps keep students safe.

But critics are concerned about how – and why – the data is being captured and stored. They say the technology puts immigrant communities at risk if information captured by the cameras gets turned over to federal immigration agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE). 

Case Western Reserve student Gregg Chase compared his school’s use of the technology to a “panopticon,” or a prison setup where a guard can see all prisoners at once.  

It is “something that a lot of students, myself included, find deeply disturbing,” he said. 

Ohio State enters fifth year with license plate reader cameras

Ohio State officials confirmed the use of license plate reader cameras – without citing Flock by name. 

The state’s flagship university began using these cameras in 2021 as part of its “crime reduction efforts both on and off campus,” according to a spokesperson. Those efforts also included more police patrols and upgraded lights.

“The safety of our campus community is our number one priority,” officials said. Nearly 59,000 students enrolled at the Columbus campus this spring. 

University officials declined to answer Signal Statewide’s specific questions about its relationship with Flock Safety, including how many of the company’s devices are currently on university grounds. WOSU reported the university had more than 60 Flock devices amid its more than 5,000 security cameras in 2023. 

Officials said Ohio State shares information with Columbus law enforcement “related to crimes.”  The city can also access the university’s cameras. 

Columbus City Council is hosting a hearing on the city’s cameras next month. It comes after a recent audit found “thousands of possibly immigration enforcement-related searches” made by departments outside the city’s police department, according to the Columbus Dispatch. 

Flock Safety says it does not share customer data with ICE. The company says local customers retain control over images captured by their devices. Those individual groups may choose to share them with other agencies, including federal authorities. 

Case Western Reserve’s Flock contract runs through 2027

Case Western Reserve University officials said its police department uses Flock cameras “for crime prevention and forensic investigation.”

A contract with the company runs through next year and is in place “for license plate reader technology only,” they wrote in a statement to Signal Statewide. 

“Flock data is only shared with pre-determined, specific local police agencies when active case numbers are provided, and in accordance with all other aspects of our policy,” officials said. “The university does not share data with federal agencies.”

Case Western Reserve did not answer questions asking to name those law enforcement groups or to share how many cameras it operates on its private campus in Cleveland’s University Circle neighborhood. The university enrolled about 12,400 students last fall. 

Cleveland City Council appears ready to extend its controversial Flock contract this week. Signal Cleveland reports the deal could have some changes, including publicly sharing information about how police use the technology.

Some Case Western Reserve students want to see the university drop Flock

Chase, the Case Western Reserve student, first clocked the university’s Flock cameras after arriving on campus for their freshman year last fall. They said their interest – and concerns – grew when ICE agents fatally shot two people in Minnesota in January. 

Chase said they worry about things such as privacy issues, including how photos captured by the cameras are used, and holes in the company’s technology.  But they said their biggest concern is for the safety of the university’s international students. 

The most recent federal data finds about 11% of Case Western Reserve’s undergraduates are non-U.S. residents. 

“I want those amazingly diverse friends of mine to be able to feel safe on their college campus, and I know that right now they don’t,” he said.  

Chase is a member of Case Western Reserve’s chapter of the Ohio Student Association, a progressive statewide advocacy group. They’re partnering with a cybersecurity-focused student organization to try to convince the university to terminate its relationship with Flock, including by not renewing any existing contracts or entering into any new agreements.  

Chase said the groups are not asking the university administration to totally get rid of security cameras. They said the devices “have a meaningful place in creating campus safety.” Instead, they think the university should develop and manage its own network of cameras. 

“We want that system to be managed locally, to be secure, and to be actually accountable to students, faculty, staff and the broader community around the campus,” said Chase. 

Other colleges in Ohio, nationwide work with Flock

Public outcry caused at least one other Ohio university to stop working with Flock. Kent State didn’t move forward with the company after a pilot program ended this spring.   

“The administration heard from members of the Kent Campus community that, for some, the cameras made them feel less secure rather than more secure,” university officials wrote in May. “That feedback was meaningful and informed the university’s decision to end the program.” 

At least 75 colleges nationwide use Flock cameras, according to a March 2026 report by the college sports newsletter FOIAball. 

The University of Akron appears on that list, though university officials told Signal Statewide they have none of the cameras on campus. Officials said they do have an account with Flock Safety, which gives them the ability to access the cameras run by the City of Akron. 

Across the state, Ohio University and Cleveland State University each said the campuses have no Flock cameras or relationship with the company. The University of Cincinnati did not respond to a request for information.

Signal Ohio is a nonprofit news organization covering government, education, health, economy and public safety.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The image — an Ohio parade in the morning, a transatlantic jet by night — is the kind of thing campaigns are built to avoid. But it is also, in miniature, the argument of this entire race. Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and 2024 presidential candidate who won the Republican nomination on May 5, is asking Ohioans to hand him a state that his own record keeps holding at arm’s length: a fortune built on a drug that failed, a company he moved out of Ohio, a public verdict that American culture is “mediocre,” and a campaign flown largely at 40,000 feet. He says none of that is the real story. “I know the American Dream exists because I’ve lived it right here, in the state where I was born and raised,” he said the night he won the primary. “I will never quit on Ohio.”

He faces Democrat Amy Acton, the physician and former state health director, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in what a July Siena College poll found to be a dead heat — 47% to 47%. In a state that has not elected a Democratic governor in 20 years, that alone is remarkable, and it is why Ramaswamy’s record is under a magnifying glass. What follows is that record, assembled in one place.

The fortune: a $5 million bet, an $8-figure payday and a drug that failed

Ramaswamy did not build his wealth in Ohio, and he did not build it slowly. In 2014 his holding company, Roivant Sciences, paid about $5 million upfront for intepirdine, an experimental Alzheimer’s treatment that GlaxoSmithKline had abandoned after four failed trials. Ramaswamy spun it into a startup, Axovant, and in 2015 took it public in what was then the largest biotech initial public offering in U.S. history, valuing the company at roughly $2.2 billion. Forbes, which put the 30-year-old on its cover as the “Boy in the Bubble,” reported he made at least $38 million in income the year of the IPO.

In September 2017, intepirdine failed its late-stage trial. Axovant’s stock fell more than 70% in a single day and never recovered; the company was eventually wound down. Ordinary investors who had bought the hype were left with next to nothing. Ramaswamy was not among them: Roivant owned roughly 78% of Axovant, and he held his personal stake through the parent, insulating himself from the wreckage below. Weeks before the failure, SoftBank had poured $1.1 billion into Roivant — not for the Alzheimer’s drug, which it reportedly doubted, but for the wider portfolio, according to reporting by The New York Times. And in 2020, according to a Fortune analysis of his tax returns by Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Ramaswamy made nearly $200 million reducing his Roivant stake in a deal with Sumitomo shortly before the company’s valuation shrank roughly fivefold after a SPAC-driven public listing.

Sonnenfeld, who founded Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute, told Fortune the fortune was built by “basically a version of pump and dump.” A 2023 Newsweek opinion column went further and called Ramaswamy a fraud outright. Those are other people’s words, and they carry limits worth stating plainly: no regulator has charged Ramaswamy with a crime, and he has never been convicted of one. Ramaswamy has called intepirdine his “single greatest failure” and framed the gamble as a bet on Alzheimer’s patients in a field where the vast majority of drugs fail — a defense drug developers make routinely. His biotech record is nonetheless the foundation on which everything else is built, including the “anti-woke” investment firm, Strive, that he launched after leaving Roivant.

The pandemic he runs against — and the one he lived

The centerpiece of Ramaswamy’s campaign is an attack on Acton’s pandemic record. He brands her “Dr. Lockdown,” accuses her of spreading “COVID ideology,” and says her role in Ohio’s 2020 response “disqualifies her” from office. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who endorsed Ramaswamy, has repeatedly said the closure orders were his own decisions, not Acton’s.

What the attack leaves out is where Ramaswamy himself stood in 2020. As Roivant’s CEO, he advised Ohio’s then-lieutenant governor, Republican Jon Husted — now a U.S. senator — on the state’s COVID response, according to a 2021 op-ed he wrote. A recording obtained by NBC4 that year shows him backing mandatory antibody testing and stay-at-home orders for Ohioans who lacked immunity, an approach sources close to the DeWine administration told the station went beyond what they considered acceptable. On an April 2020 podcast, Ramaswamy floated a national system in which people would be, in his word, “segregated” by immunity status — and one of his companies, the health-data firm Datavant, then worked to build the registry that would sort them, according to Associated Press reporting. Roivant also spent more than $70,000 lobbying the White House and NIH on COVID drug policy in 2020 and 2021.

The pandemic was also lucrative for the empire he founded. In March, Roivant’s subsidiary Genevant and its partner Arbutus announced a $2.25 billion settlement with Moderna over the unauthorized use of their vaccine-delivery technology — $950 million paid upfront in July, with the rest contingent on an appeals ruling. And in 2023, as he entered politics, Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove a reference to his service on Ohio’s “COVID-19 Response Team” from his page; he has called that a simple correction, saying the panel never met. The exculpatory facts belong high: the AP reports Ramaswamy supported vaccines during the pandemic, was vaccinated himself, and encouraged masks, while opposing government mandates for either; he says his registry idea was about restarting the economy; he holds no current role at Roivant and is not a party to the Moderna case. But critics, NBC4 reported, call the overall contrast “hypocritical” — a candidate attacking policies resembling ones he was privately advocating at the same time.

The company that left, and the culture he graded ‘mediocre’

On the economy, Ramaswamy’s critics do not need symbolism; there is a headquarters that packed up and left. In November 2024, Strive — the anti-ESG asset-management firm he co-founded in Columbus in 2022 — announced it was relocating its headquarters to Dallas, with most of its Columbus staff expected to move. Ramaswamy had stepped back from day-to-day leadership before the relocation, and the firm is run by CEO Matt Cole, but he co-founded it, and Ohio union leaders cite the move as evidence he will not fight to keep jobs in the state.

Then there is the culture itself. On Thursday, Dec. 26, 2024, while co-chairing Elon Musk’s federal Department of Government Efficiency, Ramaswamy posted a long argument on X defending why top tech firms “often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans.” The reason, he wrote, “comes down to the c-word: culture. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” A culture that “celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian,” he added, “will not produce the best engineers.” The post, which drew more than 100 million views, was about American culture broadly, not Ohioans by name, and it prompted criticism across the political spectrum, from Nikki Haley to Steve Bannon. Ramaswamy did not call Ohioans “lazy” in those words; that framing is how Acton and other Democrats summarize the post. It has stuck anyway — in part because he has not walked it back, and in part because he made his own fortune in an industry his former company staffed partly with the visa workers he was defending.

His language about everyday costs has followed the same pattern. In an April 2026 New York Times interview, he dismissed Democrats’ emphasis on affordability as a “buzzword,” pitching instead a tech-driven, even “spiritual” abundance. On an October 2024 podcast with Ezra Klein, before he was a candidate, he said he believed Medicare and Medicaid were mistakes — “particularly Medicaid,” he said, “the welfare state, without the work requirements attached to it.” A governor does not control Medicare, which is federal, and Ramaswamy has not proposed abolishing either program in Ohio; his campaign instead promotes a Medicaid-fraud crackdown. But roughly 3 million Ohioans rely on Medicaid and about 2.5 million on Medicare, and Acton has made the “mistake” remark a fixture of her stump speech.

The big ideas, and the math

Ramaswamy’s platform is a series of large promises whose arithmetic his opponents keep pressing. He wants to eliminate Ohio’s income tax, which brought in roughly $11 billion in the last fiscal year. He launched his campaign vowing to abolish property taxes, too, then retreated to a “rollback” toward pre-pandemic levels after DeWine called full elimination “devastating” for schools, police and fire; the conservative Tax Foundation estimated total elimination would cost the state about $20 billion a year, and the progressive group Innovation Ohio estimated his tax plan would blow a roughly $9.8 billion hole in the budget. He has not said in detail how he would fill it.

Some of his proposals have not survived contact with voters. Over the summer he floated a longer school day and a school year with no summer break; his campaign quietly deleted the video. During his 2023 presidential run he proposed raising the voting age to 25 for young people who could not pass a civics test or complete six months of military service. On higher education, he wants to consolidate Ohio’s public universities: “I love universities in Ohio. I want us to have the best universities. But we have too many of them,” he said in a video posted to Threads. “They need to be consolidated.” In a Columbus Dispatch op-ed and at a later campus event he named Cleveland State, the University of Akron, Kent State and Central State — a historically Black university — as struggling, and said, “I don’t think you should be funding subpar universities.” Even DeWine, his endorser, opposes closing or consolidating any of Ohio’s 14 public universities.

He has also made private-school vouchers a central plank and has suggested he might seek to dismantle Ohio’s public-school teachers’ unions while paying teachers on a merit system. The largest single donor to Victors Not Victims, the super PAC supporting him, is Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, who has given the group $20 million and is among the nation’s biggest funders of vouchers and charter schools. Yass and his allies call the cause “educational freedom”; critics, including school-policy researcher Josh Cowen, call his Ohio spending an effort to weaken public schools. Super PACs are barred from coordinating with campaigns.

The industries he would regulate — and profit from

The clearest conflict in Ramaswamy’s portfolio runs through his signature promise: to turn the Ohio River Valley into “the next Silicon Valley” by aggressively expanding AI data centers and the energy to power them. A May 2026 report from Innovation Ohio, drawn from his own ethics-disclosure filing, found he holds investments across nearly every tier of that industry — chipmakers, cloud operators, industrial real-estate trusts and cryptocurrency. His Dallas-based firm, Strive, has pivoted into a large Bitcoin treasury, and Bitcoin mining depends on precisely the energy-hungry infrastructure he wants to build. As governor, he would appoint the boards of JobsOhio, the Power Siting Board, the Public Utilities Commission and the Tax Credit Authority — the very bodies that subsidize, site and regulate data centers, an industry that has collected an estimated $2.5 billion in Ohio tax breaks since 2017. His two biggest super PAC backers, Yass and New York financier Ross Stevens, are deep in the crypto world.

Ramaswamy frames the buildout as a generational opportunity and says he will make “AI hyperscalers pay for their own energy usage.” Asked about the strain on rural communities, he has said Ohio must “protect our farmland” while producing more power. But he has not endorsed the study commission, the moratorium or the tax-code changes that rural, largely conservative communities — part of his own base — have demanded as data centers consume farmland and drive up electric bills. That resistance, and the conflicts, are the subject of separate reporting.

What the voters already decided

In November 2023, Ohioans wrote reproductive freedom — abortion up to fetal viability, along with contraception, fertility treatment and miscarriage care — into the state constitution, with about 57% voting yes. Ramaswamy opposed it. “I’m upset about this,” he said the day after, calling the amendment part of a “Republican culture of losing.” He describes himself as “unapologetically pro-life,” has praised six-week bans elsewhere as “progress,” and has called for ending federal funding of Planned Parenthood, though he opposes a federal ban and says abortion belongs to the states.

His campaign also touts the endorsement of the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, whose policy document opposes abortion in all cases, including rape and incest, states that it “cannot support any form of contraception,” and opposes in vitro fertilization. The group told NBC News that Ramaswamy assured its leaders he was “totally with” them; his campaign declined to say whether he agrees with its position on contraception. A governor cannot repeal a constitutional amendment, and Ohio’s protection stands regardless of who wins in November.

The money, and the distance

No candidate in Ohio history has spent like this. Ramaswamy has loaned his own campaign roughly $25 million — about 83% of what he raised in 2026 — on the way to what is on track to be the most expensive governor’s race the state has seen. Much of the movement happens by private jet: more than $780,000 in aircraft costs in 2025, including at least $500,000 to lease a plane through V Leasing LLC, a company Ramaswamy himself owns, as the Ohio Capital Journal first reported. His campaign also paid nearly $12,000 to an exclusive Puerto Rico resort, listed as travel. The campaign says he covers the aviation personally and that a jet lets him reach all 88 counties efficiently; TiffinOhio.net has not independently confirmed who was aboard the July 4 flight, which The Rooster tied to Ramaswamy through flight records and an anonymous aviation source.

The spending has also produced a formal complaint. On July 7, Democratic state Sen. Kent Smith asked Ohio’s campaign-finance regulators to examine $509,473 in payments the Ramaswamy–McColley committee made to American Express and reported only as monthly lump sums, rather than itemizing each purchase as state law requires. Here the balance matters, and it belongs up front: the secretary of state’s office said such errors are not uncommon, granted the campaign a one-month extension, and confirmed the campaign updated its filings before the complaint was filed; Acton’s campaign received a filing extension of its own this year; and Phil Richter, who led Ohio’s now-abolished Elections Commission for three decades, called the reporting manageable so long as documentation eventually follows. The disputed sum is less than 2% of the campaign’s spending. “Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio is in full compliance with all applicable Ohio campaign finance laws,” spokesperson Evan Machan said, adding that the campaign values transparency. What gives the episode an edge is where it landed: campaign-finance oversight was moved in 2026 into the office of Secretary of State Frank LaRose — who has endorsed Ramaswamy and is himself on the November ballot — after Republican lawmakers eliminated the independent commission Richter once ran.

The office as a way station

Ramaswamy has never held elected office of any kind. The first job he ran for was the presidency, in 2024; when that ended, he took a perch atop DOGE, which he left the day Trump was inaugurated; then he came home to run for governor. When he launched the campaign, he pledged to serve a full four-year term and rule out a 2028 presidential bid. Fifteen months later, The New York Times listed him among potential 2028 candidates, and he has not revisited the pledge since the primary. Even Attorney General Dave Yost, who briefly ran for the nomination himself, told NBC News that Ramaswamy had spent the previous year cycling through larger ambitions. To his critics, the jet to Paris on the night of the 250th is less a scandal than a tell — a glimpse of how a man ranks his obligations.

The complication his opponents leave out

There is a part of the story that cuts the other way, and honesty requires including it. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants who was raised Hindu and made a national brand attacking “identity politics,” has himself become a target of identity-based attacks — not from Democrats, but from the far-right fringe of his own party. His primary rival, Casey Putsch, repeatedly called him an “anchor baby” and “questionably American”; commentator Nick Fuentes and audiences at a Turning Point USA event have challenged his faith and his fitness to represent a majority-Christian state. Ramaswamy has answered those attacks by citing the Constitution. It is a reminder that the case against him is about his record and his choices, not his background.

What Ramaswamy says, and what comes next

Ramaswamy and his campaign reject the portrait his opponents paint. He points to his Ohio roots and his rise from a middle-class household as proof the American Dream is real, and he casts his agenda — lower taxes, cheaper energy, a technology boom and “centers of excellence” in higher education — as the fastest route to prosperity for a state he says has been left behind. He promises to grow Ohio to 15 million people. DeWine, in endorsing him, credited him with helping win business projects “from the coasts.” His running mate, Senate President Rob McColley, and the Ohio Republican Party are with him, and the polls say the race is his to win or lose. No court has found wrongdoing in any of it.

But an election is a hiring decision, and Ramaswamy is asking for the job with a resume Ohioans can now read in full: the drug that failed while he cashed out, the pandemic he profited from and now runs against, the company he sent to Texas, the culture he called mediocre, the universities he would thin, the industries he would both regulate and hold stock in, and the private jet that carried him away from the state’s 250th birthday. Whether that record reads as bold disruption or as a man who never quite wanted to be here is the question on the ballot. Ohioans answer it Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Associate Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett told lawmakers on the House panel that writes the court’s annual funding bill an increase is needed to ensure around-the-clock security wherever they go and for upgrades to the building.

“Maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one,” Barrett said. 

Kagan told members of the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee during the hearing that the court’s budget has increased, on average, by 15% per year during the last five years, mostly due to safety concerns and inflation. 

“I first joined the court in 2010. Our security was very different at the time. The Supreme Court police focused almost exclusively on protecting the building. And our (information technology) department focused on supporting the latest BlackBerry devices,” Kagan said. “I didn’t have a security team of my own, and I was accompanied by security personnel only when I participated in work-related public events.”

The court, she added, began increasing its security spending around 2017 after members of Congress encouraged the justices to take their safety more seriously. 

Security threats have steadily increased since then. 

“The Capitol Police Chief recently testified that threats against Congress are up 50% this year,” Kagan said. “The Supreme Court police expect a smaller but still very substantial 38% annual increase in threats this year, which follows a 25% increase last year.” 

Proposed $29M increase

Subcommittee Chairman David Joyce, R-Ohio, said that regardless of how the court rules on any given case, the justices “must be able to do their jobs without fear for their safety or their family’s safety.”

Maryland Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer, ranking member on the panel, said that given the “deeply divided country and increasingly violent rhetoric being directed at judges, Congress must provide sufficient funding to ensure the safety of all judicial personnel.”

The House subcommittee, he said, appropriated $207 million for the Supreme Court, which included a $28.9 million increase for security, in the bill it approved earlier this year. That legislation hasn’t yet gone to the floor for a vote. 

The Senate Appropriations Committee hasn’t yet released any of its dozen government funding bills for the next fiscal year ahead of the Oct. 1 shutdown deadline. 

