But a February analysis prepared for Republican Gov. Mike DeWine by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management shows just how expensive that promise could become for the same families it was supposed to help.

OBM estimated that replacing the revenue lost from abolishing local property taxes through the state sales tax could require a rate approaching 15% to 18%. To keep the rate from climbing quite that high, the office said Ohio could instead broaden the sales-tax base to include food, health care or other goods and services that are currently exempt.

That means a policy sold as a massive tax cut for homeowners could force state leaders into a different choice: impose historically high sales taxes on Ohio consumers, begin taxing necessities the state currently exempts, or allow deep cuts to the local services property taxes now support.

There is an important qualification. The OBM memorandum was written to analyze a separate citizen-led constitutional amendment that would abolish property taxes statewide. It was not commissioned as an analysis of Ramaswamy’s campaign platform, and Ramaswamy has not proposed a grocery tax or a tax on prescription medicine.

But the fiscal problem OBM examined is directly relevant to the promise Ramaswamy chose to make: eliminating property taxes. At his official campaign launch, Ramaswamy said, “We need to bring down property taxes in this state immediately, eventually down to zero,” according to the Statehouse News Bureau. The ballot amendment and Ramaswamy’s campaign rhetoric were not identical proposals, but they shared the same basic endpoint for real-property taxpayers — taking the tax to zero.

More than $20 billion has to come from somewhere

Ohio does not levy a statewide property tax. Property taxes are collected locally by counties and other political subdivisions and are a major source of funding for schools, police and fire departments, EMS, libraries, services for seniors and people with disabilities, and other local government operations.

OBM told DeWine that property taxes, including real property and public-utility personal-property taxes, generate about $24 billion a year for local governments across Ohio — roughly equal to the revenue Ohio receives from its state income and sales taxes combined. The memo said replacing another $20 billion or more if local property-tax revenue were abolished would be “fiscally impractical and economically harmful.”

The scale of the problem is what turns Ramaswamy’s original promise from an anti-tax slogan into a much harder governing question. Eliminating a tax does not eliminate the schools, sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, ambulances, libraries and local services it pays for. Unless those services are cut, the money has to be collected somewhere else.

OBM examined what that could look like.

A 15% to 18% state sales tax

Ohio’s state sales-tax rate is currently 5.75%. OBM, after consulting with the Ohio Department of Taxation, estimated that replacing local property-tax revenue through the sales tax could require the state rate to approach 15% to 18% — a level the agency said would be significantly higher than any other state.

The DeWine administration warned that rates that high could push consumers, particularly in border counties, to shop outside Ohio and could damage local businesses. DeWine himself was even more direct, telling reporters that replacing the lost money could push sales taxes into the high teens and calling the result “absolutely devastating,” according to the Statehouse News Bureau.

For working Ohioans, the practical effect would be difficult to miss. A household that received property-tax relief could face a much larger tax bill every time it bought taxable goods. Renters, who do not receive a property-tax bill directly, would also pay the higher sales tax.

And because Ramaswamy has separately continued to advocate for phasing out Ohio’s state income tax, replacing lost property-tax collections with higher income taxes would run directly against another signature piece of his agenda. OBM estimated that an income-tax replacement could require statewide rates of roughly 11% to 15%.

Groceries and health care could enter the tax base

The other option identified by OBM is even more politically explosive. Rather than allowing the sales-tax rate itself to rise all the way toward 15% to 18%, state lawmakers could collect money from purchases that Ohio currently chooses not to tax.

“To moderate the potential rate increase, the sales tax base could be broadened to tax food, healthcare, or other goods or services that are currently exempt,” the OBM analysis states.

Under current Ohio law, food purchased for human consumption off the premises where it is sold — ordinary groceries taken home from a store — is exempt from the state sales tax. The law also exempts prescription drugs, insulin and a range of prescribed medical equipment and supplies.

OBM did not say lawmakers would necessarily choose to tax all of those items, and it did not spell out exactly which health-care purchases would be included in a broader tax base. The memo identified taxing food and health care as possible ways to raise more money and reduce the otherwise enormous sales-tax rate required to replace property-tax revenue.

That is still a striking consequence of the zero-property-tax idea. Ramaswamy’s pitch was that Ohioans should keep more of their money because “it is your money, not the government’s.” The DeWine administration’s analysis shows that taking one major tax to zero without eliminating the public costs it finances could simply move the tax collector from the homeowner’s mailbox to the grocery checkout line, the pharmacy counter and countless other purchases.

The other choice: cut police, fire and schools

If Ohio abolished property taxes and did not replace the money with another major tax, OBM said the consequences would be severe.

Property taxes account for about 65% of local tax revenue in Ohio, according to the memo. Roughly three-fifths of property-tax revenue supports local school districts. OBM warned that abolition without replacement would force schools to lay off personnel, increase class sizes, close schools and cut programs.

For police, fire and EMS, the agency forecast station closures — especially in smaller communities and townships — along with dramatically reduced staffing and slower emergency response times.

The memo’s conclusion used language more commonly associated with partisan campaign attacks than state budget documents: eliminating local property taxes without replacing the revenue would “quite literally ‘defund’ the police” as well as fire departments, schools, libraries, senior centers and other local services.

That warning is especially uncomfortable for Ramaswamy, whose current campaign platform also promises to “crush crime” and support law enforcement. His own campaign plan calls for lower taxes while promising stronger public safety. OBM’s analysis demonstrates the financial collision that occurs if property-tax cuts are taken far enough without a credible replacement source.

Ramaswamy has backed away from zero

Ramaswamy no longer campaigns on abolishing property taxes outright.

By February, the Statehouse News Bureau reported that he had backed away from elimination and was instead promising “the biggest property tax rollback in the history of our state.” In July, he made the change explicit when questioned about how local services would be funded, saying he wanted to roll property taxes back to pre-pandemic levels — “not eliminate them, OK?” — according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

There is no evidence that the OBM memo caused that retreat. Ramaswamy had already begun softening his position before the February analysis, and his current proposal is materially different from complete abolition.

His campaign now says he would roll property-tax levels back to where they were before the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign says existing debt obligations would be honored, new construction would not be affected and local governments would continue to operate “with greater discipline.” A March campaign ad also promised the rollback while maintaining strong education and dependable police and fire services.

What the campaign’s published property-tax plan does not provide is a statewide dollar figure for the revenue that would disappear under the rollback or a detailed replacement mechanism showing how every affected school district and local government would be made whole. Ramaswamy has argued that economic growth can provide additional revenue and a financial cushion to protect important local services.

That leaves the underlying question raised by the DeWine analysis unresolved even after Ramaswamy abandoned the zero-tax endpoint: if Columbus orders a major reduction in local property-tax collections while promising that police, fire and schools will remain protected, what pays for the difference?

Property-tax relief is real. So is the bill.

Ohio’s property-tax problem is not imaginary. Homeowners in communities across the state have faced steep increases as property values have risen, and there is broad bipartisan pressure for relief. The choice is not between accepting every existing property-tax increase and abolishing the tax altogether.

But the DeWine administration’s analysis puts a price tag on the kind of sweeping promise Ramaswamy used to launch his campaign. More than $20 billion in annual local revenue cannot disappear without consequences. Either government spends dramatically less, another tax rises, the tax base expands, or some combination of all three occurs.

That is also why the possibility of taxing groceries and health care cannot fairly be described as Ramaswamy’s own proposal. It is not. It is one of the potential consequences Ohio’s budget office identified when calculating how the state could replace the revenue from the policy endpoint Ramaswamy himself once promised.

Ramaswamy has now moved away from that endpoint. But the episode exposes the weakness in the original pitch: he offered Ohioans the politically irresistible half of the equation — a tax bill heading toward zero — without showing them the other half.

DeWine’s budget office did.

The money does not simply disappear with the property tax. Under the state’s analysis, Ohio families could end up paying it somewhere else — potentially through dramatically higher sales taxes or new taxes on necessities that are exempt today.

Related: Ramaswamy’s property tax plan risks 50,000 teacher jobs.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Faith leaders recently spoke out against the ICE activity that has been taking place in the Clark County city after a June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to end temporary protected status for the 330,000 Haitians who’ve fled the violence in their home country. Legal protected status for Haitians officially ended on July 27.

Haitian Support Center Executive Director Viles Dorsainvil is a TPS holder with an asylum case pending. 

“I am calling out this administration to tell them that we deserve to be treated with dignity,” he said. “We deserve to be treated as human beings. We are not animals.”

Dorsainvil is one of about 15,000 Haitians who live in Springfield, with a mixture of temporary protected status, citizenship, and other legal status.

“They are not a threat to the community,” Dorsainvil said. 

First Baptist Church Pastor Adam Banks said Haitian people are not “political bargaining chips.”

“They are not threats to be monitored and removed,” he said. “They are care providers, co-workers, faith leaders, and family. … We demand an end to deportations that tear families and our community apart.”

ICE agents are detaining people in Springfield in shopping plazas, gas stations, and apartment complexes. 

“Springfield is under siege right now,” said Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield’s Central Christian Church.

Fellow Springfield pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien was detained by ICE agents on Aug. 20 and advocates are calling for his release.

“We hope that will happen very, very soon,” Ruby said. “He needs to be out immediately. He is a good man with a congregation to serve, and they are without a pastor right now.”

A pastor from the First Haitian Evangelical Church of Springfield was detained last week when he was in Northwest Ohio and he might be out of the country already, according to Ruby.

Many Haitians detained in Springfield by ICE are being sent to Butler County Jail in Hamilton, which had 1,103 total inmates as of Friday afternoon.

The general housing capacity for Butler County Jail is 844, even though the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction recommends 756 as the housing capacity, according to a 2025 ODRC inspection report.  

Haitians living in Springfield are being required to report to ICE offices in Blue Ash or Westerville and wear ankle monitors. 

“Being outfitted with that monitor, it just symbolizes slavery,” Dorsainvil said. 

He shared the story of a mother who came to the Haitian Support Center, having given birth a few weeks prior, but lost the baby.

“She could not even walk, but they put the shackle on her,” Dorsainvil said. “You cannot understand how hard it is to hear those people on a daily basis crying.”

They are afraid to go out. They do not have freedom to go out. They don’t have the freedom even to look for help.

– Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of Springfield’s Haitian Support Center

Advocates are calling for an end to the ankle monitors. 

“It is inhumane,” Ruby said. “It is an insult. It is designed to humiliate, and we want it to stop right now.”

The pastor recently helped a Haitian family relocate to Canada. 

“Their children had survived kidnapping attempts when they were in Haiti,” he said. “Most families can’t go to Canada. It was only an option for this family because they had an immediate family member who was there.”

The U.S. Department of State currently has a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited healthcare,” according to the agency.

A top security official and chief of staff to the nation’s defense minister was kidnapped in June. 

The federal government promised Haitians who self-deport a free airplane ticket and a $2,600 check to return to Haiti. 

“They are not getting the money that our government has promised,” Ruby said.

He talked to a reporter in Haiti who shared that Haitians who are being deported are getting off the plane and running for their lives. 

 “It puts a target on them that says to the gangs, ‘come get this person.’ ” 

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.

Trumbull County Court of Common Pleas Judge David Engler was elected to the county court’s domestic relations and juvenile division in 2024. He argued to the state supreme court in an April filing that the constitutional amendment “is being applied to eliminate parental-consent requirements for minors and to render judicial-bypass proceedings unnecessary or unavailable.”

Going further in his court filing, he argued that voters were “not informed” that the constitutional amendment would “eliminate” judicial bypass proceedings.

Judicial bypass is a longstanding legal method minors can use to ask a judge to allow an abortion without the need for parental permission. In judicial bypass cases, judges assess the “maturity and voluntariness” of a request via hearings and testimony, according to documents related to Engler’s court filing.

“The omission (of the judicial bypass proceedings) concealed a consequence essential to both advocates and opponents, and prevented average voters from understanding that the measure would alter the judiciary’s structure,” Engler wrote to the court.

The judge asked the court to dictate the administration and enforcement of the amendment “in a manner that preserves and does not eliminate or interfere with juvenile-court jurisdiction over judicial-bypass proceedings.”

Judicial bypass has been a method since the late 1990s. Engler’s county of Trumbull only saw two judicial bypass requests per year in the five years before he took the bench. In the year since he took over as judge, that number dropped to zero, leading Engler to say his office “has been stripped of a statutory and historically exercised judicial function.”

The reproductive rights amendment was passed by 57% of Ohio voters in 2023, enshrining abortion rights, miscarriage treatment, and other reproductive health measures into the state’s founding document.

The judge’s claims were countered by groups like the ACLU of Ohio and the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at Case Western Reserve School of Law, along with the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

Requesting that the court dismiss Engler’s claims, the state attorney general’s office called Engler’s arguments “untimely.” The office and the organizations who filed court documents in opposition to Engler’s request said he did not provide evidence that the constitutional amendment had specifically caused the drop in judicial bypass cases.

“(Engler) has alleged only that fewer judicial bypass cases have happened to arise in Trumbull County recently,” the ACLU of Ohio wrote in court documents. “That allegation is manifestly insufficient to support an inference that parental consent laws for abortion are no longer being enforced in Ohio.”

The Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the case without filing an opinion explaining the dismissal. The court’s announcement noted that the decision was agreed to by Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy and all six of the other justices on the court.

Abortion rights advocacy group Abortion Forward praised the decision in a recent email newsletter.

“While this case was transparently political, it does provide a valuable example of the potential for judicial interference in abortion politics in Ohio, even with the constitutional guarantee in place,” the newsletter stated.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Now, faced with a smaller, sicker clientele, the 11 insurers remaining in Ohio’s marketplace are proposing to increase premiums on average by 14.7% for 2027, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. 

Natasha Murphy, the group’s director for health policy, said the new expense will only add to the burden besetting hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who are already struggling to get by.

“It’s just exacerbating the affordability crisis that millions of Americans are finding themselves in — especially as it relates to their monthly premiums,” Murphy told the Capital Journal.

Last summer, congressional Republicans renewed President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. That was a provision in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that provided $1 trillion in cuts for the richest 1% of Americans over 10 years while cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and federal food assistance over the same period.

And while they renewed the tax cuts, congressional Republicans last year declined to renew pandemic-era subsidies for insurance purchased on the ACA exchanges. That caused premiums to more than double for nearly 497,000 Ohioans who bought their health insurance there.

It would have cost about $350 billion to extend the subsidies to 24 million Americans for 10 years. Meanwhile, Trump’s war of choice with Iran has created $38 billion in direct costs in six months — with no end in sight.

After the subsidies expired, 161,000 Ohioans dropped marketplace coverage.

That leaves insurers with customers who are likely to be sicker and more expensive to cover, Murphy said.

“They’re anticipating that the folks who remain in the market are going to be sicker and more expensive,” she said. “A lot of the folks who were healthier — and unfortunately some folks who weren’t that healthy — thought they weren’t able to afford their coverage and dropped out of the marketplace.”

The coverage losses on ACA exchanges come as policymakers are bracing for the brunt of Medicaid cuts to kick in Jan. 1. The Big Beautiful Bill hopes to create the biggest savings by placing bigger paperwork burdens on recipients and restricting states’ ability to raise revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the provisions in the Trump bill and the expiration of ACA subsidies will lead to 16 million more Americans being without health insurance by 2034.

Murphy sees the moves as part of a long-term Republican project to undermine the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation — and even Medicaid itself. She called it “death by a thousand cuts.”

“And then when you look at the Medicaid work requirements and what it’s going to take for states to finance their Medicaid programs, it’s a full-throated attack on the ACA,” Murphy said. “But it’s also a pretty significant undermining of Medicaid as a core health-safety net for millions of Americans.” 

If so many Americans lose their insurance, it will have downstream consequences. 

Emergency departments — especially those in rural communities and poor neighborhoods — will be forced to care for more, sicker people who can’t pay. That will force those hospitals to cut services or even close, ER docs warn.

“The unfortunate reality is that hundreds of thousands of Americans have dropped marketplace coverage, many of whom are and will remain uninsured,” Murphy said. “That’s going to have broad implications for individual and family-level health, but more broadly, you’re going to see providers and hospitals see their uncompensated care costs rise and that’s all going to be exacerbated by the upcoming Medicaid changes.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Nationwide, the median drive time between hospitals providing inpatient maternity care to Medicaid enrollees and the closest in-state alternative is 43 minutes for rural hospitals compared with 13 minutes for urban hospitals, the analysis found.

The study by KFF, a healthcare research organization, suggests that the closure of rural obstetrics units will accelerate as a result of the healthcare changes included in the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed last summer. That law will reduce some payments to hospitals and cut Medicaid enrollment by introducing work requirements.

Already, rural obstetric services are diminishing at a rapid rate: From 2010 to 2022, 238 rural hospitals closed their obstetrics units while only 26 hospitals opened new units. In 2023, almost half of rural counties did not have a hospital offering obstetrics services.

A 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office cited low Medicaid reimbursement rates and the challenge of recruiting and retaining providers as major factors.

Brittni Frederiksen, the lead KFF researcher for the report, said in an interview that rural hospitals already operate on thin margins, and that the additional cuts could push some of them over the edge.

“There are likely going to be rural hospitals that close their obstetric units or have to close the entire hospital, and so people will have greater distances to travel to safely deliver a baby,” said Frederiksen, an associate director at KFF who specializes in women’s health policy.

The states with the longest potential driving times, according to the KFF analysis, are Alaska, Nevada and North Dakota. The other states where the median trip would be an hour or more are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.

The states with the shortest drive times are New Jersey, Louisiana, and Ohio.

A lack of access to maternity care can lead to increased maternal mortality, low birthweight and premature births.

The United States has one of the worst maternal mortality rates among higher-income countries, at 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The U.S. rate is double, or even triple, the rate in most other high-income countries, according to The Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropic and research group.

Outcomes are even worse for women on Medicaid, the government insurance program for people with lower incomes. A recent survey of Medicaid patients who gave birth in 2023 and 2024 found that those patients experienced more complications, such as high blood pressure and gestational diabetes, than women with private insurance.

“We already have a maternal health crisis in this country, and already have very poor outcomes when it comes to delivering babies safely in this country. And then in rural areas, in particular, people already have to travel long distances to deliver,” Frederiksen said.

“Anytime you increase the distance to delivery, you know the likelihood that it could result in poor outcomes increases.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@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.

Despite her deeply held liberal politics, she admires the work of conservative groups that for decades have built influence in state governments across the country. 

“We on the left have left a huge amount of power on the table,” said Goldstein, the founder and president of State Futures, a nonprofit launched last year that coordinates hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states.

Few on the right have been as influential as the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC touts over 2,000 lawmakers as members — nearly a quarter of the country’s total state lawmakers. Despite fierce criticism, the organization has made an indelible mark on state policy by pushing hundreds of pieces of model legislation that have reshaped public education, state labor laws and taxation. 

“One of the things the right has known for decades is that by moving state policy, you move national policy,” Goldstein said. 

State Futures is among a growing number of progressive groups looking to combat the influence of groups such as ALEC. Experts say the left has years of work ahead if it wants to match the prowess of the organized right, which coalesced more readily around a few core issues. But the second Trump administration has rallied Democrats across the states seeking to oppose federal policies. This year, State Futures has worked with lawmakers who proposed nearly 250 bills in state capitols seeking to place limits on federal immigration efforts. 

Attention on state policymaking has only heightened as Democrats see the potential to flip hundreds of state legislative seats this November and chip away at the GOP’s hold on American politics. 

But Goldstein and other organizers say the left needs to make significant investments in state politics and policy that outlast any individual election cycle. In working to build Democratic power across the states, she’s studied the ALEC playbook. Aside from its relentless focus on state capitols over the years, she compliments the organization’s work of nurturing relationships that connect conservative lawmakers coast to coast.

“These are real people who are real friends,” she said. “I admire ALEC very much. I admire a lot about the right.”

For its part, ALEC says it welcomes more attention on state policy — even from those on the other side of the aisle.

Jonathan Williams, the organization’s president and chief economist, says more people are concurring with ALEC’s belief that changing policy starts with the states.

“There’s lots of groups out there that have tried to replicate ALEC from the left,” he said. “And there is some irony … that a lot of the left wanted to take ALEC out there for many years, and now they want to join in and try to replicate it.”

Williams said new progressive groups have often sprouted up with massive war chests focused on specific areas of policy.

In contrast, ALEC has built a strong base of support from conservative and free-market lawmakers and consistent funders including businesses, nonprofits and trade associations.

“You just don’t see years and years of concentrated and growing support from a wide base of supporters,” he said of progressive groups. “Some of these groups come out of nowhere, it seems.”

California Democratic Assemblymember Sade Elhawary said state lawmakers increasingly recognize the power of working across state lines. Sometimes, that’s done through pushing similar pieces of legislation. But other times it means just showing support — such as January’s gathering of Democratic lawmakers from more than a dozen states in Minnesota following a large deployment of federal immigration officers there. 

“We are so much stronger together,” she said. “We shouldn’t be doing it on our own, because then we can get attacked on our own.”

Elhawary is among the 112 lawmakers from 35 states working on federal response issues with State Futures. She said the national Democratic Party is losing the messaging war as it struggles to mount an opposition to President Donald Trump. But she said state lawmakers have the ability to articulate a clearer vision for voters by working on  issues that most matter to their constituents.

“When we can organize beyond our state, I think we can organize folks on the ground,” she said. “This is not about just the legislators. This is about community.” 

Connecting state lawmakers

Liberal groups have sought to offset the growing influence of conservative movements for years.

A group with the acronym ALICE, the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, in 2012 aimed to counter ALEC’s national influence.

Liberal activists started the group in Wisconsin in direct response to the hotly debated policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a former ALEC member. In 2011, Walker signed highly publicized legislation eliminating collective bargaining rights for most public employees, a policy championed by ALEC. 

ALICE in 2014 merged with the Progressive States Network and the Center for State Innovation, creating what is now known as the State Innovation Exchange, or SiX. The group, which says it includes about 1,800 state lawmakers across 50 states, helps legislators to strategize on legislation that can reshape policy across state lines. 

While the group does work to counter the organized right, Executive Director EJ Juárez said it employs different tactics than conservative groups like ALEC. He said lawmakers work with their communities to craft legislation that is responsive to current needs — not just a wish list from outside interests.

“It’s not just, ‘Pass this bill because we wrote it and we think it’s good,’” he said.

ALEC maintains that its model legislation is crafted and debated by member lawmakers. 

Last month, SiX unveiled a national push for legislation to hold federal immigration officers accountable by allowing residents to sue agents for constitutional violations.

Democratic lawmakers in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Utah and Washington said they would work to rewrite state laws to make it easier to sue federal agents. They cited recent laws passed by Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island in announcing their broader effort.

To date, the American Civil Liberties Union says no federal immigration agent has ever been convinced of criminal wrongdoing while on duty. 

“This is about using all the tools that are granted to the states to create the accountability and democracy that we deserve,” Juárez said. 

He said enthusiasm is rising among state Democrats looking to respond to Trump administration policies. But Juárez said the left still doesn’t have the sustained political infrastructure touted by the right at the state level.

“When you look at the organization of infrastructure on the left, it is completely different,” he said. “It is much more responsive, and it is much more reactive. And what that does is it robs many great efforts of the ability to scale to true nationwide-changing power.”

All eyes on elections

While national Democratic groups have spent months organizing in opposition to federal immigration policies, many are now turning their sights to November’s midterm elections. 

In July, Democratic lawmakers from 15 states met ahead of the National Conference of State Legislatures’ summit in Chicago to discuss not just politics, but how states should prepare for the potential of federal election interference.

Those lawmakers said they were more determined than ever to exert their inherent state authority as they look to oppose Trump. 

“None of us are in this alone,” said Pennsylvania Democratic state Rep. Leanne Krueger. “There are so many things coming at us that hearing best practices from other places is really helpful.”

That meeting was hosted by the States Project, which was founded in 2017 to elect Democrats and build power at the state level. Most state lawmakers are employed part-time, making it difficult to research policy matters and connect with lawmakers across the country, said Mandara Meyers, the executive director of the organization. 

But those needs have only accelerated during the second Trump term. 

“We’re just in an unprecedented moment, right?” she said. “I think states are dealing with a different kind of challenge and a different kind of federal interference than they ever have before.”

The States Project is one of the largest outside spenders on Democratic state legislative races. But that work is viewed as more crucial this cycle as Democrats have a path to flip several Republican-held legislative chambers and break GOP supermajorities in states across the country this November.

But Meyers acknowledged that groups on the left are still building out the organizations needed to win and sustain power in states. And despite a renewed appreciation for the power held by states, many still view state legislative races as the “kids’ table” of American politics. 

While Democrats are poised well in state races this fall, they still have a long way to go in building out the kind of institutional power the right has enjoyed in states, said Peverill Squire, a political science professor emeritus at the University of Missouri who has researched state legislatures for years. 

Even in this favorable midterm cycle, it’s unlikely that Democrats can capture the majority of legislative seats in states. GOP lawmakers currently hold nearly 55% of the nation’s 7,386 state legislative seats and Republicans have control of all chambers in 28 legislatures. 

With groups like ALEC, Squire said, Republicans and corporate interests have benefited from pushing a fairly straightforward agenda centered on deregulation and tax cuts. But he said the left has a wider range of policy interests that could make it difficult to push model legislation in states.

“My guess is that it would take considerable time and effort for them to coalesce on a common platform in the same way Republicans managed to do over the last two decades,” he said. 

