The vote marked the first test for Senate Republicans’ support for a War Powers Resolution after the expiration of the statute’s 60-day period granted to the president for military operations.

The vote failed 49-51, though notably Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, flipped for the first time to support limiting Trump’s unfettered war on Iran. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for a second time since April 30, voted in favor.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted yes, and Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., opposed the measure, as they both have done on previous votes.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., did not vote.

House lawmakers are expected to take up a similar War Powers Resolution as soon as Thursday.

The war, which Trump launched on Feb. 28 in conjunction with Israel, cost the lives of 13 American service members. The latest Pentagon figures reveal 404 service members were injured during Operation Epic Fury, the administration’s name for the conflict.

Ceasefire on ‘life support’

Despite a recent exchange of fire between Iran and the U.S. in the Strait of Hormuz, the administration maintains the operation is over, and claimed a 60-day clock on hostilities paused when the two countries agreed to a ceasefire in April. 

However, Trump told reporters Monday that any ceasefire between the two nations was on “massive life support.”

Iranian leaders have contested the existence of a ceasefire because of an ongoing U.S. Naval blockade on Iran’s ports.

Pentagon officials testified in both chambers of Congress Tuesday that the war to date has cost $29 billion, without accounting for Iran’s drone and missile damage to U.S. military installations in the region.

Hostilities ongoing, Dem says

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who sponsored the resolution, said Wednesday morning the Iran war has turned out to be “nothing like” the victory Trump promised.

“Both sides are still engaged in hostilities. And so I don’t accept that the 60-day clock is suspended,” Merkley said.

When asked Wednesday morning whether Republicans were whipping votes ahead of the War Powers Resolution, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that lawmakers should support the president while he’s overseas conducting high-stakes meetings with Chinese officials, including China’s leader Xi Jinping.

“He’s negotiating with the Chinese on a whole range of issues, some of which bear on national security, and I think it would be best if everybody hung together and supported the president,” Thune, R-S.D., said. “But we’ll see. … People have their own minds about some of these issues.”

Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In a red brick courthouse across the street from the state Capitol, the seven black-robed judges of the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday morning weighed the fate of a Republican gerrymander aimed at ousting U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a 11-term Democrat from Kansas City.

In the afternoon, they upheld the map.

Its opponents “failed to show the 2025 Map clearly and undoubtedly violates the requirements” of the state constitution, the court ruled hours after holding oral arguments.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s late April decision sharply curtailing the use of race in redistricting, much of the legal fight over gerrymandering is moving to state courts. The decision, Louisiana vs. Callais, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limited states’ ability to divide districts where a majority of residents belong to a racial minority group.

Southern Republican states have rushed forward new maps over the past two weeks that take advantage of the landmark opinion, adding to a handful of others, including Missouri, that already drew new lines in recent months at President Donald Trump’s behest before the midterms elections this November. Another wave of gerrymanders across the rest of the country will likely follow next year ahead of the 2028 election.

State supreme courts may have the final word on some of the maps. Even if the maps don’t involve issues decided in Callais, like the challenge in Missouri, many states have constitutional or statutory provisions that curb gerrymandering and limit last-minute changes to elections — providing gerrymandering opponents with grounds to challenge new district boundaries.

With federal redistricting lawsuits increasingly difficult, state laws offer gerrymandering opponents another path. 

Thirty states have some form of a constitutional requirement for free elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And at least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, according to a 2024 review by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

“I think state courts are primarily going to be the place where future fights around these maps are playing out in a post-Callais landscape,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Legal challenges abound

The elevated importance of state courts was on full display Friday, when the Virginia Supreme Court invalidated an election in which voters narrowly approved a Democratic map. The decision leaves a new map in California as the party’s only successful response so far to the GOP redistricting onslaught. Democrats have made a longshot request to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Virginia ruling.

Lawsuits have already been filed in state courts over new maps in Florida and Louisiana. Alabama’s new map could also face a legal challenge in state court, even after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the gerrymander to take effect. 

At stake in these courtroom fights is which party will control the U.S. House over the next two years, earning the power to advance or thwart legislation. While Democrats remain generally favored to retake the chamber in the November midterm elections, Republicans will likely emerge from the gerrymandering war with at least a handful of seats secured.

Suddenly, every state supreme court decision — including over a single seat in Missouri — takes on greater significance.

Marina Jenkins, executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, which is helping challenge the Missouri map, told reporters on Monday that the state’s high court had a “spotlight on” it.

“Is the court going to do what it has done in the past in a nonpartisan way that is faithful to their own precedent,” she asked ahead of the decision. “Or are they going to roll over?”

Missouri case

The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly in September approved a map intended to leave the state with just one Democrat in Congress, in the St. Louis area. Kansas City was divided among three districts, splitting apart its Democratic-leaning and racially diverse core. 

The Missouri Supreme Court considered three challenges to the map. Two similar lawsuits argue that some of the congressional districts don’t follow the state constitution’s requirements that districts be as compact as possible.

A third lawsuit argues that the map shouldn’t be in effect for the 2026 election because opponents in December submitted more than 305,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide referendum vote on the lines. In the past, state officials have paused the implementation of measures subject to a referendum until a vote is held, but in this instance they say the new lines are active.

During Tuesday’s oral arguments, the judges sat almost entirely stone-faced as they listened. Only one judge asked a single question during arguments that stretched for more than an hour, offering no sense of how the court would rule.

“There is no such thing as a perfect map or a perfect district,” Missouri Principal Deputy Solicitor General Kathleen Hunker said.

Jonathan Hawley, an attorney representing Missouri voters who argue the referendum means the map isn’t in effect, said his case will decide whether the people of Missouri “still have a meaningful referendum.”

“The referendum right is the people’s veto,” Hawley said.

The Missouri Supreme Court hours later ruled against both challenges to the maps — allowing the new lines to be used this year.

“Had the drafters intended a referendum petition filing to automatically suspend any act of the General Assembly at issue in the referendum petition, they would have so stated,” the court’s opinion says.

Florida’s GOP gerrymander

Only two Southern states, Florida and Kentucky, allow courts to decide partisan gerrymandering cases.

Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, hasn’t taken up redistricting this year. But a Florida Supreme Court decision striking down a new map there would effectively offset Democrats’ loss at the Virginia Supreme Court.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a map passed by the state legislature during a special session on the same day as the Callais decision. The new congressional boundaries are designed to hand Republicans up to four additional seats.

Several voting rights groups have sued, alleging the map violates the Florida Constitution. A 2010 amendment approved by voters prohibits districts drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.

“Instead of abiding by this law, the Legislature is defying the will of voters and backing a map that was crafted entirely with partisan intent,” Simone Leeper, senior legal counsel for redistricting at Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. 

The Campaign Legal Center and the UCLA Voting Rights Project have sued jointly over the map.

DeSantis’s office told state lawmakers ahead of this year’s special session that the 2010 amendment requires the state legislature to account for race when drawing districts — and that the provisions regarding race can’t be severed from the rest of the amendment. In effect, DeSantis contends the whole amendment must be thrown out.

The Florida governor’s pitch, coupled with the Callais decision, persuaded GOP lawmakers.

“I have a ton of comfort because the Callais decision came out,” Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican, said. “I got to read it, and it perfectly summarizes exactly why we could, and should, change our 2022 maps.”

Map opponents’ chance of success at the Florida Supreme Court is unclear. The court as recently as 2015 blocked a congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, but it has moved to the right in the years since. Six of the seven current justices were appointed by DeSantis and the other was appointed by a different Republican governor.

“The composition of the Florida Supreme Court has changed dramatically since that earlier ruling,” Bannon, the Brennan Center expert, said. “So I think there are questions about will the court be as open to those arguments.”

Process challenges

In other Southern states, map opponents are turning to arguments beside partisan gerrymandering.

The Tennessee chapter of the NAACP has sued Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the state General Assembly to block a gerrymander passed last week from taking effect. The organization alleges Lee violated the state constitution in how he called a special session for a new map. 

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, has urged a court to dismiss Lee and the legislature from lawsuit because they don’t conduct elections.

Alabama Democrats and voting rights groups are weighing a legal challenge to a new map that would focus on a 2022 amendment to the state constitution. The amendment requires election law changes to be made at least six months before a general election — a deadline of May 3 this year. Alabama’s redistricting special session began the next day.

In Louisiana, state lawmakers have not yet passed a new map after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current lines as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the legislature had previously created a second majority-Black district. Lawmakers are expected to advance a map aimed at ousting one of the state’s two Democratic House members, who are both Black.

After the Callais decision, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s congressional primary elections although roughly 42,000 absentee ballots had already been cast. Lawsuits challenging the suspension have been filed in both federal and state court.

Too late to change?

In Missouri on Tuesday, lawyers for Republican state officials took the opposite approach, urging the state supreme court to keep the map in place for the 2026 election, even if the judges strike it down. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, told reporters afterward that preventing the state from using the map now would lead to confusion, even as 12 weeks remain before the primary election.

“It’ll be disarray for the people that have been going to town halls and listening to candidates,” Hoskins said. “It would be disarray for the candidates that are running and going out and meeting voters in their district. And it’d be disarray for the local election authorities and county clerks that have already started instituting” the new map.

Hoskins’ fears turned out to be unfounded, as the court upheld the map.

Cleaver, who is running for reelection, has said that his work ethic or commitment to voters won’t change regardless of his district boundaries. 

“If I have to serve the people who live just outside of Columbia and Jefferson City, then I’ll do that,” he said when he filed to run earlier this year.

Attorneys for the ACLU of Missouri, which supported challenges to the map, said it was unfair to Missouri residents for the state to create a problem and then argue it’s too late to change it. 

At a rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday, ACLU of Missouri Policy Director Tori Schafer expressed confidence the judges would side with map opponents — hours before they allowed the lines to move forward.

“But let me clear,” Schafer said, “democracy did not begin in a courtroom and it will not be saved in a courtroom.”

Florida Phoenix reporter Mitch Perry contributed to this report.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“I want to thank Dr. Marty Makary for having done a great job at the FDA. So much was accomplished under his leadership,” Trump wrote on social media. “He was a hard worker, who was respected by all, and will go on to have an outstanding career in Medicine. Kyle Diamantas, a very talented person, will be put in the Acting position.”

Diamantas was working as the deputy commissioner for food, leading the program that focuses on nutrition and food safety.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in a social media post that Makary “pushed forward critical reforms and helped advance our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”

“I also want to thank Kyle Diamantas for stepping in as Acting Commissioner — his leadership has already delivered remarkable wins on the MAHA food agenda, and I have full confidence in his continued work,” Kennedy added. “We have an outstanding team at FDA, and the work continues without pause. The search for a new Commissioner is already underway, and we will move forward with urgency.”

Makary’s resignation marks the fourth time a senior member of the Trump administration has either left or been forced out during the last few months. 

Kristi Noem was ousted as Homeland Security secretary in early March, moving to a different job as a special envoy. Pam Bondi resigned as attorney general in early April to move back to the private sector. And Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down as Labor secretary in late April, following scandals.

The Senate voted to confirm Makary to lead the FDA in March 2025, with Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois as well as Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire supporting him. 

Medication abortion

Makary’s decision to leave the FDA comes several months after anti-abortion organizations and some Republicans in Congress called for Trump to fire him over his record on access to medication abortion. 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and Lila Rose, founder of Live Action, both released statements in December pressing for the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone. 

“The FDA needs a new commissioner who will immediately reinstate in-person dispensing as it existed under President Trump’s first term and immediately conduct a comprehensive study,” Dannenfelser wrote in a statement at the time. “Commissioner Makary is severely undermining President Trump and Vice President Vance’s pro-life credentials and their position that states should have the right to enact and enforce pro-life protections. Makary must go.”

Missouri U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter to Makary the following day urging him to wrap up a review of the current prescribing guidelines for mifepristone. 

Their frustration followed a Bloomberg Law news article that said Makary didn’t want to release the results of the study until after November’s midterm elections, which will determine which political party controls Congress for the next two years.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The terminations come after 80,000 Ohioans lost benefits between the July passage of the law and January of this year. An advocacy group said it’s likely that older Ohioans are likely the hardest hit by the latest cuts.

The new requirements were imposed as part of a Trump law that cut federal nutrition and healthcare benefits by more than $1 trillion over 10 years while cutting taxes on the richest 1% of Americans by a similar amount. It also added more than $4 trillion to the federal deficit.

A large portion of the cuts to programs for the poor are being done through new work requirements.

While similar requirements for Medicaid don’t take effect until after the November midterm elections, the requirements to get benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, took effect on Feb. 1.

“Under the new law, adults ages 55 to 64 and parents with children 14-18, as well as veterans, homeless individuals, and individuals aging out of the foster system are no longer exempted from work requirements,” Tom Betti, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said in an email.

“These generally require working at least 80 hours per month or pursuing certain educational or training opportunities.”

About 1.4 million Ohioans receive benefits under SNAP, which is available to households with incomes below 130% of the federal poverty level. 

In Ohio, that’s less than $36,000. Benefits are just $6.28 per person, per day.

Even before the cuts, the benefits weren’t reaching many eligible residents.

In Ohio in 2023, SNAP benefits were going to 95.5% of people at 100% of the federal poverty level — even though everybody making 130% or less was eligible. 

But penetration of the benefit is declining further under the new requirements — which ostensibly address a problem of questionable existence. 

An analysis of census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that in 2015, more than half of able-bodied adult SNAP recipients worked in the month they received benefits. And in 89% of households with children and a non-disabled adult, someone had worked in the previous two years. 

That’s not bad among people who tend to work low-wage jobs that often lack health benefits, sick days and paid leave, the analysis said.

Critics have said the work requirements weren’t imposed to put lazy people to work, but to achieve savings by hassling otherwise-eligible people off the system. Real-world experience seems to support that.

When Arkansas in 2018 experimented with Medicaid work requirements, it didn’t produce the outcome proponents said they wanted. The mandate created confusion, 18,000 residents lost coverage, and the state’s employment level was unchanged, the Urban Institute reported last year.

In Ohio, the new losses of food benefits are expected to land heaviest on people between 55 and 64, who previously were exempt from work requirements.

Policy Matters Ohio last week reported that half of the 1,350 people in Cuyahoga County losing benefits are over 55. That’s the only county it had data for, but Executive Director Hannah Halbert cited some reasons why older recipients are especially vulnerable.

“These federal changes include requiring Ohioans over the age of 54 to work, or qualify for poorly reasoned, narrow exemptions with criteria that may be difficult to prove,” she said in a written statement.

“That includes seniors ages 60-64, unless they are pregnant, living with another person under the age of 14 who is qualified for assistance, or an ‘Indian, Urban Indian, or California Indian.’“

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Prompted in large part by veterans seeking psychedelic-assisted treatment abroad, Republican lawmakers are looking to research its efficacy in treating post-traumatic stress and opioid addiction.

It’s a significant turnaround for a party that spent decades aggressively pursuing the war on drugs.

“I think that, looking at the effect it has on veterans,” Ohio state Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County, said, “and just hearing people talk about how it helped them — it stopped them from committing suicide — I think that’s a message that Republicans are very passionate about.”

Pizzulli chairs the Ibogaine Treatment Study Committee and lobbied for its creation as part of last year’s budget.

Pizzulli represents Portsmouth which he described as “ground zero” for the opioid crisis in Ohio.

“It was the greatest crisis to ever happen to my community in our lifetime, and we’re still paying and recovering for it,” Pizzulli said.

“I made a promise to my constituency to be sure to find alternative methods to help fix and to research things that I think could potentially be helpful.”

Supporters of ibogaine treatment insist their effort is limited to clinical therapies in a controlled setting rather than opening the door to recreational use. And they point to initial studies that show promising results for the treatment.

Right now, a handful of states are pooling funds and working together to develop a treatment that could pass muster with the FDA.

The White House has blessed the effort and kicked in $50 million. Supporters who spoke Wednesday encouraged Ohio to participate.

Still, even some lawmakers who seem open to the approach remain skeptical about the state’s role in funding the effort.

Committee testimony

Initial studies suggest ibogaine rewires neural pathways in the brain and promotes regeneration. Researchers have already seen some effectiveness in treating opioid addiction and PTSD with ibogaine, but they think it might also have applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Geoffrey Lawrence from the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation emphasized its potential in treating opioid use disorder.

He noted current medication-assisted treatments, like methadone and buprenorphine, have low success rates in part because they require regular dosing.

The average person winds up going through treatment for opioid addiction several times before achieving long-term remission.

“Ibogaine works differently,” Lawrence said. “It physically repairs the brain’s architecture and balance of neurotransmitters within a matter of days. As a result, patients are able to move beyond the symptoms of physical withdrawal and get a new lease on life.”

Logan Davidson serves as legislative director for Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. The group funds grants for veterans traveling abroad for ibogaine treatment. He stressed the conservative case for expanding access to the drug.

“The legislation we have advanced does not legalize, decriminalize or expand recreational use of any substance,” he said.

“It funds rigorous scientific research in controlled clinical settings, preserves FDA and DEA authority, demands accountability for every public dollar invested, and reflects a fundamental commitment to those who served.”

With roughly 17 veterans on average committing suicide each day, Davidson said any work at the state level to advance treatment is important.

“If there is an opportunity to accelerate an effective treatment through that process,” he said, “you can count the lives saves by the days shaved off that timeline.”

Who pays?

To that end, Lawrence explained Texas recently approved an ibogaine research program with the goal of developing a treatment that could make it through clinical trials.

And although Texas put forward $100 million split evenly between private and state dollars, that’s nowhere near enough.

And would you look at that — Ohio is set to receive about $2 billion in opioid settlement funds.

Lawrence said several states are already considering proposals to earmark some of those settlement dollars for the effort. Mississippi, for instance, committed $5 million in March.

“Using this money to create access to a drug that works effectively and immediately to help people turn their lives around could be the most impactful legacy of those funds,” Lawrence said.

But Ohio state Sen. Steve Huffman, R-Tipp City, pushed back.

“Is it the state’s job to do that?” he asked.

He noted Ohio put $5 million toward pediatric cancer research in the most recent budget, but it’s not common for state lawmakers to do so.

“Is it not the federal government’s job to financially do that to benefit all citizens?”

Huffman also asked why private industry isn’t leading the charge.

Americans for Ibogaine CEO Bryan Hubbard explained ibogaine isn’t patentable.

“There’s not the opportunity to create 6, 7, 800% rates of return on a medication that can essentially be replicated and produced by anyone,” he said. “The lack of patentability is a significant disincentive to the conventional Big Pharma model.”

He added that the current system of medication-assisted treatment for opioid abuse is often billed through Medicaid. That system serves some companies’ interests just fine, Hubbard said.

“We would be foolish to not recognize that there is a business model at work that is rooted in the daily administration of pharmacology,” he said.

If ibogaine treatment proves as successful as its supporters hope, Hubbard added, it could disrupt that approach to treatment.

Hubbard successfully lobbied the Trump administration to issue an executive order encouraging research into psychedelic-assisted treatments.

As part of that order, the president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to put at least $50 million toward state research efforts like the one Texas announced.

Hubbard encouraged state lawmakers to get on board.

“I hope that stalwart Ohio, part of the blue-collar backbone of America, will be among the states which turn the fulcrum of history to emancipate the mind, body and soul of very person who lives at the end of hope,” he said. “Ibogaine heals.”

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.

Ohio had 117 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — a decline from 233 in 2024 and 237 in 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League.  

Antisemitic incidents were down last year nationally. There were 6,274 antisemitic incidents last year in the United States — 33% lower than the 9,354 incidents tracked in 2024, according to the report. 

Despite the overall decrease, it was still the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the ADL started tracking them in 1979. 

“I think this year it was really impressive to see the numbers finally come down a little bit,” said Kelly Fishman, regional director of ADL Ohio River Valley. 

“It’s not something we’ve seen for over a decade. Unfortunately, the numbers are still up pre-Oct. 7, 2023 levels.” 

There was a spike of antisemitic incidents after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, especially on college campuses. Hundreds of Ohio college students protested the Israel-Hamas war during spring 2024. 

Antisemitic incidents on college campuses decreased last year by 66%, going from 1,694 to 583, according to the report. 

“We know that hate doesn’t stop at one identity group, and it’s the same with anti-semitism,” Fishman said. “We see anti-semitic ideology often bleed into other identities, and universities took that really seriously because they saw that it wasn’t just their Jewish students who were being impacted.” 

Despite last year’s overall decrease, incidents on college campuses were almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021. 

There was an increase in physical assaults this past year — going from 196 in 2024 to 203 in 2025, according to the report. 

Assaults in Ohio went from none in 2024 to two in 2025, according to the report. 

“While we did see incidents go down, we saw the intensity of incidents increase so they were more likely violent, and they more likely involved a deadly weapon,” Fishman said. “Unfortunately, I do think there is a bit of a correlation to the rhetoric that we’re seeing online manifest in real life.”

Antisemitic harassment went down 39% to 4,003 incidents and vandalism decreased by 21% to 2,068 incidents, according to the report. 

There were 825 incidents at non-Jewish K-12 schools last year, a slight dip from 860 in 2024, according to the report. 

Most of those incidents were antisemitic bullying or vandalizing classrooms with swastikas. 

“We are still seeing incidents with a swastika show up quite a bit in those K-12 spaces,” Fishman said.

Ohio Senate Bill 87 would codify the definition and examples of antisemitism into law, but those opposed to the bill said it would violate free speech and be used to protect speech about Israel.

The bill passed the Ohio Senate in March and is now in the Ohio House Judiciary Committee. 

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The citizenry would align with only politically approved, official truths. Shock gave way to censorship.

National Park Service rangers, steeped in the historical journey of a nation like no other, were pressured to deep-six painful truths about everything from slavery to Japanese American internment camps and focus on the “greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” 

Posted signs at the national park in northeast Ohio urged visitors to report “negative” content or information shared about our imperfect union or material that fell short of fawning over the country’s “beauty, grandeur, and abundance”   

But that executive order, to erase the discomfiting realities of America’s worst moments — lest they detract from the best — was buried in Trump’s flurry of unilateral directives (at least 259 EOs by last count), from dismantling USAID and other federal entities created by Congress to attacking constitutionally protected birthright citizenship.