Kagan rejects ‘shadow’ docket label

Lawmakers on the House panel pressed the justices about the court’s ethics policy and raised concerns over the increase in cases it takes up as part of its emergency, or shadow, docket. 

Hoyer said the justices deciding cases without a full briefing or oral arguments and then issuing a ruling with little or no explanation has had a negative impact on Americans’ trust in the court. 

Barrett noted that people “have long had the ability to seek interim relief from the court,” though she agreed with Hoyer that the justices have “seen a big change in the volume and the nature of such requests.”

Kagan responded she doesn’t believe it’s “appropriate” to refer to those cases as the shadow docket instead of the emergency or interim docket because the justices have done “a better job in the recent past” of “explaining ourselves at least to a moderate degree.” 

She added that a year ago she might have answered the question differently because the Supreme Court was providing such little explanation in those specific cases “that lower courts had a great deal of difficulty trying to figure out what” exactly the justices had addressed. 

“I don’t think that that’s so much a problem anymore,” Kagan said. “I think that as we’ve gotten more experienced in these constant requests that are coming to us for emergency relief, that we better recognize that at least sometimes there is a need for additional information. And we have issued opinions and sometimes majority and dissenting opinions accordingly.”

Ethics policy

Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, encouraged the justices to figure out a way to enforce the ethics policy the court instituted in 2023. 

Kagan testified the court “should work hard to try to figure out some enforcement system,” but emphasized any changes need to come from the justices themselves. 

“I will say that that’s an extremely difficult question for a pretty obvious reason, I think, which is that I don’t think that you would want an enforcement system that was controlled by the executive branch or by the legislature,” Kagan said. “And this is because of what you said in your opening statement about the importance of judicial independence.”

Barrett testified she was “completely committed to” the ethics code but that she was “less certain” about whether and how to enforce it. 

“I’m just not quite sure. The judiciary moves slowly. The court moves slowly. We have turtles everywhere because of that,” Barrett said. “And I think that if we had a body to enforce the code it would have to come from within the judiciary. And I just think then it’s a question of who selects the judges, how is the panel comprised. There’s just a lot of complexity.” 

Proposed screening center

The two justices testified before the Senate Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee in the afternoon. And while they addressed many of the same questions and concerns raised during the morning House hearing, they provided some additional details about security. 

The Supreme Court would like Congress to provide $6.5 million to begin the process of building an external security screening center, which Kagan said could be similar to the Capitol Visitor Center that sits underground just east of the building. 

“Right now visitors walk into the court and that’s where they are checked. That’s where they are sent through the magnetometer and checked for weapons and so forth,” Kagan said. 

As far as personnel, Kagan testified the Supreme Court has a goal of reaching 477 police officers but that the justices are “a ways away from that right now.”

“If we include people we get through contracting, we can probably do it within a couple of years,” Kagan said. “But in order to have our own employees get up to that mark, then we’re talking more about six years.”

Kagan was unable to answer a question from Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., about the types of training those police officers must complete and the facilities they would need. 

“I’m confident that the kind of training programs that we’ve put in place are good ones, but I can’t give you a whole lot of detail about that,” she said.  

Barrett told senators the need for more dedicated police officers comes, in part, from the U.S. Marshals Service telling the court months earlier than expected their officers could no longer provide security at the justices’ homes. 

“They themselves were just stretched thin,” Barrett said. “So we had always wanted to take it over ourselves, but we were forced to do that on a quicker timeline. And we are now fully doing it within the Supreme Court police through a combination of our full-time officers and contractors.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The House passed the measure, called the Sunshine Protection Act, 308-117. Its future in the Senate is uncertain.

Introduced by Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida, the Sunshine Protection Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee 48-1 in May and carries strong support from President Donald Trump.

“This bipartisan legislation represents a popular, common-sense reform and would benefit Americans by protecting precious daylight during the evening, when people are most likely to be awake and active,” the White House said in a statement Tuesday. “If (the bill) were presented to the President in its current form, his advisors would recommend that he sign it into law.”

Year-round daylight saving time

Permanent daylight saving time would mean keeping the clocks shifted forward one hour all year, eliminating the need to “spring forward” every March and “fall back” each November. The adjustment would extend more daylight into the evening, creating later sunrises and sunsets compared to standard time. 

“Establishing permanent daylight saving time would provide families with more usable daylight hours in the evening, giving people additional opportunities to spend time outdoors,” Republican Rep. Gus M. Bilirakis of Florida said during House debates Tuesday.

Many other representatives from Florida voiced their support for the bill Tuesday, saying later daylight hours would help boost the Sunshine State’s economy.  

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, agreed. 

In his remarks supporting the permanent daylight saving time, he also pointed to the harmful effects that switching the clocks twice a year can have on people’s health, as well as young children and pets’ quality of sleep.

Under the bill, states that do not observe daylight saving time before enactment would have the choice to remain on permanent standard time.

The provision would only affect two states, Hawaii and Arizona outside Navajo Nation, that already do not observe daylight saving time. Those states instead go by standard time, the hours the rest of the country follows from November to March, year-round. Other states wishing to opt out would have to enact a law one day before the federal bill becomes law.

Is standard time better?

Many health experts say standard time is better for humans because it increases the amount of daylight received in the morning, which is beneficial for body rhythms and helps improve sleep, The Hill reports.

Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, the only representative to speak in opposition to the bill during Tuesday’s floor debate, cited the benefits tied to standard time as one of her main reasons for going against the bill.

Though she too expressed frustration with the practice of changing clocks, she said dozens of medical associations show “if we stop the clock, permanent standard time is a healthier choice.” 

Dean also pointed to events that occurred the last time the U.S. briefly attempted to follow permanent daylight saving time in 1974. Some children lost their lives while walking to school in the dark, she said. 

“We aren’t voting on bills right now that would reduce the sky-high costs of food, fuel, healthcare or addressing the president’s war in Iran,” Dean said. “Instead we’re considering a bill that was deadly and dangerous in the past.” 

Daylight saving time’s past and future

Daylight saving time was first introduced in the early 20th century as an energy-conserving wartime measure, according to the academic journal Science. The U.S. has observed short periods of permanent daylight saving over the years, but the federal government has each time reverted to the practice of changing clocks.   

Lawmakers have also made attempts in recent years to enact permanent daylight saving time. In 2022, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved an earlier version of the bill, sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, and Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, only for the measure to stall in the House.

In a statement Tuesday, Murray called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to bring the House-passed bill for a vote in the Senate.

“My state, where it is often dark earlier than 4pm in the winter, has made it abundantly clear we want permanent Daylight Saving Time,” Murray wrote. “Americans from Seattle to Miami believe it’s way past time to lock the clock—I am calling on Leader Thune to bring this bill to a vote as soon as possible.”

If the Senate considers the bill this year, some opposition is likely to come up, including from Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Faber’s campaign did not clarify his comments when asked about them, only saying that Faber supports the lawful use of Medicaid dollars and doesn’t support the unlawful use of them.

The federal-and-state-funded health program for the poor covers more than 3 million Ohioans and costs upwards of $40 billion a year. 

It was created alongside Medicare in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

In April, President Donald Trump said it was “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicaid, Medicare, and childcare. Trump was asking for $1.5 trillion in additional military spending to fund his war with Iran when he made the statement. 

That was after he signed a bill last summer with massive tax cuts heavily favoring the wealthy and almost $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years. 

With the brunt of those cuts scheduled to kick Jan. 1, Trump’s top lieutenants have been highlighting provider fraud in the program without saying much about the healthcare conglomerates that have been accused of overcharging state Medicaid programs by huge amounts.

In a June 4 appearance in Ohio, acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said that Medicaid provider fraud was a “crisis” that “crippled our taxpayer programs and robbed the American purse for too long.” But KFF, the nonpartisan healthcare research organization, said there’s no reliable measure of provider fraud.

John Kulewicz, the Democratic nominee for Ohio attorney general, said there’s a simple reason why Republicans are playing up provider fraud so much these days.

“I think they want to get rid of Medicaid,” he said in an interview.

Kulewicz pointed to two May 5 media appearances by Faber, his Republican opponent.

Faber appeared on the Bruce Hooley Show on Salem Media, a self-described “Christian and conservative media company.”

“We’re spending tens of billions of dollars a year on Medicaid every single year in Ohio, so a very small percentage loss is a huge dollar amount,” Faber said at the 2:37 mark. “And the scammers figure out how to take advantage and you’re seeing it throughout the system.”

He added, “It goes back to this question: Why are we having government programs doing so many things for so many people and expecting people not to lie, cheat, and steal…? I tend to be a small-government conservative. I think you get rid of some of these unnecessary programs and we’re all going to be better off.” 

Faber’s office and campaign were asked if he was advocating to completely end Medicaid in Ohio or some part of it. And, did Faber believe millions of Ohioans should lose healthcare because of lax fraud enforcement — a function for which Ohio Republicans have been responsible since 2011?

In an email, Faber campaign advisor Matt Dole didn’t respond to those specific questions, saying instead, “Keith Faber supports the lawful use of Medicaid dollars as a safety net for those Ohioans who need it. He opposes the unlawful use of Medicaid and has a record as Auditor of State fighting fraud and waste. There is no conflict between these positions.”

Faber and other Republicans have particularly been calling attention to reports of fraud from programs under federal waivers that allow Ohio Medicaid to pay for in-home care for low-income residents. 

Among alleged abuses, state Attorney General Andy Wilson on June 23 announced Ohio indictments as part of the Trump administration’s “2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown.”

The operation had “led to criminal charges against 455 defendants nationwide for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud and opioid abuse schemes totaling more than $6.5 billion,” Wilson’s office said.

The statement didn’t specify how much of that was attributable to Medicaid funded home-care programs. 

The statement said that, as part of the national “takedown,” five people in the Buckeye State were accused of defrauding Medicaid home-health programs of $127,000.

In one case, a Cincinnati woman admitted billing Medicaid $110,000 for 16-hour-a-day care, but only providing services between the time she left her day job and midnight, Wilson’s office said. 

In another, an Elyria woman said $1,500 in fraudulent billing “stemmed from personal difficulties and expressed a willingness to repay the money,” the statement said.

The biggest fraud allegation was unrelated to home health. A Westerville doctor was accused of improperly billing $200,000 for child behavioral health services that weren’t rendered, Wilson’s office said.

On a May 5 appearance on Cincinnati’s WLW radio, Faber declared his skepticism of home-care waivers. 

“The problem is that it’s very difficult to catch the abuse because grandma’s never going to rat out granddaughter or daughter who’s supposed to be taking care of her, but she’s sitting there playing on her cell phone all day,” Faber said at the 1:16:18 mark of the “Sunday Nights With Bill Cunningham” show.

“So that’s the problem you get into and, candidly, why the legislature probably needs to get out of that waiver and get back to the… eliminate these programs.”

Faber’s office and campaign were asked to provide a documented instance in which someone in Ohio neglected a family member in such a scenario. None was provided.

Cunningham, a conservative fixture on Cincinnati radio, asked Faber, “Is this mainly focused on immigrant communities like the Somalies?”

Faber again questioned whether the home-care waivers should exist.

“Certainly regular Americans,” Faber replied. “You’re seeing it all over the place. But we know there is a very large utilization of these programs inside various immigrant populations including the Somali population. But it’s being abused all over the place and the question is, why do we have that program?”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

There were 884,912 claims filed for $746.50 million during the 2026 fiscal year, said Ohio Department of Commerce Spokesperson Reagan Reetz. 

Of those, 184,083 claims were paid out for $182.57 million during the most recent fiscal year, she said. 

In fiscal year 2025, there were 68,787 claims paid out totaling $109.73 million, Reetz said. 

It’s been a little over a year since Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine approved using $1 billion of the state’s unclaimed funds to help Ohio professional sport teams pay for new stadiums or improvements through the state’s two-year operating budget. 

Of that money, $600 million of unclaimed funds have already been spoken for and will go to the Cleveland Browns’ new domed stadium in Brook Park — about 15 miles south of downtown Cleveland. 

The remaining $400 million is set aside for other qualifying projects as determined by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management and the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission. 

Twenty-two applicants are trying to get a slice of the $400 million for their facilities, according to the Ohio Office of Budget and Management. 

Eight of those applicants have been denied — narrowing the list down to 14. 

Teams with facilities still in the running include the Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Cavaliers, Columbus Blue Jackets, Cleveland Guardians, and FC Cincinnati. 

The budget allows the state to take existing unclaimed funds that are at least 10 years old as of Jan. 1, 2026, and put them into the Ohio Cultural and Sports Facility Performance Grant Fund. It also gives property owners until 2036 to make a claim even if their money was previously transferred to the state.

Ohio’s unclaimed funds is money that is property of Ohioans held by the state for things like forgotten bank accounts, rent or utility deposits, or uncashed insurance policies. An initiated claim is when someone submits a form to claim their funds. Additional documents are needed to prove ownership of the funds. 

Ohio’s unclaimed funds is worth close to $5 billion, according to the Ohio Department of Commerce. 

Two former Ohio Democratic lawmakers — former state Rep. Jeff Crossman and former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann — filed a class action lawsuit against the state’s plan to use unclaimed funds for the new Browns stadium at the end of last year. 

Franklin County Common Pleas Court Magistrate Jennifer Hunt granted a preliminary injunction blocking the state from taking unclaimed funds to help pay for the Browns stadium earlier this year. 

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sided with the state.  

The Cleveland Browns broke ground on the new stadium earlier this year and it is expected to be ready for the 2029 season, according to the NFL.  

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A week ago, a coalition of worried Ohio faith leaders called on Gov. Mike DeWine to reassure their unsettled congregants that the state will protect and secure their right to vote, will not tolerate intimidation or harassment to keep people away from the polls, and will develop a rapid response plan with law enforcement to address any coercion during early voting or on Election Day.

“Our home stands at a moral crossroads,” said Rabbi Sharon Mars of Temple Israel in Columbus. “Do not let our right to vote be morally compromised but let us cast our ballots as free Ohio citizens who care deeply about this place and all that it can become as part of the greatest hope for democracy the world has ever seen.”

Voters sense the nefarious intent by powerful forces to deny enfranchisement to some citizens as the days tick down to the midterms.

But Ohio’s chief elections officer, who is firmly aligned with the Trumpian anti-voting agenda, (built on lies about rampant voter fraud and lies about the 2020 Election) derided those concerns and characterized the assembly of faith leaders gathered to petition the governor for help as “props” engaged in “a hyperbolic publicity stunt.”

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who regularly engages in hyperbolic publicity stunts, ranted in a post on X that “Stoking false hysteria with claims of ‘unprecedented attempts to keep people from voting’ is not voter protection. It is political theater.”

He should know. A principled bulwark against voter disenfranchisement LaRose is not.

So Ohioans who plan to vote in the midterm election and expect their vote to count on Nov. 3 need to a pay attention to what is being done now to undercut both presumptions.

Donald Trump is prepared to “throw everything at the wall to see what sticks” to subvert this election.

His obsession with passage of the “papers please” SAVE America Act — which would force millions of Americans to produce birth certificates/passports (and more documents for married women who changed their names) before being allowed to vote — hit a wall in the U.S. Senate.

Trump was in such a snit about it he refused to sign the largest housing affordability bill in decades that Congress passed last week. It became law without his signature, but the petulant president vowed not to sign any bill unless his gets approved.

Trump’s thoroughly corrupted Department of Justice, conscripted in his war to undermine and interfere in state-run elections, has waged an all-out assault on states to rattle election chiefs with threatening missives to comply or else, relentless demands for sensitive voter files, and, in Ohio, intimidating law enforcement to spook voter registration efforts.

The DOJ pressured LaRose to turn over the confidential data of nearly 8 million voters, (their name, address, date of birth, partial Social Security number, driver’s license).

Many other secretaries of state, who were pressured for the same data, declined to let the Trump justice department get its hands on the personal information of their voters with no transparency or real safeguards to protect their privacy.

Federal courts have overwhelmingly ruled that the DOJ has no legal authority to compel states to release private voter files. But Ohio’s Secretary of State, gave the DOJ everything. 

Four weeks ago, the FBI conducted a massive raid of a leading Cleveland-based voter registration group seizing phones, computers, documents, files.

There is still no explanation for the menacing operation that descended on several Ohio cities and included FBI agents showing up at volunteers’ homes on a fishing expedition.

Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, from the Cleveland area, fired off a letter to the FBI director, signed by other Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation, seeking legal justification for the raid.

“It has now been a month of silence from Kash Patel and the FBI,” said Brown, a member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee. “Refusing to answer basic questions is unacceptable and only raises more concerns about the FBI’s actions.” 

Last week there was another unexplained provocation from the DOJ — on behalf of the man whose mug hangs from a 30-foot banner on the front of its headquarters.

The department’s civil rights division sent largely identical letters to the chief elections officials in all 50 states threatening to arrest them if noncitizens vote.

You read that right. (Quick reality check: it is illegal for noncitizens to cast a ballot, states already have secure systems in place to prevent noncitizens from voting, who, case in point, don’t.)

The DOJ harangued state election administrators to fix a problem that does not exist — widespread noncitizen voting in American elections.

The threatening letter (to adhere to statutes that have been on the books for decades — and report back in five days) “is another thinly veiled attempt by the Department of Justice to intimidate election officials and coerce compliance with their efforts to unlawfully inject the federal government into states’ constitutional duty to oversee elections,” said Colorado’s secretary state, a sentiment widely shared by election chiefs across the country, excluding LaRose.

LaRose has a fanboy crush on the most corrupt president in U.S. history.

Ohio faith leaders were right to be worried. The assaults on voting are growing. Fast.

The man who tried to steal an election he lost will test the limits of the constitution he swore to uphold. Pay attention. The stakes are too high to take your right to vote for granted.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The consumer advocacy group PowerLines reported that utilities asked regulators for a record $9.2 billion in cumulative rate increases during the second quarter of this year. Those requested rate increases could affect more than 56 million U.S. customers.

Utilities in Southern states requested the largest increase in rates, totaling $4.5 billion across more than 26 million customers. 

Consumers in the Midwest face $2.7 billion in requested rate hikes across 14 million customers, while nearly the same amount of Western customers face $1.5 billion, PowerLines reported.

Most Americans get their electricity from utilities that must seek state consent for rate changes, with appointed or elected state boards approving price structures. 

The report, released Tuesday, comes as millions of Americans are already struggling to afford rising electricity bills: One in six American households are behind on utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. 

Public outcry over rising utility prices has pushed state regulators and lawmakers to consider rate freezes, additional energy assistance funds or new rates targeting large energy users such as data centers. 

Regulators often approve increases at lower rates than requested by utilities, so state officials will determine what additional costs are passed onto consumers. But PowerLines notes regulators rarely outright reject rate requests. Its analysis of 2025 rate requests, for example, found just two of 83 requests were rejected, though half were still pending at the beginning of this year.

Since 2021, electric and gas utilities have accelerated the speed at which they ask regulators for new price increases, the report said. 

PowerLines found that electric company Oncor in Texas requested the largest rate increase of the quarter, with a $1.2 billion request, part of its 5-year investment plan to meet demand from oil and gas companies and data centers. 

Dominion Energy in Virginia sought $1.5 billion across three rate requests, including a $1.1 billion request in unrecovered fuel costs. In Michigan, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy have requested about $500 million each in rate increases. 

“With more than $18 billion in requests already on the table for 2026, regulators face mounting pressure to scrutinize utility spending plans while balancing the infrastructure investments that a modernizing grid genuinely requires,” the report concluded.  

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents the nation’s investor-owned electric utilities, says its members are focused on keeping energy reliable and affordable. Drew Maloney, president and CEO, pushed for permitting reforms at an energy summit last month, saying as much as a quarter of consumer bills are driven by “regulatory bureaucratic red tape.”

But Maloney acknowledged that energy costs are part of broader affordability concerns facing American consumers. 

“We understand that energy costs are a component of that,” he said, “and every one of our members has programs that help people that need different relief from their electrical bills.” 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

For now, that means many immigration prisoners from all over the country can still be held indefinitely without bond in some of the nation’s largest detention centers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The Trump administration policy requires detention without bond for an immigrant who crossed the border illegally, no matter how long they’ve been here. 

The appeals court will rehear the case in September.

The Trump administration policy has already been disregarded by many judges, even Trump appointees in the 5th Circuit states, who have freed immigrants or ordered bond hearings despite the policy. 

Other appeals courts have struck down the policy as unconstitutional. An exception is the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has upheld the detention policy, covering centers in seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. 

Some judges in the 5th Circuit had already ordered bond hearings or releases based on the July 2 ruling. The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a related case and resolve the conflict in its next session starting in October. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In one state, a young person accused of a serious offense may be sent to a juvenile facility focused on treatment and rehabilitation. In another, they could face adult criminal proceedings, a permanent record and the possibility of an adult prison sentence.

This year, more than half a dozen states, including Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri and Utah, have passed new laws reshaping their juvenile legal systems. While some have adopted measures designed to divert more young people from incarceration, others have sought to impose stiffer penalties and expand prosecutors’ authority to pursue adult charges. 

The opposite tacks underscore an increasingly fractured approach to juvenile justice nationwide.