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.

Tiffin police were called to a residence on Douglas Street shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday after the homeowner reported that a man he did not know had entered the house and fallen asleep inside, according to a police media summary.

The man had moved outside by the time officers responded. Police identified him as Andrew Lovas, 41, of Tiffin, and requested emergency medical personnel to evaluate him.

Officers recorded a preliminary breath-test reading of .230, according to the police log. Lovas was subsequently taken into custody and transported to the Seneca County Jail.

Seneca County jail records show Lovas was booked at 8:33 p.m. Saturday on a charge of disorderly conduct under Ohio Revised Code 2917.11(B)(1), which applies to certain disorderly behavior while voluntarily intoxicated.

The jail record describes the charge as disorderly conduct involving intoxication that causes annoyance or alarm. No bail amount was listed in the booking record.

The police media summary does not indicate that anyone was injured or that Lovas was accused of damaging or stealing property inside the residence.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He has attacked affirmative action as institutional racism, spent years crusading against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and wrote a book subtitled Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

But when Ramaswamy was a wealthy young hedge-fund investor preparing to attend Yale Law School, he accepted $50,000 from a fellowship for which his own identity was indispensable.

Ramaswamy was awarded a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011. The fellowship was created specifically for immigrants and children of immigrants. Ramaswamy, born in Cincinnati to parents from India, qualified because of his family’s immigrant background.

Without that background, his Harvard degree, academic record, professional accomplishments and Yale admission would not have been enough to make him eligible.

That makes Ramaswamy’s own history difficult to reconcile with the sweeping case he now makes against affirmative action, DEI and institutions taking identity into account when distributing opportunity.

The competition was merit-based. Eligibility was not identity-blind.

Ramaswamy has defended the fellowship by emphasizing that it was merit-based. That is true, but incomplete.

The Soros fellowship selected accomplished candidates competitively. But before merit could determine who won, immigrant background determined who was allowed to compete.

Michigan Technological University described the eligibility rules for the competition in September 2010, shortly before the application deadline that produced the 2011 class of fellows. Applicants had to be green-card holders, naturalized U.S. citizens or qualifying children of naturalized citizens. George Washington University likewise described “New American” status as an eligibility requirement and said applicants had to provide documentary evidence that they met it.

Ramaswamy met that requirement. His official fellowship biography identifies him as “the child of immigrants from India” and says the fellowship was awarded to him in 2011 to pursue his law degree at Yale.

The distinction matters. The program did not simply consider every graduate student in America and choose Ramaswamy because he had the strongest résumé. It first created an applicant pool based on immigrant-family status, then used merit to choose winners from within that pool.

A candidate identical to Ramaswamy in every relevant academic and professional respect, but born to two U.S.-born parents, could not have received the same consideration.

That is an identity-based preference. It was not race-based affirmative action, and the fellowship’s current rules explicitly state that race and ethnicity are not considered when choosing among eligible candidates. But in the broader sense of affirmative action — deliberately expanding opportunity for members of a defined group because of their background — the program did exactly what Ramaswamy now condemns institutions for doing: identity affected access to opportunity.

Ramaswamy was already making serious money

This was also not the story of a penniless student whose only realistic route to Yale depended on financial assistance.

After graduating from Harvard, Ramaswamy worked at QVT Financial, a hedge fund where he specialized in biotechnology investments. His income during that period became an issue during his 2024 presidential campaign after reporters examined tax returns he voluntarily released.

Fox News reported from those returns that Ramaswamy earned a combined $1,173,690 during the three years preceding 2011.

In 2011, the year the fellowship was awarded, Ramaswamy reported another $2,252,209 in total income.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported on those earnings and Ramaswamy’s public explanations for taking the money.

There is an important timing distinction. Ramaswamy has said a large hedge-fund bonus that contributed to his income was paid after he submitted his fellowship application, so it would be misleading to claim that he had already received his entire $2.25 million in 2011 income when he applied.

But his finances before the award were hardly modest. During a contentious 2023 interview with Mehdi Hasan, Hasan confronted Ramaswamy with tax-return figures showing roughly $650,000 in 2009 and roughly $450,000 the following year.

Ramaswamy did not ultimately claim he was broke. Defending his decision to accept $50,000, he acknowledged having “a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank” and argued that someone in that position would still take the money.

That defense is perfectly understandable as a statement of personal financial self-interest. Fifty thousand dollars is $50,000, and the fellowship did not require applicants to be poor.

But it leaves the political contradiction intact. Ramaswamy had substantial financial resources and nevertheless accepted a valuable educational benefit that was available to him specifically because he belonged to a favored category: a New American from an immigrant family.

Then came the crusade against affirmative action

Ramaswamy’s subsequent rhetoric has not been limited to opposing racial quotas or arguing over the mechanics of college admissions. He has presented himself as an opponent of a much broader system of identity-conscious decision-making.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina in 2023, Ramaswamy called affirmative action “the single greatest form of institutional racism in America today” and promised that, as president, he would end it “in every sphere of American life.”

He went further, declaring that meritocracy and equity were “fundamentally incompatible” and calling for a restoration of “colorblind meritocracy.”

His 2022 book made the argument part of his personal brand. Its full title is Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.

The publisher’s biography on that same page contains a striking detail: it touts Ramaswamy’s Harvard education, hedge-fund career and Yale law degree, then notes that he attended Yale as a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

In other words, a book marketed around the “death of merit” carries an author biography noting that Ramaswamy benefited from a graduate fellowship he could not have received without qualifying through his immigrant-family identity.

His rhetoric has continued as he moved into Ohio politics. In a lengthy 2025 interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, Ramaswamy described himself as having been a “crusader” against DEI before opposition to it became fashionable and celebrated what he called a “post-DEI” moment. He contrasted equal opportunity with what he derided as attempts to produce equal results.

That philosophy invites an obvious question when applied to Ramaswamy’s own biography: If institutions should distribute opportunity without regard to identity, why should the child of Indian immigrants have access to a graduate fellowship that the child of native-born Americans could not even apply for?

His immigrant background was not incidental

One possible response is that Ramaswamy earned the fellowship. There is every reason to believe he did.

The 2011 fellowship class was highly competitive. Contemporaneous reporting from Stanford said 30 fellows were chosen from more than 1,000 applicants and that the awards provided as much as $50,000 in grants plus $40,000 in tuition support over two years.

Nothing about acknowledging Ramaswamy’s accomplishments changes the eligibility structure.

This is the same distinction at the heart of affirmative-action debates generally. Beneficiaries do not have to be unqualified for a preference to exist. The relevant question is whether membership in a particular group changes someone’s access to an opportunity.

For Ramaswamy, it did.

His immigrant background was not a biographical footnote added after he won. It was the threshold fact that permitted his application to be considered.

If his parents had been born in Cincinnati instead of India, Ramaswamy could have possessed the same Harvard diploma, worked at the same hedge fund, earned the same hundreds of thousands of dollars and secured the same admission to Yale Law School. He still would not have qualified for the fellowship.

A politically inconvenient piece of his biography

The fellowship later became sensitive enough that Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor who removed the reference from his biography shortly before he announced his 2024 presidential campaign.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported that the paid editor removed references to both the fellowship and Ramaswamy’s service on Ohio’s COVID-19 Response Team. His campaign acknowledged paying for edits but denied they were politically motivated, saying the changes were intended to correct factual distortions. The fellowship reference was later restored.

That episode is often reduced to the politically explosive Soros surname, but George Soros is largely beside the point here. The fellowship was established by his older brother, Paul Soros, and Paul’s wife, Daisy, both Hungarian immigrants. There is no basis for portraying Ramaswamy’s fellowship as a grant from George Soros or his political network.

The more consequential connection is the one in the program’s name: New Americans.

Ramaswamy received an educational opportunity because he belonged to a class of Americans the program was explicitly created to assist.

The standard Ramaswamy now sets for everyone else

Ramaswamy did nothing improper by applying for the fellowship. He satisfied its rules. The program was not need-based, so his substantial income did not make him ineligible. And a young professional accepting $50,000 that an institution willingly offers him is not, by itself, scandalous.

The issue is the standard Ramaswamy later chose to impose on everyone else.

He does not merely argue that poorly designed DEI programs should be reformed. He has turned “meritocracy” into a defining political principle and attacks affirmative action and identity-conscious institutions as fundamentally incompatible with it.

But one of the institutions that helped Ramaswamy along the way explicitly considered identity before merit ever entered the equation. It first asked whether he was an immigrant or the child of immigrants. Only after he passed that test did his accomplishments matter.

Ramaswamy benefited from that system while already earning sums that most Americans will never see in a year. When challenged years later, he defended taking the $50,000 because it was available to him.

There is nothing irrational about that decision.

What is difficult to square is Ramaswamy’s insistence that identity-based opportunity is corrosive when other people receive it, while treating the identity-based opportunity he received as simply a smart decision to take free money.

For Vivek Ramaswamy, the road to becoming one of America’s loudest opponents of affirmative action included an affirmative-action fellowship available to him because his parents came to America from India.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It is far less specific about the private school where he spent all four years of high school.

Ramaswamy attended public schools in the Cincinnati area through eighth grade before leaving the public system for St. Xavier High School, the private, all-male Jesuit school where he spent grades nine through 12 and graduated as valedictorian in 2003.

His campaign biography tells the story differently.

The official Vivek for Ohio biography specifically credits a teacher at his “Greater Cincinnati public school” with challenging him to “aim higher and believe in what he could achieve.”

The very next sentence jumps to his graduation: “That spark stayed with him, graduating as valedictorian from his Cincinnati high school.”

“His Cincinnati high school” was St. Xavier.

The campaign labels the first school public. It strips the second school of its name and its private-school status.

It is a carefully packaged version of Ramaswamy’s education: the public school is part of the origin story; private St. Xavier is reduced to a generic “Cincinnati high school.”

He has used the same shortened story in public

The campaign biography is not an isolated example.

During a June 23 interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel, Ramaswamy described the opportunities Ohio had given him and his family.

“I went to public schools through eighth grade,” Ramaswamy said during the interview.

He then moved into his parents’ story, his business career and his account of living the American Dream in Ohio. He never told listeners that after eighth grade he spent four years at St. Xavier.

Ramaswamy used the same formulation during a 2023 ABC News interview about affirmative action and educational opportunity.

“I went to public schools through eighth grade,” he said while discussing the students and racial diversity of the schools he attended.

Again, no St. Xavier.

The wording is technically accurate but incomplete in exactly the same place each time: Ramaswamy tells audiences when his public education began and ended, then leaves out where the remaining four years of his K-12 education took place.

The full version sounds very different

Ramaswamy has given the complete account when he chooses to include St. Xavier.

In a 2021 C-SPAN interview, he described the transition in one sentence: “I went to public school till 8th grade, went to a Catholic high school and graduated in 2003.”

During an April 2025 appearance on The State of Ohio, he was more specific.

“I’m a product of public education in Princeton schools through eighth grade,” Ramaswamy said. “I went to Saint X for high school.”

He also named St. Xavier while recounting his education during his 2026 Republican primary victory speech.

Those accounts require only a few extra words. They also make clear what disappears from the shortened version.

Ramaswamy did not simply attend a private school for a semester or briefly transfer out of public education. He left the public-school system after eighth grade and spent his entire high-school career at St. Xavier.

The private school he leaves unnamed can receive Ohio voucher money

The omission has added significance because Ramaswamy is campaigning on an aggressive expansion of private-school choice.

Ramaswamy has called for every Ohio family to qualify for a full school voucher, including families sending children to private schools. Ohio already offers EdChoice scholarships on a sliding scale, but Ramaswamy has proposed eliminating the income-based reduction and making the full benefit universal.

St. Xavier is one of the private schools that can receive those taxpayer-funded vouchers.

The school currently charges $19,500 in annual tuition. St. Xavier tells prospective families that eligible students can use Ohio EdChoice scholarships there, including high-school awards of up to $8,408.

That creates a sharp contrast in Ramaswamy’s campaign presentation.

He wants Ohio to send more public money to private education. The private school he attended can receive that money. Yet his official biography goes out of its way to identify the public school that shaped him while refusing even to name the private school where he spent the next four years.

Ramaswamy has compressed his origin story before

The selective treatment of St. Xavier also fits a broader pattern in how Ramaswamy has presented his upbringing politically.

During the first Republican presidential debate in 2023, Ramaswamy told a national television audience: “My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago.”

Later in the debate, he said, “I did not grow up in money.”

But Ramaswamy’s own book, Nation of Victims, describes his childhood household differently.

“We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes,” he wrote of his family when he was in sixth grade.

His father worked for General Electric as an engineer and later a patent attorney. His mother was a physician who worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.

The Washington Post and Fox News both scrutinized Ramaswamy’s “no money” framing during his presidential campaign, contrasting the rhetoric with his own description of a comfortable two-income childhood and his private-school education.

The issue was not whether his immigrant parents arrived in America wealthy. It was the much broader impression created when their circumstances at immigration were used as shorthand for the household in which Ramaswamy himself grew up years later.

The public-school story follows a similar formula.

The underlying fact is real: Ramaswamy went to public school.

The political version stops before the fact that complicates the image: he left after eighth grade for four years at private St. Xavier.

A public-school credential, minus the private-school years

Ramaswamy has made his own education part of his case for overhauling Ohio’s schools. During a May interview with Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, he cited his experience in public schools while discussing why their performance matters to him.

In that interview, he gave the entire history, naming Evendale Elementary, Robert E. Lucas Intermediate School and Princeton Junior High before acknowledging St. Xavier.

His gubernatorial campaign could have done the same thing in a single sentence.

Instead, its official biography preserves the politically valuable label — “public school” — and hides St. Xavier behind three deliberately vague words: “Cincinnati high school.”

For a candidate asking Ohio voters to trust him with the future of public education while promising to expand taxpayer support for private schools, the part of his own education that his campaign chooses not to identify is not a trivial detail.

Ramaswamy spent four years at private St. Xavier.

His campaign needed only three words to make that disappear.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump signed the proclamation Wednesday, increasing the amount of imported lean beef trimmings eligible for the lower, in-quota tariff rate by 300,000 metric tons. The additional imports will be divided into three tranches of 100,000 metric tons, with the first opening Sept. 1, the second Oct. 1 and the final tranche Oct. 31. The expanded quota expires Nov. 30.

The policy applies specifically to lean beef trimmings, which are commonly blended with fattier U.S. beef to make ground beef. The White House did not identify particular countries that will supply the additional product, instead allocating the temporary increase to eligible nations classified in the tariff schedule as “other countries or areas.”

The move has drawn sharp opposition from cattle organizations, including the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association, which argues that increasing foreign competition now could weaken the market signals producers rely on when deciding whether to make the expensive, years-long commitment to expand their herds.

Ohio cattle producers push back

Ohio Cattlemen’s Association President Lindsey Hall said cattle producers are already contending with historically high costs for feed, land, equipment and labor.

“Artificially interfering with the cattle market through increased imports is not the answer to higher grocery prices,” Hall said after Trump first announced the plan Aug. 21.

Hall said stronger cattle markets have given producers an opportunity to begin rebuilding their herds after years of contraction, while policies that weaken those market signals could discourage producers from retaining animals and making the investments necessary to increase domestic cattle numbers.

The issue reaches directly into Ohio. USDA data show Ohio had about 1.23 million cattle and calves as of Jan. 1, including approximately 275,000 beef cows. The state had about 1.24 million cattle and calves a year earlier.

Northwest Ohio has thousands of cattle of its own. USDA’s latest county estimates counted approximately 5,500 cattle and calves in Seneca County and 4,500 in Sandusky County.

The beef dispute also comes as Ohio farmers navigate broader disruptions tied to Trump’s trade policies. TiffinOhio.net reported in December that Ohio agricultural sales to China had fallen sharply amid renewed tariff and trade disputes.

Earlier this week, TiffinOhio.net reported that Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy backed Trump’s reciprocal-tariff approach as Ohio manufacturers and farmers absorbed mounting costs and export losses.

Farm groups warn of pressure on American cattle prices

The American Farm Bureau Federation has urged Trump to reconsider the import expansion. The organization calculated that an additional 300,000 metric tons would translate to nearly a 60% increase in beef imports during the 90-day period compared with current levels and warned that the added foreign supply could put further downward pressure on prices paid to American producers.

Farm Bureau said U.S. beef imports are already at record levels while ranchers are attempting to rebuild herds reduced by years of drought. The organization has argued that weakening cattle prices now could discourage producers from retaining breeding animals, slowing a recovery that already takes years because cattle inventories cannot be rapidly expanded.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association also criticized Trump’s announcement, saying increased imports would undermine efforts by domestic producers to rebuild the U.S. herd.

“U.S. farmers and ranchers need stability,” the group said, arguing that cattle-production decisions are made years in advance.

Financial markets reacted immediately when Trump first announced the plan. Cattle futures fell to eight-month lows on Aug. 21 following the announcement, Reuters reported. Economists and traders interviewed by Reuters also questioned whether the import increase was large enough to produce a noticeable change in retail beef prices.

The order does not guarantee lower grocery-store prices

The White House has presented the import expansion as an attempt to address high beef prices, but the proclamation does not guarantee that shoppers will see a particular reduction in the retail price of ground beef.

Under Trump’s order, the Department of Agriculture and U.S. trade officials must monitor whether lean beef trimmings entering under the expanded quota are being sold at prices 25% below the market price for those trimmings. If they are not, the administration must notify Trump, who could eliminate the remaining expanded quota.

That 25% provision applies to the imported beef trimmings themselves. It does not mandate a 25% reduction — or any specific reduction — in the price consumers ultimately pay for ground beef at a supermarket.

The administration argues that additional imports are necessary because domestic cattle supplies remain constrained by drought, wildfires and restrictions on live cattle imports from Mexico stemming from concerns over New World screwworm. The White House also says USDA expects U.S. beef production to decline about 4% this year compared with 2025.

Federal cattle data confirm that the domestic breeding herd remains tight. USDA reported 27.6 million beef cows as of Jan. 1, down 1% from the previous year. By July, USDA counted 28.5 million beef cows, also 1% below the previous July, although the midyear report showed the overall cattle and calf inventory edging higher.

Trump’s latest action is also not the administration’s first expansion of foreign beef access this year. The Aug. 26 proclamation specifically leaves intact a separate increase Trump authorized in February for 80,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings from Argentina.

Trump shifts attention to meat processors amid backlash

As criticism from cattle producers continued, Trump on Friday turned his attention toward the highly concentrated meat-processing industry. He said his administration was preparing legal measures aimed at giving farmers and ranchers more ability to process and sell their own meat, according to Reuters.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said additional announcements involving beef processing are expected beginning Monday. She said the administration is considering expanding opportunities for ranchers to sell across state lines, increasing support for smaller processors and rescinding existing federal guidance.

Four companies — Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS USA and National Beef Packing Co. — control about 85% of U.S. meat processing, Reuters reported. Farm and cattle organizations have long raised concerns about consolidation and the limited number of buyers available to producers, though the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association warned Friday that any regulatory changes should preserve federal meat-inspection standards.

For Ohio cattle producers, the more immediate change arrives Monday. Beginning Sept. 1, the first 100,000-metric-ton tranche of Trump’s expanded foreign beef quota will open, followed by another 200,000 metric tons scheduled to become available before the end of November.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The crash occurred around 2:50 p.m. Aug. 28 at the intersection of state Route 18 and County Road 26 in Hopewell Township, Seneca County.

According to a preliminary investigation by the patrol’s Norwalk Post, a 2015 Ford Taurus driven by Hadiya Batts, 29, of Tiffin, was traveling west on County Road 26 when Batts failed to yield at a posted stop sign at state Route 18.

The Taurus was then struck by a northwestbound 2015 Harley-Davidson Freewheeler operated by Ronald Kuyken, 74, of Fremont, investigators said.

Kuyken suffered fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene. His passenger, Susan Kuyken, 65, also of Fremont, was taken by ambulance to Mercy Health — Tiffin Hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

Batts suffered minor injuries and declined treatment at the scene, according to the patrol.

Investigators said Ronald and Susan Kuyken were not wearing helmets. Batts was wearing a seat belt.

The intersection and surrounding roadways were closed for approximately two hours while investigators and emergency crews worked at the scene.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol was assisted by the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office, Bascom Fire Department, Tiffin EMS, Mercy Health Life Flight, John’s Towing, the Seneca County Coroner, Seneca County Department of Transportation and the Ohio Department of Transportation.

The crash remains under investigation.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But the words Acton actually used at a Tuesday press conference were considerably broader. Although reporters were asking her about ICE and federal immigration enforcement, Acton never said “ICE,” never used the word “immigration” and did not announce a new immigration enforcement policy. Instead, she said Ohio should continue working with federal law enforcement while holding officers operating in the state to professional standards.

The distinction has been blurred in subsequent coverage. National Review published a headline declaring that Acton “Vows to Cooperate with ICE” and characterized her remarks as a promise to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. News 5 Cleveland went with “Party flip? Democrat Acton supports ICE collaboration,” describing her as “breaking from her party.” The story was subsequently republished Friday by the Ohio Capital Journal under the headline “Democrat Acton supports ICE collaboration.”

What Acton actually said

Video of the press conference shows Acton discussing expectations for law enforcement officers who operate in Ohio and the state’s relationship with federal law enforcement.

“We need to hold anyone who comes to our state to the same standards of professionalism that we expect of our public safety officers, and I will always fight for that,” Acton said.

Addressing previous remarks she had made about federal enforcement operations in Minnesota, Acton continued:

“I was talking about Minneapolis in a moment where, you know, I was saying that we need to hold anyone who comes to our state to the same standards of professionalism that we expect of our public safety officers, and I will always fight for that. People of Ohio deserve to feel safe, and they deserve the professionalism and the training.”

When the questioning turned to cooperation with federal authorities, Acton said:

“We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so — whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe.”

That sentence became the basis for headlines saying Acton had pledged cooperation with ICE. National Review went further, reporting that she “said she would cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.” News 5 reported that Acton would not prevent local law enforcement from assisting immigration raids.

Acton’s quoted answer itself, however, did not say any of that explicitly. She said Ohio would continue working with “federal law enforcement.” She did not specifically endorse ICE raids, discuss ICE detainers, promise state resources for deportation operations or describe what particular forms of cooperation between Ohio agencies and ICE she would support as governor.

There is an important qualification: Acton made those remarks while responding to questions about ICE, so it would be unreasonable to pretend immigration enforcement had nothing to do with the exchange. Her reference to federal law enforcement can reasonably be understood to include ICE in that context. But saying that is different from reporting that Acton announced support for ICE operations generally or pledged to assist the Trump administration’s deportation program.

Acton had already said immigration laws should be enforced

The characterization of Tuesday’s remarks as a new “party flip” also conflicts with Acton’s previous public statements.

More than seven months ago, Ideastream Public Media directly asked Acton what role state and local agencies should play in immigration enforcement.

Unlike Tuesday’s answer, Acton’s response in that January interview explicitly addressed immigration law.

“If people are here as criminals, if people are here illegally, we need to enforce the laws of this country and the laws of the state of Ohio. But we need to do that lawfully.

“Ohioans everywhere I’m going, regardless of party, are heartbroken, they’re afraid, they are horrified [by the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis]. They want to see public safety. But they want our communities, our frontline responders, to be well-trained and be good at what they do.

“Quite frankly, the Statehouse is not fully funding the local funds [for law enforcement training]. As governor, I’m going to be investing in that. But we need [ICE activity] to be lawful and we need a full and transparent investigation [of Good’s death].”

Acton’s position in January therefore already combined two ideas: that immigration laws should be enforced and that the government must carry out that enforcement lawfully.

That makes it difficult to characterize her comments this week as a sudden reversal. Months before the August press conference, Acton had already publicly said that people who are in the country illegally are subject to federal and state laws and that those laws should be enforced.

She has also criticized how ICE has operated

Acton has simultaneously been critical of federal immigration enforcement tactics under the Trump administration.

On Jan. 24, following federal enforcement operations and deadly shootings in Minnesota, Acton posted on X:

“What we are witnessing in Minnesota is not normal or okay.

“Law enforcement should be keeping people safe by going after dangerous criminals, not by terrorizing communities.

“The people of Minnesota deserve a full and transparent investigation, safe streets, and basic human dignity.”

Those comments are consistent with what Acton said in her January Ideastream interview and with her remarks Tuesday: enforce the law, pursue dangerous criminals, cooperate with law enforcement agencies and demand lawful and professional conduct from officers.

None of that establishes that Acton opposes all cooperation with ICE. She has not said that. But it also does not support portraying Tuesday’s comments as a newly announced endorsement of ICE’s broader enforcement tactics or Trump’s deportation agenda.

What changed was the headline

The Statehouse News Bureau used more restrained language in its coverage, reporting that Acton “would not direct local police to refrain from assisting federal immigration agents.” Its evidence was the same statement: “We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so, whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe.”

News 5 and National Review pushed the interpretation further, converting that general statement into headlines about “ICE collaboration” and a vow to “cooperate with ICE.” National Review went further still by characterizing Acton as agreeing to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation efforts.

What Acton actually committed to Tuesday was continued cooperation with federal law enforcement to protect public safety. She also demanded that people operating in Ohio meet the same standards of professionalism expected of Ohio law enforcement officers.

And contrary to the suggestion that Acton abruptly changed positions, her public record shows she was saying substantially the same thing in January: immigration laws should be enforced, dangerous criminals should be targeted, enforcement should be lawful and law enforcement officers should be properly trained and professional.