News about National Park Service employees being forced to remove or alter hundreds of interpretive signs or exhibits across numerous national parks that explored topics deemed too “divisive” or “disparaging” by the Trump regime was just another dystopian flashpoint.

Government mandated accounts of history were to highlight the good and hide the bad.

That covered a lot of territory for fanciful course correction on documents detailing say, the historical effects of climate change, or turbulent labor history, the slaughter of Native Americans, and clearly enslavement to emancipation to the legacy of Jim Crow. 

Flagged items destined for removal included those that revealed key Civil Rights moments on the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, or a reproduction of “The Scourged Back,” the infamous 1836 photo of former Louisiana slave Peter Gordon, with horrific raised scars from an old whipping, taken down at Fort Pulaski National Park in Georgia.

Even an exhibit that examined “the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation” was stripped from the walls of the President’s House Site in Independence National Historic Park in Philadelphia.

I had an up-close visceral reaction to that partially empty exhibit last week.

Hoping to beat the crush of the 250th anniversary crowds traveling to the birthplace of American independence this summer, I set out to see the room where it happened.

To go where courageous idealists, forged in the Age of Enlightenment, gathered to conceive of a new, world-changing republic rooted in self-evident truths, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed.

Enough ground-breaking liberty to convince Americans to put their lives on the line. To be a free people who refused to bow to tyrannical kings. Then and now.

My Philly pilgrimage to historical landmarks that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and early years of a fledgling democracy, taught a cynic like me that the spirit of the colonial era (that ended with the American Revolution) may yet save us.

To my surprise, I discovered the essence of open rebellion at the decimated slavery exhibit that once adorned the foundations of the former home of George Washington and John Adams.

The sign was salve for the soul.

First the backstory.

In January, without warning, National Park Service workers removed several panels from the open-air site that commemorated enslaved people who worked at the nation’s first executive mansion — following Trump’s edict to get rid of displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or promote “corrosive ideology.”

The twisted mandate to present only positive views of American history meant taking a crowbar to panels depicting “The Dirty Business of Slavery” in the making of a new nation.

But Philadelphia fought back.

“Donald Trump will take any opportunity to rewrite and whitewash our history — but he picked the wrong city and the wrong Commonwealth,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

A federal judge ordered the slavery exhibit restored in a scathing ruling that cited George Orwell’s “1984” novel — “as if the Ministry of Truth now existed” with its ‘Ignorance is Strength’ motto, “the court is asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

But a later appeals court stayed full restoration of the exhibit and 15 panels of the original 30 — that documented the “hidden history” of slavery at the founding site, traced the lives of enslaved workers, the conditions they endured, the resistance they mounted, and ultimately, their paths to freedom—are conspicuously missing.

Yet anonymous keepers of the flame of historical truth have tacked up copies of some of the omitted panels along with related articles on bare exhibit walls to shed light on what Team Trump purged.

One hand-written sign said while the court battle is underway “ordinary citizens are exercising our First Amendment right of free speech to peacefully protest our government’s attempt to whitewash (literally) history.”

Grassroots groups give oral histories of slavery’s stain during the week in defiance of official suppression.

This story will be told.

The revolutionary zeal of we the people that once tore free of tyranny fights on.

Take inspiration from even small sprouts of passioned dissent that truly embody the American ideal.

I do. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A Trump administration policy threatening imprisonment without bond has been struck down by three appeals courts, which could soon be joined by a fourth, but upheld by two others. The conflicting orders mean the Supreme Court must straighten out the situation as immigrants now could face different fates in different states.

The new detention policy, implemented in a July 2025 memo, threatens millions of immigrants with imprisonment without bond if they crossed a border illegally to get into the United States, no matter how long ago or whether they’ve applied for asylum. Without bond means they must be detained while awaiting court action.

The policy is a key part of the Trump administration’s stated goal to get 1 million removals a year, including deportations and voluntary returns.

So far the pace is about half that, or roughly 460,000 for the current fiscal year, if the daily rate as of mid-April continues, according to an analysis by Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University.

This spring’s mixed appeals court rulings mean that in some states, detainees may be offered bond hearings and a chance to be released pending new court dates. In other states, people can now be held indefinitely.

Most recently, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, struck down the policy Monday, saying it “strains reason” to suggest Congress intended to put millions of people into immigration detention. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Alabama, Florida and Georgia, also struck it down last week, saying the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 does not give President Donald Trump “unfettered authority to detain, without the possibility of bond, every unadmitted alien present in the country.”

In April, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Connecticut, New York and Vermont, also struck down the policy, calling it “the broadest mass-detention-without-bond mandate in our Nation’s history for millions of noncitizens.”

Judges in another appeals court covering New England states, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, appeared skeptical of the policy in a hearing this month but have not yet ruled.

Meanwhile the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, encompassing Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, upheld the new policy, saying the status quo gives people living here illegally more rights than those at the border seeking legal admission.

“It seems strange to suggest that Congress would have preserved bond hearings exclusively for unlawful entrants,” the 5th Circuit ruling said. Those states have some of the largest detention centers in the country, often accepting transfers from other states. The cross-state transfers complicate legal cases attempting to free those detained there.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, covering Arkansas and several Midwestern states, also upheld the Trump policy.

Conflicting appeals rulings like these, known as “circuit splits,” generally lead to a Supreme Court ruling to settle them, experts say.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a Stateline request for comment. Last July, a department spokesperson told The Associated Press that “President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem are now enforcing this law as it was actually written to keep America safe.”

The Trump administration policy flies in the face of decades of federal practice that let many immigrants stay free on bond while they pursue their court cases, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group.

“This has done a lot of damage to people who are caught in detention with a very low amount of due process,” Dojaquez-Torres said.

The policy has also flooded federal courts with petitions for release by people denied bond under the policy, she added. Thousands were filed each week from January through late April, compared with a few dozen a week last year before the policy was enacted, according to a ProPublica report.

The threat of indefinite detention can be an incentive for immigrants who have been arrested to agree to the administration’s option of “voluntary departure.”

Hannia Ortega, who left Oklahoma for her native Mexico at age 22 last fall to avoid the threat of detention, said the policy has “helped me not to regret leaving.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to meet people here who were deported and were not given the chance to fight their cases in front of a judge. One of the people I met was an Uber driver who was deported after 36 years in the states,” Ortega wrote in an email to Stateline.

Ortega won an award for leadership and good grades in a Tulsa high school, and said she also earned a community college degree there with the help of a private scholarship for students living in the country illegally.

She decided staying in the U.S. was too risky. Her parents brought her illegally as a 6-year-old and she did not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, a program with some deportation protections.

“It is scary and just speaks to how dangerous it has gotten for every single immigrant in the United States. I pray that better days are ahead for all but it seems unlikely any time soon,” Ortega wrote.

It’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants are threatened with indefinite detention, but of about 14.6 million undocumented residents, the Center for Migration Studies estimates, something like 5.5 million could have entered the country illegally, making them subject to the detention policy.

There are no recent estimates for the percentage, said Robert Warren, senior visiting fellow at the Center for Migration Studies of New York. But in 2017 the center estimated 38% of unauthorized immigrants crossed the border illegally either by evading border patrol officers or surrendering to them and getting a court notice to fight deportation proceedings. Others overstayed legal visas and would not be subject to the new policy.

Mustafa Cetin, a New Jersey immigration attorney, said two of his clients from Turkey were denied bond despite a clean criminal record and active asylum cases in court. Both were arrested in October during routine check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he said.

Both won release on bond through federal court decisions, and one has already won an asylum case, he said. Both followed a familiar pattern of seeking asylum in 2023 and 2024.

“They say, ‘Don’t come in,’ but if you come in, they will process you (with a court appearance ticket),” Cetin said. “We’ve seen this play out for hundreds of thousands of people. Then, this administration, instead of trying to deal with those who come to the border, they decided to scare people away.”

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The free, pet-friendly event will be centered at City Parking Lot 7 on South Washington Street, with activities and participating businesses spread throughout the downtown district. Attendees are welcome to bring their dogs.

Planned activities include a dog obstacle course, games, paw-manicures, themed photo opportunities, and pup-cup treats. Downtown retailers will offer sidewalk specials and giveaways. Grab-and-go food options will be available from downtown restaurants and food trucks along Court Street.

City Lot 7 will serve as the main event hub and will feature community vendors and live music by Paul Grover. The lot will be closed to vehicle parking during the event. All other city parking lots will remain open, with the exception of City Lot 4.

For safety, all dogs must remain on a leash. Organizers ask that attendees not bring dogs that are aggressive toward other animals, children, or strangers.

“Events like this not only create memorable experiences for the whole family, but also support our local businesses and showcase the energy and creativity happening throughout our downtown,” said Tiffin Mayor Lee Wilkinson. “I encourage everyone to come out, enjoy the evening, and be part of the fun.”

Third Thursday events are supported by Reineke Family Dealerships and UIS Insurance & Investments.

For more information, visit DowntownTiffinEvents.com or the event’s Facebook page.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The same April 7, 2026 email — sent under the subject line “Asking for some quick help… Much Thanks!” — used the official Sandusky County Juvenile and Probate Court logo as its first attachment, listed Smith’s government email address and the court’s direct office line in its signature block, and directed donors to a Venmo account that public records indicate is Smith’s personal account.

The email was signed by campaign committee treasurer Jane Mayle Smith and included a personal note signed “Judge Brad Smith.” Smith was unopposed in the May 5 Republican primary.

Smith has held the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas, Probate and Juvenile Division seat since 2009. He is the subject of multiple recent TiffinOhio.net reports, including the formal abatement of a $33,300 state audit finding against him by Tischler and the apparent acceptance of campaign contributions through a personal Venmo account. A Defiance resident filed formal complaints against Smith with two Ohio regulatory bodies on May 1.

TiffinOhio.net submitted written questions to Smith asking about each of the elements described in this article, including whether any portion of the funds raised through the April 7 solicitation was used for joint expenditures with Tischler’s campaign, and whether donors were informed before contributing that some portion of funds might be used jointly with another candidate. Smith did not respond by deadline.

What the fundraising email contained

The April 7 email opened “Good afternoon ‘Friends-of-Brad’” and was sent from bradsmithforjudge@gmail.com under treasurer Jane Mayle Smith’s name. It states that Smith “does not have a primary opponent at this time, but apparently may still face an Independent challenger in the general election” and that the campaign committee was seeking to raise “$10 - $15 grand in the next five to ten days” for a “mailer and sign blitz.”

The email instructs donors that “checks need to be made out to ‘Brad Smith for Judge’” and can be mailed to a Fremont post office box, “or donations may be made via PayPal or Venmo, as shown below. Both of those accounts are linked with this e-mail: BuckeyeBradSmith@AOL.com and the associated cell phone number for verification (if requested) is 419-680-6803.”

The email lists four attachments: an image of the official Sandusky County Juvenile and Probate Court logo; a Venmo QR code linked to the handle @BuckeyeBradSmith; a PayPal QR code captioned “Scan to pay Brad Smith”; and a 1.7-megabyte file titled “Court Overview Bubble Chart 2026,” which the body of the email describes as showing “an overview of that world, which includes nearly 60 employees and an annual $4 - $5 million budget.”

The email closes with a handwritten note from Smith, signed “Judge Brad Smith,” followed by a signature block listing his title as judge of the Sandusky County Juvenile & Probate Court; his past presidencies of the Ohio Association of Juvenile Court Judges and the Sandusky County Bar Association; the address of the Historic Sandusky County Courthouse at 100 North Park Avenue, Fremont; a “Direct Office Line” of 419-334-6204; a “24/7 Cell Phone” of 419-680-6803; and the government email address JudgeSmith@SanduskyCountyOH.gov.

The email does not state that any portion of the funds raised would be spent jointly with another candidate’s campaign committee.

The “Independent challenger” who has not filed

The central rationale for the fundraising urgency in the April 7 email is the prospect of an independent candidate appearing on the November ballot. The Sandusky County Board of Elections confirms that no independent candidate has filed nominating petitions for the Probate and Juvenile Division seat.

Under Ohio Revised Code § 3513.257, independent candidates seeking ballot access for the November 3, 2026 general election were required to file nominating petitions with the county board of elections no later than May 4, 2026 — the day before the partisan primary. That deadline has passed.

The email does not name the prospective independent candidate. Smith did not respond to written questions asking who that candidate was or on what basis the campaign represented to donors that an independent might appear on the November ballot.

Joint signs with the Tischler campaign

Joint campaign signs displayed publicly on Smith’s Facebook page show Smith’s “Re-Elect Judge Brad Smith — Juvenile Court” branding side-by-side with “Elect Beth Tischler Judge — Court of Common Pleas” branding under the shared headline “Conservative! Justice we can Trust! Republican!”

At the bottom, beneath an additional joint endorsement reading “Endorsed By Sheriff Chris Hilton & Other Area Police Chiefs…YES!” with police-badge and sheriff-star icons, the sign carries the disclaimer: “Paid for jointly by: the Brad Smith for Judge Committee and the Tischler for Judge Committee.”

The joint expenditure disclaimer establishes that the two campaign committees pooled funds to produce campaign materials promoting both candidates simultaneously. Smith and Tischler were running for separate judicial seats — Smith for re-election to the Probate and Juvenile Division, and Tischler for the General Division seat held by Judge Jeremiah Ray. Tischler lost her primary bid to Ray 59 percent to 41 percent on May 5.

The Sheriff Chris Hilton named on the joint signs was Tischler’s campaign treasurer and appeared in uniform on Facebook in the final week of the primary urging voters to back Tischler. Hilton was also one of six Sandusky County officials who co-signed the March 2023 letter requesting abatement of the audit finding against Smith.

The April 7 fundraising email solicited contributions under the stated rationale of a “mailer and sign blitz” for Smith’s re-election in the face of a prospective independent challenger. The email did not disclose to donors that any portion of funds raised would be used for materials jointly funded with another candidate’s campaign committee.

Ohio’s prohibition on using court resources in a campaign

Rule 4.1(A)(10) of the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct, which governs all judges and judicial candidates in the state, provides that a judge or judicial candidate shall not “use court staff, facilities, or other court resources in a campaign for judicial office or for any political purpose.”

The Sandusky County Juvenile and Probate Court logo used as the first attachment in the April 7 email is the official identifying mark of the court Smith presides over. The court’s official Juvenile Court website and official Probate Court website both display the same logo as their primary branding.

The “Court Overview Bubble Chart 2026” attached to the email is described in the email body as showing the size of the court Smith oversees, in apparent support of the fundraising appeal. TiffinOhio.net was unable to independently verify whether the chart was prepared using court resources. Smith did not respond to written questions on the subject.

The signature block’s inclusion of the government email address JudgeSmith@SanduskyCountyOH.gov, the Historic Sandusky County Courthouse address, and the court’s direct office line places those court contact points within the body of a campaign solicitation.

The Venmo direction

The instruction in the April 7 email that donations could be sent via the Venmo account linked to BuckeyeBradSmith@AOL.com is consistent with the publicly visible @BuckeyeBradSmith Venmo handle TiffinOhio.net previously reported on.

A May 1 TiffinOhio.net report documented that the @BuckeyeBradSmith account is publicly visible on Venmo, has received multiple transactions labeled as campaign contributions, and also reflects transactions unrelated to the Smith campaign — including a December 2024 payment from another user described as discounted Ohio State football tickets.

Ohio Revised Code § 3517.10(D)(3)(a) requires campaign committees to deposit all monetary contributions into an account separate from any personal or business account of the candidate. The Ohio Elections Commission addressed peer-to-peer platforms directly in Advisory Opinion 2021ELC-04, issued December 16, 2021, concluding that such platforms are permissible under Ohio law only when the account is established specifically for the campaign committee and kept entirely separate from any personal account of a beneficiary of the campaign fund.

On May 1, Charles Tingler of Defiance filed a public complaint about the Venmo account with the Ohio Election Integrity Commission, operating under the Ohio Secretary of State’s Public Integrity Division, and a separate grievance with the Ohio State Bar Association’s Certified Grievance Committee.

The April 7 fundraising email establishes that the @BuckeyeBradSmith account was directed to donors by the campaign committee itself, not solely by individual contributors using the account independently.

The audit finding background

The Ohio Auditor of State’s 2020 audit of Sandusky County identified seven invoices that “were identified and determined to have been manually created by Juvenile Court Judge Brad Smith by his own admission” during an investigation covering the period November 2015 through March 2018. Smith disputed the auditor’s characterization in a written statement to TiffinOhio.net last month, writing: “I take issue to the auditor’s characterization of me admitting to creating or falsifying the invoices, as I have maintained consistently that I merely updated prior invoices in order to reflect the amount budgeted by the commissioners for that year.”

A March 2023 letter co-signed by six Sandusky County officials, including Hilton, requested abatement of the audit finding. Tischler, as the county prosecutor with statutory authority over abatement actions, then approved the abatement and obtained Ohio Attorney General approval, with no repayment required from Smith.

Smith was unopposed in the May 5 Republican primary. He will appear on the November 3 general election ballot.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It started last July, when President Donald Trump, fearing that he was going to lose the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections due to his growing unpopularity, demanded Texas redraw its electoral maps.

Redrawing maps typically only happens every 10 years after each U.S. census, so new maps weren’t due for another five years. With new census data, the government learns that some states have grown or reduced in population and some may gain seats or lose seats in the House of Representatives. Additionally, with new information about the electorate, fairer maps can be drawn by governing bodies.

But that has not been the case recently. Across the country, electoral maps are becoming more partisan, and Trump’s demand for mid-cycle redistricting was the final nail in the coffin that sent the country into a gerrymandering doomsday spiral.

Instead of growing a spine and telling Trump that you can’t just demand more votes by disenfranchising the electorate, the Texas state legislature dropped to its knees, bowed and did his bidding, creating maps that look like jig-saw puzzles to split up likely Democratic voters and spread them across red districts and create five new likely Republican districts.

Democrats weren’t going to take this sitting down, so the state of California responded, putting forth a ballot measure last November asking its voters if it was OK with the state redrawing its maps to take away Republican seats as long as Texas kept its gerrymandered seats. The measure passed overwhelmingly, which disenfranchised millions of Republican voters in our country’s most populous state.

But the gerrymandering didn’t stop just with Texas and California. Not to be outdone, Missouri redrew its maps in September by splitting Kansas City up into multiple rural districts. Our own state of Ohio was required to redraw its maps because our state legislature ignored the Ohio Supreme Court last election cycle and used its gerrymandered maps anyways. The new maps released in October were even more gerrymandered than the ones the previous Supreme Court had ruled against, but with Ohio now having a GOP supermajority in the Supreme Court, the judiciary no longer cares if voting districts are fair.

North Carolina also redrew its maps in October, likely adding one more red seat, and Florida followed suit in January, spreading its districts extremely thin in an attempt to erase almost all state representation from the Democratic Party.

Democrats in Virginia responded by asking voters to approve a gerrymandered map to counter all the Republican gerrymandering happening around the country. The measure passed by about 1% of the vote and it currently is in litigation after the state’s Supreme Court overthrew the decision.

But the biggest blow to fair maps nationwide took place April 30 when the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew key measures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing states to racially gerrymander as long as they don’t say they’re specifically targeting race.

It should shock absolutely no one that the state of Tennessee immediately redrew its electoral maps, splitting the city of Memphis into multiple rural districts and eliminating the state’s only Democrat seat in Congress. Preventing situations like this in the 1960s Jim Crow south was literally the reason the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed in the first place.

Republicans in Alabama have already passed a law ignoring the results of its upcoming primaries next Tuesday if the federal court allows it to remove one of its majority Black districts so it can have one more Republican seat. Challenges are ongoing in Georgia and Louisiana as well.

This is a war that no one wins. Blue states become bluer. Red states become redder. Voters across the country are getting disenfranchised at an alarming rate.

With gerrymandering, the roles are reversed. Instead of voters choosing their politicians like the U.S. Constitution demands, politicians scheme behind the scenes to carve up their districts and choose their voters.

There is a solution, however, but we’re going to have to do it all together.

We need to demand our politicians support a ban on gerrymandering. This is a bipartisan issue and shouldn’t be difficult. Republicans hate it when Democrats do it. Democrats hate it when Republicans do it. Independents should hate it too. No politician should get your vote unless they publicly say they are in favor of legislation banning gerrymandering and supporting independent redistricting.

Until then, we’re in a race to the bottom and everyone loses.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approved medication-abortion regimen remains available via telehealth until then, following a week of uncertainty among abortion patients and providers.

“With this critical temporary administrative stay extended, we hope that some of the chaos and confusion inflicted on patients and providers last weekend will be abated,” said Evan Masingill, CEO of abortion-pill manufacturer GenBioPro, one of the defendants in the case, in a statement.

On May 4, the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling to reinstate the FDA’s in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone that the Biden administration officially lifted in 2023. Over the past week, several doctors groups submitted friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that cutting off access to mifepristone could harm many women seeking abortions and miscarriage management. Republican attorneys general from 23 states, meanwhile, urged the Supreme Court not to allow providers to send mifepristone through the mail. 

People in states with abortion bans or diminished abortion access continue to depend on abortion providers prescribing FDA’s approved mifepristone-misoprostol regimen through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.

According to new preliminary findings from the Society of Family Planning, telehealth abortion comprised 28% of all abortions at the end of 2025, an increase from 25% at the end of 2024.

Attorneys representing Louisiana have argued that in addition to undermining a state abortion ban, the federal rulemaking process allowing telehealth prescriptions of medication abortion was flawed.  

University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at the time the Biden-era rule was implemented, said the policy was well considered and based on evidence. 

“The 2023 update was the result of an incredibly careful, deliberate, time-consuming, painstaking process to make sure that they were following what the evidence was,” Bagenstos said. If, the plaintiffs were to prevail, he added, ending telehealth access to mifepristone nationwide would have “really harmful effects on women across the country, as well as really destabilizing effects on the drug approval system.” 

Louisiana’s lawsuit against mifepristone has nationwide implications and could threaten residents in states with abortion access and so-called abortion shield laws, such as Maryland. 