The new laws also come as states grapple with how to respond to serious crimes committed by children while weighing decades of research suggesting adolescents are more capable of rehabilitation than adults. 

Videos of youth-involved assaults, carjackings and large gatherings sometimes called “teen takeovers” frequently spread online, fueling renewed debate over whether tougher punishments or expanded diversion programs are the better path to improving public safety.

In Hawaii, for example, a new law signed in June by Democratic Gov. Josh Green requires judges to consider a child’s history of trauma before deciding whether to transfer a juvenile case to adult court. The law, which took effect immediately upon Green’s signature, also prohibits minors who are victims of sex trafficking or sexual assault from being prosecuted as adults for crimes committed as a result of their exploitation.

Research suggests that incarcerating children and teens in adult prisons, where they may face lengthy sentences and restrictive conditions, can increase the risk of reoffending.

“It wasn’t a question of whether kids had been traumatized, but actually how many traumas they’d experienced,” said Sara Thomas, a research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University, referring to research that found young people held at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center in Chicago had experienced a median of six traumatic events.

Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in March a measure that, when it takes effect in August, will overhaul parts of the state’s youthful offender system by requiring trauma-informed care, individualized treatment plans, therapy and reentry-focused programming.

A new law in Minnesota, which also takes effect in August, will raise the minimum age at which a child can enter the juvenile justice system for an offense from 10 to 13. The change stems from legislation passed in 2024. 

Once it takes effect, Minnesota will become one of only three states with a minimum age of delinquency set at 13, joining Maryland and New Hampshire, according to the National Youth Justice Network, an advocacy and research organization.  

Other states are moving in the opposite direction, giving prosecutors and courts more authority to pursue adult penalties in serious cases and arguing that violent offenses require stronger consequences, regardless of a defendant’s age.

In Missouri, a new law will give prosecutors more authority to seek adult charges against young people. Previously, only a juvenile officer or court could request a hearing to transfer a case to adult court. The law also narrows the offenses eligible for adult prosecution to Class A and Class B felonies, such as homicide, first-degree burglary and certain sex offenses, while requiring juvenile records and fingerprints to be added to the state’s criminal history database.

“Missouri must address the revolving door for repeat violent offenders –– and that includes juveniles,” Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe said in a news release.

Mississippi also expanded the circumstances under which young people can face adult charges. A new law effective this month requires 13-year-olds to automatically be tried in adult court for most violent crimes committed while possessing a firearm, even if the firearm was not used. The law prohibits children younger than 13 from being held responsible in adult court for misdemeanors or felonies, though parents or guardians may face civil liability.

A changing landscape

Beginning in the 1990s, amid concerns over violent youth crime, many states expanded laws that allowed more juveniles to be prosecuted as adults. 

But as juvenile crime declined over the following decades and research on adolescent brain development grew, many states began reconsidering those policies. Research suggests that the parts of the brain involved in impulse control, decision making and evaluating long-term consequences continue developing into early adulthood. 

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed the Youth Charging Reform Act into law in May 2026, altering how the state handles juvenile jurisdiction, detention, and confinement. The law, which goes into effect in October, limits when children younger than 13 can be charged with crimes and establishes new reporting metrics to track youth outcomes.

The new law preserves automatic adult court jurisdiction for teens 16 and older accused of offenses punishable by life imprisonment, including homicide and rape. Judges will retain the authority to transfer 14- and 15-year-olds accused of those same life-punishable offenses to adult court under the state’s existing transfer procedures.

The law also tightens detention rules, requiring intake officers to authorize the detention of any child 16 or older accused of a handgun violation or violent crime. By October 2029, children will be barred from being held in adult correctional facilities.

Supporters said the changes recognize that young children who engage in delinquent behavior often have unmet mental health, educational or family needs that are better addressed through services than incarceration.

“This progress brings us closer to ensuring that hundreds of young people in Maryland are met with support and services in the juvenile system, rather than being routed into a process that leads to worse outcomes for both youth and public safety,” state Democratic Sen. Will Smith Jr., the bill’s primary sponsor, said in a news release.

The Maryland State’s Attorneys’ Association views the new law as a step backward, arguing that the state Department of Juvenile Services is not equipped to handle young people accused of violent and repeat offenses.

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, the association’s president, also criticized the state’s juvenile legal system in a post on X (formerly Twitter), calling it “broken,” just weeks after a multi-jurisdictional crime ring investigation that led to charges against five teens.

“We cannot continue sending children back into a broken system and expect them to be rehabilitated while also expecting our communities to remain safe,” Bates wrote.

Supporters of changes like Maryland’s new law argue that adult convictions can create long-term barriers to employment, housing and education, making it harder for young people to successfully transition into adulthood. Juvenile records are generally confidential.

“Transfer of youth to adult court is bad public policy,” said Mary Ann Scali, the executive director of The Gault Center, a national organization that trains and supports defense attorneys who represent young people in court. “It causes more harm and does not lead to better outcomes for young people or communities.”

Sarah Johnson, senior youth defense counsel with The Gault Center, said research does not support the argument that moving children into adult court improves public safety.

“Transfer does not increase public safety. Transfer increases recidivism. Transfer traumatizes young people because they’re now placed in an adult facility,” Johnson said, noting that children may face heightened risks of physical and sexual abuse from other incarcerated people and staff.

A 2007 review by the Community Preventive Services Task Force, a panel established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to assess the effectiveness of community-based prevention programs and policies, found that transferring young people to adult court did not reduce reoffending and was associated with higher rates of recidivism.

From the peak in youth arrests in 1996 to 2024, the latest year with available data, youth arrests have declined by about 83%, according to federal data. While the number of estimated youth arrests increased between 2021 and 2023 during the COVID-19 pandemic, they fell again in 2024, which is lower than pre-pandemic levels.

In 2024, children and teens accounted for 6.8% of all arrests, according to the latest crime statistics maintained by the FBI. They made up about 10% of arrests for violent crimes and 9.5% of arrests for property crimes.

I’m looking for any way possible to try and solve this issue of unruly juveniles.

– North Charleston, S.C., Police Chief Ron Camacho

Despite the long-term decline in youth arrests, states continue to debate how to handle the small percentage of young people involved in serious offenses — and what approaches are most effective at preventing future crime. 

In Utah, lawmakers approved a measure allowing judges to send someone convicted of aggravated murder to adult prison if the person was 17 at the time of the offense and turns 18 before sentencing. The law also expands the state’s collection of recidivism data, including information on arrests and jail time.

Kansas, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction this year, rolling back parts of a 2016 legislative package designed to reduce youth confinement. A new law, which was adopted in April, creates additional residential placements, expands detention requirements for some youth accused of firearm offenses and repeat offenses, and increases possible sentences for youth who use firearms during crimes. 

Accountability and public safety

While some experts emphasize rehabilitation and keeping young people out of the adult system, others argue that accountability and public safety must remain central goals — particularly when young people commit serious violent offenses. They argue that rehabilitation should not come at the expense of accountability and that the justice system must address the harm caused to victims and communities.

In 2024, Louisiana and North Carolina both passed laws expanding the circumstances under which older teens can face adult criminal proceedings.

In Louisiana, a law pushed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry rolled back the 2017 “Raise the Age” law that had moved most 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system while allowing prosecutors to seek adult charges in individual cases. The new law requires all 17-year-olds accused of crimes to be processed through the adult criminal justice system, removing that case-by-case discretion.

As the state has embraced a more punitive approach, it has also seen the cost of its juvenile legal system rise — as well as the number of young people behind bars.

Louisiana also is expanding its youth prison capacity, with plans to open a new 56-bed juvenile facility in Vernon Parish and add 36 beds at the Jetson Center for Youth in East Baton Rouge Parish. 

Some youth advocates say the expansion risks exposing more young people to the harms associated with incarceration.

“When you build a jail, you find a way to fill them,” said Alaina Bloodworth, the executive director of the Black Public Defender Association. Bloodworth previously served as a public defender in Baton Rouge for seven years. “We’re just really going backwards.” 

In North Carolina, a 2024 law requires 16- and 17-year-olds charged with Class A through E felonies to begin their cases in adult criminal court rather than juvenile court, reversing a previous effort to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction. The change has contributed to a sharp increase in the share of youth in detention who are facing adult charges, rising from 39% in 2024 to 65% in 2025, according to the state’s annual report on juvenile justice.

The debate over how to balance accountability and rehabilitation has also been shaped by high-profile incidents involving young people that receive widespread attention online. Viral videos of youth assaults, carjackings and large gatherings have fueled public pressure for tougher approaches to youth crime.

In South Carolina, a Fourth of July city-permitted neighborhood block party in North Charleston drew national attention after videos of the incident spread online. Police said the gathering turned violent, with reports of fights, gunfire and fireworks being fired at vehicles. Officers recovered four firearms, including two automatic weapons, as well as a “makeshift spear,” according to local police.

Two female police officers were injured while attempting to break up fights, and seven people, including four teenagers, were arrested, according to local police.

“We need some help from the community because stuff like this is getting dangerous,” North Charleston police Chief Ron Camacho said during a news conference.  

“I’m looking for any way possible to try and solve this issue of unruly juveniles.” 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“Ohioans deserve leaders who exercise good judgment and who put integrity first,” Acton wrote Tuesday. “I find it appalling that Vivek Ramaswamy accepted over $10,000 from Andrew Havas.”

Ohio campaign-finance records show Havas made five contributions totaling $10,102.54 to Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign between February and June 2025.

The contributions included $2,602.54 on Feb. 28; separate donations of $2,000 and $1,000 on April 11; $2,500 on June 5; and $2,000 on June 18. The filings identify Havas as a consultant and list a Reynoldsburg address.

All five contributions predated both the recent reporting about Havas’s criminal case and his December appointment as a volunteer county chair for U.S. Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign. The records themselves do not show whether Ramaswamy or his campaign knew of Havas’s history when the money was accepted.

The controversy now centers on what Ramaswamy will do with the contributions after Havas’s record became a statewide campaign issue.

Ramaswamy’s campaign did not immediately respond Tuesday to questions about whether it knew of Havas’s history and whether it plans to return or donate the $10,102.54.

Havas resigned from Husted campaign

Havas resigned from Husted’s campaign after NBC News asked the senator’s team about his 2009 guilty plea in Mahoning County.

Husted’s campaign had named Havas its Franklin County campaign chair in December. He was one of 112 volunteers selected to represent Husted across Ohio’s 88 counties and had appeared on the campaign’s behalf at Republican events.

Havas also serves as vice chair of the Franklin County Republican Party’s executive committee and is registered with the state as a lobbying agent.

According to court records reviewed by NBC News, Havas was 22 when he was originally charged with sexual misconduct with a minor in a case involving a 15-year-old. The charge was later reduced to misdemeanor assault, and Havas pleaded guilty in 2009.

A criminal complaint accused Havas of being reckless as to the child’s age. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail and served the sentence in the Mahoning County jail from May through August 2009, NBC reported.

Husted spokesperson Amy Natoce said Havas had not disclosed the case to the campaign.

“Upon learning the facts, we immediately accepted his resignation as a campaign volunteer,” Natoce told NBC News.

Havas did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.

Acton makes the donations a judgment issue

No campaign-finance violation has been alleged in connection with Havas’s contributions. Acton’s criticism instead frames the money as a test of Ramaswamy’s judgment and whether his campaign will continue holding it now that the case has become public.

The dispute follows other scrutiny over the people whose financial support or endorsements Ramaswamy’s campaign has accepted.

TiffinOhio.net reported Sunday that the campaign received $10,000 from Cincinnati private equity founder Mark Hauser, who served federal prison time for paying to rig his daughter’s ACT score in the Operation Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal.

Ramaswamy’s campaign website has also continued promoting the endorsement of state Rep. Rodney Creech, who was accused by a minor female relative of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear. Creech admitted getting into the bed in his underwear but denied the allegation was sexual. A special prosecutor declined to charge him.

Separately, Ramaswamy’s campaign faces a state campaign-finance complaint alleging it failed to itemize more than $509,000 in credit-card spending. No ruling has been issued in that matter.

Ramaswamy and Acton will face each other in Ohio’s Nov. 3 general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“Early information has shown lettuce as a common product that regularly comes up during the investigation,” said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, in a news release. “We will continue to provide updates as we learn more.”

Officials cautioned they haven’t ruled out other food items as the source. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed 843 cases in 31 states, but that is a significant undercount based on the numbers being reported by state health officials.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by the parasite cyclospora. Symptoms include watery or “explosive” diarrhea, nausea and stomach cramps. It’s often contracted by eating or drinking something contaminated with the parasite, which lives in feces.

Michigan first reported an outbreak of cyclosporiasis on July 1 after nearly 200 cases were reported across seven counties. The state now leads the nation in cases, with the state health department reporting 2,640 cases Monday and 44 hospitalizations. The case numbers jumped 69% from Friday.

New York, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky also have reported a higher than usual number of cases. New York City alone has seen 403 cases this year, most of them since May 1. The New York City Health Department said in a statement to Stateline that it’s working with partners to determine a common source.

Ohio health officials reported 177 cases as of July 2, with 28 hospitalizations.

“Fortunately there have been no deaths in Ohio, as is consistent with our past experiences with this illness,” said Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, in a statement.

“Nevertheless, this is a serious illness that can cause dehydration and require people to seek emergency medical care, and it should be taken seriously.”

Safer Salad Greens

Given the historical links between cyclospora and prepackaged salad greens, here are some recommended safety measures if you’re going to eat lettuce:

Purchase whole heads: Buy whole heads of lettuce rather than pre-washed, bagged lettuce or pre-mixed salad kits.

Discard outer layers: Before preparing the lettuce, throw away the outer two to three layers of leaves.

Wash inner leaves: Thoroughly wash the remaining inner leaves under clean running water.

Prioritize cooking: For any greens that can be cooked, heating to a temperature of at least 158 degrees F (70 degrees C) is safest. The parasite is resistant to routine chemical disinfection, and washing alone can’t guarantee its removal.

Source: Michigan Department of Health & Human Services

The CDC expects case numbers to continue rising, given a typical six-week lag between the onset of illnesses and when cases are typically reported to the CDC. The New York Times reported it has independently confirmed at least 4,800 cases this year.

States such as  Michigan are rushing to do their own sleuthing after cutbacks have reduced surveillance capabilities at the federal level. Last year, the CDC scaled back its surveillance program that monitors foodborne illnesses. It no longer requires monitoring for six pathogens, including cyclospora, only requiring reporting for two: salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E.coli.

The CDC acknowledged that while it’s working to collect and analyze data at the national level, “State health departments may have more timely information about the situation in their jurisdictions.”

The Trump administration said on social media on Monday that the CDC is working with 3,000 health departments to gather data, and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating the outbreak alongside the CDC and state and local partners.

Local health departments in Michigan have conducted more than 1,000 interviews of those who’ve tested positive for cyclosporiasis, to try to trace the source of the outbreak, state officials said.

But in many states, the risk to the public remains low.

It’s  not uncommon for states to see at least a few cases of cyclosporiasis each year. Michigan typically identifies 40-50 each year, while Rhode Island documented six cases last year and 12 in 2024. Because it can take up to two weeks for symptoms to develop after a person is exposed to the parasite, state officials say it takes time to investigate the source.

There’s currently no evidence that links recreational water exposure, such as swimming in lakes, as a risk factor for the illness. And in none of the cases confirmed by the CDC did the affected person report any travel during the two weeks prior to falling ill.

In previous cyclosporiasis outbreaks, bagged salad mixes and kits were identified as the culprit, along with fresh cilantro, basil, raspberries, snow peas and green onions. One of the largest outbreaks of cyclosporiasis was in 2020, which resulted in 701 people falling ill in 14 states, and which the CDC linked to Fresh Express bagged salads.

The CDC has identified cases in the current outbreak in the following states: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Janine Weisman of the Rhode Island Current, Kyle Davidson of the Ohio Capital Journal and Jon King of the Michigan Advance contributed to this report. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Federal Judge Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida excoriated Trump, his sons Eric and Don Trump Jr., and their private Trump Organization for using the presidency to “manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation.”

The Trumps and their private company voluntarily dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in May in exchange for the departments of Justice and Treasury creating a $1.776 billion fund for alleged “victims of lawfare.”

Critics pounced on the settlement as a “slush fund” for “cop beaters,” referring to Jan. 6 defendants who assaulted police officers. Trump pardoned all Jan. 6 rioters on the first day of his second term. 

The Department of Justice maintained the fund was open to victims of any political leanings.

Williams, appointed during President Barack Obama’s first term, noted in her order the pot of settlement money was created to “fund claims premised on events including those arising from, inter alia, the Mar-a-Lago Documents Case and the events of January 6, 2021.”

The settlement agreement, signed May 18 by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano, also forever absolved Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization from government prosecution and tax enforcement.

“No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates. The failure of any attorney in this case to address, on this docket, the relationship of this Article II proscription with the benefits conferred by the ‘settlement’ is a glaring omission that speaks to the control of the Lead Plaintiff,” Williams wrote in the 56-page order.

Lawyers, Trump and family cited

Williams referred Trump’s attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar for review of possible disciplinary action, and will prohibit for at least one year applications to the Southern District of Florida by Trump’s other attorney, Daniel Z. Epstein.

Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization are “prohibited from referring to the purported ‘settlement agreement,’ or using, offering, admitting, or citing any of its provisions in any judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitration, or any other official proceeding as evidence of a ‘settlement’ reached in this matter,” Williams wrote. 

Further, she ordered the Trumps and their company to reimburse fees for attorneys appointed by the court to examine Trump’s case against the IRS, an agency under his control as president.

35 former judges

The president and his family sued the IRS in January over the late 2019 leak of their tax information to news media by a government contractor. The contractor had already been sentenced for the leak in early 2024.

The creation of the “anti-weaponization” fund sparked lawsuits, including from two former police officers who deployed to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump’s IRS case was revived in late May when 35 former federal judges intervened, arguing the settlement fund was “a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.”

Lawyers representing the former federal judges hailed Williams’ ruling.

“The court’s opinion is a resounding victory for the rule of law. We are proud to represent these former judges in presenting the arguments that the court adopted,” according to a statement from Norm Eisen, co-founder and board member of Democracy Defenders Action, Matt Platkin, founding partner of Platkin LLP, and Susman Godfrey.

The Trumps and their private business maintained the president sued the IRS in his personal capacity and that the court lacked authority to review the settlement.

In her order Monday, Williams said the court declined to “accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here.”

Promise to scrap fund

Outrage over the fund, including from members of Trump’s own party, delayed the Senate’s eventual passage of a bill to fund Trump’s mass deportation agenda for the rest of his term.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to Congress on June 2 that the administration would scrap the fund.

The White House referred States Newsroom to the president’s personal attorneys for comment. 

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice provided States Newsroom with a written statement. 

“There was no collusion in this case, and the partisan judge who speculated otherwise has disregarded decades of precedent. This case was brought by President Trump in his personal capacity, as well as by several members of his family, who were all victims of admitted violations of law. There was a live dispute because the plaintiffs sought relief that the government had not provided. The plaintiffs did not receive any money and were barred from receiving any from the now-defunct Anti-Weaponization Fund,” according to the spokesperson.

The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

School librarians have been navigating challenges in their work as long as they’ve been among the stacks in their local districts.

Proposed legislation to filter the reading choices students can make has brought concern, and budget reductions make some worry about the future of public school librarians as a mainstay in schools.

“Right now, a lot of administrators and school boards look at having school librarians as a luxury,” said Gayle Schmuhl, president of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association. “I think a lot of school librarians (in Ohio) are just hoping to stay employed.”

Schmuhl said many members of the association were wondering about the future of their jobs with cuts to public school funding in Ohio and debate over property taxes that go to education.

Cuts to state public education has been talked about for decades, especially after multiple Ohio Supreme Court decisions that said the state was not paying its constitutional fair share.

In 2022, a model called the Fair School Funding Plan came about with bipartisan sponsorship, and was passed in what some saw as a new era for Ohio. The plan was to fund schools based on actual need from school district to school district.

The model almost made it through the six-year phase-in as planned, but Ohio Republican lawmakers abandoned it in the last operating budget.

While the most recent state operating budget included a $226 million increase in school funding, the Fair School Funding Plan model needed at least triple that amount to maintain its initial calculations and keep up with inflation.

Lawmakers, however, increased private school voucher funding into the billions.

Courtney Johnson was a school librarian in Columbus for 10 years, and seeing funding plans decrease for public schools played a part in her move back to teaching English.

She worried that though the funding priorities for schools hadn’t been spelled out, the cuts might mean she’d be splitting her time as the librarian in multiple district buildings.

“I’m a person who likes to have roots in a place and go to my ‘work home’ every day,” Johnson told the Capital Journal.

Johnson said returning to the classroom also means following an entire class through their year-long experience, and still means helping kids with reading and writing, two things that are among the passions that brought her to the profession.

“Every kid has a story, even if they don’t trust that they do at first, and I love making space for them to tell their stories,” Johnson said.

As a librarian, she saw the importance of parents reading to their kids, students receiving the context of other subjects in school for “full background knowledge” to help them decode the words they’re reading, and encouraging the connection between kids and books.