What changed this week was not Acton’s stated position. It was the headline.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

According to a report released on Aug. 24 by the minority staff at Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, Americans have spent about $71.5 billion more on gasoline since the start of the Iran war. The average family paid an additional $604 for fuel over that time.

Much of that money has gone to higher profits for Big Oil companies, according to the report; since the start of 2026, they have reported profits of more than $125 billion.

As a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, Trump told voters: “Please remember this: I will never put personal profit before national security. Nobody should. … I will never, ever put the special interests before the national interests.”

While other presidents have traditionally avoided trading stocks, Trump has continued to buy and sell them as president. Richard Painter, who served as ethics adviser to the George W. Bush White House, told the Associated Press in May, “Technically he can do this, but it is a fundamental breach of trust.”

A White House spokesperson said in a statement sent to the AP, “Neither President Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.” 

According to the Joint Economic Committee minority staff report, Trump owned somewhere between $12.5 million and $45.6 million in oil and gas company stocks in 2025. Because those stocks have gained about 39% in value in 2026, those holdings would now be worth between $17.2 million and $61.1 million, giving the president a windfall of somewhere between $4.6 million and $15.5 million.

“President Trump continues to get richer from an illegal war that he started and refuses to resolve, while Americans pay the price for his actions,” said New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, in a statement.  “On the campaign trail, Trump promised giveaways for Big Oil and relief for working families, but he can’t deliver both. Since launching his war with Iran, Trump has made clear that he puts his own financial interests – and those of his biggest bankrollers – ahead of Americans who are burdened with higher costs for gas and everyday essentials under this administration.”

Trump is required to publicly disclose his personal financial holdings annually, though the forms only require officials to list the names of stocks and provide a range of values for each rather than an exact dollar amount. 

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

At least since Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the Senate at the beginning of 2025, Husted has had communications with Intel about potential deals with other businesses to revive the project.

Husted, a Republican, also said he pushed the Trump administration to make its controversial $9 billion taxpayer investment in the beleaguered chipmaker last year.

News of the investment and the potential deals substantially increased the value of Intel stock when it became public. 

Husted has also received thousands in campaign contributions from Intel lobbyist Josh Rubin, whom DeWine appointed to be chairman of the JobsOhio board in September 2023. Husted was DeWine’s lieutenant governor at the time. 

A quasi-governmental entity that has spent billions in what at least used to be public dollars, JobsOhio has given Intel more than $27 million for the Ohio project. The state, of which Husted was the second-ranking executive at the time, gave Intel more than $600 million. 

Husted’s communications team didn’t respond to questions for this story — including whether he thought trading of individual stocks by members of Congress should be banned.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of the good government group Common Cause Ohio, said Husted’s relationships with Intel and Rubin raise questions about whom Husted is serving.

“The problem has to do with how very cozy everything is,” she said. “It would be so very easy to make decisions based on what benefits your boss, what benefits yourself, and not what benefits Ohioans. And that’s where the challenge is. Whenever you have stock, an investment in a company, it’s very hard to look just at economic policy.” 

Blockbuster project

To great fanfare, the DeWine-Husted administration in 2022 announced the massive Intel project about 20 miles northeast of Columbus. 

It promised to be at least a $20 billion investment — and it promised to serve the strategic goal of bringing microchip production back to the United States.

It came with a price. The DeWine-Husted administration said it would put up $2 billion in state incentives and JobsOhio pledged another $150 million.

The project began to hit snags. At the start of 2024, Intel announced that it was delaying its construction timeline, citing sluggish chip sales. 

Hemorrhaging money in July 2025, the company announced that it was laying off 24,000 people worldwide, abandoning two construction projects in Europe and further delaying the Ohio project. Originally slated to begin production by the start of this year, the facility now won’t start making chips until 2030 at the earliest.

As the problems grew, so did the DeWine-Husted administration’s entanglements with the chipmaker.

Rubin, a former campaign manager and longtime advisor to DeWine, signed on as a lobbyist for Intel in 2022, the year the Ohio project was announced. 

The same year, he and his wife made nearly $15,000 in contributions to Husted’s political committee, Jon Husted for Ohio, records at the Ohio Secretary of State’s office show. A year earlier, they made at least $20,000 in such contributions.

Rubin also contributed generously to DeWine’s committee. Campaign-finance watchdog Transparency USA reports that Rubin has given $60,000 to Mike DeWine for Ohio over the years.

In September 2023, DeWine appointed Rubin, a lobbyist with dozens of clients, as chairman of JobsOhio, an entity that has passed out more than $2 billion to businesses in the form of incentives. JobsOhio gets its money from the state liquor franchise, which the state allows it to lease for far less than it’s worth.

Lobbying disclosures show that Rubin continued to actively lobby DeWine and Husted on behalf of Intel at least until earlier this year. 

They also show that Rubin was registered to lobby JobsOhio — whose board he headed — for Intel until the end of last year. Despite his and his partners’ registrations, they didn’t file any reports showing that they actively lobbied the agency after Rubin joined its board.

Intel was asked how much it had paid Rubin and his firm, how much it paid after Rubin joined the JobsOhio board, and whether any of that money was specifically to lobby JobsOhio after Rubin was part of the organization. The company declined to comment.

Rubin didn’t respond to calls and emails about these matters. DeWine’s press secretary insisted that Rubin didn’t have a conflict of interest.

JobsOhio is exempt from most state ethics and transparency laws. 

A spokesman for the agency said it has its own strong anti-conflict rules. He didn’t respond to repeated questions asking whether Rubin had ever declared a conflict or recused himself from funding decisions, even though he and his partners had been registered to lobby DeWine, Husted, and JobsOhio on behalf of Intel and multiple other clients. 

Inside track, personal investment

Lobbying disclosures also show that Rubin actively lobbied Husted for Intel from 2022 until DeWine appointed his lieutenant governor to fill the Senate seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president in January 2025. 

Husted’s office didn’t respond when asked what was discussed regarding the Intel project when he talked with Rubin, or whether Rubin had a conflict in his dual roles as Intel lobbyist and head of a quasi-public entity that had given Intel millions.

It also didn’t respond when asked whether Husted himself had a conflict stemming from a family investment in a company to which his administration had given $600 million in the form of a “reshoring” grant.

Husted’s Senate lobbying disclosures show that as of Jan. 21, 2025, his wife owned as much as $15,000 worth of common stock in Intel. His most recent financial disclosure — for calendar year 2025 — shows that investment as well.

State lobbying disclosures require different information than those at the federal level. DeWine’s disclosures show he had big enough investments in Intel to generate $14,000 in dividends from 2021 through 2023.

Since Husted disclosed his wife’s Intel investment, multiple news reports indicate that Husted was privy to developments that resulted in rises in the value of Intel stock:

• Last August, the Trump administration announced that it would take a 10% stake in Intel. Critics said the government was picking winners and losers, but Intel’s stock surged 6% on the news. Husted told The Columbus Dispatch, “It’s foundational. It’s a big deal. It’s the perfect relationship. And they had no relationship before. It’s something I’ve been working on and hoping for for some time.”

• In May, Husted told The Dispatch that he had discussed with Intel a preliminary chipmaking deal with Apple. Intel declined to confirm it to the newspaper. After Trump later wrote about the deal in a social media post, Intel stock rose 10%, CNBC reported.

• In July, Husted told The Columbus Dispatch that Intel informed him of a potential partnership with a South Korean Firm, SK Hynix. The Street reported that Intel shares jumped nearly 9% when the news broke — even though SK Hynix denied the deal.

Reform efforts

There have been efforts to stop the perception that members of Congress might be profiting from information to which they have special access.

Last year, separate, bipartisan bills were filed in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House that would ban members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks because they might be privy to such insider information.

One measure passed the House last month, but Democrats opposed it after Republicans inserted an unrelated voter ID measure.

Channel 4 WCMH in February reported that Husted didn’t take a position on a trading ban. Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty opposed it, saying it would allow the “government to control my personal financial decisions.”

Meanwhile, Husted’s Democratic opponent in the February midterms, former Ohio Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, supports a ban on congressional ownership of individual stocks — and on lawmakers becoming lobbyists after they leave office.

A review of Brown’s federal financial disclosures since 2012 didn’t appear to show he had any such investments. In an email, Brown slammed his opponent for what he called Husted’s “corruption.”

“Jon Husted has spent his entire career helping corporations and billionaires at the expense of Ohioans,” Brown said. “While Husted is busy lining his own pockets and rigging the system even further for hardworking families, Ohioans are being crushed by record high prices on their groceries, gas, health care, and utilities. Ohio doesn’t have to continue accepting Husted’s corruption. It’s why we are going to hold him accountable this November.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Lynnea Soposki, Luke Soposki, and their one-year-old son Logan Soposki died in a multi-vehicle crash on Interstate 71 in Delaware County in April. Modou Ngom, an immigrant who came to the United States in the 1990s, was the driver that caused the crash. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee started airing an ad earlier this month showing footage of the crash that killed the Soposkis while claiming former Democratic Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s votes on immigration caused Ngom to enter the country. 

“Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals. The consequences were deadly. … Because of him, Ohioans paid the price,” the 30-second NRSC ad claims.   

Brown is challenging Husted in the November election. 

“Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols. Lynnea was a beloved veterinarian. Luke loved to brew beer. … They loved each other and their son,” according to a statement from the family of Lynnea, Luke, and Logan Soposki. 

“Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone’s advantage.” 

The family said they were not asked, nor would they have consented, to the Soposkis being in the ad. The statement said the photograph was taken by Anton Marandi, who has the copyright of the photo, and did not give his permission. 

“We are asking that the advertisement be taken down, and that our family’s images and this tragedy not be used in political messaging by any campaign, going forward. We would ask the same of any candidate, of any party, who did this.”

The ad featuring the Soposki family has run its full cycle, according to a source familiar with the ad traffic, but the ad still remains on the NRSC’s YouTube page. 

“For 32 years, radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing,” NRSC Regional Press Secretary Nick Puglia said in an email. “Our ad campaigns will continue to hold Sherrod Brown accountable.”

The Soposki family said they sent both an email and certified mail to Husted’s campaign asking for the ad to be taken down, but never received a reply.  

The Husted campaign did not respond to questions sent by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

Brown served in the U.S. House from 1993-2007, and then was in the U.S. Senate from 2007-2025, before losing to Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno in the 2024 Election.

FactCheck.org said the ad has “weak ties” between Brown and the car crash that killed the Soposkis. 

Brown voted against a 1996 immigration bill that would have increased the number of Board Patrol agents, constructed border fencing and fast-tracked deportations. The bill was then rolled into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown voted for and then President Bill Clinton signed it into law. 

“Brown’s initial vote against the immigration bill made no difference in terms of what became law,” according to FactCheck.org. 

“It’s also difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would’ve had an impact on Ngom, given we have scant details about him and his immigration to the U.S.”

The Cook Political Report rates Ohio’s U.S. Senate race as a “Toss Up.” 

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.

Everybody across all lines seems to not really want these things in their local community.

– Sandusky native Holly Wenzinger, on rapidly expanding megawatt and gigawatt-scale data centers in Ohio

Along a stretch of road in a rural, northeast Ohio township just southwest of Sandusky, multiple yard signs appeared unexpectedly. One after the other.

At first, I thought they were premature campaign signs planted in early August. But every successive lawn display in screamed the same message: “Protect our community: No data center.”

What I had stumbled on in Erie County’s Oxford Township, population 1,185, was a microcosm of the ballooning revolt spreading across the state against the race to build more sprawling data centers in Ohio than anywhere else.

It took a beat for Ohioans to get wise to the financial and environmental burden of these massive facilities sold as an economic boon. Pure AI snake oil. Google the AI bubble.

Risky AI infrastructure buildout, (that relies on massive debt and unproven future revenues) also faces severe physical bottlenecks with power and water shortages — and now angry communities are blocking new data center construction. 

Tech companies thought they could get away with ignoring the silent stakeholders in the data center boom — citizens who live and work where AI factories locate.

They are the ones who bear the direct consequences of these resource-depleting data centers. They cover the costs to bring data centers online but often have no say—or even prior knowledge — about giant AI warehouses breaking ground in their neighborhoods.

Folks in Oxford Township saw what happened in nearby Perkins Township where residents were left in the dark about a massive hyperscale data center campus. It’s being constructed on an old manufacturing site a stone’s throw from Sandusky High School.

The first building alone, (about the size of three football fields) will use up to 96 megawatts (MW) of electricity — enough to power 75,000-100,000 homes or more than the entire city of Sandusky. 

When word trickled out about another hyperscale, 250-megawatt data center proposed in Oxford Township on a 146-acre campus near the EHOVE Career Center, residents were ready.

Hundreds attended a meeting hosted by data center developers that quickly became heated as many in the audience shouted objections and heckled the tech company presenters.

People were not in the mood for slick sales talk. They came prepared with questions about surging electricity bills, power grid stress, water usage, constant noise, and air pollution.

Wenzinger, a Bowling Green State University graduate with a degree in environmental policy and analysis, has seen emotions run high as communities come together “at this scale” with deep foreboding about data center development with no rules or public safeguards.

The response to this common, remarkably unifying issue has evolved into something “existential” that is “bigger than all of us and is really immediate and present,” she said.

The 27-year-old was herself drawn to the untold story of AI digital infrastructure when the Perkins Township data center moved, without notice, into her hometown.

She became a volunteer petitioner with Conserve Ohio, a grassroots organization gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment that would ban all large-scale data centers in Ohio.

Wenzinger has also been meeting with Ohioans around the state to raise awareness about the short-and long-term impacts of hyperscale data centers and how communities can protect their interests apart from corporate ones.

She is regularly astounded by how many people show up to learn what Big Tech doesn’t tell them about the 200-plus data centers in Ohio.

Wenzinger flipped through slides of her presentation in a packed local church in Oxford Township.

She told the standing-room-only crowd how new generation data centers consume huge amounts of local electricity and water, how they drive up utility bills for residents, how they create loud, non-stop noise and air emissions from backup diesel generators, how they offer very few permanent jobs after construction, and how they still get enormous public hand-outs at an enormous loss to state revenue.

Under former Republican Gov. John Kasich, Ohio committed at least $2.3 billion in sales tax exemptions to tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Google.

The quiet deals promised 100% sales tax breaks for up to 40 years if companies met certain goals.

That blank check to Big Tech cost Ohio more than $1.5 billion in 2025, almost 12 times the state’s $136 million forecast.

After losing that much revenue in data center subsidies, Gov. Mike DeWine — who supported the costly giveaways for some of the richest corporations in the world —  paused consideration of new data center tax breaks in May to figure out what went so wrong.

What went wrong with Ohio’s build-now-ask-questions-later data center boom?

Ask the farmer and the family and the retired couple and young people whose quality of life is in jeopardy today because the state’s Republican leadership gave short shrift to how communities would fare while greasing the wheels for Silicon Valley.

Politicians welcomed unregulated, massive computing facilities that run 24 hours a day and deplete energy equivalent to that of a whole city to power servers and cooling systems.

They kept the highly speculative transactions with Big Tech secret, without public input or rigorous debate, because they didn’t want people to know. 

But Ohioans know now and are fighting back. The proposed data center in Oxford Township has been tabled.

“We have carefully considered the concerns expressed by residents,” said a statement from township trustees, and determined “it is not in the best interest” of our community. The data center developer plans to revisit after the midterms. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The move comes after the Trump administration imposed a new round of 50% tariffs on a wide array of Canadian-made goods. The administration justified its action by insisting Canada was discriminating against American-made cars, dairy, and alcohol.

While the complaints are narrow and specific, the scope of Trump’s new tariffs is anything but. The motley assortment of goods includes plywood products, textiles, cosmetics, seeds, tools, machinery, electronics, furniture, and sporting goods.

All told, the Trump administration’s list touches about $20 billion in imports.

“For each product,” Champagne promised, “our tariff would match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian good.”

The Canadian list includes many similar product categories and accounts for a comparable dollar amount of imports from the U.S.

And Canadian officials are taking longer term steps to bolster their economy for the coming trade war. The government is planning a $7.5 billion package to prop up Canadian businesses and help support workers who lose their jobs.

President Trump warned on social media that he’s “giving serious consideration” to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Paying coming and going

Canada is Ohio’s biggest export market. In 2025, Ohio sent $17.5 billion in goods across the border — roughly a third of the state’s total exports.

“And that’s more than the next four highest trading partners combined,” Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore said. “Mexico, China, France, and the United Kingdom don’t even add up to that.”

More than half of Ohio’s total exports to Canada come from the equipment and machinery or transportation industries.

Meanwhile, Ohio imported about $16 billion in goods from Canada last year. Crude oil accounted for the biggest share at $3.2 billion. But Ohio brought in at least half a billion dollars’ worth of car parts, plastics, aluminum, and iron and steel alloy products.

“I mean you’re seeing what this is,” Moore said, “It’s the automobile industry. This decision is going to make it very difficult for folks in the automobile supply chain to be able to succeed in Ohio.”

And because goods will soon face tariffs whether traveling north or south of the U.S.-Canada border, Ohio companies could feel the pinch twice.

Ian Sheldon, an Ohio State University economist focusing on agriculture and international trade, points to the automotive industry.

Since the early 1990s, the industry has become deeply integrated across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, spurred on by the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Now, raw materials and components often cross North American borders several times as a vehicle is assembled.

“There is a potential for the automobile parts sector in Ohio, which is part of this highly integrated value chain, to be hurt by U.S. tariffs on what comes from Canada, and these retaliatory tariffs that Canada’s putting place against the United States,” Sheldon said.

GM and Stellantis both have a presence in Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s Toledo-area district.

In a statement she said, “We should be working to open and expand new export markets for Ohio farmers and ranchers, and our domestic companies headquartered in Northwest Ohio, not cutting off existing markets.”

“It is my hope that this Administration comes to its senses and pursues common-sense trade policies that benefit Ohioans,” Kaptur continued, “and not waste time with petty beefs and self-defeating squabbles.”

What’s next

Sheldon thinks the Trump administration may have launched this trade war to gain leverage in talks to renew the USMCA trade agreement.

This year, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada had an opportunity to extend the deal for another 16 years, but negotiations broke down after the U.S. refused to sign on.

Trump himself insisted on the negotiating the USMCA during his first administration. Less than a month before winning the 2024 election, he was insisting the deal’s predecessor, NAFTA, was “the worst trade deal ever made” while the USMCA was the best.

The USMCA remains in effect for now, and the countries will review it annually, but Sheldon sees a “huge risk” to the agreement going forward.

The U.S. undermined the agreement, he said, by sidestepping existing dispute resolution systems to launch a trade war instead. And Sheldon explained there’s additional weapons available if the countries want to continue their tit-for-tat escalation.

“I think there’s quite a lot of pressure being put on the Canadian government to impose export taxes on those important inputs like oil, gas, electricity and possibly fertilizers,” he said.

“I think if that were to happen, that would cause a considerable amount of damage not just to Ohio but to states that trade extensively with Canada.”

Moore offered a similarly gloomy outlook. If the trade war drags on, higher production costs in the immediate term and uncertainty in the long term will start affecting people’s jobs.

“Trade wars are destructive,” Moore said. “They’re going to make goods more expensive, which is going to make people in Ohio, especially low-income people in Ohio, poorer. They’re going to cost jobs, which is going to end up impacting families today, and also the children in those families and their future prospects.”

“We’re going to feel this now,” he added, “and we’re going to feel it for decades into the future.”

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans 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.

His own court records tell a story Windsor has been far less eager to discuss. His former wife accused him in 2018 of threats, confinement, controlling behavior and violence before Windsor agreed to a domestic violence civil protection order that remained in place for nearly two years. Separate records show a conservative political activist and his wife put $150,000 into one of Windsor’s media companies, later won a $185,457.60 judgment when the debt went unpaid, and were preparing to question Windsor under oath about his property when he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy was Windsor’s second known filing. His current schedules reported more than $305,000 in liabilities, while Media Dynamics Group — the company that received the $150,000 — was reported as having no income or expenses during the previous six months and just $4 in its bank account.

The records do not establish that every allegation made by Windsor’s former wife was true; the protection-order case ended by consent rather than judicial findings on each accusation. But they also do not support Windsor’s public claim that allegations against him were “proven untrue in court or later retracted.” The court files reviewed by TiffinOhio.net contain no such finding or retraction.

Together, the domestic-relations and bankruptcy cases offer a striking look at the record behind a man whose professional identity is built around investigating the records, finances and private controversies of others.

An investigative brand built on other people’s records

Windsor is founder and editor-in-chief of the Ohio Press Network and hosts The Windsor Report on 98.9 FM The Answer in Columbus. His station biography describes him as an “entrepreneur, strategist and consultant” whose career includes broadcast journalism and investigative reporting. His Facebook presence has been branded “Jack Windsor — Investigative Reporter.”

That investigative work frequently reaches beyond public policy and into personal records. On Aug. 13, Windsor’s radio show aired a segment titled “WINDSOR INVESTIGATES — The Amy Acton-Bexley police department call log-part 1,” based on records obtained by the Ohio Press Network. The report focused on a 2019 domestic disturbance at Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton’s home and emphasized that Acton’s adult daughter had called 911.

Days later, Windsor returned to domestic records in another segment involving a 2019 911 log and a separate 2013 domestic-disturbance report. His program archives those reports alongside other segments branded “Windsor Investigates.”

Windsor has taken a similarly aggressive approach to media financing. On Aug. 21, his program aired a segment titled “THE MACHINE-PART TWO-THE MONEY AND THE PIPELINE,” examining the financial network Windsor says sits behind Ohio journalism. Its description began with the question, “Who funds it and how it flows.”

State and federal court records provide an unusually detailed answer to that question for one of Windsor’s own media ventures.

His ex-wife alleged threats, confinement and violence

On March 1, 2018, Windsor’s then-wife filed a petition for a domestic violence civil protection order in Delaware County Common Pleas Court. A magistrate issued an ex parte protection order that same day. Windsor was served March 5, an attorney entered an appearance for him, and Windsor filed for divorce that day.

The allegations in the petition were extensive. According to the court records obtained and reviewed by TiffinOhio.net, Windsor’s wife alleged that he isolated her from friends and relatives, monitored her movements and communications, prevented her from working and controlled access to her email and social-media accounts.

She alleged that Windsor blocked doorways and kept her inside rooms during arguments, sometimes for hours. She accused him of throwing a dishwasher across a kitchen, punching and damaging her vehicle and shoving her from behind into a kitchen. A handwritten entry in the filing alleged that Windsor hit her daughter in the face.

The petition also described repeated contact after the couple separated. Windsor’s wife alleged that during one three-day period he called 48 times, left eight voicemails and sent 15 emails. She accused him of telling her, “You will be mine forever,” and threatening to kill any man who came between them.

Those accusations remained allegations. The court did not issue findings determining whether each incident occurred, and TiffinOhio.net found no criminal prosecution arising from them in the municipal courts searched during its reporting. The proceeding was a civil protection-order case, not a criminal prosecution.

What happened next, however, is established by the docket.

The divorce was over before Windsor agreed to the protection order

Windsor’s divorce was finalized May 24, 2018. The protection-order case did not end with the divorce. A full hearing was held June 27, and two days later Windsor agreed to a consent agreement and domestic violence civil protection order that remained effective until March 1, 2020.

The timing is important because Windsor later characterized the allegations to TiffinOhio.net as part of a difficult divorce. But the divorce itself had been final for more than a month when Windsor, represented by counsel, agreed to the protection order.

When TiffinOhio.net asked Windsor about the case, he emphasized that he had never been criminally charged or convicted in connection with the allegations and said “many things said were proven untrue in court or later retracted.” He described renewed scrutiny of the case as a “grotesque obsession of online trolls” attempting to stop him from investigating wrongdoing.

The docket reviewed by TiffinOhio.net contains no ruling finding his former wife’s allegations untrue. It contains no dismissal of her petition and no filing retracting the accusations. The case ends with the consent domestic violence civil protection order Windsor agreed to.

Then there is the money behind Windsor’s media business

In September 2022, James F. Kerg Jr. and his wife, Theresa, agreed to provide $150,000 to Media Dynamics Group LLC through a convertible promissory note. Kerg was then serving on the Shelby County Board of Elections and has a long history in Republican politics; he now sits on the board of the conservative advocacy organization Ohio Value Voters.

Windsor signed the note on behalf of Media Dynamics Group. He also signed a separate continuing guaranty, making himself personally responsible if the company failed to pay.

The note matured Dec. 31, 2024, without payment. The Kergs first sued Windsor personally in Franklin County Common Pleas Court in September 2025. That case stalled after certified mail sent to the address listed for Windsor was returned as not deliverable as addressed.

Eight days after that mailing was returned in January, the Kergs filed a second lawsuit against Windsor and Media Dynamics Group. This time they invoked a cognovit provision Windsor had signed as part of the commercial agreement, allowing judgment to be entered without the ordinary notice and trial process if Ohio’s statutory requirements were satisfied.

Judge Sheryl Munson found that those requirements had been met. On Jan. 30, she entered judgment holding Windsor and Media Dynamics Group jointly and severally liable for $185,457.60, plus post-judgment interest and collection costs.

TiffinOhio.net first detailed the loan, judgment and bankruptcy earlier this month.