Regardless of what happens in this case, abortion providers told Stateline they are determined to continue providing telehealth abortions, though potentially without mifepristone. Dr. Angel Foster, a telehealth provider in Massachusetts, a shield law state, said in the past week, about 100 patients have requested pills for future use, compared with 34 in the entire month of April. She said constantly changing rules around abortion access followed by sensational news headlines continue to create confusion for people seeking termination or miscarriage management.

“I live and breathe abortion at this point, and I find it can be hard to keep up with the ever-changing legal environment and the way that things are getting framed and phrased,” Foster said. “When you’re a patient and what you see are just the headlines, and you’ve got to figure out what it means for you, it’s really complicated.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of Republican attorneys general who asked the Supreme Court to keep mifepristone from being prescribed via telehealth visits. It should be 23. 

Stateline reporter Sofia Resnick can be reached at sresnick@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The strait is the major export route for oil produced by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Iran, according to the International Energy Agency. But since Feb. 28, when the Iran war began and the narrow passageway between Oman and Iran became a battleground, U.S. gasoline prices have soared — and the prices of consumer products and services are poised to jump as well. 

Most oil passing through the strait goes to Asian markets, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And due to greater domestic production, the U.S. is importing less crude oil from the Persian Gulf than it has in 40 years, EIA said in a March analysis.

So why are U.S. consumers paying so much more for gasoline? Globalization.

“Supply disruptions anywhere in the world can also affect prices everywhere in the world because we live in a global market,” explained Jeff Lenard, a vice president of the trade group National Association of Convenience Stores. “Oil and refined products like gasoline are traded on the commodities markets. Places with short supply are willing to pay more for product. That drives up the global price.”

Gas prices are tied to the global supply and demand for crude oil, meaning a disruption to the supply anywhere can have an effect everywhere, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, which tracks gas prices.

“It’s because the price of oil is based on how much is available in total. Since oil from there is in short supply, the rest of the oil all around the world becomes more expensive,” De Haan said.

A gallon of regular gasoline Monday cost an average of $4.52, according to AAA up from $4.14 a month ago and $3.14 a year ago. Consumer prices overall were up 0.9% in March, and were averaging 3.3% higher over the past year.

Dissecting prices

While the Middle East oil disruption affects prices throughout the world, retail pump costs can vary dramatically from state to state across the U.S.

California’s average Monday was $6.16, the nation’s highest, AAA reported. Next were Washington, $5.76, and Hawaii, $5.65. The lowest averages were in Oklahoma, $3.95, Mississippi, $3.98 and Arkansas, $4.

The price of crude oil is the biggest part of the price consumers pay at the pump. EIA estimates that it makes up 51% of the retail cost. Distribution and marketing account for 11%, refining costs and profits 20% and federal and state taxes 18%.

That means dramatic changes in the price of crude have a huge impact on retail prices.

The National Association of Convenience Stores estimates that each dollar the price of oil increases could be 2.4 cents a gallon at the pump.

Brent crude, the world benchmark, was $70.50 the day before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. Monday morning, it was more than $104.

The $34 a barrel increase since the war began would mean a 82-cent per gallon increase. 

Competition can keep prices from rising too much. No gas station wants to be an outlier projecting much higher prices than the one across the street.

Taxes and gasoline prices

There are other factors impacting gasoline prices, notably taxes that vary from state to state. 

The federal tax on gasoline has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. President Donald Trump said Monday he supports freezing the tax, though he offered no timeline. A suspension would need congressional approval, and Republican leaders have in the past been reluctant to embrace any pause.

While the average state tax is 33.55 cents a gallon, it varies widely. California’s taxes and fees are estimated at 70.9 cents a gallon, the nation’s highest. The lowest tax and fee rate is in Alaska, 9 cents a gallon.

California’s costs are also boosted by other factors, including its tough environmental standards. The state requires a special blend of gasoline that aims to help air quality.

“This fuel burns cleaner but is more expensive to produce because it requires more processing steps and expensive blending components,” EIA said.

Another reason for the higher prices is California’s reliance on in-state refineries. It doesn’t have as much proximity as other states to interstate supply pipelines

Ripple effects

About 20% of the world’s oil passed through the strait prior to the war. But reopening the strait would be unlikely to suddenly bring prices down.

“In complex supply chains, a disruption in one critical link, even if only briefly, can cascade through the system, well beyond the initial event,” Pinar Keskinocak, professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, said in an analysis. “As delays persist and compound, interconnected systems often take a long time to recover, rebalance, and return to normal.”

“I don’t expect there to be an open flooding of barrels just leaving the region,” said Jerome Dortmans, co-head of global oil and products trading in Goldman Sachs Global Banking & Markets, in an analysis.

And if the Iran crisis continues and the strait remains restricted, more price pain is probably ahead.

“A prolonged disruption of Middle East oil trade would create oil market conditions for which there is no historical precedent,” said a March report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A lawsuit that has been active since 2022 will now go before the 10th District Court of Appeals, as attorneys for more than 300 public school districts and advocates defend an attempt to force the state legislature to eliminate funding for the private school voucher program.

Public school advocates are against the state funding of private school vouchers, partly because they argue the program funding has overtaken that of public schools.

The Ohio Constitution includes a provision requiring the state to fund a single system of public schools. The lawsuit argues that the private voucher program represents an unconstitutional funding of a second system of education.

The lawsuit also argued that the program violated the equal protection clause in the constitution.

Schools including Cleveland Heights-University Heights, Columbus, Richmond Heights, Lima, and Barberton were signed on to the lawsuit, along with individuals and parents.

The case landed in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, where Judge Jaiza Page said the legislature has “exceedingly broad powers” in its authority over the state’s education system, but the power does not come with “unlimited discretion.”

Supporters of private school vouchers argued that it is a scholarship program, and does not purport to be a “system” of schools, something Page didn’t buy in the June 2025 decision in which Page said the voucher program was unconstitutional.

Calling vouchers a scholarship program “is mere semantics” because the state pays schools directly, the judge wrote.

“Where EdChoice participating private schools are inexplicably receiving double the per-pupil state funding than public schools, it is difficult to say that EdChoice is simply a scholarship that follows and/or benefits the students, as opposed to a system that benefits private schools,” Page wrote in 2025.

The judge didn’t make a decision on one claim in the lawsuit: that the voucher program created “segregation” in public schools.

Page wrote that there was no evidence of “discriminatory intent,” and denied the request for a summary judgment from both sides of the lawsuit, meaning the claim is still active and awaiting a ruling in the Franklin County court.

Anticipating the rest of the lawsuit would be appealed, Page allowed the program to continue “in recognition that this decision may cause significant changes to school funding in Ohio.”

The parties in the suit have appealed, with the state and private school advocates appealing the rulings that the voucher program is unconstitutional, that it creates more than one “system of uncommon schools,” and that the direct payments from the state allows unconstitutional funding for religious schools.

Attorneys for private school parents maintain their argument that it is “a scholarship program, not a school-funding program,” according to appeals court documents.

“It therefore cannot run afoul of any prohibition against funding ‘uncommon schools,” wrote attorney Keith Neely, of the Institute for Justice, a DC-based law firm representing private school parents.

Public school advocates are cross-appealing, pushing back against the one ruling for which Page sided with the state.

Page ruled that there was no evidence that the voucher program in Ohio creates a disparity in education.

“While it seems inevitable that some Ohio students might be excluded from the EdChoice program by a participating private school, none of student plaintiffs have alleged or provided any evidence of denial of participation in the EdChoice program,” Page wrote.

Cleveland-based attorneys Maria Fair and Mark Wallach argued in a brief to the appellate court that “there is no valid governmental interest in funding private education, much less seeking parity between public and private resources.”

“The cycle never ends: The state insufficiently funds public schools, which are then forced to seek local tax levies or apply for private grants,” the attorneys wrote.

“The state then diverts more taxpayer dollars to private entities, justifying this by citing those very same levies and grants.”

The case is scheduled to go before the 10th District Court of Appeals on Tuesday morning.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Democratic candidate Amy Acton both insist the contrast between them could not be greater, and for the most part they’re right. In both their priorities, biographies, and demeanor, they offer something very different to voters.

But absent a political record to draw on, voters are left with what the candidates actually say to distinguish them.

Billionaire businessman Ramaswamy emphasizes the success he’s had and hopes to share with Ohio voters.

Physician and public health leader Acton sees echoes of her own struggles as a child facing homelessness in Ohioans barely making rent.

The Ohio they’re promising, though? It looks pretty similar.

Both say they’ll reduce housing costs, health care costs, and taxes.

Ramaswamy’s “lower costs, bigger paychecks, better schools” slogan would fit comfortably on either candidate. Acton meanwhile says she’ll “make Ohio affordable again,” borrowing, intentionally or not, Donald Trump’s now ubiquitous MAGA construction.

Acton promises an Ohio where “everyone gets a fair shot,” while Ramaswamy commits to “revive this quaint idea that we call the American Dream.”

In their victory speeches following last week’s primary election the nominees zeroed in on the same core pocketbook concerns — the cost of housing, utilities, and taxes are all too high. And looking further down the road, voters worry schools aren’t delivering their kids the opportunity to get ahead.

But while the campaigns agree on the diagnosis, they offer very different cures.

Two Ohios

Ramaswamy framed much of victory speech around the Ohio voters could wake up to following November’s election.

Ohioans can wake up to lower utility bills because the state is producing more energy, as well as lower property taxes and income taxes “because it is your money, not the government’s.”

Ohio’s students would be doing better in reading and math because they’re not “indoctrinated with victimhood psychology,” and housing costs would be on the decline because Ramaswamy’s administration is “cutting the red tape.”

“We can wake up to an Ohio where we are more united because it is easier to connect with our fellow neighbors and to be united in a rising economic tide,” he said.

“That is one Ohio where we can wake up to in November, and that is where I will lead this state if you elect me this November.”

In contrast, he claimed if Acton is allowed to win businesses would flee “in droves,” taxes would increase by $21 billion, and public schools would continue “choking the success of our students.”

But a Democrat doesn’t need to be in charge for businesses to leave the state. Ramaswamy’s “anti-woke” investment firm Strive Enterprises moved from Columbus to Dallas, Texas in November 2024.

The purported tax increase Ramaswamy is alleging is driven by Acton’s promise to forgive medical debt. Ramaswamy’s campaign simply multiplied the average debt burden by the number of Ohioans with medical debt to arrive at a figure of $15 billion. But that’s not how Acton’s idea would work. Like a similar program in Illinois, the state purchases debt that has gone to collections for a tiny fraction of its face value. Illinois’ program wiped out more than $1.1 billion in debt with $10 million in state funding.

In a statement, campaign spokesperson Evan Machan said, “This election offers Ohioans a clear choice: Liberal Amy Acton wants bigger government and more spending, which means higher taxes, while Vivek will fight for common sense policies that deliver lower costs, bigger paychecks, and better schools.”

But Ramaswamy has been vague about how he’d fund his positive vision of lower taxes, utility bills, and housing costs.

Think tank Innovation Ohio estimated reducing property taxes would cost $6.6 billion. Eliminating income taxes would be costly as well. In the 2025 fiscal year, they generated about $11 billion. With severance taxes already comparatively very low in Ohio, it’s unclear how the administration would promote energy production. If red tape is standing in the way of housing construction, it has gone unaddressed by nearly two decades of Republican leadership.

“It doesn’t add up”

On election night, Acton described a young couple from Clermont County that she’s talked about before on the campaign trail. They stretched to afford a home but then got hit with $300,000 in medical bills after having twins born premature.

“And then it’s the groceries going up, and it’s the gas — we all saw it go over five bucks, right? Her electric bill goes up. Her property taxes go up,” Acton said.

The family’s school district even cut back its kindergarten program, Acton added.

“This is what I am talking about,” she said. “They are doing every single thing right, but it doesn’t add up, and that is why we’re fighting to help make Ohio affordable again.”

To get there, Acton is proposing a working families tax cut — pairing an earned income tax credit with a child tax credit of up to $1,000. Acton’s campaign says a married couple with two kids earning $60,000 a year would get a $1,778 tax break. She also promises to “fully fund” public schools.

The campaign isn’t explicit about how Acton plans to pay for those ideas, but there are hints.

In an emailed statement, the campaign noted state lawmakers have “put the wealthiest Ohioans and corporations first for far too long,” and Ohio’s private school voucher program “is sending billions of Ohioans’ tax dollars to fund private schools with no accountability.”

It’s unclear whether rolling back recent income tax cuts and the expansion of Ohio’s voucher program would accomplish everything Acton is promising, but they would be a start.

Acton criticized Ramaswamy as out of touch and out for himself. She pointed to past comments in which he called Medicare and Medicaid “mistakes,” downplayed affordability as a “buzzword,” and said businesses prize foreign and first generation workers because Americans “venerat(e) mediocrity over excellence.”

“My opponent says people are lazy and mediocre and not working hard enough,” Acton said. “Well, that is not the Ohioans that I know, and I know it’s not the Ohioans that you know. We are all working harder than ever.”

Libertarian agenda

Outside the major party face off is Libertarian candidate Don Kissick, who promises to “break the machine” and “restore freedom.”

His campaign supports both the amendment abolishing property taxes and another protecting same sex marriage, should the U.S. Supreme Court someday overturn its prior ruling.

Kissick wants to reduce government regulation of the marijuana industry, and strongly opposes Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “an unaccountable federal enforcement agency.”

He contends those who are here illegally should have a “straightforward and clear path” to legal status, and be required to make a good faith effort toward that goal.

Kissick’s platform seeks an end to what he terms “corporate bribery.”

“For so long,” the campaign states, “there have been corporate contributions coming to politicians from regulated monopolies in utilities, healthcare, telecom, and insurance.”

Kissick would also ban lawmakers from serving as lobbyists for five years after leaving office.

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.

Confusing ballot language could be the reason an Ohio county upheld a ban on renewable energy last week.

An early analysis of exit poll responses suggests a majority of voters likely meant to vote against Richland County’s ban on most large solar and wind projects for 11 of its 18 townships. But the ballot’s wording perplexed enough of them to have flipped the results.

That preliminary finding doesn’t change the outcome of the May 5 Richland County election. The final tally was 53% ​“yes” votes to keep the ban versus 47% ​“no” votes to axe it. But the poll sheds light on how people in the county really felt and can inform future work to roll back clean energy restrictions in Ohio and beyond.

Richland County’s referendum drew national attention because it was a rare case of residents pushing back against limits on solar and wind power. Such state and local restrictions have grown dramatically across the U.S. in recent years.

Meanwhile, skyrocketing demand for electricity is fueling an affordability crisis. Solar and wind, and batteries to store their energy, can generally come online more quickly than natural gas plants to meet some of that demand. Renewables also aren’t subject to fluctuating fuel costs, and they increase competition in electricity markets, which can rein in power prices.

Richland County’s three commissioners relied on a 2021 state law, Senate Bill 52, to pass the restrictions last July. Local residents who opposed the ban quickly began pushing to put it to a vote. SB 52 states that for any referendum against a county’s ban, its commissioners’ resolution needs a majority vote in favor to go into effect.

So, a ​“yes” vote means someone opposes the referendum effort to overturn the ban, while a ​“no” vote means the person backs the campaign to get rid of the ban.

“It’s confusing,” County Commissioner Cliff Mears told Canary Media in March when explaining his support against the referendum and for the ban.

Lots of voters may have been confused, too — about one in five across all political groups, according to early analysis of the exit surveys completed by 1,193 of the 23,042 people who voted on the issue. ​“When we model what the result would have looked like if everyone had voted their stated preference, the outcome flips,” to 54% wanting to reverse the ban and 46% wanting to keep it, said Graham Diedrich, a University of Michigan Ph.D. candidate who oversaw the exit polling at a dozen locations across Richland County.

“We anticipated this would be an issue,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, an organizing group that assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development with the ​“no” campaign. ​“I think we did the best we could on educating folks on this very complicated ballot language.”

Misunderstanding went beyond the ballot language, said Brian McPeek, one of the local leaders for the vote-no group. Those in favor of the ban suggested that repealing it would open the floodgates for projects to come into the area, McPeek said. In fact, the county would simply have returned to the prior system of accepting or rejecting most new solar and wind farms on a case-by-case basis before the projects head to the Ohio Power Siting Board for state permitting.

To further complicate matters, supporters of the renewable energy restrictions tried to cast the referendum effort as driven by outside interests, pointing to the New York headquarters for the NRDC Action Fund, which provided advertising for the campaign.

However, all decision-making for the campaign was handled by local leaders, stressed Bogin at Ohio Citizen Action. People from Ohio Citizen Action and the NRDC Action Fund identified their organizations at public town hall meetings. And Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development disclosed both groups clearly on its finance report. The finance report for the campaign to maintain the ban didn’t highlight its connections to cheerleaders for the natural gas industry, such as The Empowerment Alliance. Canary Media and the Energy and Policy Institute publicized those links only after connecting the dots from other public records and emails.

Bigger picture, Ohio’s preference for fossil fuels is causing renewable energy companies to take many projects elsewhere, said Michael Benson, president of the board of directors for Green Energy Ohio, an industry association. ​“We are losing out on the economic development potential solar provides to a state in desperate need of more energy for our grid.”

Lessons learned

The campaign against the ban did not explicitly stress renewable energy’s role in limiting climate change and its impacts. Yet concern about a warming planet seemed to factor into residents’ votes.

“Voters who were very worried about climate change backed repeal at 75%, while those not at all worried backed the ban at the same rate,” Diedrich said. Separate responses to a 2025 survey analyzed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 53% of people in Richland County said they were worried about climate change. That’s close to the 54% of exit-poll respondents whose answers suggested they opposed the ban.

Party affiliation was also a factor, with 72% of Republicans voting for the ban and 76% of Democrats voting against it. However, Richland County is home to far more Republicans, who outnumber Democrats by more than 3 to 1, meaning many must have voted against the ban in order for the final results to be so close.

“One of the biggest lessons from this campaign is just how important sustained local organizing and trusted community voices are in conversations around energy and land use,” Bogin said. In her view, the movement to reverse the ban in Richland County got as much support as it did ​“because the people making the case were neighbors talking to neighbors.” She remains hopeful that other efforts to reverse prohibitions on clean energy may succeed, and thinks the campaign could trigger a larger discussion at the statehouse about the hurdles SB 52 creates for renewables, which don’t apply to either fossil fuel or nuclear projects.

Although the campaign did not overturn the ban, Diedrich noted that 90% of survey respondents were aware of the renewables referendum before casting their ballot. To him, that shows the group effectively educated voters, despite the ​“structural” problem of the ballot wording.

McPeek said he still feels that most people will ultimately come out against blanket prohibitions on solar and wind when they get all the facts. And adoption of a prohibition against solar and wind does not mean it will go on forever.

“The question of who gets to decide what happens on private land in Richland County did not end tonight,” Morgan Carroll, another leader in the campaign against the ban, said in a statement after the vote was tallied on Election Day. ​“We will continue to stand with farmers and landowners who believe that right belongs to them, not to their government and certainly not to the fossil fuel industry.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

President Donald Trump is wielding power in unprecedented ways to bring states to heel, marking a dark new chapter in the relationship between the federal government and the states.

Since taking office last year, Trump has punished Democratic-led states that anger him by withholding federal funding and slow-walking assistance. His administration has denied disaster aid to states whose governors are most critical of him, cut childcare and social services funding, launched investigations into blue states and poured immigration officers and military members into liberal cities.

Presidents and Congress have long leveraged federal power to influence the states, funding everything from welfare to highways. And presidents have long faced legal challenges from political adversaries.

But the Trump administration has begun wielding federal resources as a weapon against states, using dollars to cajole and threaten them into complying with its political agenda. Instead of working with Congress to nudge states, Trump is moving unilaterally, bypassing lawmakers and speaking plainly about punishing political rivals — defining an era in American history that scholars call “punitive federalism.”

“These guys are acting like autocrats and trying to destroy our democracy,” said Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat. “And you have to understand the role that states play in this. There was a reason why our structure was set up the way it’s set up.”

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the second in an occasional series examining the fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

“States have rights, and thank God we have those rights and the ability to push back, because this Trump agenda is just destructive for our country,” Welch told Stateline. “And I believe we’re going to survive because of our federalism system.”

The tense political moment has underscored the role of states as Democratic leaders across the country file scores of lawsuits and introduce state legislation in attempts to check the president’s actions. State lawmakers have proposed hundreds of new measures that would limit law enforcement and immigration activities to push back against the White House. But Democratic states have had the most success in the courts, where dozens of federal policies have been challenged.

Since Trump took office last year, Illinois alone has led or joined more than 60 lawsuits against the administration. Those suits run the gamut, challenging deployment of the National Guard, immigration enforcement and the withholding of disaster funding. Democratic attorneys general say they are winning in most of the cases that have reached court decisions.

While some GOP members of Congress have balked at Trump’s targeting of blue states, many Republicans have stayed silent or defended Trump’s actions.

The White House did not respond to detailed questions for this story. In a statement, spokesperson Davis Ingle told Stateline that the administration “faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

But Trump’s punitive federalism strategy has left real people and communities scrambling to respond to White House moves.

Wendy Bobadilla worries she and other California childcare providers will be forced to close their doors if the Trump administration succeeds in blocking childcare funds to a handful of Democratic-led states.

“I don’t think he understands what he’s doing and how he’s affecting our children,” she told Stateline.

A more powerful executive branch

Federalism is a uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution that provides for power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.

Since World War II, the federal government under Democratic and Republican presidents has grown in size and scope. But the White House itself has also accumulated more power, said Nicholas Jacobs, a professor of American government at Colby College in Maine.

“It’s not just that power has shifted from states to the federal government,” he said. “Power has shifted to the executive branch specifically and has become more raw in its overt partisan nature.”

Trump has embraced partisanship in new ways, moving beyond policy differences and into raw retaliation, Jacobs said.

“(President Barack) Obama had blue states and red states, and you can see that clearly, but he didn’t seem to openly celebrate the idea that he was penalizing red states and advancing the causes of blue states,” Jacobs said. “Donald Trump actually uses those terms.”

This increasing partisanship and Trump’s deep cuts to federal agencies has strained relationships between the federal government and states, which administer many federal policies and programs.

State and local governments need certainty to create, pay for and staff programs, said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information for States, which analyzes how federal policymaking affects states. But the Trump administration has injected uncertainty and tested the power of the executive by targeting funds that were explicitly appropriated by Congress, she said.