“We’ve known this, that when kids see themselves represented in books, they feel more connected to the books, they’re going to like reading better,” Johnson said. “Likewise, kids can see how other people live in books, and develop empathy that way.”

Part of the job of the modern school librarian is discussing material with parents that they may find objectionable enough to demand it be taken off the shelves.

Sharon Hawkes, a retired librarian who is also part of the group Right to Read Ohio, decided to survey school librarians, with the help of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association’s member list.

Of those who participated in Hawkes’ study 56% “experienced censorship incidents” between 2021 and 2025.

While she only received responses from 32 school librarians, about 10% of the total school librarians in the state, she said the experiences were still indicative of a challenge in Ohio.

“We’re getting some clues about what’s going on,” Hawkes said, noting that because there’s no standard survey system in each state to study censorship in libraries, the count made by organizations like the American Library Association may be less than the actual amount happening across the country.

The American Library Association reported 98 attempts to censor 355 books in Ohio from 2021 to 2024, and last year, there were seven attempts to censor 129 books, according to the ALA.

Schmuhl agreed that the study was representative of the experience she’d heard of in the state.

“I did see that school librarians in our areas were being proactive and trying to have good communication within their school districts (about attempts to ban books),” Schmuhl said.

In Hawkes’ study, of the 16 censorship requests in Ohio between 2021 and 2024, eleven were “challenges without removals,” while eight resulted in a book ban of some kind, and three involved “relocations of books or other materials.”

According to the researcher, librarians use “objective criteria” in decisions about what materials are age-appropriate and relevant for the school libraries. Their training qualifies them to decide on the inventory, and to deal with challenges from parents, where the majority of material challenges came from in the study.

The majority of school librarians who responded to Hawkes’ survey had between 11 and 15 years of experience as the director or manager of their current library, and more than 62% had a Master’s degree in Library Science.

“More than anything, I wanted people to understand that parents do have the right to guide what their children read and when they read it … they can approach their librarians about it,” Hawkes said. “What they can’t do is ban books for other people’s children.”

For Johnson, moving back to English doesn’t mean she’ll avoid the topic of censorship.

“I think I’m going to deal with that in public schools under what we have going on right now, no matter what my position is,” she said.

The legislature approved one measure to compel public libraries to relocate “inappropriate” materials out of the sight of minors, but Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed it as “not workable.”

Another bill still in consideration by the legislature would order vendors of online educational resources that go to public libraries and schools to create protections to prevent “inappropriate” content from making it to kids’ eyes.

Opponents of the materials have said the bill could have unintended consequences, removing materials that are educational as well.

Johnson’s classroom goals include helping kids maintain reading to “get them ready for this really difficult world that we’re navigating,” and bring the parents in as part of it.

“We need to work together as parents and school communities to make sure kids are achieving literacy, and we know that having access to books at home, and at school, at their fingertips, is just the beginning of it,” she said.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Brine waste traveled underground from the Redbird #4 injection well in Marietta to active oil and gas wells about five miles away in 2019 and pressure on those wells has increased significantly ever since. 

Citizens are now concerned it’s only a matter of time until the radioactive waste infiltrates Marietta’s aquifer at the bottom of the Muskingum River Valley.

“I think eventually (brine waste) will get to the city of Marietta’s water wells,” said Bob Lane, an oil well producer in Washington County. 

“I actually believe this may take a few years before you lose your water well,” he said at a recent press conference.

“I would like to see the injection company instantly put a bond, made out to the city of Marietta, for $18 million or $20 million because what are you going to do 10 years from now when you have no drinking water? You’re going to have to spend a bunch of money.”

This is a serious environmental problem, said David Jeffery, a professor at Marietta College.

“It’s clear that it’s expanding as we’re speaking,” he said. 

And if nothing prevents it from happening, it will require lots of work and money to fix the city’s water. 

“You’re going to have to have hundreds of geotechnical people and engineers come in and put interceptor wells in and track down every little ounce of that radioactive fluid, and it’s going to be very expensive,” Jeffery said. 

“That’s going to cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to try to make sure that those fluids do not reach our aquifers or the surface.”

What is an injection well?

An injection well is a pipe in the ground that takes the waste left over from fracturing operations. 

A conventional well is a vertical pipe in the ground and most of them were drilled anywhere from 150 years ago to a few decades ago. Most abandoned wells are conventional wells. 

Ohio has more than 20,000 documented orphan wells, but there’s likely thousands more. 

Horizontal wells are now being drilled, which can extract more gas. 

Injection wells have been pumping more waste into the ground at higher pressure since 2010 when the U.S. shale boom started, said Buckeye Environmental Network Appalachian Organizer Bev Reed. 

“The brine waste fluid is pumped into geological layers thousands of feet deep, where it’s supposed to be disposed of, never to interact with the surface in any way, ever,” Reed said. 

“However, we are seeing that this has not been the case, especially in southeastern Ohio.” 

Brine waste fluid is radioactive, carrying radioactive components including radon gas, radium, other isotopes of uranium and thorium.

“We do not want (brine waste) anywhere near the surface,” Jeffery said. 

He said he couldn’t imagine a more clearly failed business concept. 

“The intention of this business is to pump the fluids down into a formation, and they’re supposed to stay there forever,” Jeffery said. 

“The problem with these formations in southern Ohio is that they have very low porosity and permeability, especially these deep formations that are down below.”

Some of the fractures are letting the toxic fluids travel upwards. 

“You’re trying to push more fluids into an area that is already under high pressure and already has non-compressible fluids in it,” Jeffery said. 

“The problem is that there’s no room for the fluids down in that layer. This stuff is coming up through these fractures because that’s the easiest way out.” 

When an injection well floods out, the brine waste flows to the next one, Jeffery said. 

“Little by little the (brine waste) is going to be coming up these fractures … as quickly as they can pump that stuff in, ruining everybody’s well,” he said. 

There are 227 active Class II injection wells in Ohio, according to ODNR. 

Washington County receives the most amount of brine waste into Class II injection wells in Ohio and about half of it comes from out-of-state, Reed said. 

“Ohio has become the dumping ground for this toxic radioactive waste stream,” Reed said. “The Marietta and Warren Township areas are particularly vulnerable due to the close proximity from the injection wells to the drinking water aquifers for thousands of people.” 

Redbird injection well

Back in 2019, Washington County oil producers noticed their wells were flooded with fluid and stopped producing gas and oil. Twenty-eight production wells that had been active for decades stopped working within weeks. 

The well owners correctly suspected the excess fluid was injected brine waste that had leaked from a nearby injection well. 

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Oil and Gas Resource Management did an investigation in 2020 that confirmed brine waste from the Redbird #4 well in Marietta migrated and leaked into nearby oil and gas wells. 

ODNR has identified seven injection wells where fluids have migrated underground since 2019, ODNR spokesperson Andy Chow said in an email. 

**“**Six of these wells were suspended by the division,” Chow said. “The owner of the seventh well modified the well to address the issue before the division’s investigation concluded.”

“The division relies on evidence observed at production wells near an injection well to determine when migration outside a permitted injection zone or beyond an approved area of review occurred.”

An abandoned well in Veto Lake — less than a mile from Redbird— blew out in 2021. 

ODNR passed new rules overseeing Class II injection wells in 2022. 

Buckeye Environmental Network filed a lawsuit against ODNR last year, claiming the state department of natural resources improperly approved two injection wells near Marietta using outdated regulations. The case is in the Tenth District Court of Appeals.  

Pressure increasing

Bob Wilson of Wilson Energy LLC was one of those who initially noticed the increase in brine waste in his oil and gas wells. 

“I noticed the gas falling off on all the wells,” he said. “Water just kept coming, and I was losing three or four wells a week, so I called ODNR, and I told them that I believe that injection water was infiltrating my wells.” 

Three of Wilson’s oil and gas wells near the Redbird wells have continued to increase in pressure readings since 2020, especially within the past several months.

One of his wells about three mile and a half miles northeast of Redbird has increased 1,800% from September 2023 to last month, he said. 

“Oil and gas wells basically lose pressure over time, so there’s something unnatural going on there,” Jeffery said. 

Wilson owns about 170 oil and gas wells, but 50 of them are no longer producing — something he attributes to the brine waste migration underground. 

“My wells can’t be repaired,” he said. “The damage they’ve done in Washington County can’t be repaired. … I get up and go to work every day and lose money.” 

Some of Wilson’s wells are 60 years old and he said they should have been able to produce for another 40-50 years. 

Of the 17 injection wells in Washington County, eight have had serious problems, according to Buckeye Environmental Network. 

Washington County water concerns

The future of Marietta’s drinking water is the biggest concern for Bob Anderson, another local oil well producer who has drilled more than 75 wells. 

“I’ve got two great-grandchildren now under the age of three years old, and every time I look at their faces, I think of this,” he said. “What are we leaving you?” 

Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, said he gets more scared the more he learns about the brine waste migration. 

“Clearly we are at the precipice of an emergency,” he said. “We have water aquifers that are being threatened as we speak, as we sit here.”

Buckeye Environmental Network is calling on the state department of natural resources to stop injection operations in Washington, Athens, Noble counties and monitor for changes after injection has stopped.  

“At the request of the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, operations have stopped at four class II disposal injection wells in Washington County,” Chow said. 

“On July 1 and 2, the owners of the wells agreed to voluntarily cease operations after the division notified them that their class II disposal injection wells were suspected to be causing impacts to other nearby wells that produce oil and gas. … While the class II disposal injection wells are voluntarily shut down, the well owners and the division will work towards a plan to address the issues.” 

Buckeye Environmental Network is also calling on ODNR to investigate oil and gas waste brine migration across southeastern Ohio, apply consistent pressure monitoring and reporting standards to wells with a history of migration concerns, and test private water wells within at least five miles of any injection well suspected of migration. 

“The division already applies consistent pressure monitoring and reporting standards to these wells,” Chow said. “The division is working on a contract to have a third-party consultant conduct a study of the private water wells near the impacted production wells in Washington County.”

A map of production wells near Redbird. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

A poster showing Ohio’s geological layers. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

A poster showing Ohio’s geological layers. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

The Ohio River on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

The Ohio River on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

The Ohio River on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Veto Lake in Washington County on July 7, 2026. An abandoned well in Veto Lake — less than a mile from Redbird— blew out in 2021. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Redbird #4 injection well in Marietta. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Bob Wilson, an oil producer in Washington County (left) reads the pressure of an injection well in Marietta while Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood looks on. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Bob Wilson, an oil producer in Washington County (left) reads the pressure of an injection well in Marietta while Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood watches. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Bob Wilson, an oil producer in Washington County (left) and Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood (right). (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Bob Wilson, an oil producer in Washington County (left) and Ohio state Rep. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood (right). (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Buckeye Environmental Network organizer Bev Reed (left) and Bob Wilson, an oil producer in Washington County (right), in Marietta on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Megan Henry on X or on Bluesky.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The report, based on newly released data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 44,447 people died from firearm-related injuries in 2024, down about 5% from the previous year. The decline was driven largely by a nearly 16% drop in firearm homicides, which fell to 15,364 deaths.

At the same time, firearm suicides rose to a record 27,593 deaths, accounting for about 62% of all firearm deaths in 2024.

The report’s authors also found that firearms remained the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1 to 17 for the fifth consecutive year, with 2,214 deaths in 2024.

About 86% of firearm deaths were among men, according to the report. But rates have risen over the past decade among some groups of women, particularly Black women. From 2015 to 2024, the firearm homicide rate among Black women increased 63%, compared with a 2% increase among white women. Over the same period, the firearm suicide rate among Black women rose 169%, compared with a 4% increase among white women.

The report also found increases among other groups of women. From 2015 to 2024, firearm homicide rates rose 39% among Asian or Pacific Islander women and 31% among Hispanic or Latina women, while firearm suicide rates increased 57% and 51%, respectively.

Overall, firearm deaths remain about 9% below their pandemic-era peak of 48,830 deaths in 2021 but are still higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to the report.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The new lawsuit is part of an ongoing legal battle between Democratic-led states and the U.S. Department of Education over a mental health grant program that Congress established following the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

At stake is a $1 billion program that offers grants to school districts across the country to help them hire and train more mental health professionals to work in schools.

Democratic attorneys general in 15 states say the Trump administration, in defiance of a December 2025 court order, plans to unlawfully terminate the grants at the end of this month, resulting in millions in lost funding.

“Our children deal with a unique set of problems which arise from growing up in 2026 — from loneliness to substance use disorder to the ever-present fear of violence — and the programs funded through these grants are designed to help them cope and hopefully thrive,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha, a Democrat, in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

In 2022, after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers, Congress allocated $1 billion to the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program to increase the number of school-based mental health professionals.

That funding effort was bipartisan; at the time Republican U.S. senators including John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina publicly supported it. And within a year, the grants had funded mental and behavioral health services to nearly 775,000 students nationwide.

But in April 2025, under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Education told grantees the funding would be halted because their programs conflicted with Trump administration priorities. At that time, the grants were supporting efforts in 49 states to prepare thousands of mental health professionals to work in K-12 schools.

Trump administration officials told the media that the grants were cut over what the administration saw as connections to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

A coalition of 17 Democratic state attorneys general sued last July, and a court ruled in their favor, ordering the Trump administration to stop the grant discontinuation. In the months since the order, the education department has threatened to withhold funding or terminate the grants altogether.

The Democratic attorneys general said they filed the new lawsuit to cover gaps in the previous court order that could allow the Trump administration to follow through on its desire to halt the funding.

“The courts have repeatedly ruled that the Trump Administration does not have the power to arbitrarily revoke grant funding that provides critical mental health services to our students,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, in a statement about joining the lawsuit.

“Still, the federal government continues its attempts to terminate funding.”

Stateline reached out to the U.S. Department of Education for comment but did not receive a response before publication.

Attorneys general participating in the lawsuit are from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The proposed policy statement, which is open for public comment through July 31, would affect how the FTC regulates AI companies. The agency said it’s meant to address concerns that “AI companies that distort their systems’ outputs to achieve undisclosed ideological objectives” could be deceiving consumers in violation of federal law.

“The FTC wants to hear from businesses and consumers about their experiences and concerns regarding the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends,” Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a statement.

The proposal specifically mentions a first-of-its-kind Colorado law that had banned “algorithmic discrimination,” or AI output that might lead to decisions disfavoring people on jobs, loans or healthcare based on their race, religion, gender and other protected categories. But the Colorado legislature already has repealed that provision. The revamped law instead focuses on regulating technology that results in “consequential decisions” for consumers. 

The controversial law prompted a lawsuit from xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which the U.S. Department of Justice supported.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting state AI laws, including creation of a Department of Justice AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws. His order also directed the FTC to issue a policy statement on regulation of state laws that “require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models.” 

Stateline asked the FTC if there were any state and city laws that officials felt were currently in violation of federal laws, but received no response.

Tyler Thompson, a Denver-based lawyer with firm Reed Smith who tracks emerging technology law, said the FTC proposal is important because it raises the possibility that companies could face deceptive-practices claims based on how they tune, weight or steer AI models, which could also prompt state policy on the issue.

“Just the fact that companies could be tweaking their models and that could lead to a deceptive trade practice, I think is huge news,” Thompson said.

Thompson believes the legal battle and the FTC’s focus on restricting similar laws will lead to “a more niche” policy focus on AI – such as deepfakes, nonconsensual sexual content, children’s safety, companion chatbots and data centers — areas where there is bipartisan agreement.

Noah M. Kenney, founder and principal consultant of Digital 520, an AI governance, security and privacy consultancy, who also responded to the FTC’s request for public comment, said the proposed statement carries more political pressure rather than being an enforceable federal regulation.

“The real effect of this statement is signaling and pressure, not legal preemption, especially paired with the December executive order’s AI litigation task force.”

Kenney said there is also an irony in the federal government’s argument.

“A federal effort to dictate what counts as a ‘neutral’ or ‘accurate’ output raises its own First Amendment concerns about compelled speech,” he said.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The public comment period on the draft rule, posted on May 29 with 41 co-signing federal agencies, closes at the end of the day Monday, July 13. The current rule emphasizes that grant applications should be reviewed based on merit, with language about measurable results that align with an agency’s strategic goals and objectives, while considering available data, evidence and results from past programs.

The proposed rule, which runs more than 100 pages, would make a host of changes related to applications, decision making, oversight and cost sharing. The wide-ranging rule could affect billions of dollars in federal grant funding for criminal justice, healthcare, the environment, elections administration, housing and education.

The Democratic governors writing about reproductive healthcare Monday also expressed concern about the speed at which the rule is set to be adopted. There were more than 278,000 public comments on the draft proposal as of Sunday afternoon, and the office said it intends to adopt the formal rule by Oct. 1. According to Regulations.gov, after a comment period closes, the agency typically reviews all comments received and conducts an analysis responding to the issues raised.

The proposed new rule states that senior political appointees would be part of the merit review process to ensure that awards “advance the president’s policy priorities.” The proposal says this approach would improve transparency, accountability and proper oversight that was not used during the Biden administration.

“Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public,” the proposed rule says. “For example, federal programs and funding opportunities were designed to advance unlawful identity-based ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (DEI) policies and preferences across the country.”

The Democratic governors said in their comment that the proposed rule would jeopardize  states’ ability to maintain stable access to reproductive healthcare and support critical service providers in their states by allowing agencies to “unilaterally terminate discretionary grants based on political considerations, even where the award terms never reserved that right and the grantee did not have advance notice.”

One example is Perinatal Quality Initiatives meant to improve maternal health and funded in part by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There are 34 collaboratives that address issues such as bloodstream infections in newborns, reducing pregnancy complications associated with high blood pressure and hemorrhaging, and maternal mental health care.

The funding is passed along to healthcare providers, hospitals and community-based organizations. Other programs include Safe Motherhood and Infant grants, Rural Maternal Health grants and others that are meant to improve services and care over a period of years.

The proposed rule would also prohibit the use of federal funds for statistical or demographic analyses, which the letter said is key to achieving longstanding federal health goals that help identify and address problems specific to certain populations. That portion of the rule could cause confusion among grantees and result in worse health outcomes, the letter said. 

The draft rule states that there would be broad authority to cancel an award at any time, at the federal government’s discretion, without notice. 

Stateline reported the Trump administration recently canceled most of the active grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, telling 53 of 67 grantees that their funding was terminated immediately because their programs normalized or promoted sexual activity for minors. The grants were canceled two years before their expiration dates.

The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association and a family planning organization in Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Health and Human Services agency in June alleging that it is politicizing the Title X grant funding program by requiring grantees to pass an “alignment review” before being awarded any funds.

“We’re sort of already getting a preview of what they’re thinking about and trying to solidify and put into official regulation,” said Christina Chang, executive director of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, in an interview with Stateline on Friday. The governors signing the letter are all members of the alliance, which exists as a way for governors to speak in support of reproductive healthcare.

The Reproductive Freedom Alliance letter also highlighted a portion of the proposed rule that refers to an existing federal budget rule called the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being used for abortion services with limited exceptions. The draft rule would add that costs associated with “elective abortions” are not allowable under federal awards. The governors called that language vague and overly broad, which could discourage providers from offering comprehensive reproductive healthcare out of fear of losing their funding.

Stateline reporter Kelcie Moseley-Morris can be reached at kmoseley@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The nonprofit hospice where Washington state nurse Milli Palmer has worked for nearly two decades announced in October 2024 that it was entering a “joint venture” with Compassus, a private equity-backed home health company. The deal was billed as a 50/50 partnership between Compassus and Providence, Palmer’s employer.

But within months, Palmer said, her employer’s priorities shifted.

After Compassus assumed control over day-to-day operations at the hospice and home health company in May 2025, management began pushing nurses and case workers to see more patients during their eight-hour shifts, she said. Staff who had been doing 13-15 patient visits per week were pressured to complete 20-25 visits.

Meanwhile, some of Palmer’s colleagues were asked to lie on paperwork or backdate legal documents, she said. The new expectations have dramatically changed the job she loved, prompting some of her colleagues to quit. The hospice now employs more traveling nurses and is seeing fewer referrals, she said.

“It has really limited our ability to make sure that patients are safe in their home,” she told Stateline. “What ends up happening is our staff is so committed to our patients and communities that they will not provide substandard care, so that pushes them into overtime, and then that impacts their abilities to care for their own families.”

Providence declined Stateline’s request for an interview. Compassus did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication.

Joint ventures in health care are not new. But private equity firms and nonprofits that co-own hospitals, urgent care clinics and home health agencies are partners with fundamentally different missions.

Nonprofit health systems are legally obligated to prioritize their community’s healthcare needs. In exchange for being exempt from paying most taxes, they must provide needed services that may not be profitable, and reinvest excess revenue into patient care and community health. Private equity firms generally focus on maximizing returns for investors, often within a few years.

As these joint ventures grow increasingly popular, they will test a wave of recent state laws that were designed to increase oversight of private equity in healthcare and prevent a repeat of the patient harm, hospital closures, mass layoffs and financial failures that have followed some of the industry’s most troubled investments.