Creditors moved to examine Windsor’s property

Winning the judgment did not produce payment, so the Kergs moved into collection proceedings. On March 13, a magistrate ordered Windsor to appear in Franklin County court at 9 a.m. April 24 for a judgment-debtor examination, where he would be required to answer questions under oath concerning his property.

Windsor filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy on March 31, 24 days before the examination was scheduled to take place. Federal bankruptcy law imposed an automatic stay that halted the state collection proceeding before Windsor appeared for the examination.

The sequence does not establish that Windsor filed bankruptcy for the purpose of avoiding testimony; Chapter 13 debtors are legally entitled to seek bankruptcy protection. It does establish that the filing came after the judgment, after collection began and after a court ordered him to appear for examination of his property, and that the bankruptcy prevented that scheduled examination from going forward.

More than $305,000 in reported liabilities

Bankruptcy required Windsor to provide a detailed accounting of his finances. His initial filing ran 94 pages and reported more than $305,000 in liabilities.

Those scheduled debts included approximately $185,458 associated with the Kerg judgment, about $69,800 owed to the U.S. Department of Education, $30,000 to the Internal Revenue Service and $4,100 to Gongwer News Service, the subscription news service that has covered Ohio state government for more than a century. Windsor also listed credit-card and collection debts.

The petition identified Media Dynamics Group, Red Straw Marketing, Windsor Brands and Windsor’s own name among business or trade names associated with him.

His disclosures for Media Dynamics Group were particularly revealing. Windsor reported that the company the Kergs had financed with $150,000 had received no income and paid no expenses during the previous six months. He valued his ownership interest in the company at $1,750 and reported $4 in its Huntington bank account.

It was not Windsor’s first bankruptcy

The 2026 case also disclosed an earlier bankruptcy. According to a court-generated notice of prior filings reviewed by TiffinOhio.net, Windsor filed a Chapter 7 case in northern Ohio in October 2005 and received a discharge in February 2006.

The earlier case was filed more than 20 years before his current proceeding and did not prevent him from seeking Chapter 13 protection again. But it means the current financial collapse is Windsor’s second known trip through federal bankruptcy court — a notable part of the record for a public figure whose current station biography promotes him not only as an investigative reporter but as an entrepreneur and business strategist.

A plan proposing roughly five cents on the dollar

As of TiffinOhio.net’s Aug. 3 review of the bankruptcy docket, five creditors had filed six claims totaling $216,037.05. Kerg’s $189,197.41 claim represented about 88 percent of that amount.

The Chapter 13 plan Windsor filed in April proposed payments of $890 per month for five years, with general unsecured creditors receiving 5 percent of their allowed claims. If Kerg’s claim were allowed in full, the plan approved on those terms and Windsor completed it, that would produce a distribution of approximately $9,460 on the nearly $189,200 claim.

Roughly five cents on the dollar.

That figure reflected Windsor’s proposal as it stood during TiffinOhio.net’s Aug. 3 docket review, not a final guaranteed recovery. At that time, Chapter 13 trustee Faye D. English had objected to confirmation, seeking tax returns, profit-and-loss statements and business bank records, and had separately challenged some property Windsor claimed as exempt. Two confirmation hearings had been continued, and no plan had been approved as of that review.

Fourteen questions about Windsor’s finances went unanswered

Before publishing its Aug. 3 investigation, TiffinOhio.net sent Windsor 14 written questions concerning the $150,000 financing, his personal guaranty, the resulting judgment and information reported in his bankruptcy filings. He responded twice before the deadline without answering any of them.

Windsor first asked to arrange a telephone conversation. Then, at 4:59 p.m. on Aug. 3 — one minute before TiffinOhio.net’s 5 p.m. deadline — he asked for an extension and sent questions of his own concerning TiffinOhio.net’s ownership, financing and staffing.

Less than three weeks later, Windsor was using his radio program to investigate the ownership and financing of other news organizations. His Aug. 21 segment promised to trace “the money and the pipeline” behind a purported $27 million newsroom network and asked his listeners, “Who funds it and how it flows.”

The segment remains publicly available through The Windsor Report.

The record behind the watchdog

None of Windsor’s financial problems makes the allegations made by his former wife true, and a civil protection order entered by consent is not a criminal conviction. But Windsor’s own public statements make the underlying records more consequential than either case would be in isolation.

He told TiffinOhio.net that allegations in his domestic case had been “proven untrue in court or later retracted.” The court record reviewed by TiffinOhio.net shows neither. Instead, it shows Windsor agreeing to a domestic violence civil protection order more than a month after his divorce was finalized.

He has used his investigative platform to examine old domestic incidents involving others. He has demanded transparency about who finances news organizations and how money moves through them. His own court record shows a political activist and his wife financing his media company with $150,000, a personal guaranty signed by Windsor, a $185,457.60 judgment when the debt was not paid and a bankruptcy filing before creditors could examine his property under oath.

That bankruptcy reported more than $305,000 in liabilities. The company that received the Kergs’ money was reported with no recent revenue and $4 in its bank account. It was Windsor’s second known bankruptcy.

And when TiffinOhio.net sent the self-described investigative reporter 14 questions about those financial records, he did not answer one.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Since the law was enacted, Ohio’s food-assistance rolls have fallen by 107,573 people — including 50,477 fewer children receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — as expanded work requirements and other eligibility restrictions have taken effect, according to an analysis of federal and state data updated Wednesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And for thousands of Ohioans, the connection to the new rules is explicit: The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services notified 12,988 people on April 30 that their food assistance would end because they had not complied with new requirements imposed under the law.

Those requirements now reach groups that previously had exemptions, including older adults, veterans, people experiencing homelessness, former foster youth and some parents of teenagers.

Husted voted for the legislation on July 1, 2025, when the Senate split 50-50 and Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote. President Donald Trump signed the legislation into law three days later.

More than 13,000 Seneca, Sandusky residents relied on SNAP before the cuts

The changes reach deeply into Northwest Ohio.

Before the new federal restrictions took effect, 7,232 people in Seneca County and 6,049 in Sandusky County were participating in SNAP in November 2024, according to county-level data compiled by the Ohio Association of Foodbanks. That amounts to 13,281 people across the two counties.

SNAP reached about 13.3% of Seneca County residents and 10.4% of Sandusky County residents at the time.

Seneca County Job and Family Services reported separately that it issued $14.7 million in SNAP benefits during 2024, averaging more than $1.2 million each month. An average of 6,477 county residents and 3,585 families received benefits monthly.

Food insecurity was already widespread before the federal changes. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks estimated 7,900 Seneca County residents and 8,930 Sandusky County residents were food insecure.

Husted said the bill would preserve benefits for people in need

Husted did not portray the legislation as a bill that would result in people losing food assistance when he celebrated its passage.

“This bill will make America safer, stronger and more prosperous,” Husted said in a July 1 statement.

He said the legislation was “prioritizing working Americans,” creating economic growth and “preserving benefits for those in need.”

Weeks later, appearing at an Akron Roundtable event, Husted went further, calling the legislation “the most pro-family, working class bill of the 21st century.”

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the law’s SNAP provisions will reduce federal spending on the program by approximately $187 billion between 2025 and 2034. CBO said the law expanded the population subject to work requirements, restricted states’ ability to waive them and imposed other eligibility restrictions that will reduce the number of people receiving SNAP.

CBPP describes it as the largest reduction to SNAP in the program’s history.

Veterans, homeless Ohioans and older adults lost exemptions

One of the most consequential changes was an expansion of the SNAP work requirement.

Under Ohio’s current rules, many adults subject to the requirement must work, volunteer or participate in an approved work program for at least 80 hours per month. Those who fail to satisfy the requirement without qualifying for an exemption can generally receive benefits for only three countable months during a 36-month period.

The federal law expanded that requirement to adults through age 64 and to parents and other household members whose youngest child is 14 or older.

It also eliminated exemptions that had applied to veterans, people experiencing homelessness and some young adults who had aged out of foster care.

Before the law changed, Ohio’s SNAP rules specifically listed homeless residents, veterans and certain former foster youth as exempt from the time limit. Under the rules effective May 1, 2026, those exemptions no longer appear.

ODJFS spokesman Tom Betti confirmed the impact in May, telling the Ohio Capital Journal that adults ages 55 to 64, parents with children ages 14 to 18, veterans, homeless individuals and people aging out of foster care were no longer exempt from the work requirements.

On April 30, the state sent termination notices to 12,988 people who had not met the new requirements.

More than 107,000 fewer Ohioans are receiving SNAP

The decline has continued.

Between the law’s enactment in July 2025 and May 2026, Ohio SNAP participation fell by 107,573 people, or about 8%, according to CBPP’s Aug. 26 analysis of USDA and state program data.

Children accounted for nearly half of that decrease. The number receiving SNAP fell by 50,477, or 9%, over the same period. Ohio’s state data define children for this measurement as SNAP recipients under age 22 who live with a parent.

The figures do not establish that every person who left SNAP did so because of H.R. 1. Participation can change for several reasons, including changes in income and household circumstances.

But the decline is occurring as the law’s restrictions are being implemented, and it has been substantially steeper nationwide than initially expected. SNAP participation fell by roughly 5 million people nationally between July 2025 and May 2026, according to CBPP. The Associated Press reported this month that nationwide enrollment had fallen more than 13% over a 12-month period as the new work requirements and other provisions took hold.

CBPP noted that unemployment remained roughly flat nationally during the period, making a dramatic reduction in financial need an unlikely explanation for the entire decline.

The organization also cautioned that some of the law’s major changes were not yet fully implemented when the May data were collected.

Husted: ‘Our work ethic is broken’

Rather than distancing himself from the law’s restrictions after passage, Husted has continued advocating for tougher conditions on public assistance.

In January, while discussing legislation that would allow states including Ohio to restructure federal benefit programs, Husted said Americans had a problem with their “work ethic.”

“Our work ethic is broken,” Husted said. “We don’t have the work ethic in this country that we once had, and we literally have the federal government telling people we will give you more money if you stay home than if you go to work. That’s crazy.”

Research reviewed by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found a more complicated picture. CBO has said SNAP work requirements cause substantial reductions in participation while producing only small employment gains among some affected groups. TiffinOhio.net previously reported on research reaching similar conclusions.

Ohio faces hundreds of millions in additional costs

The law does more than change who qualifies.

It also shifts a larger share of SNAP’s costs from Washington to state governments. The Health Policy Institute of Ohio estimates Ohio’s annual share of SNAP costs could rise from approximately $146 million to nearly $540 million as the law is implemented — a 268% increase.

Beginning in fiscal year 2027, states will be responsible for a larger share of SNAP administrative expenses. A separate provision beginning later will require states with elevated payment error rates to assume part of the cost of benefits themselves.

The Congressional Budget Office has said those changes could cause states to modify their SNAP programs, reduce costs elsewhere or, in some cases, leave the program entirely.

For Husted, however, the legislation remains one of the central accomplishments of his short Senate tenure.

When he cast his vote in July 2025, he told Ohioans the bill was designed to help working families while “preserving benefits for those in need.”

Thirteen months later, Ohio’s SNAP rolls are down by more than 107,000 people, nearly 13,000 Ohioans have received termination notices specifically for failing the law’s new requirements, and veterans, homeless residents, former foster youth, older adults and parents of teenagers face food-assistance rules that did not apply to them before Husted’s vote.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

There are many reasons – 17, to be specific – the Ohio Supreme Court, which oversees discipline of lawyers and judges, suspended Sandusky County Judge Jon Ickes from practicing law or serving as judge for two years.  

But as of now, he’s still on the November ballot. 

Ickes, whose alleged offenses range from harboring blatant conflicts of interest in cases to his use of vulgar or sexist or racist language to defendants or employees, won his uncontested GOP primary for re-election. The allegations date back to 2024. 

This means he’s on the ballot for a job he’s legally unqualified to serve, according to Kimberly Ontko, a county magistrate running for his seat as an independent. No Democrat is vying for the seat. 

Although the primary predated the Ickes suspension by several months, the Sandusky County Board of Elections at an emergency meeting ruled that Ickes’ judicial conduct was an “issue” for the primary and he can stay on the ballot. That’s according to Ontko’s description. The board director declined to comment or provide minutes of the emergency meeting from Monday. 

In an emergency lawsuit filed after the board’s decision, Ontko asked the Ohio Supreme Court to either purge Ickes from the ballot or essentially ignore votes on his behalf given his ineligibility. 

“A candidate for judicial office who is not eligible to assume the office sought has no right of ballot access,” she said. 

Neither Ickes nor the board of elections has responded to the lawsuit. 

Of the 17 offenses the Supreme Court considered, some are legalistic. He failed to recuse himself from cases where his stepson, a police officer, testified as a witness. He also used the n-word (he said he was quoting the film “Blazing Saddles”) within earshot of a Black criminal defendant. 

Other incidents raised by the court depict a crass and abusive workplace environment. He used labels like the “baby c—sucker case” with staff, who he adorned with sometimes racially charged nicknames including “dimebag Darrell” or “libtard.” He insulted staffers in front of defendants and warned a pregnant employee about how the “titty fairy” and “butt fairy” would be coming for her. 

“Ickes’s actions tainted the public’s trust. His conduct toward [his employee], women in general, and especially defendants and victims undermined the credibility of and public faith in the government, impeded the common good, and were not in the best interests of the American people,” the justices wrote.

Two Republican justices – Pat DeWine and Joe Deters – sought lighter sentences. Deters said he would have nixed the entire two-year suspension if Ickes avoided further trouble. 

Ickes could not be reached Wednesday – a court receptionist confirmed he’s no longer coming into the office, and he hasn’t yet filed in response to Ontko’s Supreme Court lawsuit. The court gave him until Friday. 

Lisa Hartley, director of the Sandusky County Board of Elections, declined to comment on Wednesday in light of the lawsuit. She said she’d need to consult with the board’s lawyers when asked to provide copies of minutes of its Monday meeting.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Democratic officials in 24 states and the District of Columbia launched a new federal lawsuit challenging a U.S. Postal Service rule establishing federal vote-by-mail standards as unconstitutional and a coalition of voting rights advocates filed a supplemental complaint against the USPS rule after the Supreme Court struck down a similar suit as premature.

The rule establishes new ballot-design requirements and mandates states collect information from voters and voting-age citizens and transmit that information to the federal government. It forbids the Postal Service from delivering or collecting mail-in ballots from people who have not been confirmed as eligible voters.

The Supreme Court’s decision Monday, with the three liberals dissenting, said states had not had the right to challenge President Donald Trump’s March 31 executive order because there was no corresponding enforceable final rule. 

The new filings largely incorporated earlier arguments, but updated the procedural history to reflect that the USPS rule is now final, and presumably open to legal challenge.

“As recently as August 12, 2026, USPS told the Supreme Court that there was significant ‘uncertainty concerning the government’s future actions,’” the voting rights groups wrote. “That uncertainty is now gone.”

In fact, the final rule published Aug. 21 hewed closely to the March executive order, the groups said.

“The Final Rule now makes concrete what Defendants previously called speculative,” they wrote. 

States’ responsibility

The voting rights groups said the rule would create a significant burden for voters.

The Democratic officials added that the requirements would place a significant strain on their resources, forcing them to scramble to overhaul their vote-by-mail systems less than three months before midterm elections.

And the rule impedes on a power that the U.S. Constitution expressly gives to states: election administration.

While Congress can make laws related to voting, the president and Postal Service have virtually no role, the state officials said.

“Whether a qualified voter may vote by mail is a question of state law, as is the question of whether a ballot will be accepted for processing and tabulation,” the states’ complaint reads. “Congress has not afforded USPS any authority whatsoever to set rules for federal elections or mail voting, even though Americans have cast ballots by mail for generations.”

The states also noted that Trump has objected to mail in voting for political purposes.

“One need not look further than the White House to explain USPS’s unprecedented and unlawful conduct,” they wrote. “President Trump has long opposed mail voting, expressing that it would ‘LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY.’ Since reassuming office, the President has aimed to—in his words— ‘get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.’”

The states that brought the suit are: Massachusetts, Virginia, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon,  Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. 

Decision coming soon

Also Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani removed her nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the administration from implementing the executive order that directed the USPS to create new restrictions and standards for mail-in ballots. She dissolved her order only to comply with the Supreme Court decision, which she suggested might be different if the court considers a complaint filed after the USPS final rule.

“While Plaintiff Organizations have substantial arguments that might persuade the Supreme Court to reach a different result if Plaintiff Organizations have an opportunity to present them, this court is compelled by the Supreme Court’s ruling” to lift the injunction, she wrote.

Talwani also set a quick briefing schedule for both cases Wednesday, with the final brief before a decision on a request for a new temporary injunction due Aug. 31.

That decision is likely to see an appeal.

White House response

Trump and administration officials have largely framed the order as an election security measure.

In a statement Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis repeated that defense and blasted Democrats for seeking to undermine the rule.

“The Supreme Court ruling was a major win for the security of American elections,” Bis wrote. “Radical Democrats continue to oppose commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders. The Trump Administration will continue to lawfully enact the agenda President Trump was elected on — which includes the safety and security of our elections.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

More than 100,000 Ohioans — including more than 50,000 children — have lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” made the largest cuts to food stamps in the history of the program. 

Ohio is expected to lose 51,000 jobs and $5.3 billion from the state economy in 2029, according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis.  

Medicaid work requirements part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could cause 356,000 Ohioans to lose their healthcare coverage and about 113,000 Ohioans have already lost their coverage after tax credits expired. 

Ohio saw the biggest drop of any state in enrollment in health plans under the Affordable Care Act between February 2025 and February 2026 (32.4%). 

The average monthly premium for Ohioans on the marketplace jumped from $126 in 2025 to $233 in 2026, according to Health Policy Institute of Ohio.  

“Trump promised to make life more affordable, and in Ohio and across the country, he has done the absolute opposite,” state Rep. Ashley Bryant Bailey, D-Cincinnati, said on a recent media call. 

“For a family, that is not one affordability problem. They are consequences of policy choices Donald Trump and the Republicans have made. You cannot cut people’s healthcare, food assistance, and watch their household costs climb, and then tell them you’re making America more affordable.”

This all comes as Ohio’s gas prices have increased nearly 42% since this time last year. 

“Ohio’s become incredibly expensive,” Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman of Cincinnati said on the call. 

“We need a Congress that’s going to fundamentally turn things around economically and lower lower costs and get wages up. One of the most important things that a new House, a new Senate, should take up is reversing the food and healthcare cuts, just because it’s such an urgent need for families.”

Ohioans are also feeling the squeeze when it comes to housing.

A full-time Ohio worker needs to be making at least $23.82 an hour to be able to afford a “modest” two-bedroom apartment, according to the to National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

“The average age now of first-time home ownership in Ohio is 38-years-old,” said Ohio state Rep. Karen Brownlee, D-Symmes Twp.

“Most people don’t wish to wait that long to have families to settle down and to put down roots. Those are prime years that you’re losing, and so there’s really, right now, a dearth of housing. Even when new housing is getting built, nobody can afford it because it’s at the highest price levels.”

Ohio has a shortage of 266,000 affordable and available rental units, according to the 2026 Gap Report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and COHHIO.

“If we don’t have our basic needs met — whether it is housing or food or healthcare — that we all must have, then the stress level of each individual who’s facing those stressors is going to go up,” Brownlee said. 

“It puts you into a state of chaos internally, which then creates an impact on your overall community.”

Midterm election

Landsman — who has served in Congress since 2023 — is facing Republican and former CIA officer Eric Conroy and Libertarian Nathan Weise in the November election.  

“Greg Landsman claiming he is fighting inflation is like an arsonist putting out the fire that he set,” Conroy’s Campaign Manager Collin Wojcik said in an email. 

“Eric knows that opening up American energy, bringing back outsourced jobs from China and Mexico, and growing wages is key to bringing down prices – not Landsman’s socialist agenda.”

The Cook Political Report rates Ohio’s 1st Congressional District as “Lean Democrat.”

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.

With the U.S. House of Representatives passing a law this year that would make it year-round, that controversy continues.

In fact, a panel of Ohio economists is split on whether the proposal’s economic benefits will outweigh the harms. They also were skeptical that it would improve Ohioans’ health.

The bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, awaits action by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. As they weigh the matter, its members have some history to look to.

The arguments around extending daylight saving through the winter are fairly straightforward: 

Adding more daylight at the end of short winter days encourages people to get out and do things like exercise, shop, and go out to eat. And by not forcing people to spring forward and fall back each year, their sleep cycles are more consistent so they enjoy all the benefits of being better rested. 

On the other side of the ledger, more evening daylight means dark mornings in which schoolchildren and other commuters are in greater danger.

During a previous try at permanent daylight saving time, images of kids standing at pitch-dark bus stops turned out to be a deal-killer.

Amid an energy crisis after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, President Richard Nixon signed a law making daylight saving permanent in the hope that people would use less electricity in the evenings. 

However, Newsweek reports, stories of kids using flashlights to get to the bus stop and darkness-related accidents dominated news coverage, significant energy savings didn’t materialize, popular support collapsed, and the measure was quickly repealed.

When 15 Ohio economists were surveyed this month about the wisdom of the latest attempt to make daylight saving year-round, they were deeply divided.

When Scioto Analysis asked them whether the current clock-changing arrangement hurts the state economy, seven agreed, six disagreed and one was uncertain.

In the comments section of the survey, Bill LaFayette of Regionomics said the disruption that comes with changing the clocks creates economic costs.

“The big impact comes from throwing off people’s circadian rhythm when the time changes,” he wrote. “There are more traffic crashes, more strokes and heart attacks, and errors at work that could have financial implications.”

But Kevin Egan of the University of Toledo said the economic effects would be marginal either way.

“The benefits and costs about balance out and whether you are for it or against primarily will come down to: Do you want an extra hour of daylight in the morning in the winter or at night in the winter?” he wrote.

“In other words, are you a ‘morning person’ or not? However, an additional factor is that there is a cost of switching the time twice per year with some studies showing a small increase in car accidents after Daylight Saving Time due to the hour adjustment and also small health impacts.”

The economists were even more ambivalent when asked how permanent daylight saving would affect Ohioans’ health and quality of life. Two said it would help, five said it would hurt and the rest were uncertain.

Jonathan Andreas of Bluffton University said we should choose between permanent daylight saving time or permanent “daylight wasting” time, so that clock changes are eliminated. And he suggested a way to help school kids if daylight saving is made permanent.

“The additional morning darkness of permanent (daylight saving time) is potentially a bit problematic for early risers such as kids commuting to schools which already begin way too early in the morning — it is already hurting their health, particularly in western Ohio!” he wrote.

“But this could be easily solved — schools should start an hour later! That would help boost learning and test scores, especially for high school students who do particularly poorly so early in the morning!”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Meta’s contribution alone — $10 million over the next five years — amounts to a tenfold increase in the Neighbor to Neighbor program’s funding. The program offers up to $500 in direct bill credits for low-income customers.

To receive a grant, residents must fall below 300% of federal poverty income guidelines and have previously applied for other state assistance like Ohio’s Home Energy Assistance Program. However, recipients can’t be enrolled in Ohio’s percent of income payment plan.

Amazon, Google, QTS, and Softbank all donated $1 million or more to Neighbor to Neighbor, and AEP pitched in another $1 million, as well. All told, the commitments come to $18.5 million.

“These additional funds are a significant infusion for a program that helps Ohioans in need,” AEP Ohio President Marc Reitter said. “This fund has always been about neighbors helping neighbors and we are happy that our data center customers are a part of it.”

It’s a dramatic expansion for a lifeline program at a moment when hundreds of thousands of Ohioans are struggling to cover their electric bills. The highest profile culprit for those rising utility costs are the data centers themselves.

Outside observers see the donations as a transparent bid for positive publicity as a nationwide datacenter backlash grows.

So how bad is it?

Heatmap News, an outlet focused on climate reporting, has been polling Americans on data centers since this time last year.

In August of 2025, attitudes for and against a data center going up nearby were evenly split — 42% to 43%. But in its most recent survey, Heatmap found opposition has rocketed to 75% of respondents.

In March, the Ohio Environmental Council polled likely voters in Ohio. Not only did they find that energy costs were a top issue, but 82% of voters believe “A.I. computing and data centers are driving up the cost of energy for everyday households.”

That frustration has spilled into political races around the country. Ohio is no exception.

Each candidate running for governor has released plans to rein in data center development. Organizers throughout Ohio are campaigning for local moratoriums and one group is collecting signatures to put a statewide ban on the 2027 ballot.

Last week, Axios reported Republicans’ main campaign committee for the U.S. Senate sent out a data center memo.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee said data centers could decide Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, and currently they’re dragging down Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted.

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo reads. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”

The memo went on to urge tech companies to “fix” the way Ohioans perceive data center development. Otherwise, “elected officials everywhere will treat Ohio as their reason to work against data centers in the future.”

The very same day that memo went out, AEP announced the multimillion-dollar donations to its Neighbor to Neighbor program.

Reactions

Tom Bullock heads up the Citizens Utility Board of Ohio, a nonprofit advocating for residential and small business utility customers.

“I think it’s good that they’re doing it,” he said of the companies’ commitments, before adding, “I wish it was not just utility bill assistance but instead getting to root causes.”

Bullock explained old homes all over the state aren’t properly insulated or air sealed; many households rely on old, less efficient appliances.

“Energy efficiency, home weatherization, more efficient appliances,” Bullock said, “Those kinds of programs save money four seasons out of the year, 12 billing cycles out of the year and grow over time.”