“They are unprecedented,” she said of the administration’s moves. “In general, an administration takes an appropriations bill at its word, and adheres to it.”

Court challenges

In California, Bobadilla worries about how the president’s actions may harm the hardworking families who rely on her for childcare.

In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was withholding $10 billion in childcare and other social services from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. The agency suggested fraud played a role in the decision, though the administration hasn’t offered evidence.

With part-time help, Bobadilla cares for about 14 children out of her home in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles. About a dozen of those kids’ families pay with the help of subsidy programs. The local poverty rate there exceeds regional, state and national averages.

With families commuting up to 90 minutes per day, Bobadilla sometimes opens as early as 4 a.m. and closes as late as 9:30 p.m. to accommodate working-class parents with fluctuating schedules.

Asked what she would tell the president, Bobadilla said, “I would tell him that I’m working very hard, that I’m not committing any fraud, that I wake up earlier than anybody that I know.”

A federal judge in late March ordered the Trump administration not to withhold the funds. A lawsuit over funding is ongoing.

It’s among more than 700 court cases challenging the administration.

“He has decided to break the law. He has decided to be blatant and brazen about it. He has decided to be consistent and frequent in his violations,” California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told Stateline. “He did some of this in Trump 1.0, but the speed and volume of unlawful actions, particularly vis-à-vis the states, is unprecedented.”

Bonta acknowledged the decisions of past presidents have been challenged in courts.

“But it wasn’t every week, time after time,” he said. “This is a different thing entirely, like this is the plan. The plan is to break the law.”

Trump has maintained his strategy of holding hostage congressionally approved funding despite court losses, according to a New York Times analysis of nearly 200 legal cases. Bonta said more than half of the 60-plus cases his office has filed against the administration aim to retrieve funding that was already appropriated by Congress.

“It’s like he’s a repeat offender,” Bonta said. “He’s incorrigible.”

Democratic and Republican state attorneys general do work across party lines on some bipartisan issues, including consumer protection and artificial intelligence. But the resistance to Trump’s expansion of federal power has almost entirely come from the left.

“Honestly, what I think they think is that they’re secretly cheering for us,” Bonta said of his Republican colleagues.

He said Republican states still benefit when Democratic attorneys general win constitutional challenges or get courts to reverse the administration’s funding cuts to states.

“And they get the benefit without having to dare to challenge their dear leader,” Bonta said.

The Republican Attorneys General Association says its members have remained focused on reducing crime in their states during Trump’s second term.

“Tax paying, law abiding citizens in blue states across America are flooding into red states because people care about their safety and their children’s future,” Adam Piper, executive director of the association, said in a written statement. “Republican Attorneys General have always been both freedom’s front line and America’s last line of defense against radicals seeking to upend the rule of law and the American way.”

Disaster assistance

Last May, floods damaged hundreds of homes in Western Maryland, leaving behind more than $30 million in damages to roads, homes, businesses and utility systems in a swath of Republican-leaning counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied assistance for the floods, which hit a conservative region of a solidly liberal state.

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore — a Trump antagonist and potential presidential contender — noted that an aid request from neighboring West Virginia was approved, despite that conservative state submitting a lower amount of flood damages to the feds. He called Maryland’s denial “petty,” “partisan” and “deeply unfair” to the affected communities.

FEMA has said the law requires the agency to closely examine each disaster and the ability of local governments to respond. The agency told The Hill that Maryland’s flood “was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments to recover.”

Chas Eby, deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of Emergency Management, said the state’s application to FEMA substantiated more than three times the amount of damages needed to qualify for the federal agency’s assistance.

“We were surprised,” he said, noting that a federal disaster declaration could have made funds available to directly aid in the repair of private property.

Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-led states at the highest rate in FEMA’s history, according to Politico, whose March analysis determined that it was three times harder for blue states to receive disaster aid than Republican-led states.

The Maryland denial not only affected those who suffered property damage, but it also has left the state uncertain about the future of disaster aid at large.

“Where we’ve relied on federal support in the past, this is a clear indicator that it may not be available in the future,” Eby said. “And therefore, how do we as state and local emergency managers meet the need? Because the expectations that I have to support disaster survivors and that Marylanders have in their government haven’t really changed.”

In the absence of federal support, Maryland awarded state disaster relief funding for the first time ever. But the initial funds — less than $500,000 — covered just a fraction of the tens of millions in documented needs, Eby said.

Allegany County, Maryland, which has an annual budget of about $150 million, has spent about $8 million so far to repair public infrastructure damaged in the floods, said county spokesperson Kati Kenney. None of that money has gone to individual households or businesses.

“That money was spent just to make it usable, not to make it back to par,” she said. “It was just like a Band-Aid.”

‘It’s not worse, it’s not better’

Many conservatives see the opposition from blue states as the latest pendulum swing of American politics rather than a more significant evolution in federal-state relationships.

“It’s not worse, it’s not better, it’s largely the same,” said Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican.

Walsh said he viewed as more egregious the actions from the administration of President Joe Biden, who he said weaponized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in efforts to push coronavirus vaccinations.

The chair of the Washington State Republican Party, Walsh said many of the elected officials in his liberal state were “deep in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a frequent pejorative description of the president’s opponents. He said Democratic politicians were wasting millions in the courts to challenge Trump, who he said has not encroached on state authorities.

“The problem in Washington state is not that the Trump administration punishes blue cities or blue states,” he said. “The problem in Washington state is we’ve got people just burning taxpayer dollars so they can get a press release out and a headline.”

Still, Democratic-led states continue to push back on the administration.

State legislators have proposed more than 250 bills in response to federal policies, according to State Futures, a nonprofit coordinating hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states. Some of those bills seek to limit federal immigration enforcement in sensitive places such as schools and hospitals, and to allow individuals to sue federal law enforcement for possible constitutional violations.

Democratic state leaders are also emulating some of Trump’s own tactics.

“We have to play their game. And I think the people in my state are beginning to understand this,” said Maryland state Del. David Moon, the Democratic majority leader.

Moon pushed for legislation allowing the state to retaliate against the federal government for withholding funds. The new law, signed by Moore last month, allows the state to place liens on federal property in Maryland or withhold revenue payments to Washington if officials determine the feds are withholding congressionally approved funds in defiance of court decisions.

“It’s going to be weeks of discussion and monitoring with our lawyers and whatever before we do something drastic like that,” he said, noting the ultimate decisions will be left up to the governor. “But we have to be ready.”

Moon acknowledged that the law is “constitutionally dubious” as it’s unclear whether it will be upheld in the courts.

“And I think folks have to admit that,” he said. “But the way this bill works, really, is you take the Trump approach: that you do whatever the F you want within your layer of government.”

Moon said his concerns about the Trump era reach far beyond the usual state-federal spats.

“I think we’re in big trouble, and it’s part of why I am resorting to more unusual thinking and tactics,” he said. “We’re at the 250 mark in the republic. This is when empires fail, and we are having a vast empire decline moment.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. States Newsroom reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@statesnewsroom.com.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The new allegations, first reported by the Daily Mail and confirmed by the Daily Beast, build on a custody battle TiffinOhio.net first reported in April, when Moreno asked a Cuyahoga County court to modify the couple’s joint custody arrangement, citing “dangerous physical behavior” by Miller in their 2-year-old daughter’s presence.

Miller, 37, was elected to represent Ohio’s 7th Congressional District in 2022 with Donald Trump’s endorsement after working on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. He filed for divorce from Moreno, 32 — the daughter of Ohio U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — in August 2024. The couple finalized their divorce in June 2025 and agreed to joint custody, with Miller paying $2,500 per month in child support.

February incident and photographs

According to the Daily Mail’s reporting, Moreno alleges that during a custody exchange at Miller’s home on Feb. 1, 2026, Miller struck her in full view of their daughter, leaving bruises on her arm, elbow, and torso. The Daily Mail published photographs Moreno’s attorneys say document those injuries.

The Bay Village Police Department confirmed to the Daily Beast that officers responded to a report of child abuse that day and that an investigation remains open. No charges have been filed.

June 2024 boiling water allegation and letter

In an earlier alleged incident in June 2024, Moreno claims Miller threw a pot of boiling water at her, with some of it hitting her chest while their daughter was present. Photos obtained by the Daily Mail show redness on Moreno’s chest.

The Daily Mail also reviewed a letter Miller reportedly wrote to Moreno that same day. In it, Miller does not admit to abuse but apologizes for failing to protect her, calls himself “worthless,” and writes that his guilt is “eating me alive.”

“I don’t know what to do. I do know you love me, protect me, and care for me. I failed to do that for you,” the letter reads, according to the Daily Mail. “I’m sorry and I just want to close my eyes and wake up and everything be normal.”

“I know that won’t happen,” it continues. “I’m sorry I failed you and Ruth. It’s eating me alive. I love you, even if you think I don’t. I love you so much. I’m so sorry. I’m just a f--- up and worthless.”

Miller’s response

Miller published a lengthy thread on X on Thursday evening rejecting the Daily Mail’s reporting and accusing the outlet of acting as “stenographers for someone who truly needs help.” He posted what he said were an email from his lawyers to the Daily Mail, transcripts of audio recordings of conversations with Moreno, and footage of Moreno leaving his home after the alleged Feb. 1 incident. Miller also accused Moreno of extortion.

“The moral of the story is this,” Miller wrote. “My ex-wife needs help. She is more focused on hurting me than loving our child.”

Miller’s attorney, Adam Brown, told the Daily Mail his client denies the allegations and said he would provide evidence responding to Moreno’s claims. The Daily Beast reported that evidence had not been provided prior to publication.

According to reporting from People magazine syndicated through AOL, Miller has also accused his ex-father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, of funding “a malicious campaign to ruin my life.” A spokesperson for Sen. Moreno did not immediately respond to requests for comment from national outlets.

Moreno’s attorney responds

Moreno’s attorney, Andrew Zashin, told the Daily Mail that the photographs corroborate years of denials from Miller.

“These images, combined with the documented history in court filings, directly contradict years of Mr. Miller’s denial,” Zashin said. “Any claim that Ms. Moreno fabricated these allegations collapses in the face of contemporaneous physical evidence.”

“It is unfortunate that these matters have become public when Ms. Moreno has made every effort to keep them private and out of court for the sake of their daughter,” he continued. “But the ongoing pattern of behavior, coupled with the continued denials, has made silence no longer possible.”

Political reaction

The Ohio Democratic Party issued a statement Thursday calling the new allegations “horrific.”

“Some issues shouldn’t be partisan — investigating allegations of abuse and condemning offenders should be one of them, and Max Miller’s record of alleged abuse is disgusting for anyone, and is reprehensible for a member of Congress,” ODP Communications Director Marisa Nahem said. “These new details surrounding the allegations of abuse against Max Miller by his ex-wife are horrific — and Ohioans won’t accept this in November.”

Prior allegations

The new claims are not the first time Miller has been accused of physical abuse. Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who dated Miller while both served in the first Trump administration, wrote in a 2021 Washington Post opinion piece and in her published memoir that Miller pushed her against a wall and slapped her after she accused him of cheating in 2020. Miller denied the allegation and filed a defamation lawsuit against Grisham, which he voluntarily dropped in 2023. A court denied his request for a restraining order to stop her from discussing the claims.

A 2021 Politico Magazine profile reported that Miller had been charged with assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest in 2007 after allegedly punching a man and fleeing police; cited for criminal mischief after smashing a glass door outside a hookah bar in 2010; and charged in 2011 with Ohio’s equivalent of a DUI. The same reporting included accounts from witnesses who described an incident in high school in which Miller allegedly pushed a teenage girl down a flight of stairs at his family home.

Grisham re-shared an earlier post on X Thursday after the Daily Mail report was published. “Today I feel broken over what so many men with money & power get away with,” the post read. “Over & over & over.”

Miller remains the Republican nominee for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District seat in the November 2026 general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The task force was initiated by Seneca County Common Pleas Court Magistrate Kenneth Clason, who works under Judge Steve Shuff, in the wake of a November 19, 2025, murder-suicide on Huss Street that left four people dead, including two young children.

According to a news release from the Seneca County Sheriff’s Office, Clason contacted Sheriff Fredrick Stevens to gauge his interest before convening the group.

“I called Sheriff Stevens first and asked, ‘Should we do this?’ and he said, ‘We should have already,’” Clason said. “Sheriff Stevens was all for it. He opened up his Rolodex and helped me figure out who we should invite. He played a large part in that.”

5 focus areas

The bylaws identify five focus areas for the task force:

• Promote collaboration among public and private agencies
• Identify gaps in services and recommend improvements
• Support education, prevention, and awareness initiatives
• Encourage data sharing and evidence-based practices
• Advocate for policies that enhance victim safety and offender accountability

“We want to get everyone in the room, open the door of communication…and develop best practices,” Clason said at the May 1 meeting.

The November 19 murder-suicide

The task force takes shape roughly five months after the Huss Street killings. According to the Tiffin Police Department, 42-year-old Ryan Eagon arrived at the 100 block of Huss Street the evening of November 19, 2025, while his estranged wife was moving out of the home with her boyfriend, 29-year-old Dustin Willey of Tiffin, and her two young children. Police said Eagon fatally shot Willey and the two children — Wrenn Willey, 7, and a 7-month-old — before turning the gun on himself outside the residence. The mother, whose identity is protected under Marsy’s Law, was uninjured.

The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Seneca County Coroner’s Office assisted in the investigation. A community candlelight vigil was held two days later at the Frost-Kalnow Amphitheater on Tiffin’s East Green.

Task force members

According to the Sheriff’s Office, the following entities and individuals are participating in the task force:

• Sheriff Fredrick Stevens, Seneca County Sheriff’s Office
• Chief David Pauly, Tiffin Police Department
• Chief Gabe Wedge, Fostoria Police Department
• Judge Damon Alt, Seneca County Common Pleas Court I
• Judge Steve Shuff, Seneca County Common Pleas Court II
• Judge Jay Meyer, Seneca County Juvenile and Probate Court
• Judge Rhonda Best, Tiffin-Fostoria Municipal Court
• Commissioner Brent Busdeker, Seneca County Commissioners’ Office
• Seneca County Probation Services
• Ohio Adult Parole Authority
• Mircea Handru, Mental Health and Recovery Services Board
• Patchworks House
• Zach Fowler, Tiffin City Law Director
• Seneca County Family & Children First Council
• Seneca County Department of Job & Family Services
• CASA
• Seneca County Prosecutor’s Office
• Defense Bar
• First Step
• Tiffin University
• Heidelberg University
• Mercy Health
• Seneca County General Health District
• Sisters in Shelter

The Sheriff’s Office said task force members will meet regularly to work on violence prevention, awareness, and education in Seneca County.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Coleman, a former WNIR-FM talk radio host and former Cleveland-market television meteorologist, took 47.3% of the vote in a five-way primary, defeating Leetonia Mayor Kevin Siembida, businesswoman Margaret Briem, businessman Neil Patel and medical school graduate Sanjin Drakovac. He will face two-term incumbent Rep. Emilia Sykes (D-Akron) in the Nov. 3 general election.

A recording from Coleman’s campaign launch event, reviewed by TiffinOhio.net, captured him saying he wanted “to make damn sure if I have any ability in Congress to enact policy to tell these, for one, national teachers unions to go to hell.” In the same remarks, he accused the unions of having “hijacked our education.”

91.7% of Ohio teachers are union members

If Coleman’s pledge is meant as a policy goal, it would put him at odds with the overwhelming majority of Ohio’s public school workforce. The most recent state-level figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Teacher and Principal Survey show 91.7% of Ohio public school teachers were members of a union or similar employee association in 2017-18 — among the highest rates in the country and well above the national figure of 69.4%.

Ohio’s two largest teachers’ unions are the Ohio Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association, and the Ohio Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers — the two “national teachers unions” Coleman singled out at his launch.

‘Fundamental changes’ and ‘shaming’ claims

In other recorded remarks during the campaign, Coleman claimed that public schools were “shaming” students who supported President Donald Trump, saying “kids are shamed or even hurt because of their political beliefs, and it’s always conservative beliefs that are being attacked.” He has also called for “fundamental changes” to schools without specifying which programs, staffing models, or funding structures he would target.

Coleman’s campaign website lists ensuring “parents have a strong voice in their children’s education” among his priorities but does not detail a specific education policy platform.

Backed by school-choice advocates

Coleman entered the general election with the unanimous backing of the Summit County Republican Party, which endorsed him on March 22. The county party and the broader Ohio GOP have aligned around an aggressive expansion of taxpayer-funded vouchers and charter schools — a position championed by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who is now running for state auditor.

In a September 26, 2023 guest column titled “Radical teachers’ unions wrong. Kids should not be forced to attend failing schools,” LaRose wrote that “the movement toward school choice, charter schools, vouchers, and greater parental involvement must continue.”

A redrawn district

OH-13 was redrawn under Ohio’s 2025 congressional map to include all of Summit County, the northwestern portion of Stark County and the Kent area in Portage County. The redrawn district favors Democrats by an estimated 3 to 4 percentage points — a shift that prompted 2024 Republican nominee Kevin Coughlin to bow out of a rematch with Sykes.

Sykes, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, has used her two terms in Congress to focus on lowering household costs, expanding health care access and securing federal funding for the district. Her campaign manager, Cory Medina, said after the primary that she intends to continue that work in the general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

What has he accomplished with all that effort? Not a lot.

Six months before the November midterm elections, the Trump administration’s quest to exercise authority over the contests and impose sweeping restrictions on voters has proved largely unsuccessful. The aggressive campaign — separate from Trump’s more effective foray into redistricting fights — has been stymied by the courts, rebuffed by many state election officials and opposed by key Republican senators.

“I think there’s many out there who are worried about the constant drumbeat of what the administration is trying to do and what they might do in the future. I hear this from voters, I hear this from election officials,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“And what I see is that there is a vast chasm between wanting to do something and trying to do something and actually successfully doing it.”

Months yet to go

Much could change between now and November, of course. 

Facing likely Republican losses in the midterms, election experts warn that Trump could lash out with increasingly brazen attempts to control elections. Or that the Justice Department will conduct more raids targeting election officials, like the FBI seizure of ballots from the 2020 presidential election from Fulton County, Georgia.

Democrats remain braced for federal election interference, especially the prospect of Trump deploying immigration enforcement agents or the military at polling locations — an action prohibited under federal law that some administration aides have nevertheless refused to flatly rule out.

But Trump’s record of achievement up to this point is poor.

The SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship, is stalled in the U.S. Senate despite Trump’s repeated demands for its passage. Federal courts blocked an executive order Trump signed last year that sought to impose a proof-of-citizenship rule unilaterally.

The Justice Department hasn’t secured a single court victory in the 30 lawsuits it’s filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. A bipartisan group of state secretaries of state is fighting the Trump administration in court — only 13 Republican states have provided the information.

And an executive order signed in March that would limit voting by mail faces five federal lawsuits, with an initial courtroom showdown set for Thursday in Washington, D.C. Federal agencies have yet to finalize plans to implement the directive, which election law experts call illegal and unconstitutional.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in late April.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told States Newsroom that Trump is committed “to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” 

Jackson named several federal laws that she said provide the Justice Department oversight over states’ election administration. She also noted Trump’s support for the SAVE America Act.

“Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable,” Jackson said in an email.

System under strain

Trump has placed the nation’s electoral system under immense stress before. 

After the 2020 election, the president and his allies worked to overturn the results, with Trump leaning on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes. The effort failed but it led to a mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Today, the system is holding but under strain. An analysis released Thursday by Issue One, a pro-democracy group, likened American elections to a resilient patient with a strong immune system. Yet the Trump administration, rather than boosting the body’s immunity, acts like a virus, it said.

“America’s election system’s immune system is not breaking, but it is actively fighting against the virus of democratic backsliding,” the analysis reads.

The group identified three safeguards it says are in critical condition: Congress, internal checks within the executive branch and the information ecosystem. 

Election officials have watched with particular concern as the Justice Department probes the 2020 election. Trump has long falsely asserted that the election was stolen and in January 2021 pressured the Georgia secretary of state to find him enough votes to overturn his loss in that state.

After the FBI obtained a warrant to seize 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta, in January 2026, the DOJ last month sent a subpoena for information on the county’s election workers. The subpoena demands the names, positions, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of election workers and poll volunteers who worked the 2020 general election.

Fulton County is fighting the subpoena in court. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the FBI doesn’t have to give the ballots back to the county, though he noted the seizure “was certainly not perfect.”

The Justice Department has also obtained a grand jury subpoena for election records in Arizona and demanded 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit. And the FBI recently interviewed a Wisconsin election official about the 2020 election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Local leaders have promised that they won’t bend to pressure from the Trump administration.

“This whole thing is designed to harass, intimidate and chill participation in our election process,” Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a video statement. “It’s not going to work, it’s not going to happen.”

Blue state action

Some states are pursuing additional safeguards against federal election interference. 

For example, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that makes intentionally obstructing polling places a felony and prohibits the military or any armed federal personnel from polling locations.

The legislative push, concentrated in Democratic states, comes as Trump administration officials have sidestepped direct questions about whether troops or federal agents could be deployed to the polls.

“It’s yet another gotcha hypothetical,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a recent U.S. Senate hearing.

The Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation May 6 that imposes a 250-foot buffer zone around election sites where warrantless arrests and searches, use of force and ID checks by state or federal officers, including immigration agents, are banned. The measure also bans masked or concealed identities near polling places, among other provisions.

Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, a Democrat who chairs the state House Government Administration & Elections Committee, said that if nothing happens during this fall’s elections, “I’ll say, ‘Good, it worked.’” 

The goal of the bill isn’t to create confrontations between Connecticut law enforcement and federal forces, but to deter intimidation in the first place, he said.

“We have a responsibility to protect all of our residents, but especially our voters, related to our elections — to prevent these sorts of tools of threat and intimidation and terror from being used to shape our political life,” Blumenthal said in an interview.

Connecticut state Sen. Rob Sampson, a Republican, said that he wouldn’t support abuse from the federal government. But Democrats, he said, were spinning a false narrative of voter intimidation for political purposes and attempting to distract from weaknesses in election security.