Last year, at least seven states enacted laws erecting guardrails around private equity’s involvement in healthcare. But some private equity critics are concerned that the recent state laws may not extend to the joint venture model.

“Policymakers need to take a look and make sure that they’re future-proofing their states’ regulations for stuff like this,” said Matt Parr, communications director with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog group that tracks private equity.

More than a fifth of private equity-backed hospitals in the U.S. are now owned through joint ventures with nonprofits, according to a new study from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

Proponents of joint ventures say private equity provides a stabilizing infusion of cash for nonprofits, as well as the expertise and connections to help them improve their operations and scale up their services. Nonprofit systems provide clinical expertise and a name the community trusts that can allow private equity entry to new markets.

“As our communities age, we have been thoughtfully evaluating how to best meet the growing need for these services,” Terri Warren, chief of community services at Providence, said in a news release announcing its joint venture with Compassus. Bringing in the private-equity backed partner, she said, would enable Providence to expand access to its hospice and home health services.

Palmer, who lives in Renton, Washington, a Seattle suburb, has worked as a nurse since 1988 and joined Providence, which operates in several Western states, in 2007. Compassus, a Tennessee-based home health company with locations in 32 states, is owned by private equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners and Catholic health system Ascension.

Their new joint venture rebranded Palmer’s employer as Providence at Home with Compassus.

“I think the public still sees us as Providence Hospice, not Providence at Home with Compassus, so they tend to blame the Providence system for what they see as a lack of response,” Palmer said. “I think Compassus is gleaning patients strictly on the Providence name.”

Investigations

One of the nation’s largest rural hospital operators is Lifepoint Healthcare, a company owned by private equity giant Apollo Global Management. Last year, a bipartisan U.S. Senate Budget Committee investigation found that underinvestment in a Lifepoint hospital in rural Iowa led to deteriorating conditions and worsening patient care even as Apollo investors made millions.

Lifepoint is an example of the growing reach of joint ventures: More than 60% of its hospitals are owned through such partnerships with nonprofit and other healthcare providers in multiple states, according to research from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

One of Lifepoint’s largest joint ventures is with the not-for-profit Duke Health, the top-ranked North Carolina health system that’s connected with Duke University and anchored by the highly rated Duke University Hospital.

Their joint venture, Duke LifePoint Healthcare, owns 15 acute care hospitals in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Although Duke’s name comes first in the branding, Lifepoint owns 97% of the venture.

In recent years, some of the Duke LifePoint’s hospitals have been the subject of both state and federal investigations.

Its hospital in Wilson, North Carolina, was at risk of losing federal Medicare funding three times in 2022 and 2023 for problems with patient safety and care. In one cited incident, a man was given contrast dye for a CT scan at the hospital, against his physician’s orders, which led to kidney damage that made him dependent on dialysis. The feds also cited the hospital for two 2022 incidents that they said resulted in patient deaths.

And the hospital was investigated by the North Carolina attorney general’s office for chronic understaffing and allegations the hospital reduced the amount of free or discounted care it provided to uninsured patients, and prioritized patient services with higher reimbursement rates.

Earlier this year a different Duke LifePoint hospital, in Hickory, North Carolina, faced an investigation over care quality problems.

The Lown Institute’s Hospital Index ranked four Duke LifePoint hospitals among the worst in North Carolina.

“To the average consumer patient, you’re going to a Duke LifePoint facility and expect a level of trustworthiness for the system that you know, but really it’s Lifepoint running most of the show,” said Parr, of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

Duke Health officials declined to comment on the investigations but in a statement to Stateline said the partnership is meant to pair Duke Health’s clinical expertise with Lifepoint’s experience supporting smaller community and rural hospitals.

“Duke Health joined the Duke LifePoint partnership to help strengthen access to high-quality care in communities where maintaining local healthcare services can be particularly challenging,” officials said in the statement.

In some cases, private equity investment has breathed life into healthcare enterprises. A 2017 case study out of West Virginia found that the formerly private equity-backed MedExpress urgent care chain benefitted rural Appalachian communities, lowering costs and reducing hospital crowding.

Proponents point out that many of the problems associated with private equity involvement also happen in other types of funding models, including publicly traded outfits or nonprofits. And some private equity firms have shifted away from extractive financial maneuvers and toward more responsible practices.

But critics are worried that increasing private equity interest will bring with it the bad actors that sacrifice care quality for the sake of boosting shareholder profits. They cite a growing body of research that indicates that the private equity model increases the likelihood of understaffing, poor patient outcomes and higher care costs.

Testing state laws

Palmer, the Washington state hospice nurse, said she and some of her coworkers have filed complaints about Compassus with the Washington state attorney general’s office, as well as the state labor department. Palmer is a member of the executive board at her local union that represents healthcare workers.

April Frazier, a hospice chaplain and Palmer’s coworker, said she’s filed a complaint because management told her and other employees to lie about missed patient visits. She said they were told to mark a missed visit as due to patient request, when it was actually the result of no staff member being available to make the visit.

Frazier has worked at Providence for 13 years and told Stateline the company has changed.

“A really big issue is taking on patients and making promises that they can be cared for, and it’s not possible due to lack of staffing,” Frazier said. For example, she said, some patients who are supposed to have aides help them with bathing can’t get that help because there aren’t enough bath aides. The aides who are available have been pressured to shorten their time with patients, she said.

“If somebody is frail and can’t move fast, their skin is delicate and they’re dying, it is disrespectful to try to rush a bath for the sake of productivity numbers,” Frazier said. “That’s the heartbreaking part, when we know what good care looks like and to be pressured to do less than that.”

The office of Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, a Democrat, declined Stateline’s request for an interview. A representative said his office has a policy of not commenting on any potential investigations.

It remains to be seen whether new state laws that restrict private equity’s involvement in healthcare will extend to joint ventures with nonprofit systems, said Parr.

“It is interesting that as you get more legislation coming through in the last few years, we see private equity may be pivoting more toward this type of business model,” he said.

The announcement of Compassus’s joint venture with Providence triggered official reviews in states where the new home health companies would be operating, including California, Oregon and Washington. Those states have laws that require varying levels of oversight for proposed healthcare mergers or acquisitions.

While each state eventually approved the deal, Oregon spent more than a year reviewing it and extracted promises from the companies before signing off in May.

Oregon has one of the toughest laws in the country aimed at private equity. Passed last year, it strictly limits the power of non-physician-run companies, such as those backed by private equity, to control clinical and business decisions for medical practices.

In their initial report on the Providence-Compassus joint venture, Oregon regulators noted the conflicting goals of nonprofits and private equity firms: “To the extent providing better care to community members conflicts with profit objectives, for-profit owners would be expected to prioritize the latter.” They expressed concern that conflict could drive cost-cutting and revenue-maximizing strategies that could hurt patient care and access.

More than 200 public comments were filed, most opposing the partnership.

Oregon eventually approved the deal earlier this year, with conditions: The joint venture must hold to its promise to invest $30 million in home health and hospice operations in the state over the next five years, and continue Providence’s community benefit programs.

As Palmer and her colleagues continue to ask Washington state officials for help, she said she hopes they’ll take a harder look at how the joint venture is affecting her community. And she’s puzzled why Compassus, a company with years of experience providing hospice and home health care in other states, has adopted policies she believes have undermined care for her patients.

“I know our communities are used to a certain standard of care,” she said, “and if we don’t provide that, we’re not going to have a business here.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Salgado Araujo was driving three men to a work site early Tuesday morning when they noticed an unmarked vehicle following them, according to a Texas Tribune interview with Hugo Balderas Ibarra, an attorney representing two of the three passengers in the van with Salgado Araujo. Surveillance footage captured snippets of the leadup to the shooting; an unmarked vehicle driving in the oncoming traffic lane to pass Salgado Araujo’s white van, and an agent opening the passenger door. 

“My clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger,” Balderas Ibarra said in a news conference Friday. 

The killing of Salgado Araujo marked the 21st shooting by immigration agents since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Four people have been shot at in Minnesota, resulting in two deaths. 

In many such cases — including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — video evidence contradicted the government’s accounts, though the feds so far have rarely investigated officers for their use of force. 

And, in the majority of cases, federal agents shot someone who was inside a car. 

Policing and use-of-force experts have long advised law enforcement officers not to stand in front of, or shoot at, vehicles. 

“Most of the policies I’ve seen around the country tell officers you don’t shoot at vehicles except as a last resort,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a policing researcher at the University of South Carolina who has taught at the FBI National Academy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. “But you can’t have that last resort if you’re the one who put yourself in that position — we call that officer-created jeopardy.”

U.S. Department of Justice’s Use of Force policy

“Firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles. Specifically, firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle.”

On July 1, an ICE officer shot at Clemente Lara-Hernandez in Harrisburg, Pa., as he tried to drive away from the agents ordering him to get out of the vehicle. An ICE spokesman said the shooting happened because Lara-Hernandez “weaponized” his vehicle by “ramming it” into the feds’ sedan, according to reporting by PennLive.

But surveillance footage obtained by PennLive shows agents breaking the driver’s side window, then firing at the vehicle after Lara-Hernandez drove around the ICE vehicle, clipping the front end as he fled.

In the Chicago area during the September immigration surge dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz,” an ICE agent shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. Agents said Villegas-Gonzalez hit and dragged an officer with his car, causing serious injuries, but video from the scene casts doubt on whether an agent was hit at all; one officer said immediately after the incident that his injuries were “nothing major.”

When ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Good in January, that was the ninth shooting in four months, all of them involving people in cars. 

Not every shooting was caught on camera. 

In December, ICE agents fired at a St. Paul man, Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero, as he attempted to evade arrest. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on X accusing Rodriguez Romero of using his car to ram multiple agents, asserting that the agent fired shots in self-defense, though interviews with agents on the scene contradicted the official account. 

The U.S. Department of Justice charged Rodriguez Romero with assaulting federal officers but dropped the charges six months later for lack of evidence. No video has emerged of the incident. 

The federal government has rarely investigated or punished officers for the shootings, nor has it released the names of agents involved. (ICE opened investigations into two officers accused of making false statements after one of the agents, Christian Castro, allegedly shot Julio Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis in January. Castro is facing state charges.)

“When there’s no discipline and there’s no being held accountable for doing something like that, it becomes a practice and a pattern,” Alpert said.

Salgado Araujo’s family is calling for an independent investigation into the shooting. 

This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Mark Hauser gave the money on May 6 to the campaign committee of Ramaswamy and his running mate, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley, according to Ohio Secretary of State campaign finance records. The filing lists Hauser at a Cincinnati business address and identifies his occupation as managing partner of Hauser Private Equity. The contribution appears on the ticket’s post-primary report.

Hauser founded Hauser Private Equity, which operates out of Cincinnati and Los Angeles, and serves as chairman of HAUSER Inc., the Cincinnati-based national insurance brokerage he built from a small local agency.

He is also, by his own admission in federal court, a participant in Operation Varsity Blues — the college admissions scandal that swept up dozens of wealthy parents, including Hollywood actors, who paid to cheat their children into selective universities.

Hauser pleaded guilty in September 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. On May 27, 2021, a federal judge in Boston sentenced him to two months in prison, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and 300 hours of community service, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.

Prosecutors said Hauser agreed with admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer to pay $40,000 to cheat on his daughter’s ACT. A co-conspirator traveled to Houston, posed as the proctor for the exam, and corrected her answers after she finished.

A donation that lands against the candidate’s own message

Ramaswamy has built his political identity on the argument that Americans should rise or fall on individual merit rather than on race-conscious policy or institutional advantage. During his 2024 presidential run he pledged to end federally mandated affirmative action. He has campaigned against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and against what he calls woke ideology in schools and business.

At his campaign launch in Cincinnati, Ramaswamy said he would lead Ohio to be a state “where we embrace capitalism and meritocracy” and promised that Ohio would become the first state in the country to put every public school teacher, principal, superintendent and administrator on merit-based pay.

The federal case against Hauser described conduct at the opposite end of that principle: a parent with substantial means paying to manufacture an academic credential his child had not earned, inside a system already tilted toward families like his.

The money race

The Hauser contribution appears on the same post-primary report that showed roughly $116,000 flowing to Ramaswamy from founders of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, and their associates — nearly all of it on primary day or the morning after. TiffinOhio.net reported on that cluster of maximum-legal donations last month. Hauser’s $10,000 falls under the $16,615 individual maximum.

Ramaswamy holds a commanding financial position heading into the November 3 general election against Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director. He has loaned his campaign $25 million of his own money, roughly 83% of what the campaign raised this year, and the contest is on pace to be the most expensive governor’s race in Ohio history.

His campaign finance reporting has also drawn scrutiny. The Ohio Capital Journal reported last month that the campaign has run more than half a million dollars through a credit card while disclosing only the monthly bill rather than the individual purchases state law requires. State Sen. Kent Smith, a Euclid Democrat, has since filed a complaint with the Secretary of State’s office over the reporting. A campaign spokesperson has said the Ramaswamy-McColley operation complies with Ohio campaign finance law.

The campaign has previously declined to address a contribution that drew attention. In February, TiffinOhio.net reported that Ramaswamy’s campaign had accepted a $500 donation from Richard Iott, a former northwest Ohio congressional candidate whose 2010 House bid collapsed after photographs surfaced of him in a Nazi SS uniform. The campaign issued no statement and gave no indication it would return the money.

For a candidate asking Ohio voters to accept that merit alone should decide who gets ahead, the Hauser contribution puts a name and a dollar figure on the question of who is helping fund that argument.

Ramaswamy’s campaign did not return requests for comment.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Stevens issued the release Monday, July 13. He wrote that a second statement was necessary “to address misinformation circulating in our community” about the July 7 shooting of Jeffrey R. Sergent, 43, at Township Road 8 and State Route 67.

The release does not say what the misinformation is, who spread it, or where it appeared.

It arrives while the criminal investigation into the shooting is still open. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is the lead agency, and it has released no findings. The Sheriff’s Office previously told TiffinOhio.net it could not provide records from the shooting because BCI had taken over the case, and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office has withheld the entire investigative file, citing the exemption in state public records law for material assembled for a pending case.

The deputies who fired have not been named. The Sheriff’s Office says they are crime victims whose identities are protected. In the new release, Stevens wrote that the deputies and a Bloomville officer “were, by law, victims of crime in the incident,” and that personal information had to be manually redacted from the footage under Marsy’s Law before any of it could be viewed.

What the Sheriff’s Office says the video shows

Viewer discretion is advised for the bodycam video below.

“The video evidence establishes many facts,” Stevens wrote. The release makes four points.

First, it says deputies did not have their guns drawn while they spoke with Sergent, and drew them only after he put the truck in reverse, struck a guardrail and then drove toward deputies.

Second, it addresses the weapons question. Sergent said he had only knives, according to the release, but deputies could not assess whether other weapons were in the truck because he rolled his windows up. The release says deputies assumed there could be more weapons because they knew his record.

Third, it addresses sound. The release says “popping sounds” audible on the clip came from a window punch tool, then an asp breaking the window, then the truck striking the guardrail. Gunfire comes after those sounds, according to the release, followed by the engine backfiring after the truck hit a cruiser.

Fourth, it addresses where deputies were standing. The release says deputies were on both sides of the truck during the arrest attempt and “never in front of it,” and that when Sergent put the truck in motion, deputies were forced to move to avoid being hit — which placed some of them in front of the vehicle.

The Sheriff’s Office account issued on the day of the shooting said deputies were positioned in front of and beside the truck when they fired into it. Both releases place deputies in front of the vehicle at the moment shots were fired. The new one describes how they got there.

“The Deputies drew their weapons and fired only when their lives and the lives of their fellow officers were in danger, as the video clip clearly shows,” Stevens wrote.

The stills

The four released images are watermarked and carry redactions applied by the agency. Two, timestamped 10:26:03 a.m., show an officer with a handgun raised toward the front of a dark pickup truck stopped along a guardrail. A third, timestamped one second later, shows the truck from the driver’s side. A fourth, at 10:26:13 a.m., shows the truck’s front end against the push bar of a cruiser, its windows shattered.

The Sheriff’s Office said in its first release that the traffic stop began at about 10:17 a.m. and that deputies negotiated with Sergent for roughly 10 minutes. The timestamps on the stills are consistent with that timeline.

The Sheriff’s Office also posted a partial body camera clip to Facebook. It has not released the full footage, and it has not said how many deputies fired, how many shots were fired, or how much of the recorded video the clip represents.

The record the Sheriff’s Office cites

Much of the new release is devoted to Sergent’s criminal history, which the Sheriff’s Office says shaped how deputies approached him. Stevens wrote that Sergent is “a known violent felony offender with our office.”

According to the release, Sergent had convictions in Ohio and Tennessee and faced charges in Georgia. His Ohio charges included resisting arrest, failure to comply, vandalism, being a fugitive from justice and assault of a police officer, the release says, and he was convicted in Ohio of escape and assault.

Those convictions stem from a 2018 case in which Sergent assaulted a Seneca County deputy and tried to take the deputy’s gun during a domestic violence arrest, according to the release, and resulted in a prison sentence.

The release also says deputies had spoken with Sergent about the felony domestic violence charges before the July 7 arrest attempt. Sergent denied the allegation and said he had evidence disproving it, according to the release, but never produced it, and the charges were filed.

The legal argument

The release closes with a legal case for the shooting. Stevens quoted Ohio’s statutory definition of a deadly weapon — any instrument, device or thing capable of inflicting death that is designed, adapted, possessed, carried or used as a weapon — and wrote that a second section of Ohio law “further clarifies a motor vehicle as a ‘deadly weapon.’”

The definition Stevens quoted matches the statute word for word. His description of the second section does not.

That section is Ohio’s felonious assault law. It nowhere classifies motor vehicles as deadly weapons. It borrows the same definition, and it mentions a motor vehicle in a single place: a sentencing provision requiring a license suspension when a vehicle turns out to have been the deadly weapon used in an assault.

Under Ohio law, almost nothing is a deadly weapon by default. Courts have held that knives, BB guns and pocket knives are not deadly weapons on their own, and that the question turns on how an object was actually used. Vehicles are treated the same way. Ohio appeals courts have held that a vehicle qualifies only when used in a manner likely to produce death or great bodily harm, and that the driver’s intent, manner of use and actions must all be examined. One Ohio appellate decision put it directly: a car can be a deadly weapon if used as one, but the state must prove the driver intended to use it as a weapon and was not merely attempting to flee the scene.

Stevens wrote in the same release that Sergent “put their lives at risk by attempting to escape instead of simply complying.”

None of this establishes that the deputies acted unlawfully. Whether an officer’s use of deadly force is justified is judged by a different standard entirely — whether the force was objectively reasonable from the perspective of an officer at the scene — and an officer may lawfully fire at a vehicle he reasonably perceives as a threat even if the driver could not be convicted of assault. Those are separate questions, and BCI is examining the first one, not the second.

What the Sheriff’s Office has done is tell the public that the law already answers a question the law does not answer, while the investigation that will answer it remains open.

What is still not public

The state’s investigation has produced no public findings. The full body camera and cruiser footage has not been released. The deputies have not been identified.

In November, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that police officers attacked in the line of duty are crime victims under Marsy’s Law and that their names may be redacted from public records. Agencies across the state have relied on that ruling to withhold the identities of officers involved in shootings. The Sheriff’s Office is invoking the same protection here.

The Seneca County Coroner’s Office has said Sergent suffered a gunshot wound to the head and a gunshot wound to the arm. Final cause and manner of death and a toxicology report remain pending.

WTOL-11 reported last week that Jacob Kendrick, a friend of Sergent’s, was on a video call with him during the encounter and described what he saw. The Sheriff’s Office release does not reference that account.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported the shooting and the coroner’s findings.

Questions about the investigation are being directed to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, according to the Sheriff’s Office. This is a developing story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Officers were sent to the residence at about 4:43 a.m. on Monday, July 13, according to a press release from Police Chief Donald A. Karr. When they arrived, they found three injured people — two adults and one juvenile. A fourth person, also a juvenile, was not hurt.

Both adults had serious injuries and are receiving treatment, Karr said. A juvenile is in custody and is being treated for minor injuries.

The department did not say how any of the four people were hurt, what led to the call, how the four are related to one another, or why the juvenile was taken into custody. No charges have been announced.

Karr said the department is not releasing any names.

“We will not be releasing names at this time out of respect for the family,” the release said. “Further details will be released as required.”

The chief said required steps were taken at the scene and that the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation was called in to process it. BCI, a division of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, is routinely requested by small departments to handle crime‑scene forensics and major‑case work.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their family,” Karr said of the injured adults.

Gibsonburg police were assisted by the Woodville Police Department, the Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office, Sandusky County EMS, Gibsonburg Fire and the Sandusky County Prosecutor’s Office, according to the release.

Gibsonburg is a village of roughly 2,500 people in Sandusky County, about 25 miles northwest of Tiffin.

TiffinOhio.net will update this story as police release additional information.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The source of the outbreak is unknown and under investigation, the health district said in a news release.