Notably, Google earmarked $500,000 of its $1 million contribution for energy efficiency upgrades for low-income households.

Helping people avoid utility disconnects is a “noble goal,” Columbus Stand Up Co-founder Morgan Harper said, but she still criticized the announcement.

“This seems like a PR play from both big tech companies and AEP,” Harper said.

Particularly rankling for Harper was AEP’s contribution. Ohioans across the income spectrum are struggling with electric bills, she explained. So why is a regulated utility like AEP making so much that it can give away a million dollars?

In an emailed statement an AEP spokesperson said the company shares its customers’ concerns about rising energy costs.

“Our employees live and work in these same communities and feel the same pressures,” the statement read. “So, we focus on what we can do: helping customers manage their bills and connecting them with every assistance program available.”

AEP operates in 11 states. Aside from its utility distribution business in Ohio, the company earns a profit through energy generation and building high volume transmission projects. The statement explained AEP’s contribution comes from AEP shareholders.

Still, Harper is skeptical of relying on handouts from what she sees as the companies contributing to the problem.

“This is not just going to be solved through charity,” Harper said. “We need structural solutions and also the government to play a role in holding these entities accountable. And and a little bit of you know millions here there is not going to be able to contend with the trillions of dollars in in value and money that these guys can throw around.”

Follow Ohio Capital Journal Reporter Nick Evans 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.

After the Ohio Redistricting Commission unanimously passed a 12-3 map in October 2025, Common Cause summed up the process by saying: “If all this sounds depressing, well, it is — at least for now.”

But the organization added an important reminder: “One thing you can say about redistricting advocates in Ohio: we don’t give up easily!”

It can be hard not to want to give up in the current political environment.

With the mid-decade redistricting wars raging on in states around the country, the U.S. Supreme Court continuing to reshape the law governing partisan gerrymandering, and voters increasingly frustrated with a political system that feels rigged against them, some may conclude that the war is over and voters lost.  

Races, deadlines, and the tools you need to cast your vote.

2026 Ohio General Election Voter Guide

The maps being used in Ohio for the 2026 midterms are set (unless maybe Trump calls one of the Republican legislative leaders and tells them he’s entitled to more seats here).

But this stage of the redistricting wars is better viewed as half-time at a sporting event rather than the end of the game; we may not like the score, but we still have time to regroup and adjust strategies that aren’t working.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but when it comes to redistricting, perhaps we need 20/30 vision. That’s because 2030 is the year that the next Census that determines congressional and state legislative apportionment will take place.

Although much conversation has centered around the mid-decade redistricting wars of the past year, Republicans’ previous REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) shows why looking ahead matters.

By targeting state legislative races in 2010, Republicans were able to influence who would control redistricting after the 2010 Census, and in turn, secure lasting majorities for themselves.

A July 2009 OpEd in the New York Times stated: “2010 is not just any election years: it is crucial given that this class of governors will be in charge as their states draw Congressional and state legislative districts as part of the reapportionment process after the next census. And given historical trends in midterm elections… the possibility (is) that Republicans could make gains in House races next year.”

Ohioans frustrated with the gerrymandered supermajority Statehouse now have an opportunity to think about the inverse; although four years is a lifetime in politics, it is enough time to play the long game on gerrymandering. 

That means paying attention not only to the 2026 elections, but to the statewide races that will determine who has a seat at the table when Ohio redraws its maps after the 2030 Census. 

If reform advocates want different results, they will need to think strategically about the elections that determine who draws the lines — and what those officials are willing to do with that power. 

Ohio’s Redistricting Commission may be unpopular in practice, but its composition still matters. 

Democrats have not won a statewide executive office in Ohio since Ted Strickland was elected governor in 2006, but many Democrats are hopeful that the current political environment will produce a political shift significant enough to break the Republican supermajority. 

Current polling confirms this is a realistic possibility. Similarly, a recent Axios headline declared, “Reliably red Ohio suddenly a red-hot mess for GOP.”

What actually happens on Election Day remains to be seen. But the larger point is that the next redistricting battle is already taking shape, even if voters aren’t thinking about it yet.

In our forthcoming book, Draw the Line in Ohio: How One State’s Fight for Fair Maps Explains Gerrymandering in America, my co-author, Josh Rultenberg, and I chronicle the state’s long battles over redistricting reform.  While that involves many ups and downs (and more of the latter for reform advocates), we want to drive home an important point: “The most powerful person in any state isn’t one of its elected leaders.  It’s an engaged, informed citizen who refuses to look away.” 

The redistricting wars, in Ohio and elsewhere, won’t end after the midterms.  That gives Ohio a unique opportunity to become something different: a laboratory of democracy.  Justice Louis Brandeis famously described state governments this way, as places where new ideas could be tested before being adopted more broadly.  But as democratic candidate for lieutenant governor David Pepper has pointed out, Ohio has increasingly become something closer to a laboratory of autocracy, largely because of its gerrymandered districts.

In listening to Ohio voters, one thing has become clear.  They are tired of the redistricting fights and are willing to experiment with new ideas.  The idea of an independent redistricting commission failed, but the failure of previous reforms does not mean that the state should stop looking for better answers.  

Hindsight may be 20/20.  But if we want better representation in the 2030s and beyond, we need 20/30 vision now.  

Rory Riley Topping is an attorney, legal analyst, and former congressional staffer who has served in all three branches of the federal government. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Draw the Line in Ohio: How One State’s Fight for Fair Maps Explains Gerrymandering in America,” which examines Ohio’s redistricting battles and what they reveal about gerrymandering nationally. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Washington Examiner, The Pragmatic Papers, and other publications.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The documents reveal new information about groups and events targeted by the agents — and contain dozens of photos of cars of people who trailed immigration agents in their cars.

The exhibits were submitted to the court by attorney Kevin Riach, who is defending Isaac Sant, one of the 15 Minnesotans charged with conspiracy to assault or impede federal agents. All 15 pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The documents further underscore the feds’ use of intelligence tactics — including the use of undercover agents and electronic surveillance — as a frustrated Trump administration sought to tamp down the widespread resistance to the immigration crackdown, which wound up ensnaring many legal residents and led to the killings of two Americans. 

Riach previously submitted another batch of undercover agents’ reports and other surveillance-related documents — including administrative subpoenas for unions’ financial records — in a motion requesting that the judge order DHS to release even more information on the surveillance campaign. 

A hearing on that motion is scheduled for Thursday. (The federal government asked U.S. District Judge David Schultz to postpone the hearing until next week, citing staffing shortages. Schultz denied that request on Monday.)

The new documents describe the efforts agents undertook to identify the individuals behind the websites defend612.com and melttheicemn.com, the website for an event in February that convened hundreds of activists from around the country to learn from members about the Minnesota anti-ICE movement. Agents subpoenaed the websites’ registrars and payment processors to confirm the identities of the website creators. 

Agents also used a “chat capturing software” to record the contents of Signal group chats, according to an undercover agents’ report, though the software isn’t named.

The new documents also contain dozens of photos of cars with redacted license plate numbers, presumably of cars that followed ICE — known as “patrollers” — and attendees at meetings of anti-ICE organizations. Previously-released internal DHS documents described undercover agents noting the license plate numbers of cars in the parking lots of such meetings, including at churches. 

Some of the photos capture daily life in the Twin Cities during the federal operation: anti-ICE graffiti on stop signs and buildings; posters of Renee Good and Alex Pretti with the message “MURDERED BY ICE”; a person in a “FCK ICE” button writing “chinga la migra” in chalk on a sidewalk; a table with pizza and coffee outside of the Whipple Federal Building.

There are several photos of mourners gathered at Alex Pretti’s memorial site. 

Prosecutors have said they have 20 terabytes of data in their possession, though not all of it is directly related to the defendants in the conspiracy case.

“I’m inferring that not every bit of evidence was necessarily gathered pursuant to a warrant,” Schultz said in an earlier hearing in the case.

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.

Seneca County Sheriff’s Office deputies were dispatched around 8:28 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 19, to the area of 1525 W. County Road 42 after Norfolk Southern reported that a train had struck a pedestrian.

Deputies arriving at the scene reported evidence of the collision on the locomotive. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, with dispatch records listing his time of death as approximately 8:46 p.m.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/man-killed-train-strike-seneca-county/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But there is another part of Click’s record that follows him onto the road.

The Vickery Republican accumulated 10 traffic citations over the decade ending in early 2023, including four for driving more than 15 miles per hour over the posted speed limit and two for failing to wear a seat belt, according to Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles records reviewed by the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Click accumulated those violations while holding a commercial driver’s license permitting him to transport passengers.

Now, as Click drives a Challenger bearing his name around the district, the contrast is difficult to miss: one of Ohio’s most frequently ticketed state lawmakers has made a muscle car part of his campaign image.

Click ranked near the top of the Statehouse for traffic tickets

Click’s driving record stood out even among 129 state legislators whose records were examined by the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2023.

Fifty-two lawmakers had no traffic tickets during the decade reviewed. Another 28 had only one.

Only three lawmakers had at least 10 citations.

Click, a former Baptist pastor and community theater actor, was one of them.

His 10 tickets placed him behind only then-state Rep. Niraj Antani, who had 14, and state Rep. Jay Edwards, who had 13. Four of Click’s citations were for exceeding the speed limit by more than 15 mph.

When the Enquirer asked Click about his record, he did not dispute the violations.

“There are more important issues than lawmakers’ speeding tickets,” Click told the newspaper.

Edwards, who had more citations than Click, responded differently.

“This isn’t something I’m proud of but I accept responsibility,” Edwards told the Enquirer. “I’m certainly not above the law.”

Highway Patrol chief: ‘Look very hard at your driving behaviors’

Ohio State Highway Patrol Superintendent Charles Jones did not dismiss lawmakers’ driving records as unimportant.

Asked by the Enquirer about legislators with repeated traffic violations, Jones said traffic laws apply regardless of occupation and specifically addressed lawmakers who had accumulated 10 or more tickets.

They should “look very hard at your driving behaviors,” Jones said.

Click was one of only three legislators who met that threshold.

The significance goes beyond traffic tickets.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says speeding endangers everyone on the road because it increases stopping distance, makes vehicles more difficult to control and increases the severity of crashes. In 2024, 11,288 people were killed in speeding-related crashes nationwide, accounting for 29% of all traffic deaths.

Ohio has its own significant speeding problem.

According to a 2025 Ohio State Highway Patrol traffic safety bulletin, 146,983 speed-related crashes occurred on Ohio roadways from 2020 through 2024. Those crashes included 1,713 fatal crashes that killed 1,890 people.

Speed was a factor in 30% of all fatal crashes in Ohio during that five-year period.

The problem is also present in the two counties Click represents.

State traffic data show 278 speed-related crashes occurred in Sandusky County in 2025, while Seneca County recorded 163.

Combined, Click’s two-county district experienced 441 speed-related crashes in a single year.

A muscle car becomes a campaign prop

A recent photograph shows Click posing directly in front of the campaign-wrapped Challenger alongside two other Dodge Challengers.

The white car is difficult to mistake for anything other than political advertising. An eagle stretches across the rear quarter panel. Red and blue graphics cover the vehicle. An outline of Ohio appears on the door alongside large lettering promoting Click as state representative.

The hood is covered in American flag imagery.

It is essentially a campaign sign on wheels.

What is not clear from the photograph is who legally owns the Challenger or who paid for the vehicle wrap. TiffinOhio.net has therefore not characterized the vehicle itself as a campaign expenditure.

There is also no evidence reviewed by TiffinOhio.net showing that Click has received a speeding citation while driving this particular vehicle.

But the documented record preceding it is substantial: 10 traffic citations, four involving speeds more than 15 mph above the limit, and a ranking that placed Click among roughly the top 2% of Ohio lawmakers examined for traffic violations.

The branding may be new.

The driving record is not.

Click is now sponsoring legislation dealing with traffic safety

There is another wrinkle to Click’s driving record.

He is currently a primary sponsor of House Bill 82, legislation dealing with traffic offenses in construction zones and named the Trenton Gallaway Work Zone Safety Act.

The bill was introduced by Click and state Rep. Mark Johnson in February 2025 and was reported favorably out of the House Public Safety Committee in June.

That puts Click in the unusual position of sponsoring legislation focused on dangerous driving behavior in work zones after compiling one of the longest traffic records among his Statehouse colleagues.

Click’s four documented speeding citations predate the current legislation, and there is no indication any of those violations occurred in a construction zone.

Still, his own record provides context as he asks lawmakers to change Ohio’s traffic laws while simultaneously making a Dodge Challenger part of his reelection image.

Click heads into a difficult general election

The Challenger is appearing as Click tries to rebuild his political standing after a bruising Republican primary.

Click survived the May 5 Republican primary by just 599 votes, defeating first-time challenger Eric Watson 6,859 to 6,260.

Nearly 48% of Republican voters in the district voted to replace the three-term incumbent.

Click also lost Seneca County outright, winning the nomination only through his stronger performance in his home county of Sandusky.

The narrow victory has been followed by an increasingly visible reelection push. Click is scheduled to hold a Sept. 21 golf fundraiser in Tiffin featuring Republican officeholders and Statehouse power brokers, even though Seneca County was the portion of his district he lost in May.

He faces Democrat Aaron Jones, a Tiffin City Council member, U.S. Army veteran and longtime manufacturing supervisor, in the Nov. 3 general election.

Click’s campaign-wrapped Challenger gives the incumbent another highly visible way to put his name in front of voters.

It also makes a record he once dismissed as less important considerably harder to ignore.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“We need to bring down property taxes in this state immediately — eventually down to zero,” Ramaswamy told supporters during his February 2025 campaign launch. “If you own land, it should not feel like it’s a lease from the government.”

But Ramaswamy, now the Republican nominee for governor, has since quietly abandoned that promise.

By early 2026, Statehouse News Bureau reporting noted that Ramaswamy had backed away from eliminating property taxes and was instead promising the “biggest property tax rollback in the history of our state.” By July, Ohio Capital Journal reported that Ramaswamy acknowledged eliminating property taxes was no longer feasible.

His current campaign plan now calls for rolling property taxes back to levels before the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and limiting future growth.

The shift came as state fiscal officials, tax researchers, local governments and municipal bond attorneys were putting numbers behind what eliminating Ohio property taxes would actually mean.

The most detailed analyses were prepared in response to a separate citizen-led constitutional amendment seeking to abolish real property taxes statewide — not Ramaswamy’s current rollback proposal. But those analyses examined essentially the same endpoint Ramaswamy promised voters at the beginning of his campaign: eliminating taxes on real property.

More than $20 billion would have to come from somewhere

Ohio does not collect a state property tax. The money is collected locally and pays for schools, police and fire departments, emergency medical services, libraries, developmental disability programs, senior services, roads and other local government operations.

In a February 2026 memorandum to Gov. Mike DeWine, Ohio Office of Budget and Management Director Kimberly Murnieks said property taxes generate roughly $24 billion annually for local governments — approximately as much as Ohio collects from its state income and sales taxes combined.

Because the proposed abolition amendment applied to real property but did not eliminate public-utility personal-property taxes, the amount that would actually need to be replaced would be more than $20 billion annually.

OBM concluded that replacing that revenue through other taxes would be “fiscally impractical and economically harmful.”

If Ohio tried to replace the lost revenue through income taxes, OBM said rates could need to rise to roughly 11% to 15% statewide.

A separate Tax Foundation analysis calculated that replacing Ohio property taxes through income taxes would result in an average all-in state and local income-tax rate of about 12.6%, with enormous differences among counties. In some counties, the combined rate required to replace property taxes could approach 27%.

That 27% figure is not a proposed statewide Ohio income-tax rate. It represents the upper end of the Tax Foundation’s county-by-county estimates if income taxes were used to replace the property-tax revenue currently collected in each county.

The alternative would not necessarily be cheaper.

OBM estimated that replacing the lost revenue through Ohio’s sales tax could require increasing the state rate from 5.75% to somewhere around 15% to 18%. DeWine went even further, warning that the rate could approach 20%.

For comparison, Tax Foundation data from July 2026 show Louisiana currently has the highest average combined state and local sales-tax rate in the country, at just over 10%.

Schools are particularly dependent on the tax

The consequences would be especially significant for Ohio public schools.

A study by Butler County Auditor Nancy Nix estimated that roughly $13 billion in annual property-tax revenue goes to school districts.

The Ohio Legislative Service Commission likewise found that property taxes account for approximately 95% of school districts’ local operating revenue, excluding property taxes paid by the state through existing rollback and homestead-exemption programs.

That does not necessarily mean schools would simply lose every dollar. A Legislative Budget Office analysis noted that eliminating real-property taxes could dramatically reduce districts’ calculated local capacity under Ohio’s school-funding formula, potentially requiring the state to provide considerably more money.

But the proposed abolition amendment contained no mechanism requiring the state to replace the lost revenue, and doing so would transfer an enormous new financial obligation to Columbus.

An anti-abolition coalition, Ohioans to Protect Public Services, has estimated that eliminating property taxes without replacement could result in more than 50,000 teacher layoffs. WOSU reported the coalition’s estimate in April.

That figure is an advocacy coalition’s estimate rather than an official state layoff projection. But the scale is notable: the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce reported 111,646 full-time-equivalent teachers in Ohio public schools during the 2023-24 school year. A loss of 50,000 positions would represent roughly 45% of that workforce.

Police, fire and EMS funding would also be exposed

Public safety agencies are another major recipient of voter-approved property-tax levies.

Ohioans to Protect Public Services estimates that eliminating property taxes without a replacement could jeopardize more than 32,000 positions among police officers, firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers and other first responders.

Again, that is a coalition estimate, not an official state forecast. But local governments’ reliance on property-tax revenue for public safety is well documented.

The Ohio Legislative Service Commission reported that Ohio had 944 law-enforcement agencies employing 26,004 full-time officers as of January 2024, including municipal police, sheriff’s deputies, township officers and state law-enforcement personnel.

Some communities are overwhelmingly dependent on property taxes for police services. The research compiled on the abolition proposal found, for example, that Washington Township said property taxes represented approximately 95% of its police funding.

“The total elimination of property taxes without a secured, guaranteed replacement creates a public safety crisis,” Independence Police Chief Robert Butler, president of the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, said during the debate over abolition.

Bond attorneys warned of another problem: Ohio’s local debt

Eliminating property taxes would not eliminate the debts Ohio communities have already incurred.

That created another warning from some of the state’s largest municipal bond-law firms.

In a February memorandum, attorneys from Bricker Graydon Wyatt, Calfee Halter & Griswold, Dinsmore & Shohl, FBT Gibbons and Squire Patton Boggs examined the impact of the proposed constitutional amendment.

They said Ohio local governments had nearly $22.3 billion in outstanding general-obligation bonds, many of which are secured directly or indirectly by property-tax revenue.

Abolishing that underlying security, the attorneys warned, would likely trigger immediate credit downgrades to “junk” status for affected Ohio general-obligation debt and could freeze the municipal credit market for local governments seeking to finance schools, roads, water systems and other infrastructure.

The memo also warned that replacing property taxes with income- or sales-tax revenue could make future borrowing more expensive because those revenue streams are more economically volatile.

The warning was directed at the full abolition amendment, not Ramaswamy’s current rollback proposal. But it underscored another complication with his original zero-property-tax promise: existing debts do not disappear when the tax securing them does.

Ramaswamy’s new plan still leaves billion-dollar questions

Ramaswamy is no longer proposing to eliminate the tax entirely.

His campaign now says he would roll property-tax collections back to levels “before the end of the Covid pandemic.” The campaign says new construction would not be affected, existing debt obligations would be honored and local governments would continue operating “with greater discipline.”

But the campaign has not publicly specified the exact tax year it would use as its rollback baseline.

The Statehouse News Bureau reported in July that Ramaswamy has said savings from reducing the size of government and economic growth — including a goal of increasing Ohio’s population to 15 million — would help finance his proposal.

Fifteen million residents would represent roughly a 36% increase in Ohio’s population. The campaign has not detailed a timetable under which that population growth would occur or provided a dollar-for-dollar replacement mechanism for local governments affected by the rollback.

Innovation Ohio, a progressive policy organization, attempted to quantify the proposal by assuming Ramaswamy meant rolling property taxes back to approximately 2021 levels.

Its analysis estimated that such a rollback would initially reduce local property-tax collections by roughly $4 billion annually, with the gap reaching approximately $6.6 billion a year by the time the policy was fully implemented.

The organization estimated that approximately $4 billion of the eventual reduction would fall on school districts.

TiffinOhio.net previously reported on that analysis in April.

The $6.6 billion estimate depends on Innovation Ohio’s assumed 2021 baseline. Ramaswamy’s campaign has not committed to that year, meaning the exact fiscal impact of his current proposal cannot yet be calculated.

The abolition effort is now targeting 2027

Meanwhile, the separate citizen effort to abolish Ohio property taxes has not disappeared.

Organizers failed to collect enough signatures to place their constitutional amendment before voters in November 2026 and announced in June that they would instead continue collecting signatures in hopes of making the November 2027 ballot.

That means Ohio voters will not decide on complete property-tax abolition this fall.

They will, however, decide between candidates offering sharply different approaches to the property-tax problem — including Ramaswamy, who began his campaign promising to take the tax to zero and is now asking voters to support a historic rollback instead.

The promise has changed.

The unanswered question is how much the replacement promise would cost — and who would ultimately pay for it.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, publicly endorsed the principle behind Trump’s reciprocal tariff policy before the president unveiled his sweeping tariff agenda in 2025.

During a January 2025 interview with The Breakfast Club, Ramaswamy laid out three approaches to tariffs and rejected the idea that the United States should leave its markets open when foreign countries imposed barriers on American goods.

Instead, he advocated reciprocity.

“If you’re another country and you’re applying tariffs to us … then we’re going to level the playing field,” Ramaswamy said.

“I think that is totally legitimate,” he added. “In fact, I think in most cases that makes sense.”

Asked later in the interview whether the United States should impose the same tariff when another country levies one against American goods, Ramaswamy answered affirmatively.

“Yeah, I think yes,” he said. “So it’s that simple.”

That position closely tracked the reciprocal trade policy Trump was preparing to pursue. In February 2025, Trump signed a memorandum directing his administration to develop reciprocal tariffs, saying the United States would respond to tariffs and other trade barriers imposed by other countries.

Ramaswamy continued supporting reciprocity after launching his campaign for governor. The Washington Post reported in April 2025 that Ramaswamy had indicated before Trump’s tariff announcement that he would support reciprocal tariffs — taxing imports in response to tariffs imposed on American goods.

There was a distinction between Ramaswamy’s position and every tariff Trump ultimately imposed. Ramaswamy argued for matching foreign trade barriers and had criticized imposing tariffs higher than those imposed on the United States. Trump’s eventual tariff program went considerably further in some cases.

But Ramaswamy had sided with Trump on the underlying use of retaliatory tariffs as an instrument of trade policy.

And as Trump’s tariff agenda played out, businesses and farmers across Ohio began reporting the cost.

Ohio manufacturer loses more than $4 million

At Tosoh SMD Inc. in Grove City, the bill climbed into the millions.

The central Ohio manufacturer, which employed 221 workers and makes specialized materials used in semiconductor and solar-panel manufacturing, lost more than $4 million in just six months because of tariffs imposed under Trump, according to reporting by The Columbus Dispatch.

The losses amounted to approximately 5% of the company’s annual revenue, Tosoh President and Chief Operating Officer Joe Buckfeller told the newspaper.

Tosoh produces sputtering targets and other high-purity materials used by companies including Samsung, Texas Instruments and Intel. The Ohio operation depends on specialized imported materials, including aluminum from Japan and France and copper from China.

Those imports became substantially more expensive under Trump’s tariffs.

The company attempted to pass some of the additional costs on to customers, but Buckfeller said customers resisted paying them. Tosoh also could not simply replace all of the imported materials with American alternatives because domestic suppliers did not produce some of what the company required at the necessary specifications.

In other words, tariffs promoted as a way to bolster American manufacturing were costing an Ohio manufacturer millions of dollars to continue making products in Ohio.

Ohio soybean farmers lose their Chinese market

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The consequences were also spreading across Ohio farm country.

China had long been the largest overseas customer for American soybeans. But amid Trump’s renewed trade war with Beijing, China retaliated against U.S. tariffs and turned increasingly toward producers in countries such as Brazil.

For Ohio soybean growers, the collapse was dramatic.

By the end of 2025, Ohio agricultural exports to China had fallen nearly $76 million compared with the previous year — a decline of about 74% — according to federal trade data reported by the Ohio Capital Journal.

Ohio soybean exports to China fell even further: 85%.

The decline was not attributable exclusively to tariffs. Brazil’s growing dominance in the Chinese soybean market and other economic forces also contributed. But the renewed U.S.-China trade confrontation was a major factor, with China halting purchases of American soybeans during the dispute in retaliation for Trump’s tariff policies.

Ohio farmers had been warning about the damage for months.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, soybean producers were being squeezed simultaneously by rising input costs, low commodity prices and disappearing overseas sales.

Clark County farmer Brian Harbage, whose operation is roughly half soybeans, said China had gone so long without purchasing American soybeans that recovering the lost business during the remainder of the year was mathematically impossible.

“We’re not going to catch up for this year because they haven’t bought any up to this date,” Harbage told TiffinOhio.net. “They can’t physically buy enough between now and the end of the year to make up for the losses.”

Shelby County farmer Chris Gibbs was even more direct about the condition of Ohio agriculture.