“In the last few years, I don’t always trust the results,” Sampson said on the Senate floor. “Now, some people will go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re an election denier.’ I’m not saying that there’s tens of thousands of faulty or erroneous or fraudulent votes. I’m just saying that there’s definitely some.”

GOP elections bill stalled

Trump and Republicans in Congress say major action is needed to boost election confidence. 

At Trump’s urging, the U.S. House passed the SAVE America Act in February. In addition to requiring voters to show documents such as a passport or birth certificate that prove citizenship, the legislation also imposes ID requirements at the polls and would require states to bolster efforts to clean voter registration lists.

Polling suggests Americans support at least some of the bill’s provisions. A Politico poll conducted in April found 52% of Americans support requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, while 18% oppose. 

Democrats, election administration experts and some Republicans say the proposal would lead to chaos. Its provisions would take effect immediately, upending voting requirements potentially months or weeks before elections. Married women and others who have last names that don’t match their birth certificates could face additional obstacles registering to vote.

The SAVE America Act hasn’t advanced in the U.S. Senate. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican and major proponent of the bill, attempted to add the measure onto a budget bill in April, but the Senate rejected it, 48-50.

“This doesn’t mean Trump and his allies in Congress will stop,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group, said in a statement.

The Senate has since moved off the SAVE America Act and would need to hold a procedural vote to return to it. Whether that happens is in doubt, but Kennedy indicated to Punchbowl News that he intends to force another amendment vote later this month. His office didn’t respond to an email from States Newsroom seeking confirmation.

Postal Service

Without the SAVE America Act, Trump’s options to legally restrict voting are limited. 

Trump signed an executive order in March attempting to limit the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of ballots through the mail. The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” that include the names of voting-age citizens in each state — effectively creating a national voter list.

But the order has come under legal attack from Democratic groups, a coalition of Democratic states and multiple voting rights organizations. Its opponents are hopeful that federal judges will soon block the directive like they did a March 2025 order that included a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

“I don’t have confidence that the Trump administration or Donald Trump will refrain from trying to interfere with our elections,” Blumenthal said. “But I have great confidence that the American people will stand up against it.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A panel of economists surveyed on the issue last week said the subsidies are a bad idea. But they also said one of the strongest responses — banning construction of large new centers — is a bad idea, too.

The outsized power of utilities has been a sore spot in Ohio at least since 2020, when federal prosecutors revealed that Akron-based FirstEnergy had paid $61 million in bribes to get a $1.3 billion ratepayer bailout. Far from stopping the scheme, Gov. Mike DeWine’s top regulator played a prominent role in drafting the corrupt bailout legislation.

Now grocery prices remain stubbornly high, gasoline prices are approaching $5, Ohioans are losing their healthcare, and the average cost to cool a home is projected to be $778 between June and September. 

Part of the increase in electricity prices can be attributed to spiking demand from data centers powering the mushrooming artificial intelligence industry.

Utilities are allowed to extract a profit from ratepayers on building projects intended to meet the spiking demand. That’s been good for stockholders — and highly profitable for the executives who run the companies.

For example, Bill Fehrman, CEO of Columbus-based AEP, was paid $37 million — or nearly $12,000 an hour — last year.

At the same time, the people who control the companies building many of the data centers — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — are among the richest in the world and are said to be in a race to control the AI market.

It might seem odd, but Ohioans are being forced to subsidize the centers even as the projects cause their electric bills to spike and the centers’ biggest product — artificial intelligence — is projected to put thousands of Ohioans out of work over the coming decades.

In January, Policy Matters Ohio estimated that some tax breaks for Google and Meta are so big they amount to taxpayers giving up $1 million for each job created. That money is being gifted to companies the top executives of which have a net worth of $1.8 billion and $215 billion, respectively.

Ohio economists are skeptical of the wisdom of those subsidies.

Fourteen were asked whether they agreed that “tax incentives for data centers are an efficient use of public funds to stimulate job growth in Ohio.” Ten disagreed, three were uncertain and just one agreed. 

In the comment section of the survey, Albert Sumell of Youngstown State University made the same point as several other economists — that after construction is complete, data centers create few jobs but lots of environmental impacts.

“I can’t think of a worse use of public funds than to incentivize data centers. They are associated with very few permanent jobs and high external costs,” he wrote.

Ejindu Ume of Miami University was the only economist who agreed that subsidies for data centers were a good idea. He did not explain his reasoning in the comment section of the survey.

As more than 200 data centers have exploded onto the landscape, some Ohioans are calling for a halt. A group is trying to gather 413,000 signatures to put a constitutional ban of large new centers on the November ballot.

Most of the economists surveyed by Scioto Analysis said the economic costs of such a ban would outweigh the benefits. Seven said they would, two said they would not, and five were uncertain.

Michael Jones of the University of Cincinnati said that from an economic standpoint, a ban is too heavy-handed. But he added that the companies should pay for their own “externalities” — the environmental and other costs they create.

“It should be up to the market to pick winners and losers; and Ohio should not be targeting a particular industry,” he wrote. “If there are concerns about energy use or land use, then data centers should internalize and pay the real costs of their deployment.”

David Brasington, also of the University of Cincinnati, said it comes down to the nation’s safety.

“AI is a national security issue,” he wrote. “We need to out-compete rival nations in AI, and allowing data centers is critical for that goal. How would it be to wake up one day and find a foreign nation had broken through our cybersecurity firewalls?”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Last month, Ax Ohio Tax President Brian Massie announced they’ve collected 305,000 signatures so far. That puts them on track to clear the statutory minimum for the ballot, but doesn’t account for rejections. To feel confident, the campaign really wants at least 620,000 signatures for their submission.

They’re not on track for that.

Organizers can keep gathering signatures for as long as they want. Once they submit them, though, that’s pretty much it. If the campaign falls short there’s a brief, 10-day window to make up the difference. If they can’t, any subsequent effort to make the ballot would have to start over from square one.

“I want the citizens of Ohio to hear this,” Massie said. “They can rest assured that we will not stop until we get this amendment on the ballot.”

He said the campaign will announce its plans sometime in the middle of June.

Good news, bad news

Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer sees citizen-initiated ballot measures as a central part of our democracy, and she’s been personally involved in several initiative campaigns. While Turcer acknowledged it can be “challenging” to wish the anti-tax campaign well, she said the point of direct democracy is that’s it’s open to everybody.

And there are some factors working in the campaign’s favor.

“We are going into really good signature gathering weather,” Turcer said.

“We’re going into farmers markets and parades, Memorial Day weekend,” she rattled off. “I mean, you can start to think about the different festivals and different ways that people are out and about outside, which makes signature collection easier than, say, January.”

Their signature total puts them in “decent shape,” Turcer said. It also doesn’t hurt that the pitch is straightforward: do you want to keep your property taxes or get rid of them?

But the campaign faces significant challenges, too.

Every ballot measure sees a vast number of signatures rejected over clerical errors, Turcer said. Information could be illegible or incorrect. Petition circulators could mix up signatures from multiple counties, potentially spoiling otherwise valid signatures. And the process of physically scanning all those documents for submission takes a really long time.

“In many ways, this is about, can I submit the appropriate paperwork in a really specific way, in a way I have never done before?” she said. “And it’s easy to get caught up in the hurdles.”

What’s more, the petitions themselves have a kind of shelf life. When elections officials go to validate signatures they’re comparing the petition to current information — not whatever was current at the moment the signature was made.

“It’s a good kind of rule of thumb,” Turcer said, “(to) say 20%, 25% of the signatures that we collected a year ago could no longer reflect where the voter now lives, and so they will not count in the total.”

And that means there are risks in submitting this year, and risks in waiting until next year, too. Turcer said only the campaign knows the quality of the signatures they’ve collected so far, and she’d be shooting for a similar threshold to the one the Ax Ohio Tax campaign has in mind.

Turcer could imagine going forward with less of a cushion — but not much less.

“At least over 600 (thousand),” Turcer said, as the absolute minimum she’d be willing to submit.

Campaign check-in

About a week after Massie’s announcement, Les Carrier joined a handful of other organizers to gather signatures at a community event in Hilliard. The former city councilman called out passersby by name and had a minute to chat with every one of them.

Carrier seemed energized by Massie’s update. Three hundred thousand signatures isn’t halfway from their goal, it’s halfway there. He used terms like “skyrocketing” or “snowballing” to describe interest in the campaign.

To him, the math is pretty simple.

“A $160,000 home in Old Hilliard now is worth $300 (thousand),” Carrier said. “Their taxes have doubled. Their income hasn’t. So, I mean, something’s got to give.”

Counterintuitively, he said enthusiasm began growing after Gov. DeWine’s administration warned eliminating the roughly $24 billion property taxes generates each year would lead to dramatic increases in sales or income taxes.

Carrier downplayed the loss in revenue — “Chicken Little is what I called it” — and said making up the difference would be simpler and fairer with consumption taxes.

“Everybody consumes at a certain level, everybody pays, and it broadens the tax base from which everything’s drawn,” Carrier said. In contrast, with property taxes, “what you’ve done is you’ve narrowed it down to those that have worked to build up equity and build up home valuation, and now they’re being punished for it.”

Consumption taxes, like sales or value-added taxes, are regressive, meaning they fall more heavily on those with lower incomes because those households spend a greater share of their income to get by.

And although Carrier thinks the solution is simple, that doesn’t mean everyone is on board. Massie, for instance, was blunt about his plans for replacing revenue. “We’re not going to,” he said, insisting instead that lawmakers need to cut spending, and “start a DOGE” in Ohio, referring to Elon Musk’s failed federal cost-cutting effort.

Carrier remains optimistic about the campaign’s chances of making the ballot this year, but he has no problem with waiting.

“I think we could make it for this year,” Carrier said. “But my personal opinion, I haven’t talked to Brian (Massie) about it yet, is if we don’t make 600 (thousand), we just keep on charging into next year.”

Andrea Beeson and Suzi Remick signed the petition after speaking to Carrier, and both expressed concerns about property taxes pushing people out of their homes.

“I feel bad for the aging people,” Remick said. “If they have to lose their homes, that would be horrible.”

Ohio farms get a significant property tax break because their valuation is based on agricultural use, but Beeson still worries about farmers near her home in Madison County getting priced out.

“Who do they sell to? Developers that can pay more than another farmer,” she said. “And now we’re getting houses and houses and houses and our schools can’t hold them all.”

Beeson and Remick said they’re still weighing whether it’s a good idea to abolish property taxes. They signed the petition because they want to give the campaign a chance to convince them and then have the chance to decide if and when the measure appears on the ballot.

“Right now, they don’t know how it would work, where the money would come from for schools and everything else,” Beeson said. “I want that option, and I want to see how they would do it.”

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.

Sheltered homelessness decreased by 8% with 165 fewer people in emergency shelters and transitional housing, but unsheltered homelessness increased 43% — from 455 in 2025 to 651 in 2026, according to the point-in-time count. 

“We’re seeing more people forced to live outside in encampments and cars and places that are never meant for human habitation,” said Columbus City Councilmember Tiara Ross. 

Point-in-Time counts are one-night estimates of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness that are conducted nationwide in partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Franklin County’s count took place in January. 

“If people are outside on our cold days, then what we suspect is that that is an under count,” said Community Shelter Board President and CEO Shannon TL Isom. 

“There’s even more people that are outside on our cold days.” 

Last year’s point-in-time count took place during a storm, which Isom said is part of the reason why there was an increase in unsheltered homelessness this year. 

“When we were counting, it was during a winter storm last year … and we were able, because of hotels and motels, to have people gathered, so we ended up counting them as sheltered when, otherwise, like this year, they would have been outside,” Isom said.

Franklin County is projected to see a 68% increase in unsheltered homelessness by 2028. 

“We know from both local data and predictive modeling that without additional investment, you will see this trend continue … and that’s a hard truth that we have to sit and grapple with,” Ross said. 

Chronic homelessness increased 16.4% and people with severe mental illness experiencing homelessness increased 42%, according to the report. 

People experiencing homelessness with HIV/AIDS increased 75%, people with chronic substance use experiencing homelessness increased 53%, and survivors of domestic violence experiencing homelessness increased 32%, according to the report. 

Family homelessness went down 3.8%, parenting youth homelessness decreased by 40% and no parenting youth were identified as unsheltered, according to the report. 

“You will not see children in Franklin County ever unsheltered, we immediately have flex space for that,” Isom said. 

There were 96 veterans experiencing homelessness, one less than last year, according to the report. 

A little more than half of people experiencing homelessness were men (58%), 41% were women, and 1% is non-binary. 54% of people experiencing homelessness were Black, 33% were white, 9% were multi-racial, and 1% were Hispanic, according to the report.  

Franklin County is Ohio’s most populous county with 1,356,303 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

“There is no debate that our city is on an upward trajectory, but that does not mean that everybody is able to participate in that upward trajectory,” said Michael Wilkos, chair of the Columbus and Franklin County Continuum of Care. 

People living in Franklin County need to be making at least $27.79 an hour working a full-time job to be able to afford a “modest” two-bedroom apartment — more than $5 higher than the state average, according to a report last year by Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio and the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The Community Shelter Board and the Columbus and Franklin County Continuum of Care recommend expanding housing-focused system-funded street outreach. Franklin County currently has four outreach workers. 

They want to scale up hotel options as a bridge toward permanent housing. 44 people living outside moved into permanent housing from Dec. 1, 2025 to March 31 with Winter Warming Center funding. 

Hotel use year-round would permanently house 200-300 unsheltered people experiencing homelessness. 

“It is imperative that we have housing as the solution, not just sheltering,” Isom said. “People in this community should be able to skip over a shelter bed to get into housing.”

The Community Shelter Board and the Continuum of Care wants to get three hotel-based non-congregate shelter sites, which could reduce family homelessness by 48% by 2028. 

“We know that diversion programs that prevent people from entering shelter in the first place works,” Ross said. “We know that rapid re-housing moves individuals and families quickly back into stable housing works. We know that permanent, supportive housing that pairs housing with services for those with highest needs work.” 

There were 11,759 people experiencing homelessness in Ohio in 2024, according to the latest U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Homelessness Assessment Report.

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.

In a May 7 statement, party Chairwoman Gina Grandillo said Democratic ballot requests in Seneca County climbed 43% over the 2022 midterm primary, compared with a 3% increase among Republicans. The party reported that overall Democratic turnout in the county reached 148% of registered Democrats — a figure that reflects voters who chose a Democratic ballot regardless of prior party affiliation — while Republican turnout declined by roughly 300 voters. The party said it gained approximately 700 Democratic voters on net in Seneca County.

The party reported similar trends in neighboring Sandusky County, where it said Democratic turnout reached 146% with more than 1,100 additional Democratic voters participating in the primary.

The Seneca County figures land alongside one of the closest Republican incumbent primaries in northwest Ohio. State Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) survived his Republican primary by 599 votes, finishing with 6,859 votes (52.28%) to challenger Eric Watson’s 6,260 (47.72%), according to unofficial returns from the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections. Click held the seat only on the strength of his home county of Sandusky, which he carried by 15.4 percentage points. In Seneca County, Watson — a first-time candidate and Tiffin small-business owner — defeated Click by 8.5 points.

OH-88 race set for November

Click will face Democratic nominee Aaron Jones in the general election. Jones, a Tiffin City Councilman, U.S. Army veteran and production supervisor at Toledo Molding & Die in Tiffin, ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. He was elected to Tiffin City Council’s 1st Ward in 2024 and is a 1991 graduate of Clyde High School. Libertarian Ben Machoukas is also competing in the race.

Jones lives in Seneca County — the same county Click lost on Tuesday.

Shaver wins OH-5 Democratic primary

The primary also produced a Seneca County native at the top of a congressional ticket. Brian A. Shaver, president of Fostoria City Council, won a four-way Democratic primary in Ohio’s 5th Congressional District with 28.68% of the vote, defeating Martin M. Heberling III (25.80%), Daniel John Burket (24.42%) and Scott E. Tabor (21.10%), according to unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State.

Shaver, an educator and longtime local elected official, will face 10-term Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Latta in the November general election. The Cook Political Report rates the district R+14, meaning its 2020 and 2024 presidential results trended 14 points more Republican than the national average. Latta defeated Democrat Keith Mundy by roughly 35 points in 2024. Independent candidate Dalton Franklin will also appear on the November ballot.

The Seneca County Democratic Party said Shaver is the first Seneca County native in recent memory to appear on a congressional general-election ballot in the district.

Statewide context

The party also pointed to statewide Democratic primary outcomes. Former Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton, running with former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper, was unopposed for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, the 2024 presidential candidate and Trump ally, won the GOP nomination with roughly 82% of the vote against Casey Putsch, according to unofficial returns. A third Republican ticket, Heather Hill and Stuart Moats, was disqualified by the Ohio Secretary of State after Moats withdrew. The Seneca County Democratic Party said Acton and Pepper collectively received nearly 90,000 more primary votes than Ramaswamy — a comparison the party made between Democratic and Republican gubernatorial primary turnout. TiffinOhio.net was unable to independently verify that figure.

In the Democratic primary for Ohio attorney general, Upper Arlington attorney and city council member John Kulewicz defeated former state Rep. Elliot Forhan and will face Republican Auditor Keith Faber in November. State Rep. Allison Russo defeated Cincinnati oncologist Bryan Hambley roughly 67% to 33% in the Democratic primary for Ohio secretary of state and will face Republican Treasurer Robert Sprague in the fall.

Grandillo wins State Central Committee seat

Grandillo, who chairs the Seneca County Democratic Party and serves as solicitor for the Village of Republic, won a seat on the Ohio Democratic State Central Committee. The party said she carried Sandusky, Seneca, Union and Wyandot counties and defeated Brandi R. Downs by 4 percentage points overall. TiffinOhio.net was unable to independently verify the district-wide margin from publicly available county returns.

Grandillo credited the turnout to local organizing.

“This level of participation is not accidental,” she said. “It reflects months of grassroots organizing, community engagement, and a growing sense among voters that their voices matter. Seneca County has always had a strong independent streak, and when people are given a real choice, this community shows up for democracy.”

Grandillo also said the party intends to keep building.

“There is real energy here, and it did not happen overnight,” she said. “We have been putting in the work, and we intend to build on it. Onward.”

She cautioned against complacency.

“These results are encouraging, but nobody is taking November for granted,” Grandillo said. “The stakes are too high, and there is still a tremendous amount of work ahead.”

The general election is November 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Among the major changes are new loan limits for graduate and professional students, a restructured repayment system where new borrowers will have only two plans to choose from and the elimination of a key loan program for graduate and professional students that allowed for unlimited borrowing.

The provisions — most of which will take effect July 1 — stem from congressional Republicans’ mega tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last year. 

The U.S. Department of Education finalized regulations, published May 1, that implement sweeping changes outlined in the GOP’s “big, beautiful” law. The department received more than 80,000 public comments before the rule was finalized. 

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said that “at a high level,” the reforms center on “lowering the cost of college, simplifying student loan repayment and restoring accountability to the federal student lending system,” during an April 30 call with reporters regarding the new regulations. 

The average federal student loan debt balance stands at $39,547, according to the Education Data Initiative.

As July 1 approaches, here’s a closer look at some of the biggest changes coming to the federal student loan system: 

Elimination of Grad PLUS

The Grad PLUS program, which allowed for graduate and professional students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, will soon be eliminated under the package and unavailable for new borrowers.

“If you are currently borrowing Grad PLUS loans, so you borrowed Grad PLUS loans before July 1, you will be allowed to continue using Grad PLUS until you finish your program, or until three years have expired, basically whichever is sooner,” said Preston Cooper, senior fellow in higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

“Current students are grandfathered in — it will only be new graduate students, as of this fall, after July 1, who will be subject to the new loan limits,” Cooper said. 

New borrowing caps

The package also sets forth new annual and aggregate loan limits for graduate and professional students, along with parents who take out federal student loans for dependent undergraduate students. 

Graduate student loans will be capped at $20,500 annually, with a $100,000 aggregate limit. 

Parent PLUS borrowers will have an annual cap of $20,000 and an aggregate cap of $65,000 per dependent. 

Professional student loans will have a $50,000 annual limit and an aggregate cap of $200,000. 

The programs that fall within the department’s “professional” category and are subject to that larger loan cap include: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology and clinical psychology. 

The department clarified in a fact sheet on the finalized regulations that the “professional” student classifications “do not express a value judgment about the importance of any occupation or field” but instead serve a “loan-administration function.” 

The agency has received immense pushback from groups representing people in fields that do not fall under the department’s definition and will thus be subject to lower annual and lifetime borrowing caps. 

Incoming repayment options

In another major shift, the regulations replace prior repayment options with two new plans — the Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, and the Tiered Standard plan — both of which will launch July 1.

RAP is an income-based repayment plan that “waives unpaid interest for borrowers who make on-time payments that do not fully cover accruing interest,” per the department’s fact sheet. 

Balances under the plan will also “decline with each on-time payment, as unpaid interest is fully waived and the Department then reduces principal by an amount equal to the borrower’s payment, up to $50,” per the agency. 

The Tiered Standard plan offers fixed monthly payments, ranging from a 10-year to 25-year period, depending on the outstanding principal balance of the borrower. 

‘A lot more expensive’

“The upshot is that loan repayment is going to get a lot more expensive for almost everyone, and for some people, it’s going to get significantly more expensive, and the transition is also going to be difficult for a lot of people to manage,” Michele Zampini, associate vice president for federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access & Success, told States Newsroom.

Zampini, whose organization aims to advance affordability, accountability and equity in higher education, said she thinks “there will be a lot of students who will have to turn to the private loan market, who otherwise would have been able to cover their costs through the (Grad PLUS) program.”

Victoria Jackson, assistant director of higher education policy at the nonprofit policy and advocacy group EdTrust, said that with the new loan limits and “drastic cuts to aid availability” in the regulations, “you would really hope that it would come with other, more affordable and better forms of financial aid.” 

“And what they’ve done is just created this vacuum that right now can really only be filled with private loans, which are costlier and riskier for students, or students are just not going to go,” Jackson said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its efforts to eliminate the Department of Education, including through a series of interagency agreements that transfer several of its responsibilities to other departments. 