Cyclosporiasis is an intestinal illness caused by a microscopic parasite. People become infected by consuming food or water contaminated with the parasite. Symptoms include intense, watery diarrhea, loss of appetite, weight loss, cramping, bloating, nausea and fatigue, and typically develop within two to 14 days after exposure. The health district said person-to-person spread is extremely unlikely.

The illness can cause prolonged illness in older adults, pregnant women, young children, and people with weakened immune systems or underlying health conditions, according to the health district. Anyone experiencing symptoms should contact a healthcare provider; early diagnosis and treatment can shorten the illness and prevent complications.

Part of a broader Ohio and Midwest increase

The Seneca County cases come as cyclosporiasis case counts climb across Ohio and neighboring states.

The Ohio Department of Health reported 177 cases statewide in 2026 as of July 2, with 171 of those occurring in June, mostly after June 20. Twenty-eight Ohioans had been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported in Ohio.

ODH Director Bruce Vanderhoff said the illness is not typically life-threatening but called it “a serious illness that can cause dehydration” and said it can require people to seek emergency medical care.

The state’s most recent public county-level breakdown, reflecting data as of July 2, listed 2 cases in Seneca County. The health district’s figure of 5 lab-confirmed cases reflects a later date and is drawn from cases reported directly to the district; the two counts are not a direct comparison.

That same state breakdown shows heavier concentrations elsewhere in northwest Ohio: 30 cases in Lucas County, 20 in Wood County, 10 in Wyandot County, 7 in Crawford County, 5 in Fulton County and 2 in Sandusky County.

ODH said it is working with local health departments and with state and federal partners on interviews and traceback investigations to identify any common exposure. As of that release, no common source had been identified. The illness is generally transmitted by eating contaminated produce, and ODH said it can be treated with antibiotics, along with rest and fluids.

How to reduce your risk

The health district listed several preventative steps residents can take while the investigation continues:

• Wash your hands with soap and water before preparing or eating food.

• Carefully wash all produce.

• When able, cook produce to at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit.

• If you are experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, do not swim or visit splashpads. The health district noted that one person with diarrhea can spread germs to everyone else in a pool.

The Seneca County General Health District can be reached at its Tiffin office, 92 E. Perry St., at 419-447-3691, or its Fostoria office, 801 Kirk St., at 419-435-4401.

More information about the illness is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

According to the campaign, the endorsement was made by the executive committee of the UAW Ohio State CAP Council on the recommendation of the Fostoria Area UAW Community Action Program, which represents members in Seneca County. That route matches the process the union describes publicly: candidates are vetted by UAW Region 2B’s area Community Action Program councils, which then make recommendations to the Ohio or Indiana state CAP boards, made up of rank-and-file members and retirees.

The endorsement lands in a district built on factory work. Manufacturing is the largest employment sector in both Seneca and Sandusky counties, with roughly 7,000 workers in each — about a quarter of employed residents in each county — according to U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey estimates.

Jones has spent more than 20 years as a production supervisor at JVIS Tiffin USA, formerly Toledo Molding & Die. Before that, he served four years in the U.S. Army as an airborne infantryman with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard — the Army’s official ceremonial unit. He has represented Tiffin’s 1st Ward on City Council since 2024.

“I’ve spent two decades on a plant floor in Tiffin,” Jones said in the campaign’s announcement. “I know what it means when a line goes down, when a shift gets cut, when a plant that’s been here for generations starts talking about consolidation. The people who build things in Seneca and Sandusky County don’t need somebody in Columbus who’s never done it. They need somebody who has.”

The campaign also said Jones does not accept corporate PAC money, that more than 90 percent of the money he has raised this cycle has come from donors inside House District 88, and that his average contribution is about $73.

Campaign money was a live issue in the district this spring. During the Republican primary, challenger Eric Watson repeatedly criticized incumbent Rep. Gary Click over filings showing Click drew the bulk of his fundraising from corporate political action committees and donors outside the district.

A district Click nearly lost

Click, R-Vickery, is a three-term incumbent who is term-limited after the coming cycle and is seeking a fourth and final two-year term. He survived the May 5 Republican primary by fewer than 600 votes, finishing with 6,859 votes to Watson’s 6,260 — 52.28 percent to 47.72 percent — according to returns from the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections. Click carried his home county of Sandusky but lost Seneca County, where Jones lives and holds elected office. Watson declined to endorse Click after the race.

Jones ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. The UAW endorsement adds to a growing list of labor and veterans’ backing for his campaign: the national veterans group VoteVets endorsed Jones in March, and the Ohio Federation of Teachers endorsed him in a June 18 letter from union President Melissa Cropper.

Ohio’s 88th House District covers all of Seneca and Sandusky counties. The general election is Tuesday, Nov. 3.

More information about the Jones campaign is available at jonesforohio.com.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”

McMaster is scheduled to announce his appointment to the Senate at 4 p.m. Eastern during a press conference. The person selected for the role would serve out the remainder of Graham’s term through early January. Graham was close to his sister, Darline Graham Nordone, after their parents died when she was a teen.

Graham, 71, died unexpectedly this weekend of an aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, according to preliminary findings from the District of Columbia’s medical examiner that were shared by Graham’s office. 

Graham’s death has also triggered a special election process in his home state to determine who will advance to the November general election for a full six-year Senate term. 

Graham won the Republican primary in June and was set to face Democratic candidate Annie Andrews later this year. 

The special election to determine which Republican will advance is scheduled for Aug. 11, with a runoff taking place on Aug. 25 if necessary. 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Allies of an Ohio progressive advocacy group that is being probed by the FBI are hoping to use news of the investigation to mobilize voters this November.

Innovation Ohio launched a social media ad campaign this week referencing the June 11 raid of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The investigation’s exact focus remains unclear, but the FBI previously asked elections officials in at least Cleveland and Columbus about voter registration work performed in 2023 and 2024 by a company owned by an OOC founder.

The ads, which feature clips of TV news coverage, describe the raid as “a deliberate attempt to scare Ohioans, suppress participation, and silence those fighting to protect our freedom to vote.” It directs viewers to Hands Off Ohio, a website that’s raising money to continue the OOC’s voter registration drives in Ohio and to help targets of the investigation push back publicly. 

Innovation Ohio President and CEO Michael McGovern said the Hands Off Ohio coalition is taking its message directly to voters after previously holding in-person rallies. The ad campaign costs at least $100,000, and is being targeted at progressive voters in the state, McGovern said. In addition to social media platforms, the ads also will air on streaming video devices.

“We think Ohioans are smart enough to see through the BS. Rather than allow themselves to be intimidated, we believe these authoritarian tactics will motivate everyday people from across the state to come together to defend their freedoms,” McGovern said.

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative and its political arm, the Ohio Organizing Campaign, are major progressive groups in Ohio, helping fund voter registration drives, ballot initiatives and other forms of political organizing and advocacy. 

The groups also serve as a conduit for tens of millions of dollars coming from large national foundations that fund liberal political causes across the country. The Ohio Organizing Campaign spent $9.6 million in 2024, the group’s public tax filings show – of which $9.1 million went to Black Fork Strategies, a political firm owned by Ohio Organizing Collaborative founder Kirk Noden. 

Black Fork, in turn, was the subject of several complaints by elections officials in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties that year, among others. Elections officials referred their concerns to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, saying Black Fork’s canvassers committed multiple instances of apparent voter registration fraud, including changing voter registrations without those voters’ knowledge, and in a handful of instances, registering dead people to vote. Elections officials said they detected the questionable registrations and blocked them. An elections official in Cuyahoga County told Signal Statewide in an interview last month that none of the registrations resulted in fraudulent voting.

Federal officials haven’t commented on the case, and officials with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative have denied wrongdoing.

Signal Ohio is a nonprofit news organization covering government, education, health, economy and public safety.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

As of Thursday night, the U.S Election Assistance Commission has no members. The White House in an email dismissed Democrats Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland. Republican Christy McCormick resigned, and GOP member Donald Palmer left earlier this year.

Trump’s move guts, for now, a four-member board created in 2002 after the chaos that dogged the 2000 presidential election. That result came down to the vote count in Florida, where the question was debated of whether “hanging chads” on ballots counted or not.

The commission legislation, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, is designed to have the panel help states establish credible voter registration and voting systems.

Activists saw Trump’s sudden firings as the latest, and perhaps most ominous, chapter in his efforts to influence elections in a way opponents say is meant to help his party in the fall midterms.

To them, it becomes part of a growing list that includes extraordinary congressional map-drawing in Republican-leaning states, a fierce effort to require voters to provide photo ID and proof of citizenship and the Supreme Court’s curtailing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

“Here we go again,” said a joint statement by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Rep. Joe Morelle, D-New York., after the commission decision became public. They’re the top Democrats on the congressional committees that deal with election law.

“Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference,” they said.

The White House insisted it is interested only in a fair election.

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” a White House official who asked not to be named told States Newsroom in an email.

Trump’s election orders

To skeptics, Trump’s latest action was part of an ongoing push to influence election procedures – an effort unheard of in modern times for an incumbent president – that shows no signs of abating.

The election commission would not alter the national voter registration form as Trump wanted so that it would include proof of citizenship. Trump issued an executive order requiring proof of citizenship for voters, but a federal judge blocked the effort, saying states and Congress had that authority.

He is also attempting to restrict voting by mail. The Supreme Court last month rejected a bid to bar mail votes from being counted after Election Day. The votes can count as long as they are postmarked by that day.

But the administration is trying another court challenge, aimed at preserving Trump’s executive order telling federal agencies to come up with a national list of documented adult U.S. citizens who could then vote.

The order would also have the U.S. Postal Service establish a system for dealing with mail-in votes from the approved lists. A federal judge has blocked the order. The case could wind up at the Supreme Court later this year.

Can the SAVE America Act be saved?

On Capitol Hill, when Congress returns to work Monday from the Fourth of July recess, House lawmakers will confront how or whether to proceed with the SAVE America Act, Trump’s bid to require voters to show identification and proof of citizenship.

The legislation is expected to go nowhere, since it needs 60 votes in the Senate, which has 47 members who caucus with the Democrats.

Trump, though, has put enormous pressure on supporters to move the bill. “THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” he wrote on Truth Social Friday. He explained he will not sign a housing reform bill, which passed Congress by big bipartisan margins last month, in protest. Without his signature, the bill will become law anyway at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

The SAVE America Act has paralyzed the House, as supporters refused to let members consider any other legislation until the chamber passes the act.

Trump has been moving on other fronts. His administration backed a successful challenge to a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that tore down decades-old barriers that kept minority voters in the South from voting and gaining political clout. 

The president also energized movements across conservative states to redraw congressional district lines, normally done after censuses in years ending in zero.

Instead, eight states, including Texas, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Missouri have adjusted their maps this year in ways expected to help Republicans.

California and Utah have redrawn maps to create more potential Democratic seats. But all the changes, said the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, have created “a Republican advantage of some size.” 

Trump’s initiatives have sparked bitterness for and against.

“Democracy doesn’t disappear overnight, it erodes piece by piece. SCOTUS weakens voting rights. Trump guts the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and pushes the SAVE America Act to choke voter registration and fair elections. We cannot stay silent. We must resist,” Rep. Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., said on X.

Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., applauded Trump’s latest action.

“President Trump is right to clean house at the Election Assistance Commission,” Hamadeh said on X.

“For too long, it has enabled weak standards & defended vulnerable machines that fueled irregularities in 2020 & 2022. Rather than address legitimate concerns with transparency & accountability, the EAC circled the wagons & politicized a sacred nonpartisan process,” he said.

Rigged elections?

At the heart of all these efforts is Trump’s long-held view that elections are too often rigged. He made that claim after losing in 2020, despite no evidence of much if any fraud.

Most recently, he alleged rigging in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, where Republican Spencer Pratt failed to advance, topped by two Democrats. Again, there’s been no evidence of wrongdoing.

The independent Election Assistance Commission that Trump gutted helped in establishing the credibility of elections by, in its description, “advancing Safe, Secure, Accurate, and Accessible Elections.”

The Center for Election Innovation & Research has found that over the past 25 years, “states have implemented several innovative policies that streamline the process of voter registration, promote voter list accuracy, and create more options for eligible citizens to register or update their voter registration.”

Among the changes: more online voter registration, same-day voter registration, and automatic voter registration. Forty-six states and Washington, D.C., use at least one of these methods, up from seven states in 2000.

Next steps

The commission’s ability to effect change now appears stymied.

“Congress deliberately structured the Election Assistance Commission as a bipartisan agency to help states administer free, fair, and secure elections,” said Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.

“These removals leave the agency without leadership and unable to carry out its major responsibilities,” he said.

Trump is using the authority that the Supreme Court appeared to give him in a decision last week allowing him to remove members of independent agencies, except for Federal Reserve governors.

Trump would have to appoint two Democrats as well as two Republicans to the EAC, but they would need Senate confirmation.

Asked if the president planned appointments anytime soon, the White House official said, “The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Legislators at an annual conference hosted by Future Caucus, an organization that aims to strengthen bipartisan dialogue among Gen Z and millennial leaders, engaged in tech-related policy discussions and agreed states should impose some guardrails on online activity, especially for kids.

South Carolina state Rep. Brandon Guffey urged lawmakers to pursue policy that would hold Big Tech companies accountable for exposing kids to harmful online content. He said he champions “guardrails” over device bans because “we cannot keep kids (offline) right now.” 

“I don’t want to take away anybody’s rights to be free,” the Republican said. “But at the end of the day, we have a responsibility to protect the next generation.” 

Guffey wrote Gavin’s Law, an act passed in 2023 that made “sextortion,” or the use of explicit content for blackmail, a felony in the state. The law was named after his 17-year-old son Gavin Guffey, who lost his life in 2022 due to online sextortion, and whose story Guffey shared with the roomful of quiet, attentive legislators.

Tomicah Tilleman, president of the organization Project Liberty that works to shape and advance AI policy, also warned state lawmakers of the addictive nature of the technology, a feature he said comes at the cost of users’ personal data for tech companies’ financial gain. 

“Take a hard look at the structures that have led us to where we are, and start thinking at a very first-principles level about how we can build something better,” Tilleman said.   

State Rep. Christine Cockley, a Democrat from Ohio, highlighted the growing issue of young people turning to AI chatbots for suicide assistance. 

She is working to pass a bill alongside a Republican colleague that would require AI developers to build their models using mental health frameworks because she said she is “sick of hearing” stories about chatbots helping children write suicide notes and encouraging self-harm.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is that we have to listen to the people with the lived experience to create good, sound policy,” Cockley said.

What to do about AI? 

AI was a dominant theme throughout the rest of the morning.

State Reps. Monique Priestley, a Vermont Democrat, and Joe Hogan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, talked about the speed and scale of AI’s growth into almost every sector of society and weighed the pros and cons of managing the technology at the state level versus federal level. 

Hogan said he believes states can succeed in protecting children and consumers from chatbots, but he thinks a “national framework” is more effective when it comes to developing the actual AI models. 

On the other hand, Priestley said states should lead on the issue because it would help them address harms that only happen in certain areas, she said. 

Plus, she added, it would protect states’ rights to self-govern. 

Though the panelists expressed a handful of different views on questions related to AI policy, they agreed that the technology requires government regulation. 

“It is the one bipartisan issue where we can come together and experiment,” Priestley said. “We are the laboratories of democracy, and when we are scared into not being those laboratories, then I think all of America is let down by that.” 

Bipartisan look to the future 

Future Caucus has convened summits of young lawmakers since 2017, with the goal of strengthening bipartisanship.

This year’s Future Summit, as the meeting is called, focused on the country’s 250th birthday with the title “Next 250 — The Courage to Build.” 

Organizers invited Gen Z and millennial lawmakers to look back on the history of American politics, share their visions for the country’s future and work together to build a plan for that next chapter. 

Aside from Friday’s internet safety and AI sessions held, state legislators sat in on discussions led by their peers throughout the week on topics such as passing bipartisan legislation, bridging the gap between elected officials and public constituents and empowering female leadership. 

“There is joy in this community that surprises people, and it comes from discovering that politics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game,” Future Caucus president and CEO Layla Zaidane said in a speech Thursday. “Solving problems (with people) who think differently from you is not only possible, but it is deeply fulfilling.” 

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Department of Homeland Security agency issued new guidance to employers saying work authorization for hundreds of thousands of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status impacted by a recent Supreme Court decision would expire in one to two weeks, instead of Friday.

The agency said Haitians with TPS will have valid work authorization until July 24, while nationals of Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen with TPS will have it until July 17.

The decision came hours before immigrants hailing from those countries were set to lose their work authorizations under earlier USCIS guidance.

The Supreme Court ruled June 25 that the Trump administration could move forward with a plan to end TPS for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, even while the lower courts continue hearing legal challenges. 

The conservative justices found the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS was not subject to judicial review, impacting several other cases challenging the termination of humanitarian protections.

But the lower courts had not aligned their cases with the Supreme Court order by Friday, leaving in place, for now, their orders forbidding deportation.

Typically, decisions from the high court go into effect 32 days after a ruling. USCIS jumped ahead of that schedule with its July 1 guidance. The July 24 expiration date is still within 32 days of the court decision and could be further delayed.

Trump and asylum

During his second term, President Donald Trump has ended TPS for about 1 million immigrants who were initially granted humanitarian protections because they hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return. 

Federal judges are still hearing arguments about if the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS was based on discriminatory practices, such as race or country of origin. 

But the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority did not find that immigrants challenging their legal protections being revoked were “entitled” to any judicial holds postponing the end of their TPS. 

TPS recipients from Haiti and Syria will have their deportation protections in place until lower courts lift them or unless they have a protected status other than TPS, such as a pending asylum case. 

But not every TPS recipient can apply for asylum. For example, if someone has TPS due to a natural disaster, they are unlikely to meet the criteria for asylum, which is fear of persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

The Trump administration last year stopped processing asylum cases for immigrants from dozens of countries, including Haiti and Syria, but a federal judge in June struck down that policy. 

DHS has said that it plans to deport those who have lost TPS following the Supreme Court’s decision.

So far, the administration has declined to renew protections for 14 countries under TPS. The remaining countries with TPS are El Salvador, Lebanon and Ukraine. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has until Saturday to extend TPS for immigrants from El Salvador, who were the first to receive protections from the program. 

TPS can be renewed on cycles ranging from 6 to 18 months. It does not provide a path to citizenship.

Healthcare crisis

TPS beneficiaries from Haiti make up one of the largest shares of immigrants in the program Congress created in the 1990s.

The states with the largest population of TPS recipients from Haiti are Florida, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio according to the immigration advocacy group fwd.us.

More than 50,000 Haitians with TPS work in the healthcare industry, and lawmakers from both parties have raised concerns about the consequences of such a sudden loss of workers.

New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, warned that “immediately shutting off TPS will create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes, and in the (intellectual disabilities) community.”

Members of a union that represents healthcare workers along the East Coast gathered in New York City Friday to protest their opposition to work permits ending for TPS recipients and raised concerns that a sudden loss of workers would exacerbate the shortage of caregivers. 

A 2024 report found that nearly half of all nursing homes in the U.S. struggle with staffing shortages. 

“If TPS ends, we will face a caregiver crisis, the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Andy Cassagnol, the executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199.

He said the move will worsen staffing shortages in home care settings and nursing homes. 

“This is a cruel, heartless, and inhumane policy that will rip parents away from their children and devastate whole communities,” Cassagnol said of the Supreme Court’s decision. “Imagine seniors and individuals living with disabilities waking up to find their favorite aide is just gone. Maybe someone who is the only familiar face in their lives has disappeared.”

U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat who sponsored a bill in the House that would extend TPS for Haiti for three years, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision that the “implications of this ruling are nothing short of catastrophic.”

Haitians allege racism

But even if Pressley’s bill managed to garner 60 votes in the Senate, it’s unlikely that Trump would sign the measure after he vowed on the campaign trail to end TPS for Haitians and used pejorative language to describe Haiti and its people. 

The president’s words regarding Haiti have been central to TPS recipients’ claims that the decision to end protections was due to racism, not an evaluation of improved country conditions.  

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court noted equal protection arguments were unlikely to prevail in the lower courts. 

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The justices also decried the state law that requires partisan labels on state supreme court races, an Ohio Supreme Court decision to allow judges to endorse political candidates, and movements throughout the country to politicize judges’ seats.

“When average citizens start to talk about judges and justices by putting them in a political tribe, it undermines who we are,” said former justice Yvette McGee Brown, in a press conference outside the Joseph P. Kinneary federal courthouse in downtown Columbus.

Brown stood with fellow former justice Michael P. Donnelly and former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor during the press conference with the organization Justice in Motion.

Donnelly said the fear is not just the loss of independence for judges and justices, but of societal and legal norms that were once believed to be concrete.

“You all grew up with the same norms that we accepted as Americans: that America was the great melting pot; if you were born here, you were an American; no one is above the law,” Donnelly said. “You see these norms being broken … it’s like a firehose coming at us.”

The justices were also joined by former North Carolina Supreme Court justice Robert Orr, along with former Ohio attorneys general Nancy Rogers and Richard Cordray, and judges from across the state.