The tariffs, he said, had helped put farmers in a “hell of a mess.”

Farmers were also absorbing tariff-related increases on some of the equipment and materials they needed to operate while selling crops into a market weakened by retaliation.

Estimates at the time put losses for soybean producers at roughly $100 per acre in 2025.

Ramaswamy’s campaign said it was time to ‘hit back’

As concern about Trump’s tariffs mounted in April 2025, the Ohio Capital Journal asked Ramaswamy’s campaign whether he supported the tariffs and what he would tell Ohioans experiencing economic pain from the policy.

His campaign did not directly answer whether Ramaswamy supported each of the specific tariffs Trump had announced.

Instead, campaign manager Jonathan Ewing defended the broader economic argument behind Trump’s approach.

“For decades, Ohio workers have been hit hard by America’s manufacturing exodus, and it’s time to hit back,” Ewing said.

The response came after Ramaswamy had already publicly endorsed reciprocal tariffs.

The Washington Post noted at the time that Ramaswamy had said relatively little about Trump’s tariffs in the days following their announcement, despite having previously indicated support for reciprocal tariffs.

Trump’s full tariff program was not identical to the policy Ramaswamy had advocated. Ramaswamy favored reciprocity and had cautioned against tariffs that went beyond leveling what he considered an unfair playing field.

But as a candidate seeking to govern one of the nation’s major manufacturing and agricultural states, Ramaswamy had endorsed tariffs as a legitimate way to retaliate against foreign trade barriers, defended Trump’s hardball approach to trade negotiations and said reciprocal tariffs “in most cases” made sense.

Trump then put tariffs at the center of his economic agenda.

In Ohio, a Grove City manufacturer reported losing more than $4 million. Agricultural exports to China plunged. Soybean exports to the country collapsed by 85%. Farmers described losing money on every acre they planted and warned that one of their largest overseas markets could not simply be recovered overnight.

Ramaswamy sided with Trump on reciprocal tariffs.

Ohio farmers and manufacturers were left dealing with the consequences of the tariff fight that followed.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office announced at approximately 3:15 p.m. Wednesday that Scott Dodd Jr. had been taken into custody.

Authorities had spent much of the day searching for Dodd after a Gibsonburg police officer was stabbed at Union Bank Wednesday morning.

Sandusky County Sheriff Chris Hilton told 13abc that Dodd allegedly stabbed the officer during the incident. The officer was taken to a Level 1 trauma center in Toledo and was undergoing surgery before 11 a.m.

Authorities had not publicly identified the officer as of Wednesday afternoon.

The stabbing triggered a large-scale search across Gibsonburg and surrounding areas.

The Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office warned residents earlier Wednesday that Dodd should not be approached and described him as armed and dangerous.

“DO NOT APPROACH,” the sheriff’s office said while the search was underway. “Residents of Gibsonburg area please contact the Sheriff’s Office or call 911 if you see this subject.”

The Village of Gibsonburg also advised residents to remain inside because of the active search.

“At this time we are advising all residents to please stay inside due to an active search,” village officials said earlier Wednesday.

Those warnings were issued before Dodd was taken into custody.

An Ohio Blue Alert was issued during the search. Authorities described Dodd as approximately 6 feet tall and 150 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes and a scruffy beard.

The alert indicated that Dodd appeared to have suffered a gunshot wound to his right cheek. Hilton said investigators were working to determine whether the injured officer fired her weapon during the confrontation, according to 13abc.

Dodd was last reported on foot in the area of West Madison Street before his apprehension.

The search also affected nearby schools.

Woodmore Local Schools and Eastwood Local Schools were placed on lockdown while authorities searched for Dodd. Students and staff were accounted for during the lockdowns.

Multiple law enforcement agencies participated in the investigation and search, according to Hilton.

Court records cited by 13abc show Dodd had previously been arrested in Sandusky County on an assault charge in 2025. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to undergo anger-management treatment and placed on active probation, according to the station.

Authorities have not yet announced what charges Dodd will face in connection with Wednesday’s incident or released details about where or how he was taken into custody.

The Sandusky County Sheriff’s Office is expected to release additional information about the incident and apprehension.

This is a developing story and will be updated as additional information becomes available.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Parton’s nephew, Bryan Seaver, delivered the news of her death in a video for the family, sparking mourning from her birthplace of Locust Ridge in the mountains of East Tennessee across the state to Nashville, where she found fame, and around the world, where her name brought people happiness in her deeds and passion for life.

“Sadness lies with us, but not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light, and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by (husband) Carl, her parents and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens,” said Seaver, who led her security detail for a decade.

Parton opened doors for generations of singers and songwriters from all walks of life, giving people hope that “anything was possible,” Seaver said. “She never saw a door she couldn’t open, and the doors she opened made and changed history.”

The daughter of a sharecropper and farmer, Parton asked that she be buried in a field of cotton, he said, “because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.”

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee called her “Tennessee’s favorite daughter” after learning of her death.

“Dolly Parton was one of a kind, who loved people, her work, her family, and her Lord. Tennessee has forever been changed — enhanced — by her, and will never be quite the same without Dolly,” Lee said in a statement.

Through her business network, Parton has an estimated net worth of $650 million and used her considerable wealth for philanthropic causes. 

“I’m kind of addicted to the feeling of giving,” she told People magazine in 2021, “knowing that I’m doing something good for someone else.”

The Dollywood Foundation created Dolly’s Imagination Library in 1995, which donates some 10 million books to children each year to bolster literacy.

“They call me the Book Lady,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Washington Post.

She started The Buddy Program in the 1990s, offering $500 to Sevier County middle school students to stay in school and graduate in Tennessee, eventually lowering the dropout rate. The foundation also offers $15,000 scholarships annually to five Sevier County High School seniors “who have a dream they wish to pursue and who can successfully communicate their plan and commitment to realize their dreams.”

Parton raised $12.5 million to help the victims of a 2016 wildfire in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that devastated cities such as Gatlinburg and $1 million in response to Hurricane Helene in the East Tennessee mountains. She also gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center during the COVID-19 pandemic to support development of the Moderna vaccine and filmed herself receiving a shot to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Parton received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022 for years of charitable work, which included putting together a team to help her support favorite causes, such as the Imagination Library.

Early this year, officials renamed the East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in her honor after she made a donation described as “generational and transformational.”

The fourth of 12 children, the country music icon debuted on the Grand Ole Opry at age 13 after growing up singing in church. 

She moved to Nashville and broke in with Porter Wagoner on his show in the 1960s, then went out on her own and recorded hits such as “Joshua,” “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “Here You Come Again,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream.” Her songwriting skills and unmistakable voice enabled her to win 10 Grammys and earn a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999.

Parton starred in movies such as “9 to 5,” “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” and “Steel Magnolias” before opening Dollywood theme park in Sevierville, which led to the creation of a network of theme parks.

Early in her career, Parton’s appearance caught people’s attention, but she also displayed a business acumen that led her to an RCA contract and the decision to protect the publishing rights to her song catalogue, allowing her to collect millions of dollars in royalties over the years.

Parton opened Dollywood in 1986, saying in her biography, “I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.”

The Dollywood Company has multiple parks, including Dollywood’s Splash Country, Dolly Parton’s Stampede, the Dream More Resort and Spa, and her 50% share of the company was believed to be worth $165 million, Forbes reported in 2021.

In addition to the Country Music Hall of Fame, Parton was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, an honor she turned down at first because she didn’t think she “earned that right” but then relented after finding out that musicians outside the rock genre received the recognition.

Parton was a member of the Grand Ole Opry for more than half a century and Time magazine named her to its list of 100 most influential people five years ago.

This story was originally produced by Tennessee Lookout, 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 light of the ruling in the nation’s highest court, the administration late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts to vacate her decision from earlier in August that blocks the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out aspects of Trump’s executive order, while the voting rights groups that brought that challenge argued Tuesday the block should remain in place.

Monday’s decision from the Supreme Court also drew the ire of Democrats, who argued that Trump’s executive order ran afoul of the Constitution and threatens democracy. 

Under the Constitution, states are responsible for administering elections. Many Democrats have said Trump’s order seeks to unlawfully grab that power for the executive branch.

The Supreme Court’s ruling halted a June decision from Talwani in a case brought by more than 20 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. 

But that ruling does not apply in a separate case, filed in the same Massachusetts federal court, by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and several other voting rights groups challenging Trump’s executive order. 

In its emergency motion in the voting rights groups case, the administration wrote that “the Supreme Court’s order leaves no room for any further dispute: this Court lacked jurisdiction to issue the preliminary-injunction in this case, just as it lacked jurisdiction to enter summary judgment in the (states’) case, because there is no justiciable controversy over a proposed rule until it is actually finalized by an agency.”  

Final rule published

Further complicating the matter, the U.S. Postal Service on Friday issued a final rule that details how the agency would execute Trump’s order. 

The voting rights groups on Saturday asked Talwani to enforce her August order as a result of the Postal Service issuing the regulation. 

Regarding that request, Talwani on Tuesday afternoon said the rule violated her order because she specifically said the administration could not take steps to implement the executive order. However, she declined to take action “other than identifying the violation.”

The groups redoubled their request earlier Tuesday, writing that the Supreme Court’s decision was based on the lack of a USPS final rule.

“That decision addressed a materially different record and did not consider the critical development that occurred last Friday: The USPS Defendants promulgated a Final Rule, transforming the posture of this case and supplying a final agency action that was not before the Supreme Court,” they wrote.

Talwani’s order on the administration’s request was still pending Tuesday afternoon.

Democratic blowback

Meanwhile, Democrats were quick to blast the Supreme Court’s decision, including the top Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it’s “a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to put a dagger into the heart of our democracy,” in a Monday statement. 

The New York Democrat noted that “Trump’s effort to turn the Postal Service into a voter suppression machine is blatantly unconstitutional – yet his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward,” while adding that “Senate Democrats will fight every attempt to hijack mail-in voting and rig the rules before voters have their say this November.” 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also blasted the decision and vowed to continue fighting, saying “the sycophantic Supreme Court majority’s decision in the vote-by-mail case is sowing chaos in service to Donald Trump’s effort to undermine our free and fair elections.” 

Jeffries, also of New York, added that “the Trump-aligned justices on the Supreme Court did not and cannot give the President the power to decide how states run elections or who gets to vote by mail.” 

The respective heads of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Governors Association also pushed back against Trump’s executive order.  

“This is the latest attempt from Trump to rig the midterms because Republicans know their corrupt, cost-hiking policies are deeply unpopular and hurting people every day,” DNC Chair Ken Martin, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene, DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, and DGA Chair Andy Beshear said in a statement.

“Democrats will not let them get away with it, and we are confident the American people will reject these Republican schemes in November,” they wrote. “We’re going to fight every day until Trump’s illegal executive order, and all of his other attempts to undermine our free and fair elections, are completely thrown out.” 

A spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s U.S. House campaign arm, did not return a message Tuesday.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker and the Democratic nominee for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, launched his campaign out of his garage. Fellow Brook Park councilman Thomas Dufour has served as his campaign manager, communications director, and treasurer since January. At an Aug. 15 town hall in Medina, he added another job title: cameraman.

“It started with just me and Tom in the garage, and then two became four, four became eight,” Poindexter said in an interview earlier this month, sitting at a picnic table in a small park in Parma.

Cook Political Report initially deemed the race “Likely Republican,” with Poindexter up against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Max Miller in a district that President Donald Trump won by 11 percentage points in 2024. Ohio’s 7th Congressional District includes Cleveland’s West Side suburbs, as well as Medina, Wayne, and Ashland counties.

When allegations of domestic violence against Miller caused several prominent Republicans to call for his resignation — a movement led by Miller’s ex-father-in-law, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — Democrats turned their attention to Poindexter. Miller denies the allegations against him.

Progressives who backed Poindexter in the primary, like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, have since joined forces with some of the more moderate voices in the party, like former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and the Blue Dog PAC. Cook Political Report now says the race is a toss-up.

Races, deadlines, and the tools you need to cast your vote.

2026 Ohio General Election Voter Guide

After Poindexter was interviewed by The New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, and Politico in early August, he told the crowd in Medina that going on national television has been “a nightmare.”

Poindexter spoke in Medina about starting an associate’s degree at 27 years old, paying student loans for his daughter, and living with his parents after a divorce in 2020. He has acknowledged the charges he picked up as a young man: a misdemeanor assault charge and two misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges, one that he pleaded no contest for and another that was dismissed. He added that fatherhood changed his perspective.

Between campaigning and serving on Brook Park’s city council, his work as an apprenticeship instructor at Ironworkers Local 17 is still his primary source of income, according to personal financial disclosures.

Poindexter has limited name recognition in his district, but his unusual biography could help, said Cyril Kleem, the Republican mayor of Berea. Brook Park shares a school district with Berea, and Kleem endorsed Poindexter in early August.

“A lot of working class people have felt left out,” Kleem said. ‘Some of those people have gravitated toward the Republican Party, particularly toward Donald Trump, because I think to a certain extent, the Democratic Party has been accused of forgetting about them. I think he represents them.”

Despite having support from almost the entire Democratic Party — including $6 million in committed spending from a super PAC dedicated to flipping the U.S. House of Representatives — Poindexter has repeatedly tried to shed the party label.

“I’m not in this to carry the flag for the Democratic Party,” he said. “I’m in this to flip a seat for working families.”

As Democrats rally behind Poindexter, Republicans splinter on Miller

While Kleem mainly endorsed Poindexter because of their collaboration at the local level, “of course” the allegations against Miller were a factor in his decision, he said.

Kleem said he privately told Poindexter to avoid talking about the scandal frequently, reasoning that protecting Miller’s daughter was more important than winning the race. The Brook Park councilman agreed, Kleem added. When asked about the scandal in interviews, Poindexter usually acknowledges the severity of the situation before pivoting to focus on Miller’s policies.

“If you talk to a strategist, they’re going to go for the throat. I still believe in ethics,” Kleem said. “If my doctor gave me six months to live, I’m not going to be sitting around worried about the elections I won. I’m going to want to spend time with my kids and my wife.”

In a July 8 affidavit for a defamation lawsuit he brought against his ex-wife, Miller wrote that labor unions turned against him because of the allegations. Representatives for three trade unions informed him that they would pull their endorsements, and the international organization for a fourth told him they would endorse Poindexter, he wrote.

Since then, four Republican U.S. senators have called for Miller’s resignation, including both of Ohio’s senators. U.S. Sen. Jon Husted pulled Miller’s endorsement from his campaign website shortly after releasing a statement saying he thought Miller would be “making the right decision” by dropping out of the race and resigning.

Husted’s campaign took $10,000 from Miller’s leadership PAC in 2025. According to campaign finance records as of July 31, he has not returned the donation. Republican candidate for Ohio governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s website still shows Miller’s endorsement.

Voters in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District have had mixed reactions to the allegations.

Victoria Kovach, a registered Republican from Strongsville who works as a server and social worker, said she plans to vote entirely Democratic this year. She usually votes Republican in local elections, she said, but the last time she voted in a federal race was for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Her elderly father, her friends, and her 20-year-old son’s friends have all heard about the allegations, she said. Her father, who she said voted for Trump, supported Moreno and Husted’s calls for Miller to drop out of the race and resign.

“I know they’re allegations, but those are some pretty serious allegations — enough to ruin your name,” she said. “That’s not what we need to represent our county, which is why I feel like you have Republicans out here who are going to vote Democratic.”

Poindexter is running as a listener. But whom will he listen to?

Even though they don’t always see eye to eye on policy, Kleem said Poindexter will always hear him out. Poindexter emphasizes a commitment to strong constituent services when speaking to voters, promising to hold quarterly town halls and establish congressional offices throughout the district if elected.

“The [U.S.] House of Representatives is supposed to be made up of people who are representative of the people they serve,” he said. “I do that better than my opponent. I do that better than anybody else who has run for this district in quite a long time.”

He also brings his own ideas, like phasing in universal healthcare by first lowering the minimum age to qualify for Medicare to 55. He supports regulations on data centers, opposes increased military spending for the war in Iran, and doesn’t hide his support for reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

When asked what legislation he would support on his first day in office, he immediately said the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Reintroduced in 2025, it would give more power to unions and weaken right-to-work laws. He has also said he would support Moreno’s push to lift the cap on the amount of annual income subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security.

Some of his more progressive stances may be appealing to Democratic voters in a primary, but Kleem warned that they could alienate Republicans and independents in a general election.

His campaign does not accept corporate PAC money, and personal financial disclosures show that he does not hold stock investments. An outside group with corporate ties is supporting him: Jobs and Democracy PAC, a super PAC in favor of artificial intelligence regulation backed by AI company Anthropic, spent over $512,000 on advertising for Poindexter before the primary.

Poindexter has said he doesn’t know why the Anthropic-backed super PAC is supporting him. Miller has accepted campaign donations from a wide variety of corporate interests, including the Haslam family, Pfizer, John Deere, and more.

“I don’t have to be pro-labor, folks. I am labor,” Poindexter said in a speech at the North Shore AFL-CIO headquarters in July. “My friends, my family — I would not be able to look them in the eye if I went to Washington and forgot where I came from.”

Eileen Velasquez said she listens to the news on the radio in between caring for her grandchildren and shuttling guests from the Best Western in Brook Park to the Cleveland Airport. She doesn’t vote because whether Republican or Democratic, “the rich get richer,” she added.

Her food stamps to feed her family were cut by $175 around three months ago, and she criticized Trump for his attacks on immigrants. But instead of leaning toward one party or another, she simply listens.

“Politicians promise you gold, but they give you copper,” she said.

Neither Kovach nor Velasquez had heard of Poindexter when interviewed, and both said they had little hope that the Democratic Party could offer significant change. A poll conducted by Tavern Research in early August found that 35% of voters in the district were not familiar with Poindexter’s name.

Kleem said that faith cannot be won back in the few months before an election. As he finds his political lane, Poindexter could find himself being pulled in different directions if the people endorsing him have different perspectives, Kleem added.

“At some point, he’s got to find himself,” Kleem said. “The Brian I know is not Bernie Sanders, and he’s not anyone else. He’s Brian Poindexter. He’s a working man … I believe he is the kind that, if he was in a position to take on his own party, I think he would.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Wexner, 88, will remain on the board as chair emeritus, but he is no longer a voting member, university spokesperson Ben Johnson said. 

“Les Wexner has stepped back from his role as chair …. Les and Abigail have been great supporters of the university for many years, and we appreciate his ongoing service on the committee,” Johnson said in a statement. 

The Ohio State University Medical Center was renamed the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in 2012. Wexner was appointed chair in 2013, but has not been at a board meeting since May 2025. 

A spokesperson for Wexner declined to comment. 

Robert Schottenstein will likely replace Wexner’s place as chair, according to a resolution set to be approved at the Sept. 1 meeting. 

“New board chairs always refresh the committee structure and appointments,” Johnson said in a statement. 

Schottenstein is the chief executive officer and president of Columbus-based M/I Homes, Inc. He was a trustee of Ohio State University from 2005-2014 and served as chairman of the board from 2012-2014. 

Schottenstein did not respond to a request for comment by the Ohio Capital Journal. 

Wexner and Epstein

Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands who lives in New Albany, was deposed by members of Congress in February about his relationship with Epstein.

Wexner was listed as an alleged co-conspirator of Epstein’s in a 2019 FBI document. The same document listing Wexner as a co-conspirator says there is “limited evidence of his involvement.”

U.S. House Democrats accused Wexner of facilitating Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking ring. Wexner has denied any wrongdoing. 

Epstein — who died by suicide in a New York jail 2019 after being arrested on federal sex trafficking charges — was Wexner’s personal financial adviser from 1987 to 2007, during which time Epstein reportedly misappropriated millions of dollars. 

Wexner graduated from Ohio State in 1959 and went on to found L Brands in 1963, which created Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Schottenstein previously served as a member of the board of L Brands. 

Wexner previously served on the Ohio State University Board of Trustees, including as the chairman, and was also a founding member of The Ohio State University Foundation. 

Les and his wife Abigail Wexner, and the Limited Brands Foundation, have given, raised or pledged more than $200 million, Johnson said. 

Ohio State University has received 500 requests to remove Wexner’s name from university buildings, which remain under consideration, Johnson said. 

The name requests are not related to Wexner stepping down as chair, Johnson said. 

In addition to the Wexner Medical Center, Wexner’s name is on two other buildings at Ohio State. 

The Wexner Center for the Arts is named after Les’ late father Harry Wexner. 

Wexner’s name is on the Les Wexner Football Complex at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. 

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.

Data centers are indeed energy-intensive and the worry about their impact on local energy prices has moved most developers to work to get their energy generated in behind-the-meter projects that don’t draw from the electrical grid.

So if you are a data center developer, what kind of power are you going to put behind the meter?

Looking at the top sources of power in the United States, you can whittle the options down pretty quickly.

Coal, once the heavyweight for energy in the United States, has seen its economics turn against itself and the United States has only begun construction on one coal-fired power plant in the past 13 years.

For all the talk of small modular reactors, nuclear power is still not viable in Ohio due to the massive up-front costs and decades of regulatory hurdles to clear.

Hydropower and geothermal power demand specific topographic conditions, and biomass has economies of scale that don’t make it competitive with other technologies.

This leaves developers with three choices: solar, wind, and natural gas.

The state has put its thumb on the scale when it comes to choosing between these technologies. A range of state decisions have made siting solar, wind, and natural gas projects very different from one another.

Solar and natural gas projects over 50 megawatts must be approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board. For reference, this would be large enough to power all the homes in Canton with a little bit of energy left over.

Wind projects, on the other hand, only need to be 5 megawatts to face Ohio Power Siting Board scrutiny. That is only enough to power about half the homes in Athens.

The state has also given considerable latitude to county governments to ban solar and wind projects in unincorporated areas, a barrier gas-powered plants do not have to overcome.

For projects that are not outright banned, two local representatives get a vote on Siting Board decisions for wind and solar projects, a requirement not faced by natural gas projects.

Solar and wind projects also face a regime of siting rules that do not apply to gas plants.

Solar facilities face specified setbacks, landscaping, fencing, stormwater, noise, and vegetation requirements. Wind facilities face turbine setbacks and shadow-flicker, ice-throw, blade-failure, communications-interference, noise, and aviation requirements.

Solar and wind projects also face decommissioning planning requirements that gas-powered plants are not subject to.

Gas-powered plants do have one requirement that solar and wind projects do not: they must submit a range of operational air-quality analyses. This makes sense to a certain extent given solar and wind generation is emissions-free.

In an ideal world, technologies can compete against each other on a level playing field.

If there are specific costs associated with outcomes like public health, environmental sustainability, or even aesthetics, these can be captured through fees and taxes specifically designed to internalize these costs into the market.

Creating separate regulatory regimes for different technologies, on the other hand, makes legislators the arbiters of technological superiority rather than the market.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The city received $968,620 through the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Small City Program for the reconstruction of East Perry Street between Jefferson Street and the Sandusky River, according to the City of Tiffin.

The project is estimated to cost approximately $1.05 million. The grant will cover 80% of construction costs as well as construction administration and inspection, while the city’s required 20% local match and design expenses will be paid through Road & Bridge Levy funds.

Design work is expected to begin in 2027, with construction currently scheduled for 2030.

The project will continue an earlier reconstruction of East Perry Street between Greenfield Street and Jefferson Street that was completed in 2023.

City Engineer Matt Watson said the project is part of a broader effort to rebuild state routes through Tiffin and address deteriorating infrastructure beneath heavily traveled roads.

“This grant award allows us to continue the initiative of rebuilding our state routes within our community,” Watson said. “Like the 2023 East Perry Street Reconstruction Project and the current North Sandusky Street Reconstruction Project, we are leveraging outside grants with our Road & Bridge Levy dollars to remove compromised brick underneath our truck routes.”

Watson said the city’s goal is to improve the long-term durability of high-volume roadways and extend the amount of time between future resurfacing projects.

Mayor Lee Wilkinson credited Watson and ODOT for securing the funding.

“I want to thank ODOT for their support of our community,” Wilkinson said. “I especially am thankful to City Engineer Matt Watson for going the extra mile to stretch our local dollars.”

The Small City Program provides federal transportation funding to eligible cities with populations between 5,000 and 24,999 for roadway and signal projects on the federal-aid highway system.

According to the city, ODOT received 15 applications seeking slightly more than $25 million during the latest funding round and awarded approximately $13 million.

Tiffin officials said the City Engineer’s Office has now secured approximately $8.7 million in state and federal grants for road and bridge infrastructure projects since voters first approved the Road & Bridge Levy in 2018.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The property, located at 458 Second Avenue, includes approximately 542,784 square feet of manufacturing and warehouse space on 35.42 acres. The facility is rail-served and includes multiple loading areas, drive-in doors and heavy electrical infrastructure.

Kreate is a Northwest Ohio-based manufacturer whose products include storage totes, shelving, waste containers, chairs and garden products. The company serves major retail customers and has expanded operations and projects beyond Ohio.

Details about what Kreate plans to produce at the Tiffin facility, how many employees could work there and when operations could begin have not yet been announced.

The acquisition gives new ownership to one of Tiffin and Seneca County’s largest industrial properties, which has been part of the area’s manufacturing base for decades.

It also leaves Tiffin without any large existing industrial buildings currently available for companies seeking move-in-ready space, according to the Chamber & Development.

Earlier this year, RELN expanded its Tiffin manufacturing operations by leasing the remaining available space in the existing speculative building at Eagle Rock Industrial Park.