Under the most recent agreement, the Treasury Department will take over Education’s responsibility for collecting on defaulted federal student loan debt — the first step in a multiphase process toward Treasury taking on Education’s entire, roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.

Transition to new system

Zampini noted that, when it comes to the incoming student loan regulations, she does not have confidence in the Education Department’s “ability at this moment to successfully manage the transition without a lot of issues, as far as servicing and as far as account tracking and plan enrollment and things like that.” 

Jackson, of EdTrust, said that “by weakening the federal financial aid system, I think there’s a weakening of our higher education system and making it more difficult for low-income students, students of color and other marginalized students to access graduate education.”

She added that “people who complete those degrees tend to have more financial security in the future — they earn more over their lifetimes and, on markers of financial success and opportunity, do better.” 

“I think this is one prong of a plan of undermining our overall higher education system.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Residents in Richland County, Ohio, voted narrowly Tuesday to keep a ban on utility-scale solar and wind across much of the community — a setback for those who hoped the referendum could serve as a blueprint for overcoming local restrictions on renewables nationwide.

The vote was 53% to 47% in favor of keeping the prohibitions adopted last July for 11 of the county’s 18 townships. Turnout was 30%, according to the election results.

The rural county’s referendum drew widespread attention because it was a rare example of community members trying to use a ballot measure to counter state and local limits on siting wind and solar energy, which have mushroomed in the U.S. in recent years. In Ohio, more than three dozen counties restrict one or both types of energy, an authority granted by a 2021 law. Fossil fuel and nuclear projects are exempt from such bans and from other hurdles the statute erected for renewable energy. If Richland County had voted to overturn its ban, it would have been a first for Ohio.

This election result was a loss for the local group Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development, which first got the issue on the ballot and then reached out to voters. The group argued that reversing the ban would attract jobs and businesses to the area while protecting property owners’ rights to lease land for the energy development of their choice.

“As a group of your Richland County neighbors, we made a commitment to stand up to our elected officials and forced a countywide conversation about property rights and government overreach,” said Morgan Carroll, a leader in the campaign against the ban. ​“We did it with integrity, with passion, and with a deep love for our community. That’s not nothing. That is everything.”

Campaigning in favor of the ban was Richland Farmland Preservation, a group that claimed the amount of land required for solar and was incompatible with preserving the area’s agricultural character. Darrell Banks, a committee member for that effort who is also a Richland County Commissioner, said of Tuesday’s results, ​“I think this is an affirmation by the voters that their township trustees and county commissioners are aligned with the best interests of their communities, and we appreciate the support of Richland County very much.”

Richland Farmland Preservation’s funders included organizations with ties to people and groups who have promoted the natural gas industry. Emails released last Friday show communications between Banks and a strategist for a political consulting firm that has done substantial work for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money group that promotes natural gas. Banks said that the strategist, Tom Whatman, is a ​“family friend.”

The links ​“should trouble every Richland County resident, regardless of how they voted,” said Bella Bogin, director of programs for Ohio Citizen Action, a statewide advocacy organization whose volunteers assisted Richland County Citizens for Property Rights and Job Development on the referendum. ​“This community deserved a fair process, and the fight to bring that back to the county is not over.”

Despite the loss, Brian McPeek, another leader of the campaign to end the renewables ban, stressed that the margin by which it lost in the very Republican county was quite narrow. ​“The big thing that we showed yesterday is that this was not a partisan issue.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

PJM Interconnection, based in the Philadelphia suburbs near Valley Forge, has been under scrutiny as record electricity prices in its auctions contributed to skyrocketing bills for consumers and businesses in the last year. 

In a report issued Wednesday, PJM said the growing demand from data centers and broader electrification of the economy is exacerbated by tightening supply as older, dirtier power plants retire and supply chain and permitting issues make new plants harder to build fast enough.

“The PJM region is now navigating a convergence of three structural forces that have pushed the system into disequilibrium,” the report says. “The result is a transition from an era of managing surplus to an era of managing scarcity — one that is anticipated to persist for some time based on current projections.”

PJM’s electricity pricing model depends on a concept it calls the “shared reliability compact” in which all customers, large and small, share the same standard of reliability and agree to pay to ensure it.

The organization’s board recognized price volatility — while economically rational — is creating unsustainable stress on the compact and called on PJM’s staff to reexamine its foundational assumptions in a resource-constrained world.

It also suggested that government intervention in the market has kept investors on the sidelines by undermining the credibility of economic signals that would normally spur the construction of new generation plants. 

In 2024, Gov. Josh Shapiro sued PJM demanding a limit on prices after an auction in July of that year resulted in a record price. Federal regulators agreed last week to extend the price control for a second time through 2030.

Shapiro pushed back on the notion that his administration’s intervention has dissuaded new investment.

“A core reason why the reforms described in this report are needed is that PJM hasn’t been moving fast enough to connect new resources for many years and continues to deny states a full seat at the table,” spokeswoman Rosie Lapowsky said in a statement. 

“The Shapiro administration looks forward to working constructively with fellow states and with PJM on next steps, but Gov. Shapiro is never going to let Pennsylvanians get stuck with a bill they don’t deserve,” the statement said. “That’s why any changes must prioritize reliability, protect consumers and increase transparency.”

Jon Gordon, director of the renewable energy industry group Advanced Energy United, said PJM finds itself in a tough spot and is taking fire from many elected leaders. He said the report is a self-reflective document.

“They’re trying to lay out the facts of the world. They want everyone involved in the solution.

These are really big, profound decisions,” Gordon said. “Time is short and we need to solve these problems yesterday, and that’s where the challenge will be.”

PJM, which manages the grid for 13 states, including Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., stopped short of offering a solution, but invited stakeholders to join in discussion to restore confidence in the system.

“Wholesale electricity markets are extraordinary institutions, and their most essential infrastructure is not a price curve or a performance obligation — it is legitimacy,” PJM President and CEO David Mills said in a letter accompanying the report.

“Generators, utilities, investors and consumers must all believe, at a basic level, that the rules are fair, stable and the product of a process they recognize as credible.” Mills continued. “It is built through the kind of deliberation this paper is intended to initiate — and it is the only foundation on which a durable market design can rest.”

The paper identifies three possible pathways for reform:

The first would stabilize the market by ensuring that the vast majority of power needed is obtained through longer-term agreements to insulate ratepayers from volatility. Any additional power needed would be secured through spot auctions to allow higher prices to ensure capacity is available for peaks in demand on the hottest and coldest days of the year. 

Another would do away with the shared reliability contract when supplies are scarce and develop a framework that differentiates between customers that can and cannot be cut off. Policymakers, including the PJM governors and the Trump administration, have backed a requirement for large loads such as data centers to build their own power plants.

“Path B focuses on physical accountability – those who do not bring or fund supply cannot lean indefinitely on the shared pool – but it requires a fundamental reorientation of how the PJM system allocates reliability as a scarce good,” the report says.

The third would pair long-term contracts that reduce volatility with a shift in how power generation owners recover revenue to cover the cost of producing electricity, placing an emphasis on payments for the underlying electricity commodity rather than the availability of power plants to handle peaks in demand.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Happy Harvest and Get Wright Lounge filed a lawsuit in Franklin County Court of Common Pleas after Ohio Senate Bill 56 took effect March 20 after Ohioans for Cannabis Choice failed to get enough signatures to get a referendum on the November ballot for voters to block the law.

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Magistrate Jhay Spottswood-Harrison heard the preliminary injunction hearing. 

“This bill completely put my clients out of business,” said Scott Pullins, the attorney for the plaintiffs. 

“There were no ways to get rid of the inventory except to destroy it, and the court attempted and succeeded in fashioning a fair and equity remedy to solve that problem. Now, would we like to see it extended statewide to any other retailers in a similar situation.” 

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey M. Brown issued a 14-day TRO on April 22 allowing Happy Harvest locations and Get Wright Lounge to sell their existing products, but the 10th District Court of Appeals stayed the TRO last week. 

Happy Harvest has locations in Delaware, Marion, and Wood counties. Get Wright Lounge has one location in Columbus. 

“The TRO restores the status quo that existed for years before March 20, 2026, and in fact, the TRO strengthens what the law was back then by expressly putting in more stringent age restrictions, more restrictions against marketing children, more restrictions as to products that look like hemp,” Pullins said. 

The state argued Ohio’s law now aligns with new federal restrictions on hemp products that are set to take effect Nov. 12.  

Congress voted in November to ban products that contain 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container when they voted to reopen the government. 

The only way to sell marijuana in Ohio starting Nov. 12 is by getting a license from the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control, said Ann Yackshaw, assistant section chief in the Ohio Attorney General’s office. 

“The only way for plaintiffs or anyone else to get that license is to let Senate Bill 56 continue in effect so that the Division (of Cannabis Control) can continue to regulate and continue to build out the regulatory framework to bring these people into cannabis regulation in the state of Ohio,” Yackshaw said. 

“Putting Senate Bill 56 on hold would put that rule-making process on hold, and then no one would be able to get into the cannabis program in the state of Ohio.”

Previously, the 2018 Farm Bill said hemp can be grown legally if it contains less than 0.3% THC. 

But the 2018 Farm Bill created challenges from a definition standpoint and a series of loopholes, said Andrew Makoski, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control. 

“Hemp products exploded, not just in Ohio, but all across the country, where people were using the hemp definition to sell these intoxicating products that had the technical definition of hemp,” he said. 

“With any kind of unregulated marketplace, you don’t know what you’re actually getting. What you found was a large spike in accidental ingestions.” 

Stopping S.B. 56 would take Ohio back to an unregulated market where “any child or anybody could walk into a store buy whatever they want,” Makoski said. 

Ohio Senate Bill 56

The bill had to go to conference committee in the Ohio legislature after it passed the Ohio House, but the Ohio Senate voted not to concur with changes made to the bill at the end of October. 

“The General Assembly enacted a sweeping criminal statute through a midnight conference report that neither chamber ever read three times in its final form and that consolidated four separate bills … into a single omnibus vehicle,” Pullins said. 

Under the new law, THC levels in adult-use marijuana extracts will be reduced from a maximum of 90% down to a maximum of 70%, cap THC levels in adult-use flower to 35%, and prohibit smoking in most public places.

The new law prohibits possessing marijuana in anything outside of its original packaging, criminalizes bringing legal marijuana from another state back to Ohio, and requires drivers to store marijuana in the trunk of their car while driving.

“Customers who wish to get lower prices and go to Michigan and other states have now been declared to be felons if they buy the product and bring it back here,” Pullins said. 

The new law funnels unregulated THC through the Ohio Division Cannabis Control, Yackshaw said. 

“That is the regulation that plaintiffs say that they were looking for, but they don’t want it because they don’t want to have to go through the stringent procedures that the Division of Cannabis Control lays out,” she said. 

Mark Fashian was the president of hemp product wholesaler Midwest Analytical Solutions in Delaware, Ohio, but he is now out of business because of the new law. 

“After March 20, my sales have died,” Fashian said. “(Senate Bill 56) basically made everything that I do illegal. … I have five employees, and right now they’re finding other jobs.”

Happy Harvest was one of his best customers and they have more than $200,000 of stranded inventory, Fashian said.

“Every day (Ohio Senate Bill 56) is enforced, it destroys lawful Ohio businesses, businesses operating a good faith reliance on the 2018 federal farm bill,” Pullins said. 

A Sandusky County judge last month issued TRO on the hemp portion of the new law which allows the sale of intoxicating hemp products to continue in Fremont. 

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The U.S. Supreme Court, specifically Justice Samuel Alito, ordered a one-week pause on a federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that stopped access to mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortions, through the mail, or through any other means outside of in-person distribution.

The circuit court took up the case after a Louisiana-based challenge to the FDA’s “justifications for remotely dispensing mifepristone,” justifications Louisiana officials said were “based on flawed or nonexistent data.”

Following the court of appeals decision on May 1, drug companies that make mifepristone requested a pause.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mifepristone distribution would be allowed for one week as the court decides next steps in the appeals process.

Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio praised the pause, adding that restricting the drug “would have devastating consequences in Ohio and nationwide.”

“Decades of research and peer-reviewed studies demonstrate mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness,” Dr. Bhavik Kumar, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, said in a statement.

“It’s our sincere hope that the Supreme Court will make this restoration permanent so patients remain able to access this vital health care.”

Greater Ohio Planned Parenthoods plan to operate as usual until May 11, providing telehealth, mail and in-person medication abortion care.

Telehealth is a leading method of abortion care in Ohio, trending upward in the latest annual abortion report released by the Ohio Department of Health.

Kumar called the appeals court decision “another politically-motivated attack on abortion.”

“This decision dictates how providers must practice medicine and eliminates patients’ personal choices about their health care,” Kumar said.

Mifepristone has been FDA-approved for decades, and decades of studies have promoted their safety, despite anti-abortion rights advocates claims that the drugs were overall a danger to pregnant people.

“Americans have safely and effectively used mifepristone to terminate pregnancies since it was approved a quarter-century ago,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of the abortion rights group Abortion Forward.

“The actions by one federal court in Louisiana are both a drastic overreach impacting patients far outside their jurisdiction, and an unacceptable blockade against people in need of options.”

While Ohio passed a constitutional amendment in 2023 to add abortion rights into the state constitution, Republican state legislators have been working to go around the amendment, attempting to not only further regulate abortion care, but disincentivize funding for clinics who provide abortion.

The legal activity also comes as Trumbull County Probate Judge David Engler attempts to get the state amendment thrown out, claiming the constitutional clause is keeping him from being able to rule on cases in which a minor requests court approval to conduct an abortion without parental consent, which involves a longtime legal method called judicial bypass.

The lawsuit is supported by anti-abortion group Ohio Right to Life, which has worked to garner support for legislative measures to further regulate abortion as well.

“Parents, and when necessary, a probate judge in their stead, should maintain the ability to be involved with a decision of this magnitude when it involves their underage daughter,” said Carrie Snyder, executive director of Ohio Right to Life.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Recent polling suggests that things may be a little different among Ohio Republicans.  

The Democracy and Public Policy Network in the Department of Political Science at Bowling Green State University conducted its seventh web-based poll from April 7-14, 2026, with insight from 1,000 registered Ohio voters.

The poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9 percentage points. The weighted sample reflects a +11 recalled vote margin for President Trump in the 2024 presidential race.

To measure the strength of the MAGA movement, we asked those who intended to vote in the state’s May 5 Republican primary if they consider themselves part of the MAGA movement.  

Overall, 55% of those who said they planned to vote in the Ohio Republican primary identified as part of the MAGA movement.

What could explain the difference between Ohio Republicans and the national figure? 

First, the question was asked a little differently in each survey, with the national survey asking, “Are you a MAGA supporter,” while ours asked, “Do you consider yourself to be part of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement?” 

The slight difference in the wording seems unlikely to account for the difference, however.  

Also, the difference is unlikely because of Democrats planning to vote in the Ohio Republican primary. Only two of the respondents who planned to vote in the Republican primary identified as Democrats.  

The more likely culprit is that only just over half of those who said they planned to vote in the Republican primary have a very favorable opinion of Donald Trump, and nearly 20% believe the country is going in the wrong direction.

About half of Ohio Republican primary voters strongly approved of the Job Trump is doing as president.   

Which Ohio Republicans are more likely to identify as part of the MAGA movement?

Men (58%) were a little more likely than women (53%) to identify as part of the MAGA movement, as were those without a four-year degree (62%) compared to those with one (44%). 

Older voters were more likely than younger voters as well. 

Fully 65% of those aged 65 or older considered themselves part of the MAGA movement, whereas just under half of both 18-29 year olds and 30-49 year olds did.

More than 70% of those who consider themselves very conservative considered themselves part of the MAGA movement.    

Republican union members were only a little less likely (52%) than non-union members (56%) to identify as MAGA.  

Fully 62% of those who consider themselves Born Again identified as part of the MAGA movement, whereas only 50% of those who are not Born Again did, and 61% of those who say religion is very important in their lives considered themselves part of MAGA, while only 41% of those for whom it is not important at all did.  

Those who live in small towns or rural areas were substantially more likely than those who live in suburbs to consider themselves part of the MAGA movement.  

What does all this mean?

With only just over half of Ohio Republicans saying they identify as MAGA, that may reduce Donald Trump’s ability to influence the elections in November. 

Not only will Trump’s name not be on the ballot to provide coattails for Republicans, the shine of the MAGA brand may be coming off a little bit in the Buckeye State. 

Certainly the MAGA movement remains popular with those voters traditionally associated with it: older, rural, conservative men without four year degrees who consider themselves Born Again. But those voters are unlikely to be sufficient to carry the day in statewide elections in Ohio in 2026.  

On the other hand Democrats should certainly not be counting their chickens. 

The high percentage of Republican union members who consider themselves part of MAGA is a sign for Democrats that organized labor’s opposition to President Trump and his policies has not reached many of their Republican members. 

Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton are going to need those voters to prevail in November.   

Finally, all of this points to the possibility of Ohio once again becoming a battleground state, but for that to happen Democrats will need to prove it at the ballot box.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“If this is true, HEATHER HILL won the Republican primary and they stole it from us, Ohio!!” Hill wrote in a post to her campaign page. “I have been told by several sources that I received 23% to 25% of the vote as a withdrawn candidate – does anyone have a way of verifying this?”

Hill provided no source for the figure and no county-level data to support it.

Her claim conflicts with both the official tabulation and Ohio law. Unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office show Vivek Ramaswamy and his running mate, Senate President Rob McColley, with 673,902 votes (82.47%), and Casey Putsch and Kimberly Georgeton with 143,257 votes (17.53%), out of 817,159 total votes cast. Hill’s ticket is not included in the statewide tally.

The omission is by design. After Hill’s running mate, Stuart Moats, filed paperwork on April 22 to withdraw from the race, Secretary of State Frank LaRose declared Hill ineligible under a state statute that does not permit replacement of a lieutenant governor candidate within 70 days of a primary unless that candidate has died. LaRose’s office notified all 88 county boards of elections that votes cast for Hill and Moats would not be counted.

Where county boards have publicly tabulated the withdrawn ticket as a separate line item, the share has fallen far short of Hill’s claim. Ashtabula County’s unofficial results report the Hill/Moats ticket at 5.39% of votes cast in that county’s Republican gubernatorial contest.

Hill sued LaRose in an attempt to be reinstated, arguing that the law’s silence on withdrawal — as opposed to death — created a gap that should be resolved in her favor. On May 4, the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously dismissed her case. The court — six Republicans and one Democrat — sided with LaRose and Attorney General Dave Yost, with justices writing that allowing a late replacement could invite “last-minute political maneuvering” in future races.

“The decision that we made was based in exactly what the law says: You can’t be a candidate for governor if you don’t have a candidate for lieutenant governor,” LaRose told WDTN-TV after the ruling. “My job is to follow the law. We did that. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed that, and so she’s not a candidate for governor and any votes for her won’t count.”

Hill and Moats had publicly feuded in the days leading up to his withdrawal. On April 18, Hill posted on Facebook that she would replace Moats over “irreconcilable differences” and later accused him of using a racial slur — an allegation Moats denied. Moats filed his withdrawal four days later.

Hill’s name and Moats’s name remained on the printed ballots Tuesday because counties had already produced and distributed them, but votes for the ticket were not tabulated in the statewide totals.

Ramaswamy will face Democrat Amy Acton, the state’s former health director, in the November general election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sen. Bill Reineke (R-Tiffin) is the lone remaining contender for Senate president after Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) ended his own bid for the position, according to a report Wednesday by Gongwer News Service, a subscription-based statehouse news outlet.

Cirino, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, told Gongwer he had spent roughly a year and a half pursuing the role and had hoped to bring the presidency to a senator from northeastern Ohio, but concluded that he lacked the support of his Republican colleagues.

The seat will open because current Senate President Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) was selected in January as Vivek Ramaswamy’s running mate in the 2026 gubernatorial race. McColley’s current Senate term ends Dec. 31, 2026. Republican senators traditionally meet to choose leadership in informal caucus votes after the November general election.

Reineke, a partner in the Reineke Family Dealerships, currently serves as Senate president pro tempore — a position he has held since January 2025. He represents the 26th Senate District, which includes Seneca County, and previously served three terms in the Ohio House representing the 88th District from 2015 through 2020.

A leadership candidate tied to two of Ohio’s biggest scandals

Reineke’s potential elevation would place a lawmaker with documented ties to two of the most consequential corruption scandals in recent Ohio history at the top of the upper chamber.

In 2019, Reineke voted in favor of House Bill 6 — the FirstEnergy-backed nuclear and coal subsidy law that became the centerpiece of the largest bribery scandal in Ohio history. Federal prosecutors alleged that FirstEnergy funneled roughly $60 million through a dark money group to secure passage of the bill, leading to the racketeering conviction of former House Speaker Larry Householder, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence. Former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges was also convicted in the scheme.

According to a 2020 review of campaign finance records by the Ohio Capital Journal, Reineke received $1,500 from FirstEnergy’s political action committee in the years leading up to his vote for HB 6.

Reineke is also among the Ohio politicians who received campaign contributions from William Lager, founder of the now-defunct Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow online charter school. Ohio Secretary of State campaign finance filings show Reineke accepted $12,155.52 from Lager in October 2014, during his first run for the Ohio House. ECOT collapsed in 2018 after state audits found the school had overbilled Ohio taxpayers by tens of millions of dollars by inflating student attendance figures. Tiffin City Schools alone lost approximately $1.13 million in funding to ECOT over a six-year period, according to a report from the nonprofit Innovation Ohio.

The FBI subsequently investigated whether ECOT employees were reimbursed for political donations made to candidates including Reineke, as previously reported by TiffinOhio.net. Reineke has not been charged in connection with either the HB 6 or ECOT investigations.

The next Ohio General Assembly convenes in January 2027.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Creech took 6,712 votes to Smith’s 4,796 — 58.32% to 41.68% — according to unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State as of Wednesday afternoon. Smith, a Farmersville pastor, held the seat from 2018 until Creech defeated him in the 2020 Republican primary.

Creech now advances to the November 3 general election, where he will face Democratic candidate Timothy Hornbacker and Libertarian Joshua A. Umbaugh.