Orr said the separation of powers between the branches of government is critical for democracy.

“The founders of our nation feared the consolidation of power into the hands of any one branch or any one person, and it was the judiciary that the framers of our Constitution … turned to, to abide by the law, to be independent, to be judges not for a party or a person, but for a Constitution and the people,” Orr said.

_Former Ohio Supreme Court justice Yvette McGee Brown speaks at a press conference on Wednesday, as part of a movement to promote the elimination of partisanship in the judicial branch.

(Photo by Susan Tebben / Ohio Capital Journal)_

Justice in Motion puts judges from multiple states on a tour bus that travels from Pennsylvania to Michigan, holding events like the one in Columbus “focused on the rule of law, constitutional democracy, and public trust,” according to the organization.

Donnelly said the “assault” on the rule of law “could not be overstated,” especially with enormous ramifications possible from the midterm elections in November.

“In my lifetime, I have never seen this danger to the rule of law,” Donnelly said. “Call it out, don’t be afraid, exercise your vote as an American, it’s all on the line.”

Cordray said the danger to judicial independence starts at the very top.

“We’re here because we believe in the rule of law, and hate to see it corrupted by people who think they’re above the law, including the president of the United States,” he said.

O’Connor was flanked by her own “defender of democracy,” her 19-month-old dog Carlo. She pointed back to the redistricting battles that lasted the better part of four years in Ohio, with the supreme court she led rejecting five statehouse district maps and two congressional maps.

The former chief justice and former state lieutenant governor also mentioned the defeat of Issue 1, an effort she championed to overhaul the redistricting system in Ohio, and eliminate the Ohio Redistricting Commission.

Because Issue 1 was voted down in 2024, the commission continues to be made up of elected officials, mostly from the majority party, and includes the governor, secretary of state, and auditor of state.

But hard work in the next election could not only bolster the integrity of the judiciary, but bring about hope to address gerrymandering again, O’Connor said.

“We have the opportunity to vote for people who will make up the redistricting commission that we still have, that will make a difference how maps are drawn,” she said.

O’Connor added there is “talk” of a possible push to try redistricting reform again in 2027, depending on the results of the midterms.

The judges and justices urged Ohioans to educate themselves on the judicial candidates running in the November election, from the supreme court, down to their county courthouses.

Partisan politics should play no role in an independent judiciary, Donnelly said, and public confidence in it “is its lifeblood.”

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I don’t understand the idea of a championship golf course near the nation’s capital. There are already world-class golf courses there,” said former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who served from 1999 to 2007. He is the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, the 27th president.

“Now is not the time to devastate cherry trees that have an important role as part of the cultural alliance between the United States and Japan … It’s very concerning.”

Taft, a Republican as is Trump, is an avid outdoorsman and golfer. He said chopping down cherry trees is an afront to his family heritage and a threat to the beauty of Washington as an international tourist attraction.

“They are a United States institution,” Taft said. “People from all over the world come to the Cherry Blossom Festival.”

Cherry trees were given by the Japanese to former President Taft and his wife, Nellie, who had ambitions to beautify the nation’s capital. She admired the flowering trees when her husband was the presidentially appointed Governor General of the Philippines.

Some of those historic trees plus others could be removed to make way for Trump’s plan to turn the public East Potomac Golf Links into a “championship” venue capable of hosting major tournaments such as the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup.

The plan would also eliminate a riverside bike trail and other public recreation areas. Trump toured the course June 28 with government officials and golf course planners. The project could begin as early as Sept. 1.

The Ohio connection to the threatened Japanese cherry trees goes back to 1912-1913 when 3,020 saplings from the banks of the Arakawa River in a Tokyo suburb were planted along the Tidal basin.

“Without President and Nellie Taft, the trees wouldn’t be there,” the former governor said. “They make Washington a more beautiful setting.”

Bob Taft had an emotional ceremony in 2000 in Japan during his first foreign trade trip as governor. He joined Yukika Sohma, daughter of former Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaki, to plant Ohio dogwood trees in a Tokyo park across from the building housing Japan’s legislative assembly.

“Times change, but the flowers will keep on,” Sohma said at the time in a story published in the Columbus Dispatch.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Some people on Ohio’s death row praised Gov. Mike DeWine for having the courage to come out against the death penalty. Others said actions speak louder than words, and they want the governor to commute their death sentences to life without the possibility of parole.

But all agreed with the governor on one thing: Ohio’s death penalty law is broken. DeWine said long delays in carrying out executions undermine its intended function as a deterrent. Condemned prisoners resoundingly said that the possibility of being executed never stopped anyone from committing murder.

In the days after DeWine called on legislators to abolish the death penalty in Ohio during a press conference last month, The Marshall Project turned to the people who are awaiting execution in the state’s prisons. Sixteen responded, providing a rare perspective on capital punishment from those most directly affected by it.

DeWine helped enact Ohio’s death penalty law 45 years ago as a young state legislator. In his statement last month, he said the decades it takes, on average, to carry out executions have rendered the sentence meaningless.

Several of the people we heard from said they had hoped, or even expected, to hear him say he would commute the sentences of the more than 100 people on the state’s death row to life without parole. But during his two terms in office, DeWine has commuted only one person’s death sentence.

Since his announcement, the governor has not answered questions about whether he might commute more before his term ends in January.

“All he did was kick the can down the road for others to deal with. And, to me, that made him a coward!” said Grady Brinkley, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend and sentenced to death in 2002.

Jeremiah Jackson, 46, was convicted in 2010 of murdering a laundromat employee in Cleveland during a series of robberies. He compared DeWine’s announcement to a candy wrapper: “Nothing sweet inside to have. Just something to look at.”

DeWine has not carried out an execution during his time in office, routinely saying that the drugs needed for lethal injection are not available. In his statement, he did not address the morality of executions, though some commended him for supporting a position increasingly embraced by pro-life conservatives.

“It takes courage to reexamine your beliefs and speak openly about that change,” said Stanley Jalowiec, who was convicted of murdering a police informant in 1994.

Nearly all of the people we heard from on death row agreed that the death penalty does not deter crime.

It “never even entered my mind as I was committing my crimes. Why should it have?” asked George Brinkman, who received two death sentences for five murders in 2017.

“Nobody thinks: ‘I’m gonna rob this gas station and shoot a clerk,’” said Thomas Knuff Jr., who was convicted of fatally stabbing two people and sentenced to death in 2019. “I’m sure some crimes of murder are planned. But those people never think they will get caught, so they never think about a death penalty beforehand.”

Several said they were unaware, prior to their arrests, that Ohio has a death penalty, or that it has executed 56 people since 1981.

“I don’t know that capital punishment could ever be a deterrent to murder, no more than prisons are a deterrent to crime,” said Keith LaMar, who maintains that he is innocent of killing five prisoners in a 1993 riot at the state prison in Lucasville, for which he was sent to death row.

“People make decisions based on what they themselves perceive their options to be, and sometimes — most times — we can’t see what we can’t see,” he said.

Jalowiec agreed.

“Most of the guilty men I have spoken with never seriously considered the possibility of a death sentence before committing their crimes,” he said. “Many acted under the influence of drugs and alcohol, acted in a moment of rage, or simply believed they would never be caught. The possibility of execution was not part of their decision-making process.”

A growing body of research has found that the brain’s ability to fully reason, assess risks and check impulses continues to develop until a person’s mid-20s and sometimes later. About a third of Ohio’s death row prisoners were sentenced before they turned 25, and some were convicted of crimes committed when they were teenagers, according to a Marshall Project review of state prison records.

“I believe most death row inmates were kids when we caught our cases and hadn’t fully matured into adulthood,” said Jonathan Monroe, who was 25 a quarter century ago when convicted of killing two women in Columbus in search of drugs. “Our upbringing, the abuse that we endured and the lack of proper guidance should all be factored in.”

As governor, DeWine cannot unilaterally repeal the death penalty. He asked lawmakers to do that. And, if they don’t, he urged them to put the issue on the ballot for voters to decide.

Since 2011, Democratic legislators, and more recently some Republicans, have tried to repeal Ohio’s death penalty, proposing legislation that would set the maximum punishment at life without the possibility of parole.

Death row prisoners are not optimistic that lawmakers will give voters the chance, or that voters would ultimately support repeal.

“They have been talking about abolishing the death penalty since 2005. I know. I have been on this case since 1985,” said Percy Hutton, who has an execution date set for 2028. Hutton was convicted of fatally shooting a man during an argument.

Though DeWine said nothing about the possibility of wrongful convictions, several people said exonerations of people sentenced to death should give everyone pause.

“Lots of guys have been released over actual innocence from death sentences in America, and some were ultimately killed before DNA or other evidence cleared them,” said Knuff. “Death is absolute. Death is final.”

Opponents of the death penalty in Ohio released a report earlier this year highlighting a dozen people freed from the state’s death row after being wrongfully convicted.

Beyond abolishing the death penalty, state officials should extend rehabilitation programs to people on death row, many respondents argued.

Edward Lang III was sentenced to death nearly 20 years ago at the age of 18 after being convicted of killing two people during a drug deal in Canton. If his sentence were commuted to life without parole, he said he would “join a college program. Get a state job to help provide for myself. These things are not available to death row, as we are just left to rot away.”

If the governor were to grant them mercy, several said they dreamed of participating in prison programs, getting educated, being less of a financial burden to their families and mentoring younger prisoners. One man said he relies on his family to supplement his $16 monthly prison stipend, which isn’t enough to cover his hygiene needs.

“Things can change for the better, and holding on to that hope is important,” said Taci Jordan Vixen, who along with co-defendent Archie Dixon, is scheduled to be executed in 2027 after being convicted of burying a man alive in 1993.

But a couple of people said that life without parole would be a fate worse than death.

Richard Bays, who was convicted of killing a man during a home robbery while under the influence of crack cocaine, said he would contemplate ending his own life in that situation.

“I don’t want commutation,” said Knuff. “Life in prison is no life I want.”

James Conway III was convicted of fatally shooting an Ohio State University student and wounding another person outside a club in 2002. He’s had the same nightmare over and over again during his 23 years on death row.

“They come get you, to take you to the execution chamber, and you can’t contact family or legal counsel. Many of us, including myself, suffer panic attacks and other conditions related to the extreme long-term stresses of living under the threat of being executed,” he said.

“It just comes over you, and you go through it until your body can’t take it anymore. Then you sort of pass out and hope things are better when you wake up.”

Decades of waiting to be killed are psychologically torturous, many said.

LaMar is the next person scheduled to be executed in Ohio, with a date set in January. He called the years he has waited since arriving on death row in 1995 “soul-murdering.”

“I noticed almost immediately that most of the men were mentally unstable and should have been in some kind of mental institution,” he said.

While some cling to hope, others say they feel like they are already dead, emotionally and spiritually.

“Just being on the Row will suck the very life out of a person! Year after year of this makes a person want to die! There is no reason to go on!” said George Skatzes, who was convicted of murdering three people, including a corrections officer, during the 1993 prison riot in Lucasville.

The families of condemned prisoners also suffer under death sentences.

“The tears, the fear and the grief were simply too much for her,” Jalowiec said of his mother. “My family has spent decades living with the uncertainty, stress and emotional burden that comes with a death sentence.”

Conway said his mother talked about killing herself when he was convicted in 2003. Her grandchildren — his kids — grew up without a father present in their lives.

“In my opinion, they should have access to the same resources that are available to victims’ families through the prosecutor’s office,” Conway said. “Regardless of what anyone thinks about me, they are victims of this situation as much as anyone.”

Austin Myers, the youngest person on Ohio’s death row, said he feels forgotten “by nearly all except for those who want you dead.”

“I believe that much of my family mourned the loss of me at the time that I was convicted and sentenced to death, and I never heard from them again,” he said.

One man said his children took their mother’s last name. Some said they have become estranged or watched most of their family members die while they waited to be executed.

They struggle daily with a legacy of pain and suffering that will not die with them.

“The victims are waiting to cheer on our death. Our families are waiting to grieve us,” said Lang.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Why did the legislature last fall, as we were preparing to give thanks for our blessings, rush through changes in our election laws that made it harder to vote and easier for Donald Trump to stifle resistance? 

The answer comes from a multi-layered 22-year story that points to one conclusion: The Ohio Republican Party has stolen voters’ power in elections and access to the franchise, and is equipping Donald Trump to do the same in the next few months.

First, let’s get the simplicity of grace periods out of the way.

In Ohio last year, if you dropped your absentee ballot in the mail five days before Election Day and for some reason it was routed through the Detroit Post Office (I speak from recent experience) it might arrive at the local board of elections a day or two after Election Day.

In 2025, Ohio’s four-day grace period meant your vote would have been counted if it was postmarked before Election Day and arrived within four days after the election. 

Not this year. The legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine changed the rules.

A ballot that arrives after midnight election night won’t be opened. It’s headed to the incinerator rather than counted in what promises to be one of the most consequential mid-term elections in American history.

More than 11,000 votes in the November 2024 presidential election would have been destroyed rather than counted under the new rule.

Let’s go back two decades and find out why we had a grace period in the first place.

In 2004, Ohio was one of three closely watched pivotal states in the hot Bush-Kerry presidential election. Polling showed them neck and neck. Adding to Ohio’s tension was a constitutional amendment proposing to ban same-sex marriage, plus new voting machines across the state. Turnout promised to be extraordinary — and it was.

The system failed. There weren’t enough machines, not enough poll workers, and some voters were waiting in line for more than eight hours.

At one polling place at closing time there were 400 people still in line. Worse, a machine in a Columbus suburb gave George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes and Kerry lost the state by only 2 percentage points. 

For only the second time in American history there was a Congressional motion to reject a state’s slate of electors. It was Ohio’s.

The election was a public relations nightmare for Ohio Republicans. They controlled the state legislature, governor’s office, Ohio Supreme Court, and the Ohio Secretary of State’s office with J. Kenneth Blackwell at the helm.

Republican state Rep. Larry Wolpert of Hilliard offered a solution in 2005: Let anyone who wants to vote by mail do so. The supporting argument was that mail-in ballots would take the pressure off of having enough machines and poll workers on election day.

Absentee ballots were not as common then. In the 2004 election and for decades previously, Ohioans could only cast a mail-in ballot if they knew they would be out of town or otherwise incapacitated on election day. In 2004, about 10 percent voted by mail, and many were overseas military as the U.S. engaged in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The legislature approved Wolpert’s idea. 

But as Wolpert anticipated the first test in the 2008 presidential election he had a new concern: What if the U.S. Postal Service can’t handle all the ballots in a timely manner. And again, Ohio was in the spotlight as the first Black presidential candidate faced off against a military and citizen hero.

Wolpert proposed another fix: A 10-day grace period. As long as a ballot was postmarked no later than Election Day, it had 10 days to arrive at the local board of elections to be counted. The legislature approved.

In those days, Republicans didn’t know who would be most likely to vote by mail. They did it to prevent another election disaster.

But now they know who is most likely to vote by mail: Democrats, about 2-1.

Which brings us to the Trump-MAGA regime.

What began as an effort to help all Ohioans vote and avoid embarrassing catastrophes has become a tool for disenfranchising Democrats and concentrating power in the hands of Republicans who claim to be populists but instead are working against the people of Ohio.

(For anyone who wishes to argue that Republicans would not do such a thing, I’ll remind them that the Republican Speaker of the Ohio House and former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party were arrested in 2020 and now in prison for orchestrating what a federal prosecutor described as the largest bribery scandal in state history. The GOP goal was to use the bribes to orchestrate elections and pass laws that benefited those who would do the bribing. In this case, it was First Energy, and Ohioans were on track to pay billions in higher utility rates as a result.)

The 10-day grace period stood the test of time. In 2020 and the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 57% of Ohioans voted by mail or early to avoid large crowds and the deadly infection. 

But Donald Trump lost that election. And that’s when it all started. The steal.

His false claims of voter fraud, especially for mail-in ballots, and attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power energized his MAGA adherents in Ohio.

The state was overrepresented among those arrested in the Jan. 6 insurrection. When Mar-a-Lago was raided, a Columbus-area man attempted to shoot up an FBI office. 

And an emboldened Ohio legislature came to Trump’s aid. 

Emboldened how? Despite the Speaker of the House and director of the Ohio GOP indicted in a massive bribery scandal months before the 2020 election, gerrymandered district borders resulted in Ohio voters returning the GOP to power at the Statehouse.

More importantly, this emboldened legislature and Gov. DeWine in 2021 drew district boundaries again that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled violated the constitution’s anti-gerrymandering clause. They defied the state court and we proceeded to elect an unconstitutionally districted legislature. 

Today, of our delegation to Congress, 66% are Republican. In the Ohio Senate, 77% are Republican. In the Ohio House, 65% are Republican. But only 19% of Ohio voters have registered as Republicans and in polling, about one-third of Ohioans identify as Republican. 

People wonder: Will Donald Trump defy the courts? In Ohio, the legislature and governor already have. 

In the midst of that battle, in May of 2022, then-Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman was quoted in the Columbus Dispatch as saying that as the supermajority we “can pretty much do what we want.”

But while the Ohio GOP was riding high in 2022, the same wasn’t the case at the national level. The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection held a series of hearings concluding in December 2022 that poured emotional testimony and photos into the political ecosphere as it explored Trump’s role in attempting to block the election certification, his failure to stop violence, and his baseless claims of voter fraud. 

At the same time, a predicted Republican sweep of Congress in midterm elections failed to materialize, raising concerns among GOP leaders that they might be facing headwinds.

And Trump announced his plan to run again in 2024.

The Ohio GOP jumped to action to complicate free and fair elections. A bill languishing in the Senate for a year, Ohio House Bill 458, introduced in October 2021, proposed to eliminate August special elections. That’s all.

The bill was grabbed in the first week of December 2022 and more than 40 new provisions were added, imposing new identification requirements to register to vote and to cast a ballot on Election Day. Failure to present the required ID meant the voter had to use a provisional ballot and then go to the board of elections to prove identity. 

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose defended the ID requirements saying that polling shows people overwhelmingly favor some form of photo ID for voting. That was true. About 80% of Americans liked the idea. But while that was the main talking point, the legislature went way beyond photo IDs to make it harder to vote.

Lawmakers also reduced the time voters had to prove their identity in the event they were challenged at the polling place. The time period was reduced from seven to four days, meaning they might need to secure a certified birth certificate and visit the Bureau of Motor Vehicles by Saturday rather than have a full week. 

How many Ohioans might be ill-prepared to meet these new requirements? Bureau of Motor Vehicles data suggested that about 500,000 registered voters did not have the necessary state identification to continue to vote. Trump beat Kamala Harris by 640,000 votes in 2024 and Hillary Clinton by 447,000 in 2016.

For people who might be challenged at their polling place in Cincinnati’s densely populated Price Hill area, a trip to the board of elections in Norwood to prove their identity might require a half day’s bus ride. If they needed a certified birth certificate, another few hours on the bus and $24. 

The bill also reduced the number of days in which a voter can request an absentee ballot, eliminated the option of voting at the board of elections the day before the election — one of the busiest days — and limited the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots to just one per county.

Franklin County, Ohio’s 17th most sprawling county with 891,435 registered voters has one box, as does Lake County, Ohio’s tiniest county: one box and 80% fewer registered voters (161,867). 

And after Republican Ohio Senate General Government Committee Chair Theresa Gavarone of Bowling Green said the 10-day grace period for mail-in ballots might be eliminated, they instead reduced it from 10 days to four. Her argument for the reduction was two-fold: People want to know who won, and more days to count means more opportunities for fraud. 

But her suggestion that people wanted to know who won meant they wanted the vote count within hours of the polls closing. Knowing who won didn’t include taking time to make sure that everyone who put their ballots in the mail on time or were challenged at the polling place were counted. That, historically, was tens of thousands of voters.

Moreover, lawmakers offered no evidence that fraud ever occurred in those grace periods. 

There was little time to muster public testimony in the 10-day window in which the bill was debated, but 19 presented opposition testimony and only one, speaking on behalf of the Florida-based Opportunity Solutions Project, was in favor of the bill.

Two days after the last opponents spoke, the bill was voted out of committee, approved in the Ohio Senate and the Ohio House concurred. 

Did any of these changes make a difference?

In the five years prior to this bill, an average 7.2% of people who didn’t have adequate identification were unable to satisfy requirements in time to prove they were legitimate voters.

In 2023, the first year of the new identification requirements, the rejections surged four-fold to 29% and remained high at 25% in 2024, according to a study by All Voting is Local, a voter-rights advocacy group.

In total, 34,364 provisional ballots were rejected in 2024, the group said.

The report is head-exploding.

Who are the people who were rejected? Were any of them legitimate voters who were unable to gather the new documentation? Did they have transportation? What communities did they live in? What was their life situation?

This information wasn’t explored by GOP lawmakers in public, though it is very possible they had it then (and LaRose is able if not required to know most of this now).

And with so few people in Ohio paying for quality local journalism these days, there aren’t enough investigative reporters to find out.

As he signed Ohio House Bill 458, Gov. Mike DeWine said that he believed that the provisions should assure the state’s election integrity “and I do not expect to see any further statutory changes in Ohio voting procedures while I am governor.”