With that building now fully occupied and the former Ameriwood property sold, local development officials said the area’s inventory of large industrial buildings has been fully absorbed.

Another speculative building is already under construction at Eagle Rock Industrial Park.

AFLP broke ground earlier this month on a new 120,000-square-foot industrial building expected to cost approximately $13.6 million. The building is being designed to accommodate either a single company or multiple industrial tenants seeking between 50,000 and 120,000 square feet.

Construction is expected to be completed by summer 2027.

“This acquisition is an encouraging next step for a property that has played an important role in Tiffin’s manufacturing history,” Tiffin Mayor Lee Wilkinson said in a statement. “We are pleased to welcome Kreate’s investment in our community and look forward to learning more about the company’s plans for the facility.”

Wilkinson said the transaction also demonstrates the need to continue developing new industrial buildings and sites to accommodate future companies considering Tiffin.

The Seneca Regional Chamber & Development said it will continue working with Kreate, the City of Tiffin, Seneca County and regional partners as plans for the property move forward.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Caudill says her mother was placed in a nursing home shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, became traumatized when her family could no longer visit and died two months later.

Then she looks into the camera and assigns blame: “Amy Acton is to blame for this.”

What Ramaswamy’s campaign does not tell viewers is who it chose to deliver that accusation.

Caudill is not a previously apolitical Ohioan who emerged in 2026 to tell a story about the pandemic. She has spent a decade in Republican politics. She chaired Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hamilton County. She became a Trump delegate. She worked with Republican Jim Renacci’s gubernatorial campaign until it cut ties with her after she posted a violent “silencer” meme targeting Jon Husted. She returned to the Republican National Convention as an Ohio delegate in 2024, holds leadership positions in conservative political organizations and, in May, narrowly won election to the Ohio Republican Party’s State Central Committee.

Ramaswamy’s campaign paid for the advertisement. It gives viewers no indication of Caudill’s extensive Republican political résumé.

That background does not determine what Caudill experienced when her mother died. It does, however, provide significant context when a gubernatorial campaign puts her on television to make the extraordinary claim that its Democratic opponent is personally responsible for a death.

And as TiffinOhio.net reported in a fact check Monday, the factual foundation beneath that accusation has problems of its own.

Trump turned Caudill into a political activist

Before becoming a familiar face in Republican politics, Caudill built a successful career in the insurance industry.

NPR profiled Caudill during the 2016 presidential campaign, describing her as a retired insurance business owner who had owned four Allstate offices. Caudill told NPR she eventually built what she described as the largest Allstate agency in Greater Cincinnati.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign marked a turning point.

“Since Trump announced that he was going to run, I’ve gotten politically involved, which I had never done before,” Caudill told NPR in January 2017.

She did not remain a casual volunteer for long.

By March 2016, WVXU identified Caudill as the Hamilton County chair of Trump’s campaign. Contemporary reporting documented her organizing supporters, distributing Trump signs and representing the campaign as it arranged events in Cincinnati.

Her public comments during that campaign also demonstrated how closely she had aligned herself with Trump’s political movement.

After the release of the Access Hollywood recording, Caudill referred to Republicans who withdrew their support from Trump as “traitor Republicans,” specifically naming figures including Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.

In another NPR interview, Caudill said she believed workers who installed her roof were in the country illegally. Asked what made her believe that, she responded: “They didn’t speak English. None of them did.” NPR noted that the foreman had never confirmed her assumption. The same profile described Caudill joining friends along Cincinnati streets to publicly demonstrate support for Trump.

Trump had given Caudill a political identity and, increasingly, a role inside Republican politics.

Then came the Jon Husted “silencer” meme

A year later, Caudill became involved with another Republican candidate for governor.

In 2017, she served as a campaign volunteer and local supporter for then-U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci, who was competing for the Republican gubernatorial nomination against several candidates, including then-Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.

The primary became bitter.

Caudill ended up in the middle of it.

In October 2017, just days after a gunman killed 60 people in Las Vegas, Caudill posted an altered image on Facebook depicting a man bound to a chair, with Husted’s face placed over the man’s face and duct tape covering his mouth.

Across the image were the words: “A Silencer is a good thing when used properly.”

Contemporary public-radio reporting described the meme as seemingly advocating Husted’s assassination. Renacci’s campaign publicly said the post did not reflect its views.

It was not Caudill’s first attack on Husted during the campaign.

As TiffinOhio.net previously reported, Caudill had also entered the comments beneath a former Husted staffer’s Facebook tribute to her deceased grandmother and repeatedly attacked Husted there, including by posting derogatory memes and comparing him to a portable toilet.

After the “silencer” episode drew additional scrutiny, Renacci’s campaign parted ways with Caudill.

The target of that meme is now U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, the Republican nominee seeking a full Senate term in November.

Nine years after one Republican gubernatorial campaign severed its relationship with Caudill over her treatment of Husted, another Republican gubernatorial campaign chose her to appear on television and deliver one of its attacks against Acton.

She remained an “original” Trump activist — and went after J.D. Vance

Caudill’s political activity did not end with the Renacci controversy.

In 2022, she joined a group of Donald Trump’s original Ohio delegates in an extraordinary letter asking Trump to withdraw his endorsement of J.D. Vance in the Republican U.S. Senate primary.

The letter identified Caudill as Trump’s 2016 delegate from Ohio’s 1st Congressional District and described its signatories as the original Ohio “Trumpers” who supported him while much of the state Republican establishment opposed him.

The group told Trump that his Vance endorsement felt like a “betrayal” and urged him to reconsider backing a candidate they characterized as a “political chameleon and snake oil salesman.”

Two years later, Caudill’s assessment of Vance had changed dramatically.

At the 2024 Republican National Convention, after Trump selected Vance as his running mate, Caudill told El País that she knew Vance well, called him “one of us” and predicted Trump and Vance would make a strong team.

Caudill was again an Ohio delegate at the convention.

Later that month, FOX19 interviewed her at a Cincinnati-area Trump rally. Caudill described rallies as essential for recruiting volunteers, poll workers and voters.

“I hope to be able to turn Hamilton County red,” she said. “That’s my goal to turn Hamilton County into a Trump county.”

Her role now extends beyond individual campaigns

By 2025 and 2026, Caudill had become embedded in Republican and conservative political organizations beyond presidential campaigns.

A 2025 coalition letter organized by Americans for Prosperity identified Caudill as director of the Ohio Freedom Coalition. Former gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci’s current political organization likewise identifies Caudill with the Ohio Freedom Coalition.

Caudill also serves in two political leadership positions with Northeast Republican Women.

The organization’s 2026 leadership roster lists her as chair of both its Legislative Committee and Political Advisory Committee. Its newsletter says committee chairs sit on the organization’s board of directors and help shape its goals and outlook.

The Legislative Committee tracks government policy and legislation. The Political Advisory Committee, according to the organization, keeps its president and board informed about political developments, issues and political leaders.

By that point, Caudill was no longer simply volunteering for candidates. She was helping operate pieces of the conservative political infrastructure around them.

She tried twice to win a seat inside the Ohio Republican Party

Caudill also sought formal power inside the Ohio Republican Party.

In 2024, she challenged incumbent Michelle Schneider for the Republican State Central Committee seat representing Ohio Senate District 8.

Official Hamilton County election results show Schneider defeated Caudill decisively that year, 15,017 votes to 9,625, or roughly 61% to 39%.

Caudill tried again in 2026.

This time she won.

Official results from the Hamilton County Board of Elections show Caudill defeated Schneider by just 368 votes: 11,755 to 11,387.

Caudill received 50.80% of the vote to Schneider’s 49.20%.

The same election records show Caudill also won a Republican county central committee seat in Delhi Township.

The victory placed Caudill inside the governing structure of the Ohio Republican Party at the same time she was continuing her work with outside conservative organizations.

Her 2026 campaign questionnaire shows what she wants the party to become

Caudill’s own State Central Committee campaign materials offer additional insight into what she hoped to accomplish in the position.

In a 2026 questionnaire submitted to Ohio Gun Owners, Caudill answered “yes” to all eight of the organization’s questions.

One asked candidates whether they would support closing Ohio Republican primaries so only Republican voters could participate.

But the pledge went further.

The organization also asked whether candidates would “oppose and refuse to endorse” any Republican candidate who supported keeping the state’s current open-primary system.

Caudill answered yes.

Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, the anti-abortion organization that also endorsed Ramaswamy for governor, endorsed Caudill for State Central Committee.

She entered the 2026 general-election season not as an outsider to Republican politics, but as an elected member of the state party apparatus with a decade-long record of organizing for its candidates and conservative causes.

That is who Ramaswamy’s campaign chose for its ad

None of this means Caudill did not grieve her mother.

It does mean the biography viewers are given in Ramaswamy’s advertisement is incomplete.

The spot was paid for by Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio, according to the disclaimer and ad-tracking information reviewed by TiffinOhio.net. Ramaswamy’s campaign therefore made the decision to feature Caudill and broadcast her accusation across Ohio.

The campaign does not tell viewers that she chaired Trump’s Hamilton County campaign.

It does not tell them she was a Trump delegate.

It does not tell them that another Republican gubernatorial campaign parted ways with her after the “silencer” meme aimed at Husted.

It does not tell them she was an Ohio delegate for Trump again in 2024.

It does not tell them that she holds leadership positions in conservative political organizations.

And it does not tell them that, three months before the ad aired, Republican primary voters elected her to the Ohio Republican Party’s State Central Committee.

Instead, the ad supplies one identifier for Caudill: her personal experience losing her mother.

The omissions surrounding that story extend beyond Caudill’s politics.

TiffinOhio.net’s review of the underlying timeline found that Caudill’s mother, Dorothy Farrell, was a resident of Erlanger, Kentucky, and died July 25, 2020, at St. Elizabeth Hospice in Edgewood, Kentucky.

Acton had resigned as Ohio health director six weeks earlier.

Ohio’s stay-at-home order had already been lifted.

Kentucky operated under its own pandemic rules and had preserved exceptions for end-of-life visitation. By July 15, 10 days before Farrell died, the state had also begun reopening nursing homes to visitors under new restrictions.

The ad does not identify the nursing home where Farrell stayed, meaning the available public record cannot establish whether that facility was in Ohio or Kentucky or precisely which visitation rule applied to her.

Yet Ramaswamy’s campaign offers viewers a definitive conclusion anyway.

“Amy Acton is to blame for this.”

The person selected to say it is not merely a grieving daughter. Linda Caudill is also a longtime Republican organizer, Trump campaign veteran, conservative political leader and newly elected member of the Ohio Republican Party’s State Central Committee.

Those facts do not appear in the ad.

They are part of who Linda Caudill is.

Caudill did not immediately respond to a request for comment for TiffinOhio.net’s earlier fact check. This story will be updated if she responds.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I’m supporting everyone up and down the ticket,” the Republican nominee for Ohio governor said, according to a recording obtained by TiffinOhio.net. Asked directly whether he would campaign alongside Miller, he changed the subject to where the voter grew up, and then came back to it: “this is the most important election for preserving Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we’re done.”

That is a rationale, and it is the first one he has offered. It is worth being precise about what it covers.

What is on the other side of the ledger

Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, is the daughter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio. In police reports and court filings, she has said Miller held a gun to her head, threw hot water from a skillet at her body and scalded her chest and stomach, and pushed her against a wall. CNN obtained a recording of her February police interview through a public records request. An officer asked her what Miller did with the gun. “Holds it on me,” she answered.

The couple’s 2-year-old daughter turned up with a fractured collarbone. Detectives, a county Division of Children and Family Services caseworker and a Cleveland Clinic physician met in March to go over it. A detective who summarized the meeting wrote that bruising around the fracture made the injury suspicious, and that someone on the call said it would have taken a high degree of impact. A child protection specialist described the bruising near the fracture as resembling a handprint.

Two other women have accused Miller of physical violence.

Then there is the part that is not an allegation. On Aug. 2, during a roughly 20-minute livestream on X defending himself, Miller posted a link to a public Dropbox folder of records assembled by his attorney, Aaron Minc. Inside it was an unredacted nude photograph of his 2-year-old daughter. The same document carried the child’s name, unredacted, more than 70 times. Emily Moreno’s lawyers said the post had drawn more than 204,000 views by the following afternoon.

Minc has admitted he released the file and apologized. He called it completely unintentional and said he corrected it Monday morning. He has also told reporters the image did not show the child’s genitals and that she was shirtless. A federal lawsuit filed on Aug. 12 on the child’s behalf, against Miller, Minc and Minc’s firm, says a pediatrician reviewed the photograph and found otherwise.

Subodh Chandra, the lead lawyer on that case, put it this way: “This child is an entirely innocent victim who has become collateral damage to her father’s political ambition.”

Bernie Moreno, the child’s grandfather, was blunter. “When he went out and did what he did — including releasing photos of my granddaughter completely naked — now you have hundreds of thousands of psychotic human beings that have that. To say oops is grotesque,” he told reporters. “My personal opinion is that this is a felony, and that every single human being that touched that photo and transmitted it electronically should go to jail because it is illegal to do that.”

What Miller says

Miller denies all of it. He has never been criminally charged in connection with any of the allegations.

Prosecutors did not bring charges after concluding there was insufficient admissible evidence to take to a grand jury, according to police records. A child welfare agency deemed two reports that he abused his daughter unsubstantiated; a third recorded an “indicated” finding of physical abuse, meaning investigators saw signs of abuse but could not determine who caused it. Miller has said the bruising on his daughter resembled marks from a car seat strap. He acknowledged spraying his ex-wife with a kitchen sink sprayer during a 2024 argument but said the water was not scalding, said he did not mean to hurt her, and called it “horseplay.” He denies drug use and has offered to be tested. He sued Emily Moreno for defamation.

He also asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him. It agreed on Aug. 4, saying it was reviewing allegations he may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use, and noting that opening a review does not itself indicate any violation occurred. “I have absolutely nothing to hide,” Miller wrote.

The same logic, the opposite answer

Ramaswamy is not the only Republican who framed this around the majority. He is the only prominent one who got to a different conclusion.

Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, wrote on Aug. 6: “What kind of person would treat their daughter this way? This guy is clearly a degenerate sociopath. Max should step aside and seek help. Staying in this race makes it far more likely we lose this seat and hand Democrats a majority to impeach President Trump.”

Same premise. Same stakes. Opposite instruction.

Bernie Moreno had already gotten there on Aug. 2. “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help,” he wrote. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter. If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.”

Sen. Jon Husted, who faces former Sen. Sherrod Brown on Nov. 3, followed on Aug. 6. “Anyone who commits domestic violence is not fit to serve in Congress,” he wrote. “The House Ethics Committee should thoroughly investigate any credible allegations, and any member found to have committed domestic violence should resign from Congress immediately.” He added: “I believe Max would be making the right decision to step aside as a candidate and resign from Congress to focus on what is in the best interest of his daughter.”

Both senators are listed as endorsers of Ramaswamy. So is Miller. All three names sit on the same page, which was still live and unchanged when TiffinOhio.net fetched it Tuesday.

The page is easy to edit. We know because they edited it.

“Rep. Max Miller” appears under “Ohio Congressional Delegation,” listed with Reps. Dave Taylor, Jim Jordan, Michael Rulli and Warren Davidson.

In April, TiffinOhio.net reported that Ramaswamy’s campaign was promoting the endorsement of state Rep. Rodney Creech (R-West Alexandria), who was accused by a minor female relative of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents. Creech denied wrongdoing and was never charged. Within two days his name was gone. It has never come back. A string search of the live page Tuesday returned no result for Creech.

State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) came off in the same edit and was back within roughly two hours of the removal being reported. He is on the page today.

So the campaign can move a name in under a business day. It has done it twice. What it has not done, in three weeks of a House ethics review, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a toddler, and two of its own endorsing senators calling for the man to quit Congress, is move this one.

None of that is silence anymore. Silence was the Aug. 5 answer, when reporters caught Ramaswamy at the Ohio State Fair and he said he wished everybody’s family well and that his prayers were with the granddaughter involved in that situation. That was all he would give them. Saturday was different. Saturday he gave a reason.

What it is worth

The deadline to replace Miller on the November ballot passed Aug. 10 with no substitute filed. He is the Republican nominee against Democrat Brian Poindexter, and he has said there is no chance he removes himself. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved the district to Toss Up this month. U.S. Rep. Mike Carey held a fundraiser co-hosted by Miller after the ethics review opened.

Meanwhile, the super PAC whose stated purpose is electing Ramaswamy has twice put his opponent’s childhood sexual abuse on Ohio television. Amy Acton disclosed on a 1994 medical licensure application that she had sought therapy after being abused as a child. Ohio removed that question from the form because it discouraged people from getting treatment.

That is the arrangement as it stands 10 weeks out. An abuse survivor running for governor is fair game for the airwaves. A congressman accused by three women, under House ethics review, and sued over a nude photograph of his own 2-year-old, keeps his spot on the endorsement list.

A voter asked Ramaswamy on Saturday whether he would go campaign with Max Miller. He never answered that. He answered a question nobody asked, about what he thinks is at stake in November, and in doing so he told Ohio what he is willing to carry to get there.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The FirstEnergy scandal followed the signing by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2019 of House Bill 6. The law allowed public funds to be used to prop up aging nuclear and coal facilities. FirstEnergy, a major Ohio utility company, admitted in a 2021 settlement that it had paid millions of dollars to public officials to get the bill enacted and had hidden those payments. Other energy companies, including American Electric Power, were also involved in making payments to public officials.

Investigations and legal proceedings in the case are continuing in Ohio.

Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, issued a press release on Aug. 19 that lists executive orders she would issue on her first day in office if elected. They include measures intended to prevent future corruption in the state government.

Acton’s plan includes three executive orders: one to create an anti-corruption task force, one to prevent state appointees from jumping back and forth between government regulatory agencies and lobbying positions for the regulated companies, and one to increase campaign finance disclosure requirements for state contractors. 

Civic leaders fighting to root out corruption in the state say such measures are long overdue.

“We have had some real challenges with ethical government in the state of Ohio,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of the nonpartisan good-government group Common Cause Ohio.

“There were the FBI arrests, and in fact, our former speaker is currently in prison because of shenanigans involving dark money and corruption in the Public Utilities Commission,” she told the Ohio Independent. “So Ohioans are very aware that corrupt activities actually end up ripping us off,” she said. “It ends up affecting our pocketbooks.” The scandal left Ohio ratepayers paying more for electricity, Turcer said.

Turcer said Acton’s proposals could help change the way Ohio’s government operates.

“You can’t study away a problem, but she plans to create an anti-corruption task force, and I think that’s incredibly important,” Turcer said. “Analyzing all the different ways that there’s corruption or fraud or abuse of power, where government isn’t functioning well, is a really good beginning to an administration.”  

Turcer said at a moment when Ohioans are struggling to pay their bills, ethics reform is especially important. 

“This is a time for candidates to step up with new ideas that really focus on ways to improve people’s lives. It is really clear that people are hurting, and they are hurting because of a variety of policies,” she said. “If they do not choose to address corruption, they are not getting at the heart of what is wrong.”

Acton is running against Republican biotechnology entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in the Nov. 3 election. Incumbent Republican Gov. DeWine is term-limited.

The policy plan on Ramaswamy’s campaign website does not mention government corruption. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The spot, paid for by Vivek Ramaswamy and Rob McColley for Ohio and tracked by the ad-monitoring firm Medium Buying, features Delhi Township Republican activist Linda Caudill speaking directly to the camera about her mother.

“I had to put my mother in a nursing home because she had fallen,” Caudill says. “A few weeks after that is when Amy Acton shut down the state. My mother didn’t understand it. It traumatized her. She didn’t know why her family couldn’t come visit her. Two months later, she died. Amy Acton is to blame for this.”

What the ad never tells viewers is where Caudill’s mother lived or where she died.

Dorothy Farrell was 88 years old and a resident of Erlanger, Kentucky. She died on Saturday, July 25, 2020, at St. Elizabeth Hospice in Edgewood, Kentucky, according to her obituary from the Ronald B. Jones Funeral Home in Ludlow, Kentucky. Her funeral Mass was held at St. Henry Church in Elsmere, Kentucky. She was buried in Fort Thomas, Kentucky.

The same obituary that establishes those facts identifies one of Farrell’s surviving children as “daughter, Linda Caudill of Delhi, OH.”

Caudill did not learn where her mother lived and died from a news report. She buried her.

The timeline the ad leaves out

Ramaswamy’s campaign constructs a simple sequence for viewers: Acton “shut down the state,” Caudill’s mother could not see her family, and two months later she died.

The actual timeline is considerably different.

Gov. Mike DeWine lifted Ohio’s stay-at-home order on May 19, 2020, replacing it with an advisory containing strong recommendations and dropping travel restrictions. Farrell died more than two months later.

Acton resigned as Ohio health director on June 11, 2020. Farrell died six weeks later.

Kentucky allowed gatherings of up to 50 people to resume beginning June 29. Farrell died nearly a month after that.

And Kentucky’s own restrictions included an exception for people receiving end-of-life care from the beginning of the pandemic.

When Gov. Andy Beshear restricted visitation at Kentucky nursing homes in March 2020, patients receiving end-of-life care were the only group still permitted visitors, according to the National Governors Association’s record of Kentucky’s pandemic actions. Subsequent guidance told acute-care facilities to discourage visitors “except for visits in end-of-life circumstances” and similarly preserved end-of-life visitation at senior-care facilities.

None of those facts appear in Ramaswamy’s ad.

The strongest possible case for the ad still leaves a major hole

The ad does not identify the nursing home where Farrell stayed before entering hospice. That matters. Delhi Township sits across the Ohio River from Northern Kentucky, and without the facility’s name it cannot be established from the available records whether the nursing home was in Ohio or Kentucky.

Grant the campaign the possibility that it was in Ohio.

The ad still asks viewers to assign responsibility to Acton without giving them the information necessary to determine whether Acton’s rules actually governed the visitation Caudill describes. It never identifies the facility. It never identifies the specific order that prevented Caudill from visiting. It never mentions that Farrell lived in Kentucky. It never mentions that Farrell ultimately received hospice care and died in Kentucky. And it never mentions that Acton had been out of office for six weeks by the time Farrell died.

Instead, Caudill tells an Ohio audience that “Amy Acton shut down the state” and then says, “Amy Acton is to blame for this.”

The missing geography is not some incidental biographical detail. It is fundamental to determining whether the Ohio official being blamed actually controlled what happened.

DeWine has repeatedly said the COVID decisions were his

There is another problem with Ramaswamy’s effort to personally assign Ohio’s pandemic decisions to Acton: the governor who appointed her has repeatedly said otherwise.

DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy, has publicly taken responsibility for the decisions his administration made during COVID-19.

“The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it. The buck stops with me,” DeWine told NBC4 in December.

Ramaswamy and groups supporting him have nevertheless spent much of the 2026 campaign making Acton personally synonymous with Ohio’s pandemic restrictions.

An earlier Ramaswamy ad blamed Acton for Ohio’s March 2020 primary election closure, a characterization DeWine himself contradicted and PolitiFact rated Mostly False. A Ramaswamy-aligned group has blamed her for Ohio’s pandemic shutdowns, used her history as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse in an attack ad and attacked her over a missed CDC training and an old joke about a television remote.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, spent parts of 2020 advocating pandemic measures people close to the DeWine administration considered more aggressive than those Ohio ultimately adopted.

The latest ad takes that strategy somewhere new: it puts a grieving daughter on television to directly blame Acton for what happened to her mother.

Who Ramaswamy chose to put on television

Caudill has been a known figure in Ohio Republican politics for nearly a decade.

In 2017, she served as a volunteer and county leader for Jim Renacci’s gubernatorial campaign.

That October, days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Caudill posted a meme to Facebook depicting a man bound to a chair with rope. Jon Husted’s face had been edited onto the man, with duct tape covering his mouth. The caption read: “A Silencer is a good thing when used properly.”

Cleveland.com reported at the time that the meme seemed to advocate Husted’s assassination. A Renacci spokesman said Caudill’s post did not reflect the campaign and that she had been asked to remove it.

A month earlier, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Caudill had entered the comments of a Facebook post written by a former Husted staffer as a tribute to her deceased grandmother and repeatedly attacked Husted there. She posted derogatory memes, including one comparing him to a portable toilet, and called him “disgusting.”

After the “silencer” post drew additional attention, Renacci’s campaign parted ways with Caudill.

The man depicted in that meme is now the Republican U.S. senator appearing on the same November 3 ballot as Ramaswamy.

Nine years after another Republican gubernatorial campaign cut Caudill loose over her conduct toward Husted, Ramaswamy’s campaign chose her as the face of a television attack on Acton.

And it put her on television to make an accusation that depends heavily on facts the ad never gives Ohio voters: her mother lived in Kentucky, died in Kentucky hospice care, and passed away weeks after Acton had already left the Ohio Department of Health.

Those facts were not difficult to find. They are in her mother’s obituary.

Caudill did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association endorsed Democrat Dr. Amy Acton on Tuesday, one month after the state’s largest police union threw its support behind Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. Among other departments, the OPBA is the certified bargaining agent for personnel at the Tiffin Police Department, and it has represented the deputy and dispatcher unit at the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office under an agreement filed with the State Employment Relations Board.

The union put collective bargaining at the center of its decision.