BCI investigation and “concerning and suspicious” findings

A minor female relative accused Creech in 2023 of climbing into bed and under the covers with her while erect, wearing only his underwear, according to Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau. Text messages showed the minor complaining that Creech had been rubbing her legs and grabbing her waist, and that she was “put to tears” from being so uncomfortable around him, according to NBC4.

Creech told BCI investigators he had gotten into bed with the minor in his underwear but denied the sexual nature of the allegations. The case was first reported to the Preble County Sheriff’s Department in July 2023, but no investigation was launched. The Preble County sheriff and the county prosecutor — both personal acquaintances of Creech — recused themselves, and BCI did not begin investigating until November 2023, four months later.

Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, brought in as a special prosecutor, wrote in October 2024 that Creech’s “behavior during the time of the investigation was concerning and suspicious” but that “the evidence falls short of the threshold needed for prosecution.” No charges were filed. Creech has called the allegations “demonstrably false.”

Stripped of committees, then restored

House Speaker Matt Huffman (R-Lima) stripped Creech of all 4 committee assignments — including his chairmanship of the House Agriculture Committee — in May 2025 and asked him to resign. Creech refused. In February 2026, Huffman reversed course, reinstated Creech to his committees, and signed a letter requesting the Ohio Republican Party endorse him for re-election. The party obliged.

Creech responded to the allegations on his official Facebook page by labeling his accuser’s statements “textbook parental alienation” — a concept that researchers, child welfare advocates, and the United Nations have described as pseudoscience deployed in family court to discredit children who report abuse.

The Click alliance

Creech is a close legislative ally of state Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery), who is also seeking re-election in Tuesday’s Republican primary in Ohio House District 88. The two are cosponsors of House Bill 249, the so-called “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act,” which the Ohio House passed 63-30 on March 25.

During committee testimony on the bill in March, Planned Parenthood of Ohio’s Danielle Firsich called out Creech’s cosponsorship: “You have a man who was just put back on his committees, who was accused of sexual misconduct with a minor, who is a sponsor on this bill.”

Click and Creech are also linked to House Bill 693, the “Affirming Families First Act,” which Click cosponsored alongside state Rep. Josh Williams (R-Sylvania). The bill would write a statutory definition of “parental alienation” into Ohio law — the same framework Creech invoked publicly to dismiss his own accuser.

Both lawmakers were quietly removed from Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s official campaign endorsements page in April, with Click restored within hours of TiffinOhio.net documenting the change. Creech’s name was not restored. Both also appeared together on a March 19 endorsement graphic from U.S. Senate candidate Jon Husted’s campaign, where Click serves as Sandusky County campaign chair.

Outside money

A super PAC funded by the parent company of online sports betting giant DraftKings ran Facebook ads and sent campaign mailers boosting Creech in the closing weeks of the primary. One mailer featured a photograph of a young girl. Creech’s daughter said the group used family photos of children Creech “has not contacted or seen in years.”

If Creech wins re-election in November, it will be his last term in the Ohio House under the state’s term limits, having been first elected in 2020 to the seat then numbered District 43.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Andrew King lost the Ohio Supreme Court Republican primary to former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell, 32.15% to 29.72%. Kristina Roegner lost the Republican primary for state treasurer to former state Rep. Jay Edwards, roughly 53% to 47%. And state Rep. Josh Williams lost the Republican primary in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District to former state Rep. Derek Merrin, 44.1% to 25.3%, finishing a distant second in a five-way field.

Click himself survived his own primary in the 88th House District, but only by 599 votes — defeating challenger Eric Watson 52.28% to 47.72% while losing Seneca County to Watson by 8.5 percentage points.

Three formal endorsements, three losses

Click’s connections to the three losing candidates are documented in primary sources.

Roegner’s official campaign endorsements page lists “Gary Click, HD 88” among the Ohio House Republicans backing her treasurer bid — a list that also included Speaker Matt Huffman, Speaker Pro Tempore Gayle Manning, and Majority Whip Nick Santucci. Roegner ran with the backing of gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, while Edwards consolidated support from Vice President JD Vance and U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

Williams’s official campaign endorsements page at joshwilliamsforohio.com lists “Rep. Gary Click” among more than two dozen Ohio House members backing his congressional bid. Williams acknowledged Click’s endorsement on social media on Aug. 11, 2025, calling Click “a strong conservative & voice for faith, family, & freedom in Ohio.” The two have co-sponsored multiple pieces of Ohio House legislation, including House Bill 693 — the so-called “Affirming Families First Act,” which would write a statutory definition of “parental alienation” into Ohio law — and HB 249, the “Indecent Exposure Modernization Act.”

The King endorsement was issued by Click on Facebook. King’s own campaign endorsements page at voteandrewking.com does not list Click among the state representatives backing his Supreme Court bid; King’s site features Reps. Brian Lorenz, Mark Hiner, Thad Claggett, Marilyn John, and former Rep. Mark Fraizer.

The Williams endorsement, in context

Click’s continued backing of Williams was already a documented point of friction inside the Ohio GOP coalition before Tuesday’s results.

TiffinOhio.net reported in March that Williams had posted sexually explicit and degrading content about women on his public Facebook page in 2018 — material that resurfaced as he campaigned on a legislative record built around protecting children from obscenity. When confronted in 2023, Williams declined to apologize, telling The Rooster: “What do I gotta apologize about? I made the post in 2018 being funny while I was in college burning time.”

Click formally endorsed Williams’s congressional campaign in August 2025 — two years after Williams’s posts were first publicly reported. Williams quietly removed state Rep. Rodney Creech from his endorsements page in mid-April after TiffinOhio.net coverage of Creech’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation file, but kept Click’s endorsement on the page through Election Day.

Click’s near-loss compounds the pattern

Tuesday’s results landed against the backdrop of Click’s own narrowly held seat. Watson conceded Tuesday night but pointedly declined to endorse Click in the November general election, telling supporters “the topic of endorsements will not be discussed at this time” and signaling he intends to remain politically active. Watson carried Seneca County by 8.5 points; Click held on only because of his 15.4-point margin in his home county of Sandusky.

Click did get wins at the top of the ticket. Ramaswamy, whom Click endorsed for governor, defeated Casey Putsch and Heather Hill in the GOP primary. U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, whose Sandusky County campaign Click chairs, was unopposed in the Republican Senate primary. But both of those races were structurally favorable to the candidates Click backed — Ramaswamy held the Ohio Republican Party endorsement issued more than a year before the primary, and Husted faced no opposition.

In the three down-ticket races where Click’s preferred candidate had to win on the merits of a contested Republican primary — Supreme Court, treasurer, and OH-9 — Click’s slate went 0-for-3.

A pattern documented before the votes were cast

The Ohio Democratic Party labeled Click — alongside Creech — as one of the GOP’s “most toxic endorsements” in an April 14 release, after Williams temporarily scrubbed Creech from his endorsement page. TiffinOhio.net’s subsequent reporting documented a pattern in which multiple Republican campaigns either removed Click from their public endorsement materials or were caught quietly restoring him after coverage. Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign briefly removed Click in April before restoring him within hours of TiffinOhio.net documenting the change. Watson, in the closing weeks of his own primary campaign, called Click “a liability” and built his closing message around Click’s distancing from other Republican campaigns.

What was characterization three weeks ago is now also a vote count. Three Republican candidates Click formally endorsed asked GOP primary voters to send them to higher office. None of the three got there.

Tuesday’s results across all three races are unofficial pending certification.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Shaver received 11,848 votes, or 28.68% of the 41,318 Democratic ballots cast across the district, according to unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State.

Martin M. Heberling III finished second with 10,662 votes (25.80%), followed by Daniel John Burket with 10,089 votes (24.42%) and Scott E. Tabor with 8,719 votes (21.10%).

“I’m truly humbled and honored to be the Democratic nominee for Ohio’s 5th District. Thank you to every voter who put their trust in me,” Shaver said in a post-election statement. “There’s real work ahead as we move toward victory over Bob Latta on November 3. Let’s come together to bring new leadership to D.C. and ensure the people of this district have a representative who works for them.”

Who is Brian Shaver?

Shaver, 48, teaches social studies at Fostoria Junior/Senior High School and lives on a small family farm in Fostoria with his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Genevieve, according to his campaign website. He has served on Fostoria City Council since 2019 and is the council’s current president.

During the primary, Shaver campaigned on congressional accountability, campaign finance reform, term limits and a ban on stock trading by members of Congress.

“I have to leave my personal views and religious views at the schoolhouse door,” Shaver told Richland Source in an April interview. “That positions me really well to serve all the people of this district.”

Shaver also argued the redrawn district gives Democrats their best opening in decades. “This is probably the best positioning for a Democrat to win the congressional district in about 70 years,” he said.

The road to November

Latta, of Bowling Green, has represented the 5th District since 2007 and is a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He was unopposed in the Republican primary after challengers Erica Kelley and Robert Owsiak Jr. did not appear on the ballot, according to Ballotpedia.

The 5th District covers all or part of nine northern Ohio counties — Crawford, Hancock, Huron, Lorain, Richland, Sandusky, Seneca, Wood and Wyandot — and includes Fostoria, Tiffin, Findlay, Bowling Green, Norwalk and Elyria. The Cook Political Report rates the district solidly Republican.

Independent candidate Dalton Franklin will also appear on the November 3 general election ballot, per Ballotpedia.

In 2024, Latta defeated Democrat Keith Mundy with about 67% of the vote.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Richland County voters on Tuesday backed a move by their three county commissioners and preserved a ban on wind and solar power by a thinner margin than partisan politics may suggest. 

In a tight contest, 12,189 voters (52.9%) voted to uphold a ban on industrial-scale wind and solar in most of the county, while 10.853 (47.1%) voted to overturn it, according to preliminary election results.

This means the north-central Ohio county will maintain its prohibition on renewables in 11 of 18 townships there, a restriction imposed by the county’s three Republican commissioners. 

Solar power in Ohio is often polarized along political lines, with Democrats in support and Republicans opposed. But only about 1 in 4 primary voters in Richland County picked a Democratic ballot, meaning a broad swath of Republican voters wanted to reverse the ban.

The referendum campaign tailored its messaging around Republicans, framing the issue as one of government overreach and not global climate change. 

Regardless, the effort fell short. 

Morgan Carroll, a central figure in the repeal campaign, said in a phone call Tuesday evening that the result was disappointing, but proved that solar isn’t a clean-cut partisan issue. 

“It wasn’t that far off from being 50-50,” she said. “It’s telling from such a Republican county that we’d even have that close of a result.”

Darrell Banks, a county commissioner who supported the ban, said the county won despite the outside money that poured in.

“This is an affirmation by the voters that their Township Trustees and County Commissioners are aligned with the best interest of their communities,” he said. “We appreciate the support of Richland County voters.”

Several interests from far outside Richland County sought to move the needle there. The Natural Resource Defense Council, a national environmental nonprofit via its political arm, and Ohio Citizen Action, a grassroots organization from Columbus, spent heavily in support of a repeal. 

On the other side, known Republican operatives backed the campaign in support of the wind and solar ban. 

The election was the second test in state history of a 2021 law that gives local governments broad powers to block renewable energy projects in their jurisdictions – powers they don’t have when it comes to coal, gas or nuclear energy projects. 

You can read Signal Ohio’s more comprehensive coverage on the referendum here.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sixty-one percent of respondents to the survey, which asked how important several health-related issues were, said the price of healthcare will have a major impact on which party they support as control of Congress hangs in the balance.

Among MAHA voters, who are predominantly Republicans but also include independents and some Democrats, 42% said cost is their top issue heading into the elections. 

“While the issue of health costs is more salient for Democratic voters than for Republicans, larger shares across partisans say health costs will have a major impact on their voting decisions than say the same about vaccine policy or food safety,” the survey said. 

Seventy-two percent of Democrats, 63% of independents and 47% of Republicans said the cost of healthcare will have a major impact on which party’s candidate they vote for. 

Vaccine policy came in next, with 57% of Democrats, 46% of independents and 32% of Republicans surveyed saying it will have a major impact on their choice. 

Issues related to food safety came in third after 43% of Democrats, 40% of independents and 38% of Republicans responded that it will have a major impact on their choice of candidate.  

MAHA issues

For MAHA voters, twice as many listed health costs as their first priority than the next issue: restricting the use of certain chemical additives in food, which was a key concern for 21%.

Ten percent were interested in politicians who will reevaluate vaccine approvals, 8% want lawmakers to limit corporate interest in food and 8% want Congress to limit the use of pesticides in agriculture. Eleven percent said none of those or had no answer. 

The survey showed that a significant majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe the government hasn’t done enough to address chemical additives in food or pesticide use in agriculture, two core demands of MAHA supporters.  

“The public perception that there is not enough regulation may be rooted in broader skepticism toward the industries themselves,” the survey said. “Most U.S. adults do not trust pharmaceutical companies, food and beverage companies, or agricultural companies to act in the public’s best interest.”

Doctors and healthcare providers were the most trusted source of information at 70%, followed by agriculture companies at 40%, food and beverage companies at 25% and pharmaceutical companies at 21%. 

Seventy-five percent of those polled said the government hasn’t done enough to regulate chemicals in food, while 65% said it should do more to regulate pesticides in agriculture. 

The poll of 1,343 U.S. adults took place from April 14 to April 19. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points for the full sample and 6 percentage points for MAHA supporters.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It’s all the president thinks about even as the war he started (for no good reason) takes a sharp bite out of your wallet every time you refuel.

Two months ago, the erratic felon in the Oval Office dragged the U.S. into a quagmire in the Middle East with no clearly defined objective or exit strategy.

Trump just bombed Iran, a nation that posed no imminent threat to America — if we take him at his word. Last summer, Trump repeatedly said Iran was decimated following U.S./Israeli airstrikes that “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. 

But he launched an epic attack on Iran anyway, amassing over 50,000 troops and multiple carrier strike groups in the region, rapidly depleting key munition stockpiles and running up a tab of at least $25 billion-and-counting.

Iran retaliated (predictably) by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy chokepoint.

Which gets us back to soaring gas prices and ballrooms.

Closure of that vital waterway in the Persian Gulf is directly related to what you’re paying for a full tank of gas today over what it cost in late February. 

Why? Gasoline prices are primarily determined by supply and demand in a global market, not a domestic one.

When supply of crude oil, used to make gasoline, is disrupted — courtesy of Trump’s Iran war — and demand for gas stays the same, (because you still need to get to work) prices rise. Worldwide. Plus, higher transportation costs mean you also pay more for other products from groceries to clothes.

But as gas prices surge to record highs in Ohio, compounding cost-of-living spikes everywhere else, and the global economy is knocked sideways by Trump’s reckless “excursion” into Tehran, the president is laser focused — not on an urgent way out of the mess he created — but on a gold-plated legacy to dwarf the White House.

“We need a ballroom,” Trump said ludicrously as warning signs of recession flashed around the world. A petulant plutocrat obsessed with opulence not governing.

The serial liar, who promised no taxpayer money would be spent on his ballroom, sent a bill to Congress for $400 million to build it.

A Trumpian Palace of Versailles done on the public dime — while you can’t afford gas for your car.

But the Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” mentality King Donald and his billionaire cronies assume in their gilded bubble, isn’t constrained to only the Trump circle.

Last week, Ohio’s power brokers in state government gloried in the groundbreaking of the palatial pet project of a multi-billionaire NFL owner.

Jimmy Haslam had called in his GOP chits to get hundreds of millions in public funding for his private sports facility investment.

Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the Cleveland Browns (who should henceforth be called Brook Park Browns) padded the campaign coffers of leading Ohio Republicans and dropped $100,000 on their efforts to defeat an anti-gerrymandering ballot issue two years ago to grease the skids for lavish government subsidies for a new domed stadium/entertainment complex in Brook Park.

Call it another billionaire bailout on the backs of Ohioans struggling to stay afloat with climbing electric bills, rent hikes, rising out-of-pocket medical costs, worsening food price inflation, and gas prices that recently spiked nearly 40 cents in a single day.

But Ohio “needed this” gushed Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine as he rubbed elbows with the Big Money gathered to break ground on the Haslam’s $2.6 billion suburban boondoggle.

He was there to chat about what the state’s role might be in lessening the financial burdens of a football team owner whose personal net worth is $10.3 billion and whose family’s overall worth is $14.4 billion.

The state has already agreed to kick in a whopping $600 million via unclaimed funds, (currently tied up in court) and Brook Park expects to throw in another $245 million, to be generated via tax revenues.

The Ohio Department of Transportation approved $35 million in state funding to help upgrade infrastructure near the new stadium site.

The Haslams are angling for a bump in the Cuyahoga County sin tax, maybe doubling or tripling the rate, to pull in more public money for maintenance.

DeWine lauded the largesse of the state plan to subsidize a privately owned, for-profit business owned by an enormously rich sports industry titan and suggested, with a straight face, that the massive handout in public funds to the Haslams “did not interfere with the money we need for education and all the other things we want.”

Yet before Republican lawmakers gifted their generous GOP donor with a generous state grant (to leave Cleveland in the dust) Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman — who pocketed $60,999 from Jimmy and Dee between Jan 1, 2024, and March 24, 2025 — maintained the state couldn’t afford to fully fund public education and passed a budget (the governor signed) that cut the Fair School Funding Plan by two-thirds.

That budget also slashed state aid to libraries and cut millions from Ohio food bank funding, childcare, clean water programs, etc.

If only the state had $600 million to spare for desperately needed quality of life initiatives.

If only the plutocrats drawn to domed playgrounds and gaudy ballrooms pumped their own gas. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Races for the state’s top judicial positions were made explicitly partisan when Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the races starting in 2022. Brunner is currently the only Democratic justice on the 6-1 Republican court.

O’Donnell said she was “humbled” by the election results.

“This is not just a victory for my campaign team, but for all Ohioans who support law and order, public safety, and fair, consistent court decisions,” she said in a statement late Tuesday night.

In addition to working in the Franklin County Courts, O’Donnell also previously worked for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. She’s also served with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, and most recently as a federal immigration judge in Laredo, Texas.

O’Donnell came out ahead in a tight race with Fifth District Court of Appeals Judge Andrew King. Ninth District Court of Appeals Judge Jill Flagg Lanzinger and Second District Court of Appeals Judge Ron Lewis were also on the ballot Tuesday.

The May primary included party affiliations for judges, after state lawmakers decided to add the labels in 2022.

A win for O’Donnell and for incumbent Republican Justice Dan Hawkins in the Nov. 3 general election would establish a full 7-0 Republican Ohio Supreme Court.

Hawkins faces First District Court of Appeals Judge Marilyn Zayas to defend his seat.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Both candidates received high-profile endorsements, with Roegner backed by Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican candidate for governor, and Edwards touting the support of Republican Vice President JD Vance.

During her primary campaign, Roegner touted her experience and her goal to maintain financial discipline, along with returning money to Ohioans from the state’s unclaimed funds, rather than allowing it to be used for sports stadium funding, as legislators pledged.

Late Tuesday night, Roegner congratulated Edwards and said it was important for Ohio to stay “on a strong fiscal path.”

“Ohio Republicans remain united in our commitment to responsible government, strong economic growth, and protecting the hard-earned tax dollars of Ohio families,” Roegner said in a statement.

Edwards used his campaign promising to bring “young energy” to the Ohio Treasurer’s Office and help maintain the “Trump Republican Party.”

While he said the pledge to use unclaimed funds for sports venues “could have been spent a better way,” but has said he’s not against the idea “if we can afford to do them, and if we’ve checked all the other boxes.”

Edwards will face Democrat Seth Walsh, a Cincinnati community organizer, in the Nov. 3 general election. Walsh was unopposed in the primary.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The three-term Vickery Republican defeated challenger Eric Watson 52.28% to 47.72% across the two-county 88th District, with 6,859 votes to Watson’s 6,260. But the geography underneath that headline number is the story. According to Decision Desk HQ data with more than 95% of the vote reporting, Click won Sandusky County — his home county — by 15.4 points, with 7,189 votes cast there. In Seneca County, where 5,930 votes were cast, Watson beat Click by 8.5 points. Click’s Sandusky margin alone produced the entire district-wide win.

For an incumbent who has represented both counties since 2021, that split is not a routine home-county effect. It is a Seneca County problem. And the Democratic nominee waiting in November lives in Tiffin.

What the primary actually exposed

Click’s path to renomination was narrower than it should have been for a sitting incumbent in a deep-red district. The shape of that narrowness matters.

Five days before the primary, Ohio Gun Owners downgraded Click from a C-minus to an F, citing what the group described as undisclosed campaign contributions from gun-control lobbyists. Watson held the organization’s top non-incumbent rating. End Abortion Ohio endorsed Watson outright; Click responded by calling the group “clowns” on his official Facebook page and watched the comment thread fill with rebukes from his own supporters. In April, Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign briefly removed Click from its endorsements page, restoring him within hours of TiffinOhio.net coverage.

None of those individual stories was fatal. Together, they describe a primary in which the activist right, the gun lobby, and at least one statewide GOP campaign were willing — publicly — to put distance between themselves and a sitting Republican representative. The 47.72% Watson received is the receipt for that distance. The Seneca County loss is the receipt for what that distance looked like on the ground.

Watson concedes the office, not the voters

Watson confirmed his loss Tuesday night with a written statement that drew a deliberate line on the central question of the November race.

“Tonight, we proved a lot of people wrong,” Watson said. “Many said this campaign wouldn’t even clear one-third of the vote, but we won Seneca County by a significant margin and built a movement that nobody can ignore. While we came up short tonight, I am incredibly proud of what our team and supporters accomplished in such a short amount of time.”

Watson said he had spoken directly with Click: “Earlier tonight, we called Representative Gary Click to congratulate him on his victory. We had a gracious conversation focused on the people of District 88 and the future of our communities.”

Then the line that mattered: “The topic of endorsements will not be discussed at this time. This is not the last the people of District 88 have seen of Eric Watson.”

That is not the language of a defeated challenger folding into the nominee’s coalition. Watson conceded the office. He did not concede the voters. The roughly 6,260 Republicans who picked him in the primary — gun-rights hardliners, anti-abortion absolutists, opponents of corporate data centers, opponents of digital identification — are now voters Click will have to win back without a public hand from the candidate they preferred. Watson’s statement leaves the door open for that to change. It also leaves the door open for it not to.