Except the opposite happened.

Trump took office and began an effort to take control of elections. 

On Oct. 14 last year, Gavarone and Republican state Sen. Andrew Brenner of Delaware County introduced Ohio Senate Bill 293 with one purpose: Eliminate those last four days of grace. That’s all. Keep the talking points simple. But like the previous bill, it would grow to be much more.

For context, in the same week that the no-grace bill was introduced, the federal government was shut down over healthcare-benefit cuts that were about to go into effect, Vice President JD Vance said the president was considering invoking the insurrection act, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an order that Pentagon news media were not permitted to publish any information that wasn’t authorized by the Defense Department, an alleged drug boat was exploded killing three people and the president posted an AI video of himself in a fighter jet dropping fecal matter on No Kings protestors, tens of thousands who had gathered that weekend.

In that head-spinning news on a weekly basis, the bill was through both houses in five weeks — a remarkable feat for Ohio lawmakers. Bills and resolutions usually don’t move that fast unless Republicans want to control women’s reproductive rights or, well, elections.

In her public statement about eliminating voters’ grace, Gavarone did not disclose publicly that this was an idea considered and discarded three years earlier — which might require explanation as to why it was kept.

Instead, Gavarone cited a Donald Trump March 25, 2025 executive order that said all ballots must be received no later than Election Day to be counted. 

One might conclude that she believed Trump had the authority to do so and states had to act. It was a curious position for her to take, considering that the U.S. Constitution grants election powers to the states and Congress, not the president.

Though Trump’s order was most likely unconstitutional, and some states said they would resist, Ohio Republicans were just getting started.

Only one week after introduction, the first hearing on Ohio Senate Bill 293 was held in the Senate General Government Committee chaired by Hudson Republican Kristina Roegner.

Gavarone and Brenner offered more reasons for the legislation. Brenner’s statement was simple: Four days of grace are four more days for cheating, though he offered no evidence that the grace period had facilitated any cheating.

Gavarone told her colleagues that the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that Mississippi’s grace period was unconstitutional. Ballots had to be counted on Election Day, the 3-judge panel said. She argued that states needed to respond swiftly to the ruling and named a few other states that already had changed their rules.

An example she gave was Minnesota, which she described as a “reliably blue state.” But Minnesota’s mail-in ballots always were required to arrive by the close of polls on Election Day. They only adjusted the time for in-person delivery on Election Day — it had nothing to do with the grace period. Moreover, the “reliably blue state” was actively opposing Trump’s executive orders in the courts. 

Thus, Gavarone’s contention that this was a bipartisan mutually-shared concern about election integrity loses credibility. The audacity to suggest it flies in the face of the name of the plaintiffs on the case: The Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party.

That wasn’t the end to her fog of disinformation. Gavarone apparently was unaware of the following as she proposed restrictions on Ohio voter rights:

• The three judges on the 5th Circuit panel who heard the appeal of the Mississippi District Court ruling were all Trump appointees. A disproportionate number of the 5th Circuit’s cases are appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and a disproportionate number are overturned. In other words, this court’s record wasn’t stellar.

• The U.S. District Court for the southern District of Mississippi, which originally heard the arguments, threw it out on a summary judgment, meaning the judge had heard enough. Republicans had no case. The judge, Louis Guirola Jr., was appointed to the bench by Republican George W. Bush, had been the senior judge for six years and also served at the time on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the behest of Chief Justice John Roberts. He was respected.

• The 5th District ruling was a year old. If the ruling is foundational to her bill, why did the GOP wait a year?

• More importantly, Gavarone didn’t disclose potentially disqualifying information. Several states had filed suit to block Trump’s executive order and they won just a few months earlier. A U.S. District Court in Massachusetts found that grace periods were indeed constitutional – NOT unconstitutional. The court went as far as to block Trump’s order.

• And finally, the Mississippi 5th Circuit ruling was not binding on Ohio, though the Massachusetts case had implications for Ohio because Trump’s executive order was blocked.

Public hearings on the no-grace bill began a week after her testimony and public opposition was 50 to two.

The only supporters were not from Ohio. One was a lawyer from Texas, the other a lobbyist from Indiana and both working for organizations tied to Project 2025, a playbook for dismantling the separation of powers in the federal government and shifting governing authority to the president.

The Texas man was Chad Ennis. He assisted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in questioning the integrity of the 2020 elections in Harris County, Texas, a county of 5 million people which votes Democratic. Paxton is a 2020 election denier who led Republican states in attempting to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Ennis is now vice president of the Honest Elections Project, which was among about 100 conservative organizations supporting the creation of Project 2025. 

The other proponent was Paul Lagemann, a former Indiana flooring-business owner who became a political consultant and for the last 19 months has been a lobbyist for Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation was a key leader in Project 2025.

On the other hand, 50 Ohio citizens delivered opposition testimony.

Unfazed, Republicans moved the bill to the Senate floor where it was approved immediately after opponents finished their testimony. 

Then the black magic happened.

When the bill moved across the building to the Ohio House, it grew from five pages to 67 and contained several new cumbersome requirements that for all practical purposes gave Donald Trump what he wanted from Congress in the so-called SAVE Act — if not more.

The changes require the secretary of state to compare the state registered-voter database with the Department of Homeland Security’s database of U.S. citizens.

Should there be a discrepancy, the person’s voter registration would be summarily canceled with no warning or opportunity to respond. 

Moreover, the secretary of state must routinely check every voter, compare birth dates, name-spellings, driver’s license numbers, addresses and Social Security numbers across other databases.

If a jot or tittle is out of place, a letter is to be sent to the voter seeking proper documentation and verification or they will be challenged when they try to vote and have only four days to fix discrepancies.

In the Ohio House, there was no public support for the more restrictive bill.

Opposition grew – 74 provided testimony against it. That’s 74-0.

But despite there being no public support, the bill was voted out of committee to the full Ohio House where it was approved the following day, back to the Ohio Senate for approval of the House amendments, then to the governor for his signature.

DeWine signed it Dec. 19 and it went into effect three months later.  

Left in the ether was the opposition testimony from Ohioans. Like that of John Sheehan. He is a Dayton-area retired Air Force major who did his research. He found that in the three previous elections, 20,896 votes would have been incinerated rather than counted if the four-day rule had not been in effect.

“Is it actually the intent of the Ohio legislature to disenfranchise over 20,000 registered Ohio voters?” he asked in his testimony.

Another was Columbus attorney Andrea Yagoda, who in the short time she had to prepare her 7-page testimony she spelled out many of the same arguments used in the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the  5th Circuit ruling. She delivered an angry demand.

“These legislative committees always ask the voters for data, etc when we testify and yet conveniently fail to provide any to support their bills. Tell us Senators Gavarone and Brenner how does the four-day grace period encourage fraud? Ohioans like myself would like to know.”

What are Ohioans to do as the legislature dismantles public education, facilitates taxpayer subsidies of artificial-intelligence factories, prohibits free speech on campus, and operates its own newsroom that attempts to discredit the free press?

“Vote” is too simple of an answer. While voters do in fact need to turn out Ohio elections already are stolen at the state level and the final machinations for a Trump takeover are only months away.

The questions are: What do Ohioans hope for and how do we get it? 

First of all, the majority of Americans no longer support this administration. In Ohio, Trump’s approval has dropped from plus 11 in the 2024 election to minus 14 in a recent Fox News poll.

The right to vote is identified by 85% of Americans as extremely or very important to our country’s democratic identity, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll done in anticipation of the 250th anniversary.

Alarmingly, the poll shows 33% believe there is NO threat to voting rights. If you are concerned, you are in the majority.

Ever hear of Alcoholics Anonymous? They meet regularly and challenge each other to live constructive, productive lives. Form a Trump Derangement Syndrome Anonymous group. Meet often with friends, discuss shared values, challenge each other to constructive action, and figure out how to be seen, heard, and respected. 

Each time you meet, talk about what you did. Freedom of speech and assembly and the right to address our government — to irritate if necessary — may be our last resort.

Find and contact your state legislator here: https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/

Doug Oplinger is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who worked at the Akron Beacon Journal for 46 years and led the statewide Your Voice Ohio media collaborative of 50 newsrooms for five years. He is a contributing author in the Kettering Foundation book “Reinventing Journalism to Strengthen Democracy” and provides pro-democracy news analyses of Ohio current events in The Ohio Defiant on Substack and Facebook. He can be contacted at oplingerdoug@gmail.com.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Researchers at Stanford University and other institutions studied how a hotter, drier climate is poised to spike water bills for residents of Santa Cruz, California, in a peer-reviewed study published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability. While the study focused on that coastal city, the outlook is similar for many cities that will be forced to make costly upgrades to water systems as climate change intensifies, said lead author Jennifer Skerker, who worked on the research while studying for her doctorate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. 

Without significant government funding, the costs of new water transport systems, desalination plants and sewage water reuse systems are likely to be borne by individual water systems, which are expected to pass them onto consumers through water bills.

“So this really pits water affordability against water reliability, when in reality we need both of these to have safe, accessible and affordable water for everyone,” said Skerker, who now works for a local water utility.  

Though low-income residents use significantly less water, they will be hit hard by rising rates, which force them to spend a larger share of their resources, she said. Water rates have increased at three times the rate of inflation over the past two decades, as water providers updated aging infrastructure and addressed deferred maintenance backlogs.

The research comes as many Americans are already struggling with high energy bills: One in six American households are behind on utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. While rising electric prices have sparked outrage among ratepayers, regulators and state lawmakers, relatively cheaper water has not always received the same level of attention. 

“I think water affordability definitely needs to be part of the conversation with energy affordability,” Skerker said. “…On the water side, households might be using less water than is healthy, or we can even see households making tradeoffs between paying for water or energy, or paying for groceries or medical bills.”

Like other Western cities, Santa Cruz has implemented many water conservation practices: By 2021, locals had cut water use by nearly two-thirds over two decades. That leaves few low-cost options to increase water supplies in an area entirely reliant on surface water.

The study lays out several potential scenarios for local water bills depending on climate conditions and water investments. In one of the driest scenarios, researchers predict median water bills for the poorest residents could rise from about $60 to $111 per month (in 2026 dollars) by the middle of the century. That means more than one-third of households in Santa Cruz could struggle to afford water. 

The study acknowledges that cities with larger reservoirs, more interconnected systems or access to lower-cost water sources may not experience the same acceleration in water bills. But it does envision “water affordability hotspots” across the country as more areas struggle to source and treat enough drinking water.

“It does seem unsustainable,” Skenker said, “and I think cities really need more help from the state and federal government.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Ohio Capital Journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Jai Chabria, now Ramaswamy’s chief strategist, was then a senior advisor to Gov. John Kasich. The Columbus Dispatch reported in August 2011 that he was among senior administration officials “heavily involved in strategy and decision making” for the pro-SB 5 committee.

The Dispatch story was not primarily about Chabria. It was about Connie Wehrkamp, Kasich’s deputy press secretary, who took a leave of absence from the governor’s office that week to go work for Building a Better Ohio full time.

Wehrkamp is now Connie Luck. She is Ramaswamy’s campaign spokeswoman. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as Connie (Wehrkamp) Luck.

The campaign they worked on lost, and it lost badly. On Nov. 8, 2011, Ohioans repealed SB 5, 61% to 39%. In Seneca County the margin was wider: according to the county board of elections’ official canvass, 11,825 voters here rejected the law and 7,122 voted to keep it — 62.41% to 37.59%, across all 51 precincts, on 51% turnout. It was not close. It was buried.

Neither Chabria nor Luck wrote SB 5. The bill was sponsored by a state senator, and nothing in the record makes either of them its author. But when the law reached the ballot, and Ohio’s teachers, firefighters and police officers were fighting to kill it, both were working to save it.

The campaign points to its union endorsements. The Ohio Conference of Teamsters and the statewide construction trades have backed Ramaswamy, citing his opposition to a right-to-work law and his support for prevailing wage. Chabria has noted that a decade ago, Republican endorsements from organized labor “would have been unfathomable.”

What Senate Bill 5 actually did

Since 1983, Ohio law has given public employees the right to bargain collectively — to negotiate as a group, through a union, with the government that employs them. It applies to teachers, firefighters, police officers, dispatchers, school custodians, snowplow drivers, nurses at public hospitals and clerks at the county courthouse. The law says they may negotiate over wages, hours and the other conditions of their work: health insurance, pensions, staffing levels, safety rules, how layoffs are handled.

Senate Bill 5 would have cut that down to wages. Health insurance and pensions would have come off the table entirely. Public workers could still have argued about their paychecks. They could not have bargained over what came out of them.

The bill also would have banned strikes by every public employee in Ohio, and required workers to pay at least 15% of their health insurance premiums. It would have replaced negotiated salary schedules with merit pay, and ended the “fair share” fees that non-members pay toward the cost of bargaining that covers them.

Then there was binding conciliation, and that one hit the firehouse hardest.

Police officers and firefighters in Ohio already cannot legally strike. That was the trade in 1983: safety forces give up the walkout, and in exchange, when talks deadlock, a neutral arbitrator hears both sides and picks one of the final offers. It is the leverage they have instead.

SB 5 would have taken the arbitrator away too. A Tiffin fire captain could not have struck, could not have gone to a referee, and could not have bargained over her pension or her family’s health coverage in the first place. About 350,000 Ohio public employees would have been covered.

The law never took effect. Ohio’s constitution lets citizens veto a statute directly: gather enough signatures and the law is frozen until voters rule on it. Opponents gathered 1.3 million — the most in state history for a referendum — and on Nov. 8, 2011, Ohio struck the law down.

The unions SB 5 would have covered are not with him

SB 5 was a public-employee bill. It never touched the private-sector building trades. Every worker it would have hit was on a public payroll.

Most of those unions have endorsed Democrat Amy Acton.

The Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the Ohio Association of Public School Employees, AFSCME Ohio Council 8 and AFSCME Retirees Chapter 1184 endorsed Acton jointly in December. So has the Ohio Federation of Teachers. So have the United Auto Workers, SEIU District 1199, the Communications Workers of America, the United Mine Workers and the painters’ district council.

Ramaswamy’s labor support comes almost entirely from the one corner of organized labor that SB 5 left alone.

Even that corner is splitting. In April, the Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council — 18 unions across 10 counties — publicly broke with the statewide trades body that had endorsed Ramaswamy and backed Acton instead.

The lawmaker Ramaswamy endorsed for state treasurer

In January, Ramaswamy’s highest-profile down-ballot endorsement went to state Sen. Kristina Roegner of Hudson in her candidacy for state treasurer. Roegner, who previously served in the Ohio House, was sworn in weeks before SB 5 reached the floor. She voted for it. The House Journal for March 30, 2011 records final passage at 53 to 44, with Roegner in the affirmative column.

It was not a party-line vote. Five Republicans broke with their caucus and voted no. Roegner was not among them. She also voted with the majority to reject a Democratic motion to have the 300-page bill read aloud in full, and again to reject a motion to table it.

She backed the bill publicly as well, calling it “a bill that should cause the taxpayers of Ohio to celebrate” in comments reported that spring.

Two years later, she and then-Rep. Ron Maag announced three measures at a Statehouse press conference: bills barring mandatory union dues in the private and public sectors, and a joint resolution to put right-to-work before voters. Roegner argued the proposals were about individual freedom, not a rerun of SB 5. Then-Senate President Keith Faber said the Senate would not take them up. The bills died.

Ramaswamy endorsed her anyway, calling her “kind and deeply loyal” and joining a letter urging the state party to back her.

He was not alone. State Rep. Gary Click, the Vickery Republican who represents Seneca County, endorsed Roegner too. She was one of three candidates Click endorsed who lost on May 5. Click’s own standing with the top of the ticket has wobbled: his name was quietly removed from Ramaswamy’s endorsement page in April, then restored.

Roegner lost. Jay Edwards, the former state representative backed by Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — and dogged by questions about his HB 6 vote and Householder ties — beat her 53% to 47%. He faces Democrat Seth Walsh in November.

Chabria waved off the Vance-Ramaswamy split as “a headline in search of a story.”

Where Ramaswamy draws his line

Ramaswamy has never claimed to oppose unions across the board. He opposes particular ones, and he says so. During his 2024 presidential campaign he called for eliminating teachers’ unions and federal employee unions. As a candidate for governor he has said he is “certainly not running a campaign not to eliminate teachers’ unions either.”

David Pepper, Acton’s running mate, has argued in appearances with northwest Ohio union members that a candidate who reserves the right to eliminate the unions he dislikes is a threat to all of them. Ramaswamy’s campaign points to its labor endorsements as the rebuttal.

11,825 votes

The workers SB 5 covered teach in Tiffin and Fostoria. They ride the trucks out of the firehouses. They drive the patrol cars. In 2011, voters in this county were asked whether those workers should keep the right to bargain, and 11,825 of them said yes — a 25-point margin against the law.

The people who lost that fight now run the campaign of the Republican nominee for governor. Whoever wins in November decides whether it gets picked again.

Attempts to reach Ramaswamy’s campaign for comment were unsuccessful. The election is Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. Marshals requested help from the Wyandot County Major Crimes Unit/METRICH Enforcement Unit and the Wyandot County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday, July 9, to locate James D. Fisher, who was wanted on an outstanding warrant out of Huron County. Investigators identified a home at 16368 State Highway 231 in Nevada as the place where Fisher was believed to be staying.

With assistance from the Wyandot County Sheriff’s Office and the Ohio State Highway Patrol Special Response Team, the Marshals carried out the operation at the residence and took Fisher into custody.

While speaking with people inside the home, investigators learned that firearms and suspected illegal narcotics were on the property, according to the release. Detectives also determined that James E. McDaniels was barred from legally possessing or having access to firearms. Based on that information, investigators obtained a search warrant for the residence.

During the search, deputies and detectives recovered more than 2 pounds of suspected methamphetamine, $81,263 in cash and more than 140 firearms, the release said.

McDaniels was arrested and charged with aggravated possession of drugs and having weapons while under disability. The suspected narcotics will be sent to a laboratory for analysis, and additional charges will be submitted to the Wyandot County Prosecutor’s Office for review, authorities said.

The Wyandot County Major Crimes Unit, U.S. Marshals Service, Wyandot County Sheriff’s Office and Ohio State Highway Patrol all took part in the investigation.

Wyandot County Sheriff Todd Frey encouraged residents to report suspicious activity through the Wyandot County Sheriff’s Office app, the METRICH app or by contacting their local law enforcement agency. Anonymous tips are accepted.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Creech, R-West Alexandria, was investigated by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation over allegations that in 2023 a minor female relative accused him of climbing into bed with her while wearing only his underwear. Creech told investigators he had gotten into bed with the minor in his underwear but denied the sexual nature of the allegations. Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, brought in as a special prosecutor, declined in October 2024 to bring charges, writing that Creech’s behavior was “concerning and suspicious” but that the evidence fell short of the threshold needed for prosecution. No charges were filed. Creech has denied wrongdoing and called the allegations “demonstrably false.”

Click and Creech are among the cosponsors of House Bill 249, the Indecent Exposure Modernization Act, which the Ohio House passed in March and which is now pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republican sponsors describe the measure as a way to shield children from obscene public performances and to preserve privacy in restrooms and locker rooms. Opponents, including the ACLU of Ohio, call it a drag ban that would criminalize gender nonconformity and raise First Amendment concerns.

In its statement, the party put two direct questions to Click: whether he will call on Creech to step aside, and how he justifies cosponsoring what its backers market as child-protection legislation alongside a colleague whose conduct a special prosecutor labeled “concerning and suspicious.”

“Let’s be entirely blunt about Gary Click’s silence,” said party chair Gina Grandillo. “Rodney Creech admitted to state investigators that he climbed into bed with a minor relative. His own Republican Speaker was troubled enough to strip his committees and ask him to resign. Yet Gary Click looks the other way.” Grandillo accused Click of being “entirely comfortable using ‘child protection’ as a political talking point” while staying quiet about Creech, and said families in Seneca and Sandusky counties “deserve to know why their representative won’t stand up.”

The allegations first cost Creech his committee posts. House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, stripped Creech of all four of his committee assignments — including his chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee — in May 2025 and asked him to consider resigning, calling the matter “very serious.” Huffman reversed course in February 2026, restoring Creech to his committee seats, though not to the Agriculture chairmanship, and signing a letter requesting that the Ohio Republican Party endorse him for re-election. The party did so, and Creech went on to win his May primary. He is the Republican nominee for re-election in House District 40, which covers Preble County and parts of Montgomery and Butler counties.

Click and Creech are frequent legislative allies. Click is also a primary sponsor of House Bill 693, the Affirming Families First Act, which would write the disputed concept of “parental alienation” into Ohio law — the same term Creech used publicly to dismiss his accuser. That bill remains before the House Judiciary Committee.

Click, who represents House District 88 covering Seneca and Sandusky counties, has not publicly called for Creech to step down, according to a review of endorsement materials, campaign statements and public reporting by TiffinOhio.net. He has previously disputed the outlet’s coverage of his record. Click faces Democrat Aaron Jones in the Nov. 3 general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.