“OPBA’s primary focus is strengthening collective bargaining rights. Dr. Acton shines in that area. She understands how the state works, knows the challenges that law enforcement officers face every day, and will work to preserve our ability to collectively bargain as a union and address the serious concerns that arise from policing and protecting such a diverse state,” said George Sakellakis, whom the union identified as its director of government relations.

OPBA Executive Director Tom Austin framed the endorsement around public safety and public employment.

“The Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association is proud to endorse Dr. Amy Acton’s campaign for governor of Ohio because we know that she will fight for our police officers and Ohio’s public employees, protect our families, and strengthen public safety to ensure safer communities,” Austin said. “Dr. Acton understands the critical role that law enforcement plays in protecting Ohio communities and will stand alongside our members to ensure safety across the state.”

The union says it represents more than 8,000 public employees working across law enforcement in Ohio, operating out of four regional offices. Its members include police officers, corrections officers, sheriff’s deputies and dispatchers.

The police vote is split

The endorsement lands on the other side of a line drawn a month ago. On July 21, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio — the state’s largest law enforcement union — endorsed Ramaswamy and his running mate, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley of Napoleon. The FOP backed an all-Republican statewide slate, which the union described as the first time in recent memory it had done so.

That was a shift. In 2018, the Ohio FOP endorsed seven of eight Democratic statewide candidates. By 2022, that number was one.

Acton’s campaign has been assembling public safety endorsements on the other track. The Ohio Association of Professional Fire Fighters, which says it represents more than 14,000 firefighters and retirees, endorsed her earlier this month in Cincinnati. Four major public service unions endorsed her in December, and the Dayton Building and Construction Trades Council broke from its statewide affiliate in April to back her.

Why collective bargaining is the fault line

For public safety unions in Ohio, the phrase carries a specific memory. Senate Bill 5, the 2011 law that would have stripped bargaining rights from police officers, firefighters, teachers and other public workers, was repealed by voters 61% to 39%. Seneca County rejected it by 25 points.

Ramaswamy’s chief strategist, Jai Chabria, and his campaign spokeswoman, Connie Luck, both worked on the effort to save Senate Bill 5 from that repeal.

Acton, in the campaign’s announcement, tied her answer to the same two issues the OPBA raised.

“I am incredibly honored to receive the endorsement of the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. The OPBA represents hardworking Ohioans who have dedicated their career to protecting their communities and providing essential services,” Acton said. “As governor, I will protect collective bargaining power and our public pensions, stand alongside our public safety officers, and strengthen public safety to ensure that all Ohioans feel protected.”

The rest of the coalition

The campaign lists more than 20 labor organizations backing Acton, among them the Ohio AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Nurses Association, SEIU District 1199, the Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers District 1, the United Mine Workers of America and the North Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council. A full list is posted on the campaign’s website.

Acton, a physician and the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, is running with former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper. She has built her campaign around affordability, including a working families tax cut and a state prescription drug purchasing platform.

Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, is running with McColley, whose 1st Senate District covers a stretch of northwest Ohio. Ramaswamy has been endorsed by President Donald Trump and the Ohio Republican Party.

Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In an unsigned emergency docket opinion, the court’s conservative majority wrote the Trump administration is likely to prevail on its argument that 23 Democratic-led states do not have standing to stop his executive order to change how the U.S. Postal Service processes mail-in ballots. 

The majority justices also wrote that a lower court’s injunction is “causing irreparable harm,” but left open the possibility that the executive order could still be considered unconstitutional.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the majority wrote. 

The legality of a Massachusetts federal district court order, which paused the executive order to overhaul vote-by-mail systems before the Nov. 3 midterms, will now be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

In a lengthy dissent, Jackson wrote the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The principle of courts not altering voting systems too close to the election has been eroded, she said, amounting to a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

“States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion,” she wrote.

Final rule issued

The March 31 executive order at the heart of the case in part directs USPS to direct the redesign of mail-in ballot envelopes, including adding a unique barcode. It also asks USPS to collect voters’ names and addresses from state elections officials and directs the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and prosecute state officials who violate the order.

The Postal Service issued a final rule Friday detailing how the process would be carried out.

Whether an overhaul of mail-in ballots for each state could be completed in time for the Nov. 3 election remains to be seen, as vote-by-mail documents are sent to voters well in advance of Election Day.

A federal district judge in Massachusetts chastised the Trump administration for sowing confusion and “creating” an emergency by noticing a rule Friday that the U.S. Postal Service will eventually require federally regulated mail-in ballot voting envelopes and state data.

A 95-page notice alerting that the final rule would appear in the Federal Register on Aug. 26 outlined justifications for federal requirements on states to redesign ballot envelopes and provide a list of recipient names and addresses to USPS. The final rule became effective Friday, according to the document.

The final rule runs contrary to U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s Aug. 11 preliminary injunction barring the federal government from changing states’ mail-in voting rules prior to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, the judge wrote in a brief order on the docket Sunday. 

“Defendants did not file an appeal and did not seek, let alone obtain, a stay of the preliminary injunction,” Talwani wrote. “Nonetheless, on August 21, 2026, USPS issued its Final Rule, with an anticipated publication date in the Federal Register of August 26, 2026.” 

Talwani was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2013 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate the following year. 

Effective date delayed

The rule includes a provision that it will not be in effect for this year’s midterm elections if Talwani’s injunction is still in place, but the judge said it would still create significant confusion for voters.

The Trump administration asserted the rule would “have no effect on the rules themselves while the injunctions are in place, while ignoring the confusion that the publication will engender,” Talwani wrote.

It’s unclear what effect the final rule will have on the active litigation on the issue.

The federal government had appealed Talwani’s injunction because, it argued, Trump’s order could not be challenged until an agency published a final rule.

Groups want quick order

The voting rights advocacy groups, led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, who sued President Donald Trump and administration officials over a March executive order overhauling mail-in voting procedures swiftly filed an emergency motion Saturday. 

They urged Talwani to quickly enforce her injunction, and to order expedited responses from the administration, citing “immediate, ongoing, irreparable harm caused by Defendants’ violation of the preliminary injunction, and in light of these fast-approaching dates.”

“There are now only 73 days before the November 2026 election, and far fewer before mail ballots begin to go out,” they wrote.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in late July a similar district court ruling against its mail-in voting restrictions order in a case brought by nearly two dozen Democrat-led states.

The states argued that the federal government has no constitutional role in election administration, that the executive order unfairly limited vote-by-mail, which some states use exclusively, and that an overhaul of ballot requirements this close to an election was unworkable. 

High court appeal

In a supplemental brief filed to the Supreme Court justices Monday, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the USPS’s rule issuance “underscores the need for relief from the district court’s improper, unripe injunction.”

“The Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest requirements for preparation and envelope design for federal ballot mail — requirements that fall well within its traditional authorities to impose mailing standards for particularly sensitive types of mail,” wrote Sauer, who formerly worked as Trump’s personal defense attorney. 

Democratic officials in 23 states — California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia brought the suit challenging the executive order. 

Twelve states with Republican attorneys general — Alabama, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas — joined the appeal to the Supreme Court on the federal government’s side.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Senate races, as well as the campaigns for every House seat, will serve as a test of Republican policies after two years of unified control of Congress. The outcome of this year’s midterm elections will also have a substantial impact on the remainder of President Donald Trump’s term. 

Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, requiring Democratic candidates to win over voters in at least four states that previously chose a GOP lawmaker.

Zachary Peskowitz, political science professor at Emory University, said Republicans have a bit of an advantage this year, but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll keep their majority. 

“I think that the Senate is a tougher map for the Democrats than the House is,” he said. “But given Trump’s approval ratings, obviously it is certainly possible that Democrats win, even in these tougher states.”

Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas could be won by either candidate, according to a top elections forecaster, giving Democrats several paths to regain the Senate. That marks an improvement in the party’s chances, though they may also need to secure wins in competitive races in Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.

A 50-50 split would keep Republicans in charge of the Senate with the vice president casting the tie-breaking vote.

While each Senate candidate has a different message and variations in their policy goals, big-picture issues like the war in Iran, immigration enforcement tactics and the rising cost of living are at the top of voters’ minds. That’s been clear on the campaign trail.

Immigration enforcement key in Maine

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, seeking her sixth term against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, has faced several questions about immigration funding and federal officers’ actions. 

As chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, Collins was central to negotiations earlier this year over whether Congress should place new guardrails on immigration enforcement after federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.

She told reporters during the launch of her bus tour in mid-August that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents involved in enforcement in Maine will now have to wear body cameras. Her comments came about a month after federal officers shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford. 

“I think what happened is too many of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents were sent out there without proper vetting and without proper training,” she said. 

Collins also defended her decades-long strategy after a reporter asked about her voting record and criticism from Democrats that she often aligns with Trump.

“My approach has not changed in any way,” she said. “I have worked with five presidents. I’ve supported them when I think they’re right. I have not hesitated to oppose them when I think that they’re wrong.”

Affordability concerns amid Iran war 

North Carolina Democratic candidate Roy Cooper told supporters at a campaign rally in Henderson that healthcare should remain at the forefront, noting that changes to Medicaid included in Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law won’t take effect until after the election. 

“As we say back home on the farm, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said. “That’s why we need to send leaders there, to make sure that we are paying attention to those who have been left behind. Making sure that people have quality healthcare.”

The former governor and state attorney general spoke about concerns military families have experienced since Trump coordinated with the Israeli government to launch a war against Iran, which drags on despite the president’s initial claims it would only take about four to six weeks.

“We know this war in Iran has no strategy and we know that it is sending prices soaring at home,” he said. “Everybody at Fort Bragg obviously is on pins and needles worrying about their deployed loved ones who are out there. But also having to face the brunt of the rising prices in their own military families.” 

Cooper then criticized his opponent, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, for his comments on the economy, saying he hadn’t accepted how challenging the cost of living has become for Americans.

“People are struggling and looking up at the middle class and thinking, ‘Am I ever going to get there? Is the American dream dead?’ And so many people in the middle class who are just barely hanging on, not knowing what to do next,” he said. 

The issues highlighted during those two events are reflected in nearly every Senate campaign, with each candidate positioning themselves as the best solution to Americans’ struggles. 

GOP holds ‘slimmest of advantages’ 

So far, polling and analysis haven’t indicated a clear outcome to this fall’s elections. 

The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter rates Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas as toss-up races. Campaigns for Senate seats in Georgia, North Carolina and New Hampshire currently lean toward Democrats. 

Iowa and Texas had been in the lean Republican category but CPR changed that in late August, with Senate and Governors Editor Jessica Taylor writing “we see the overall battle for the Senate as a toss up, but one in which Republicans may still hold the slimmest of advantages.”

“Even though, on paper, it should be extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to flip seats that President Donald Trump won by more than 13 points, it’s increasingly hard to ignore both public and private polling showing both races to be more competitive than the Lean category reflects,” she added. 

Ratings could continue to fluctuate, possibly several times, before voting ends on Nov. 3, but the top concerns aren’t likely to change much during the next couple of months. 

A Pew Research Center poll released in late July shows voters consistently want politicians to talk about the economy, with 29% saying it’s an important issue, followed by 9% focused on ethics and reform, 7% on immigration, 5% on healthcare, 4% on foreign policy and 4% on the president. 

Democrats held a slight advantage at the time of the poll, with 43% of those surveyed saying they would vote for a candidate from that party while 37% said they were likely to support a Republican. The remaining 20% said they hadn’t decided or would vote for someone else. 

The poll showed that while voters agreed more with Republicans on crime and immigration, Democrats held an advantage on education, healthcare and environmental policy. 

Neither party outpaced the other on economic issues, with 37% saying they agree with Democrats, 36% saying they believe Republicans handle that issue better and 25% saying neither. 

Dems have enthusiasm edge

Emory University’s Peskowitz said many people will cast ballots based on party affiliation, though swing voters will decide based on the specifics of each candidate. And this year, that will likely be their economic policies. 

“What voters often do if they have negative perceptions of the economy or don’t feel great about the economy, they punish the incumbent presidential party,” he said. “The other important thing to keep in mind is enthusiasm of partisans and whether they’re willing to turn out to vote or not.” 

That trend may favor Democrats, since Republicans have held the House, Senate and White House for two years. And midterm elections almost always see the president’s party lose seats in Congress. 

Michael Traugott, a research professor emeritus at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, said the primary elections during the last several months have shown somewhat more enthusiasm among Democrats than Republicans based on turnout.

“And we’ll have to see how much of this, you know, carries over to the fall,” he said. 

What the president says about Republican candidates in toss-up states and whether Trump decides to endorse those candidates could also become a factor, Traugott said. 

“This is not necessarily the positive advantage that it’s been in past elections because he has historically low approval ratings,” he said. 

“Mike Rogers is going to have to think a fair amount about whether or not he brings Donald Trump into the state of Michigan to campaign with him. And I think that this could be true in other states,” Traugott added. “I’m not sure that Susan Collins would like to have Donald Trump come in to campaign with her.”

Rogers, a former GOP congressman who ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat two years ago, and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, former executive director of the Detroit Health Department, are both slated to appear on the ballot after winning their primaries. 

Democratic candidates will spend the next few months trying to sway voters frustrated or disillusioned with their party’s current focus, despite that being an uphill climb, Traugott said. 

“I think the pull of party identification is still very strong. So if there are people who voted for Trump in ‘24, say, and are unhappy with what’s happened since, I don’t think they’re going to switch to Democrats. It’s more likely they won’t vote for Senate,” he said. “Depending upon other things going on in their state, they could even stay home. So the consequence would be more in terms of turnout or not marking the ballot for the Senate race than it would be voting for a Democrat.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The administration noted in the Federal Register that it plans to use the fee to “serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system, including activities carried out by DHS” and the departments of Justice, State and Labor.

Currently, it costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 for an employer to hire a highly skilled foreign worker through the H-1B visa program. Congress created the program in the 1990s and visas are capped annually at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for foreign workers who graduate with a masters or doctoral degree from a U.S. institution.

A federal judge in June struck down the Trump administration’s attempt to increase the H-1B visa to $100,000 for foreign workers hired outside the U.S. 

Workers on a temporary H-1B visa work in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine or education.  

Employers use the H-1B program to hire foreign workers who have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree for up to three years, but the temporary visa can be extended for up to six.  

Last year, the Trump administration imposed a one-time $100,000 H-1B visa fee to employers in an effort to prevent high-skill jobs going to foreigners instead of U.S. citizens. However, the program is used to fill high-skill jobs that are difficult to fill with American workers. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

During a White House Rose Garden event celebrating the back-to-school season, Trump and McMahon lauded the incoming federal school choice effort along with many of the education policies the administration has pursued, including ongoing efforts to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department.

At least 30 states have already opted in to the school voucher program, which allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for people donating to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships.

The program, known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit, was created in the GOP’s mega tax and spending cut bill Trump signed into law in July 2025. 

“One year ago, as part of the great, big, beautiful bill, we passed the Education Freedom Tax Credit — the largest ever expansion of school choice — and we want every parent to have the power to send their child to a high-quality school that shares their values,” Trump told the crowd of educators, parents and students. 

Monday’s event highlighted Trump and congressional Republicans’ continued focus on school choice as a central point of their education agenda, with the upcoming voucher program marking a pillar of that effort. 

The umbrella term “school choice” centers on alternative programs to a student’s assigned public school. While opponents argue these efforts drain critical funds and resources from school districts, advocates say the initiatives are necessary for parents dissatisfied with their local public schools.

Attendees at the Rose Garden also included Republican Govs. Jim Pillen of Nebraska and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, as well as GOP Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the House Committee on Education and Workforce.  

McMahon echoed the president, saying the federal program gives parents “unprecedented freedom to choose the path that is best for their child.” 

She added that “it’s no surprise that over half of our nation’s states — both red and blue — have raced to this historic choice option, benefiting families whether their child attends public or private school.”  

Dems working to reverse program

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are already attempting to axe the program. 

Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii in April introduced a bill in the Senate, alongside nearly 30 of their colleagues, that would repeal the program. 

Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin introduced a companion bill in the House in June with Reps. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, Maxwell Frost of Florida, Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and dozens more original co-sponsors. 

The legislation faces a dismal fate in the GOP-controlled House and Senate. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The district said it qualified for the Community Eligibility Provision, a federal option under the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs that lets high-poverty districts feed every student for free without collecting household meal applications. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sets the rules and the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce administers the programs in Ohio.

“No student should have to worry about whether they can afford breakfast or lunch at school,” Food Service Director Colleen Neely said in the district’s announcement Monday. “Providing meals at no cost to our households allows us to focus on making sure every student has the nutrition they need to learn, grow, and succeed.”

Superintendent Greg Williamson said in the announcement that the change helps both in the classroom and at the kitchen table — a student who has eaten breakfast is ready to learn, and a family that no longer budgets for school meals keeps that money at home.

“This puts students first, and it is a real savings for our families,” Williamson said. “I want to thank Colleen and our food service team for helping to get us here.”

How the program works

To use the Community Eligibility Provision, a district, a group of schools or a single school must have at least 25% of its students already certified for free meals without a household application — children identified through programs such as SNAP, Medicaid and Ohio Works First. The USDA lowered that threshold from 40% in a rule that took effect in October 2023, opening the option to more districts. Eligibility is measured using data as of April 1 of the prior school year.

Tiffin City Schools met the threshold for 2026-27. Free meals apply to every enrolled K-12 student at Washington, Krout, Noble, Tiffin Middle School and Columbian High School. Breakfast is served before school and lunch is served daily. The district’s Lincoln Pre-K building was not among those listed in the announcement.

The free meal covers one complete breakfast and one complete lunch per student per school day. Anything beyond that — extras, second lunches, snacks, milk for students who bring their own food, and incomplete meals — is still charged to the student’s meal account, and students cannot buy those items on a negative balance.

Meal accounts have moved to PaySchools Central, which replaced Titan/LINQ. The district said previous balances carried over. Families can register at payschoolscentral.com or through the PaySchools Central app, and the district still accepts cash and checks. PaySchools customer service can be reached at 877-393-6628.

The one form families are asked to fill out

Because the district is no longer collecting free and reduced-price meal applications, families will not receive one this year. Instead, the district is asking one person per household to complete a short CEP Household Information Form, available on the PaySchools dashboard under School District.

The form does not determine whether a student eats free — every K-12 student does, regardless. The district said the form is confidential, takes a few minutes and helps Tiffin City Schools qualify for other state and federal funding that supports students. Household income data collected through those forms is commonly used in school funding and program eligibility calculations, which is why districts operating under the provision still ask for it.

Ohio and federal context

Ohio does not pay for universal free school meals. The two-year state budget signed in June 2025 keeps funding that makes meals free for students who qualify at the reduced-price level, but the line item that covers the state’s share of school meal programs was cut by about 5% compared with the prior year, according to an analysis by Policy Matters Ohio. A bipartisan Senate proposal to fund breakfast and lunch for all Ohio students, carrying a roughly $300 million annual price tag, was not included in the budget.

That leaves the federal Community Eligibility Provision as the main route for Ohio districts that want to feed every student without charge. It also arrives as hunger programs across the state report strain: participation in summer meal programs has climbed while federal nutrition cuts tighten eligibility, and groups running mobile summer meal routes have reported steady demand from families during the months when school meals stop.

For Tiffin City Schools, the change lands less than a year after voters approved the district’s first new operating levy since 2012.

Questions about school meals can be directed to the Tiffin City Schools Food Services Department at 419-447-5768. Menus are posted on the district’s Food Services page.

USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer, and lender.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The limits imposed as part of the 2025 federal congressional budget reconciliation bill, championed by President Donald Trump as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, may mean billions less in federal funding and state-directed payments, which could include devastating effects, especially to rural and financially struggling hospitals.

The healthcare research group KFF released a new analysis estimating $60 billion in current federal spending for hospitals could be reduced when new limits from the reconciliation bill take full effect.

That number is a moving goalpost, as the changes aren’t all being implemented at the same time.

“It does not represent the amount by which federal payments would be reduced in any given year, since these limits will be phased in over time starting in January 2028, and will fully take effect at different times in different states,” KFF wrote in the analysis.

The group also estimated an overall federal Medicaid spending reduction of $911 billion based on the terms of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The reduction in state-directed payments to hospitals will have varying impacts from state to state, and even from hospital to hospital, based on how much the states are spending for their individual Medicaid programs.

Hospitals operating on relatively high margins could see the changes land more softly on their bottom line.

“On the other hand, hospitals with relatively low operating margins (like rural hospitals and those serving relatively large shares of Medicaid patients) may adapt in ways that affect Medicaid enrollees’ access to care, such as by cutting service lines or closing,” KFF researchers stated.

Ohio’s Medicaid program serves more than a quarter of the state’s population, accounting for nearly 3 million residents, and is the second most common form of health insurance in the state, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio.

The institute noted the Medicaid budget in the state exceeded $43 billion in fiscal year 2025, with the federal government paying 68.5% of the total costs.

With the budget reconciliation bill restricting the ability for states to raise revenue through methods like provider taxes, along with placing caps on the amount states can reimburse providers through those state-directed payments, Ohio will have to account for the funding gap.

As part of the changes from the budget bill, Ohio has to change or eliminate a health insuring corporation franchise fee by July 1, 2027.

The fee is calculated using state Medicaid member counts, and is a provider tax overseen by the Ohio Department of Medicaid.

The health policy institute’s research showed the change or elimination of the fee could result in annual losses to state revenue of $640 million starting in 2028, along with $1.5 billion in lost federal matching dollars.

“States may pursue reducing Medicaid expenditures, however, doing so is likely to have negative health and economic consequences for Ohioans,” the institute said in a March analysis of the reconciliation bill’s changes to Medicaid.

The analysis also said Medicaid enrollees could see a loss of optional covered services, such as dental coverage, as a result of the changes, and Ohioans may have to pay more for things like prescription drugs.

Originally, the total funding losses to the state’s Medicaid program were estimated at $33 billion over the next decade.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio state Reps. Darnell Brewer, D-Cleveland, and Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County, recently introduced Ohio House Bill 984. 

“This legislation aims to provide greater financial predictability for counties, fiscal responsibility for taxpayers, support providers, and most importantly, help ensure that Ohio’s foster youth have access to care and resources they need to thrive,” Brewer said at a recent press conference. 

The bill would require the Ohio Department of Children and Youth to set reimbursement rates for the placement and care of children in foster care. 

“My goal with House Bill 984 is to ensure that the system safeguarding our children’s welfare remains viable by reigning in out of control rising placement costs,” Pizzulli said. 

Counties across Ohio are facing financial challenges due to rising placements and cost of care, the lawmakers said. 

Scioto County went from having 407 children in foster care in 2022 to having about 197 children in foster care today, but the county’s placement costs have increased, Pizzulli said. 

“We’re spending roughly three times as much per child as we were just five years ago,” he said. 

“Many of the children coming into care today have much more significant needs than we saw years ago. Providers are dealing with staffing shortages, wages have gone up, and the cost of providing this care has gone up.”

The costs in Scioto County surpassed $8 million last year, Pizzulli said. 

“What we are facing is an unsolvable math problem,” said Scioto County Commissioner Scottie Powell. 

“Counties pay nearly three quarters of all placement costs through levies and their general funds, with the federal reimbursement covering the remaining one quarter,” Powell said. 

The number of Ohio children placed in custody has dropped 9% since 2020, but costs have increased by 68% — a jump from $231 million to $389 million, he said. 

The average cost of care for a child in Ross County went from $59.64 per day to $151.55 per day and in Hocking County it went from $65.94 to $181.02 per day, Powell said. 

Scioto County Job and Family Services Director Tamela Moore Morton said they have a child in custody “who exhibits extreme behaviors” and has been placed in at least a dozen different placements around Ohio. 

“Because of behaviors, the facilities can decide to increase our daily rate to any amount they want, without necessarily increasing the level of care,” she said. 

“They know this child is hard to place, so they take advantage of the situation and charge the county unreasonably, or threaten discharge, or return the child to the lobby of the agency. There is no limit or cap on the amount they can ask for.” 

The child was on track to use nearly $1 million dollars of Scioto County’s funding in one year, Morton said. 

“That’s not the child’s fault,” she said.

“But when you have 200 other children that need those same protections, how do you choose who gets the services with the limited funds? Every county either has or will have a similar situation with a high needs child that could bankrupt their county in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately, Scioto County is already there.” 

Pizzulli mentioned the 16 children from Vinton County who were found by law enforcement authorities in terrible conditions at the end of June and how the therapeutic foster care costs needed for each child (ranging from $150-250 each day) would have bankrupted the southeastern Ohio county. 

The Ohio Controlling Board recently approved $1 million in emergency funds to help the 16 children from Vinton County, whose ages range from 18 months to 18 years old. 

“It’s imperative, especially in circumstances like that, that counties have the resources that they need to make appropriate placements and ensure children receive the care and support they deserve,” Pizzulli said. 

“I don’t want to wait for another county to reach a breaking point.” 

There were more than 14,000 children in foster care in Ohio in 2025 while the state had more than 6,000 certified foster homes, Brewer said. 

“Every foster youth deserves a safe, loving, and stable home,” Brewer said.  

“Foster parents and providers deserve the support they need to provide. We are trying to create reasonable guardrails, not barriers, to appropriate care.”

The Ohio lawmakers are currently on break and will come back after the November election. Any bill that does not pass before the two-year General Assembly ends in December would have to be reintroduced. 

“What we know of the General Assembly is that if we really want to do something, we can do it, and we can do it very, very quickly if we want to,” Pizzulli said. 

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.