Why Seneca County is the story

The second variable is Aaron Jones, and Jones is the variable Click has not faced before.

In 2020, Click won the open seat against Democrat Chris Liebold with 62.9% of the vote. In 2022 and 2024, he defeated Democrat Dianne Selvey, a Whirlpool retiree from Clyde, in two consecutive general elections. Both Liebold and Selvey ran modest campaigns against an incumbent who outspent them and benefited from a deeply Republican district.

Jones is a different kind of candidate. He is a U.S. Army veteran who served four years as an Airborne Infantryman with the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard. He has worked more than 20 years at Toledo Molding & Die in Tiffin, where he is a production supervisor. He was elected to Tiffin City Council in 2024 to represent the 1st Ward. In March, the national veterans organization VoteVets endorsed his campaign. He held his April 16 campaign kickoff at a downtown Tiffin event open to anyone who walked in.

And he lives in Seneca County. He represents Seneca County constituents on Tiffin City Council. His institutional base — Tiffin City Hall, Tiffin’s downtown, the manufacturing workforce at TMD, the local Democratic infrastructure — is concentrated in the same county where Click just lost a Republican primary by 8.5 points.

Republican primary voters are not the November electorate. Seneca County will not vote in November the way it voted Tuesday. But the Seneca County Republicans who turned out — the most reliable Republican voters in the county — preferred a first-time challenger to a three-term incumbent. That is a brand problem in the county where Click’s general-election opponent has spent the last two years building name recognition.

Local issues now have a candidate willing to talk about them

The third structural change is the local terrain.

The Seneca Poultry concentrated animal feeding operation in Bloom Township and the Sunny Farms Landfill near Fostoria — both of which directly intersect with drinking water, agricultural runoff, and the limits of state versus local regulatory authority — have been the dominant constituent issues across the district for over a year. Both are in Seneca County’s backyard. Watson hammered Click on both during the primary. Jones, at a March 19 League of Women Voters forum at Tiffin Middle School that Click did not attend, told voters his hometown’s “only water source” is the Sandusky River and tied state oversight failures directly to a well drilled near a closed landfill.

Click skipped that forum, citing an Ohio House session conflict. The House’s published schedule confirms it was in session March 18 — but those sessions begin at 2:00 p.m., and the LWV event was held in the evening. Watson and Jones both showed up. Voters in the room saw the contrast.

For an incumbent who built his legislative profile around statewide social-issue bills — the SAFE Act, the “Personhood Act,” and a string of culture-war proposals — the local issues now driving the race are not on his menu. They are on Jones’s. And the geographic center of those issues is Seneca County.

The structural reality

None of this means Click is favored to lose. District 88 remains Republican-leaning. Donald Trump carried both Sandusky and Seneca counties decisively in 2024. A Democratic upset would still require a swing well outside the historical norm.

What is true is that Click is heading into the general election having lost one of his two counties to a first-time primary challenger, having shed nearly half of his own primary electorate, against a Democrat whose home base is that same county, with local issues he has not previously had to defend, and with a fundraising profile — heavily weighted toward corporate PACs and out-of-district donors — that Jones will be in a position to make a campaign issue.

Whether Click’s narrow primary becomes a leading indicator or a footnote will depend on three things observers can measure between now and November: whether Watson’s voters consolidate or stay home, whether Jones can convert his biographical and institutional advantages into name recognition across both counties, and whether the Seneca Poultry and Sunny Farms files produce additional disclosures that put Click further on the defensive.

What’s no longer true is the assumption that District 88 is a foregone conclusion. Tuesday’s results retired that assumption. The Seneca County map retired it loudly.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Former Ohio state Rep. Derek Merrin will compete against Kaptur, who has represented Ohio’s 9th congressional district since 1983 — making her the longest-serving woman in congressional history.

Results will remain unofficial until they are certified by election officials later this month.

“Northwest Ohio is ready for fresh new leadership,” Merrin said in a news release. “That’s why we are going to defeat Marcy Kaptur this November. After decades in Washington, she’s part of the problem—not the solution. Our campaign offers a clear alternative: new leadership, a focus on lowering costs, supporting law and order, and putting Northwest Ohio first. Tonight is the beginning.”

Merrin served four terms as an Ohio state representative for the Toledo district from 2016 to 2025. He lost a close race to Kaptur during the 2024 election.

Merrin received 44.1% of the vote, Ohio state Rep. Josh Williams received 25.3% of the vote, former deputy director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Madison Sheahan got 20.2% of the vote, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Alea Nadeem received 5.5% of the vote, and healthcare industry worker Anthony Campbell received 4.9% of the vote, according to unofficial results by the Associated Press. 

President Donald Trump won this district by 11 points in 2024. 

The Ohio Redistricting Commission unanimously passed a new congressional map in October, increasing the Republican advantage in the state 12-3. 

Republicans currently hold 10 out of 15 Ohio U.S. Congressional districts.

There are currently 217 Republicans and 212 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. There are five vacancies. 

Ohio District 1

Former CIA officer Eric Conroy won Ohio’s 1st Congressional District’s Republican Primary with 71.9% of the vote, the Associated Press projects. 

“Republican voters in Southwest Ohio sent a clear message: it’s time for new leadership,” Eric Conroy said in a statement. “I’m grateful, I’m humbled, and I’m ready to get to work.”

President Donald Trump endorsed Conroy in the election. 

Former businesswoman Holly Adams received 19.7% of the vote and nonprofit CEO Rosemary Oglesby-Henry got 8.4% of the vote, according to unofficial results by the Associated Press.

Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman of Cincinnati beat Damon Lynch IV in the Democratic primary — receiving 68% of the vote, according to unofficial results by the Associated Press.

Conroy will now face Landsman, who has served in Congress since 2023, in the Nov. 3 election.  

Ohio’s 13th District

Carey Coleman won Ohio’s 13th Congressional District’s Republican Primary with 473% of the vote, the Associated Press also projected.

Leetonia Mayor Kevin Siembida received 18.8% of the vote, businesswoman Margaret Briem got 16.9% of the vote, businessman Neil Patel received 14.5% of the vote, and medical school graduate Sanjin Drakovac got 2.6% of the vote, according to unofficial results by the Associated Press.

Coleman will now challenge incumbent Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, who has served in Congress since 2023. 

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.

Ray finished with 4,338 votes (58.99%) to Tischler’s 3,016 votes (41.01%), according to unofficial returns from the Sandusky County Board of Elections. A total of 7,354 Republican ballots were cast in the race.

The roughly 18-point margin gave Ray a clear win in a primary that played out against the backdrop of months of TiffinOhio.net reporting on overlapping financial, disciplinary, and political relationships inside the Sandusky County courthouse.

A primary shaped by accountability reporting

The contest unfolded as TiffinOhio.net documented a series of relationships between Tischler and other Sandusky County officeholders. In April, the outlet reported that Tischler had formally abated a $33,300 state audit Finding for Recovery against Probate and Juvenile Court Judge Brad Smith with Ohio Attorney General approval and no repayment required, then publicly backed Smith’s re-election while seeking the bench herself. Smith later endorsed Tischler’s campaign on Facebook.

One week before the primary, Sandusky County Sheriff Christopher Hilton — who serves as Tischler’s campaign treasurer and was one of six county officials who signed the March 2023 letter requesting the abatement — appeared in uniform on Facebook urging voters to support her.

The Ickes connection

The race also intersected with disciplinary proceedings against Sandusky County Common Pleas Judge Jon Ickes, who is facing recommended sanctions before the Ohio Supreme Court in Case No. 2025-1323. According to the amended complaint in that case, it was Ray himself who first brought the underlying allegations to Tischler on April 29, 2024, contacting her in her capacity as the court’s statutory counsel. Tischler then reported the allegations to Sandusky County Administrator Theresa Garcia, helping set the formal accountability process in motion.

Tischler later testified in the Ickes disciplinary hearings, rating him a 9 out of 10. The Board of Professional Conduct’s recommendation in that case remains pending before the Ohio Supreme Court.

In a written response to TiffinOhio.net before the primary, Tischler said: “My decision to run against Judge Ray, and the fractured relationship between Judge Ray and my office have nothing to do with him reporting Judge Ickes to discipline.” She did not elaborate on the nature of the fractured relationship she described.

Ray’s record on the bench

Ray, a Bellevue native, was first elected to the Sandusky County Court of Common Pleas in 2018. He began his legal career as an assistant prosecutor in Erie County before entering private practice and later co-founding the Fremont law firm Mayle, Ray & Mayle. The General Division has jurisdiction over felony criminal matters, civil cases above the statutory threshold, and domestic relations cases.

Tuesday’s results are unofficial pending certification by the Sandusky County Board of Elections.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Frankart finished with 3,051 votes (50.4%) to Distel’s 2,998 votes (49.6%), according to unofficial returns from the Seneca County Board of Elections with all 51 precincts reporting. A total of 6,049 Republican ballots were cast in the commissioner race.

The margin — fewer than one percentage point — left the incumbent advancing to the general election while signaling that nearly half of the Republicans who voted in the primary preferred the challenger.

A primary shaped by oversight controversies

Frankart’s first term in office has been dogged by questions over his handling of the Seneca Poultry concentrated animal feeding operation in Bloom Township. Earlier this year, the Seneca Conservation District publicly corrected him after he told voters in an Advertiser-Tribune candidate Q&A that the facility was “locally monitored” by the district. The conservation district confirmed the operation falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s Division of Livestock Environmental Permitting.

A separate timeline document prepared by the Seneca County General Health District, obtained by TiffinOhio.net, showed Frankart called the county health commissioner in January to express concerns about her inquiry into the poultry facility — an inquiry that had been prompted by a Common Pleas judge and a resident worried about a well drilled near a closed landfill.

One day before voters went to the polls, the Advertiser-Tribune published a report based on a deposition transcript in which Frankart acknowledged under oath that some of his past public statements about a regional landfill and the Ottawa-Sandusky-Seneca Joint Solid Waste Management District were inaccurate and had not been corrected. The deposition was taken in May 2024 in connection with litigation involving WIN Waste Innovations.

Frankart’s record and Distel’s challenge

Frankart, a grain farmer from Adams Township, was first elected commissioner in November 2022 and serves as vice president of the three-member Board of Commissioners. Before joining the board, he served 14 years as an Adams Township trustee.

Distel, a Clinton Township trustee, told the Advertiser-Tribune during the campaign that he had heard from residents who “felt dismissed or intimidated” when they raised concerns about the poultry operation, and pledged he would “never bully residents or approach decisions with a predetermined outcome.”

The commissioner race was one of the most closely watched contests in a primary cycle that featured unusually heavy intra-party competition in Seneca County, including contested Republican Central Committee races in 30 of the county’s 51 precincts.

An independent waits in the fall

No Democrat filed for the commissioner seat. Frankart will instead face independent candidate David Ziegler, an Eden Township trustee, in the November 3 general election.

Ziegler has served on the Eden Township Board of Trustees and previously testified before the Ohio Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee in 2021 in support of Senate Bill 52, the law that gave local governments greater authority over the siting of large solar and wind projects.

Tuesday’s results are unofficial pending certification by the Seneca County Board of Elections.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Click, a three-term incumbent from Vickery and ex-pastor who quietly stepped down from his church in 2025, finished with 6,859 votes (52.28%) to Watson’s 6,260 votes (47.72%), according to unofficial returns from the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections as of 9:21 p.m. Tuesday. The 599-vote margin out of 13,119 ballots cast left nearly half of the Republicans who voted in the two-county district choosing the challenger over their sitting representative.

The result was one of the narrowest GOP incumbent primary margins in northwest Ohio this cycle, and it landed after months of escalating attacks that pulled Click — once considered a safely conservative incumbent — into a defensive posture against an opponent running to his right.

A district split in two

The headline number masked a sharper geographic split. According to Decision Desk HQ data with more than 95% of the vote reporting, Click carried Sandusky County, where he lives, by 15.4 percentage points. In Seneca County, where Watson lives, Watson won by 8.5 points. Sandusky cast 7,189 votes in the race; Seneca cast 5,930.

Click’s home-county margin alone produced the district-wide victory. Without it, the result inverts.

The split is not a routine home-county effect for an incumbent who has represented both counties since 2021. It is a 14-county-point swing between two adjacent counties that share a state representative. And it lines up with the geography of the campaign — Watson held forums and built his volunteer base in Tiffin and Fostoria, while Click’s institutional support and donor network sat closer to Fremont and Clyde.

A primary that turned personal

The contest grew sharper in its closing weeks. Five days before Election Day, Ohio Gun Owners downgraded Click to an F rating, citing what the organization described as undisclosed campaign contributions from gun-control lobbyists. Watson held the group’s “Aq” rating — its top score for non-incumbent candidates.

The endorsement of Watson by End Abortion Ohio earlier this spring prompted Click to label the group “clowns” on Facebook, a post that drew rebukes from his own supporters in the comment section.

The candidates also clashed in person. At a Sandusky County Republican Women candidate forum in March, Watson drew repeated applause as he pressed Click on guns, digital identification legislation, and data center policy. Click skipped a separate League of Women Voters forum in Tiffin the night before, citing a House session conflict.

A challenger from the right

Watson, a Tiffin small-business owner who founded Watson’s Hat Shop in Cave Creek, Arizona, before returning to Seneca County in 2022, campaigned on opposition to data centers on farmland, an end to property taxes, rejection of digital identification, and what he described as defense of “conservative Christian values.”

Throughout the primary, Watson hammered Click over campaign finance records showing the incumbent raised the bulk of his money from corporate political action committees and donors outside the 88th District. A TiffinOhio.net analysis of Click’s contributions from 2020 through 2025 found that less than 14% of his total campaign funding came from individual donors inside Sandusky and Seneca counties.

Click, who chairs the House Community Revitalization Committee and sponsored House Bill 68 — the “SAFE Act” restricting gender-affirming care for minors and transgender participation in school sports — leaned on his legislative record and ties to House Republican leadership to defend his seat.

Watson concedes — but holds back endorsement

In a written statement issued Tuesday night, Watson conceded the race and confirmed he had called Click to congratulate him, but pointedly declined to offer an endorsement. The statement led with the Seneca County result.

“Tonight, we proved a lot of people wrong,” Watson said in the statement. “Many said this campaign wouldn’t even clear one-third of the vote, but we won Seneca County by a significant margin and built a movement that nobody can ignore. While we came up short tonight, I am incredibly proud of what our team and supporters accomplished in such a short amount of time.”

Watson said he had spoken with Click directly: “Earlier tonight, we called Representative Gary Click to congratulate him on his victory. We had a gracious conversation focused on the people of District 88 and the future of our communities.”

On the question of whether he would back Click in the general election, Watson was unequivocal: “The topic of endorsements will not be discussed at this time.” He closed the statement by signaling future political plans: “This is not the last the people of District 88 have seen of Eric Watson.”

What’s next

Click will advance to the November 3 general election against Democratic nominee Aaron Jones, a Tiffin City Councilman, U.S. Army veteran, and longtime manufacturing supervisor who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. Jones lives and was elected in Seneca County — the same county Click lost to Watson on Tuesday. Libertarian Ben Machoukas is competing as a write-in candidate.

Tuesday’s results are unofficial pending certification by the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Results will remain unofficial until they are certified by election officials later this month.

In the Democratic primary, Kulewicz defeated former state Rep. Elliot Forhan.

“You have chosen a lawyer who is ready to restore the office of Attorney General to the people of Ohio,” Kulewicz said at an Ohio Democratic Party event after the race was called.

The Upper Arlington attorney campaigned on Ohio’s need for a lawyer in the Attorney General’s Office, instead of a politician, and plans to combat “price-fixing monopolies that are raising the prices that we pay for the necessities of our lives,” Kulewicz told the Capital Journal in April.

Kulewicz will now take on current Ohio Auditor Keith Faber for the job in the Nov. 3 general election.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Results will remain unofficial until they are certified by election officials later this month.

Both candidates are political newcomers who’ve distinguished themselves as communicators. They’ll have ample opportunity to make their case.

Acton is breaking Democratic fundraising records in Ohio; according to pre-primary reports her campaign has cleared $10 million. Ramaswamy has spent that much on campaign ads already, and with a $25 million personal loan, appears ready to spend more. And that doesn’t even account for the Super PAC supporting his bid.

Acton, who didn’t have a primary challenger, described herself as a “scrappy kid from Youngstown” in a speech to supporters Tuesday night. She drew comparisons between her own struggles as a child facing homelessness and the challenges Ohioans today face in making ends meet.

“I am running for governor because people in this state are struggling,” Acton said. “They are doing everything right. They’re working harder than they ever have, but there is no more breathing room. They’re struggling with the cost of everyday life, and I refuse to look the other way.”

And Acton needled her opponent for criss-crossing the state in a private jet.

“When you are looking at a state from 30,000 feet, my opponent cannot possibly see the struggles and the stories that I’m hearing on the road,” Acton said. “Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t just out of touch. He is out for himself. That is what is happening here.”

The AP called the Republican primary race for Ramaswamy less than 30 minutes after polls closed.

“I do believe that this marks, without exception, the single most consequential election for governor that our state has ever seen in our history,” Ramaswamy told a crowd of supporters at sports bar in Columbus’ Arena District Tuesday night.

“There has never been a greater contrast between two candidates,” he said, insisting he celebrates success while Acton villainizes it.

“She will remind you every day that I’m a billionaire,” he said, “and I will remind you that I was not born a billionaire. I was not born a millionaire. I was not born an anything-aire.”

Meet the candidates

Acton built a career in public health both as a practicing physician and a teacher at Ohio State University. But her introduction to Ohio voters came as the calming voice alongside Gov. Mike DeWine early in the COVID-19 pandemic. She conveyed empathy and encouragement to Ohioans stuck in their homes, and she had a knack for breaking down complex information in an understandable way.

The rare Democrat in a state government dominated by Republicans for more than a decade, Acton was blamed by some in the GOP for COVID lockdowns. She ended up resigning as state health director in June of 2020, just months after the pandemic began.

Ramaswamy told supporters the COVID lockdowns were bad, but Acton quitting was the greater sin.

“To me, that is the most damning indictment of somebody who wants to lead this state,” he said. “I will never quit on Ohio.”

Ramaswamy is not the first billionaire businessman to try his hand at politics, but that resume isn’t really what brought him here.

About the time he stepped down as CEO of his biotech firm, Ramaswamy wrote the first in a string of books tapping into growing “anti-woke” sentiment on the right. He rode that success to frequent appearances on cable news and then launched a quixotic 2024 presidential bid.

The fast-talking, long-shot candidate made big promises and got under the skin of his Republican rivals.

But Ramaswamy never criticized Donald Trump and later endorsed him after bowing out of the race. He parlayed that support into a short-lived stint at the head of the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk.

Primary competition

Since emerging in 2020, Acton has been a high priority recruit for state Democrats. She announced her candidacy in Jan. 2025, while big name Ohio Democrats were still mulling their 2026 plans.

Following his loss in 2024, former U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown left the door open to running for U.S. Senate again or for governor. Last August he decided on a U.S. Senate run. Democratic former U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan weighed his chances for governor or U.S. Senate, too. In the end, he pursued neither.

When Ramaswamy announced he was running for governor in Feb. 2025, Trump’s endorsement came just hours later. In May of last year, the state party endorsed Ramaswamy. A few days later, his most significant challenger, Attorney General Dave Yost, dropped out of the race. Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel never jumped in.

But Ramaswamy did draw a notable challenger in Casey Putsch. The Perrysburg man has a following on YouTube and started the nonprofit Genius Garage which trains students to build race cars.

Putsch also has a history of Holocaust denial and last month made winking reference to the Beer Hall Putsch — Adolf Hitlers first, failed attempt to gain power — in a Putsch “beer hall rally” in Toledo. On Facebook, Putsch dismissed that characterization as a “psy-op,” and offered to buy a beer for anyone who showed up in a German car.

He’s also made openly race-based attacks against Ramaswamy and courted ‘groypers’ — a far-right fringe group known for nativism and antisemitism.

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.

The Associated Press projected Tuesday evening Russo’s victory over oncologist Bryan Hambley and that Sprague had defeated Marcell Strbich.

Russo has served in the Ohio House since 2019, and headed up her legislative caucus as Ohio House Minority Leader from 2022 to 2025.

She pointed to her experience as a lawmaker, and her tenure as part of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, in which she stood in opposition to almost all of the maps approved by the Republican-majority commission.

She voted for the most recent Ohio Statehouse district maps, but she and the other Democrat on the commission, Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, said they approved the maps after being threatened with worse maps by GOP members of the commission. They said they wanted the process to be considered by voters, though the 2024 ballot measure to prevent gerrymandering was defeated.

Having gone through the process, Russo said she’s prepared to “use the bully pulpit” of the Secretary of State’s Office to make changes and act as a “guardrail” against overreach from the legislature or the president.

Hambley was an underdog coming into this year’s Democratic secretary of state primary. A cancer doctor at the University of Cincinnati, Hambley has never held public office, giving voters a potential blank-slate candidate. 

Hambley called Russo to concede around 8:15 p.m. as the race was called.

He said he was proud to endorse Russo as the next secretary of state and her “vision for democracy which returns the power of the vote to the people of Ohio.”

“We lost today because most Democrats in the state of Ohio went to vote and they voted for Rep. Russo’s vision for our state,” Hambley said. “That is exactly how it is supposed to work in a democracy. All of the Democratic ticket, from Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton and Rep. Russo on down, I hope that tonight they ensure they don’t leave any community or county in Ohio behind,” Hambley said.

The overall theme of the campaigns on both sides of the aisle was upholding the integrity of elections, though the means of upholding that tenet differed.

On the Republican side, Sprague’s campaign released ads featuring children’s show-like puppets, zombies, and space aliens, in an effort to emphasize his goal to keep voter fraud away from the ballot box, in a state where the current secretary of state has said fraud is rare.

“My north star is to hold the most secure elections in the state of Ohio,” Sprague told the Capital Journal on Tuesday night.

While Sprague pushed for universal voting machines with a secure paper trail for all votes but defended the state system as strong, Strbich criticized the system as a whole, and called for updated software security systems, pointing to his military security background as evidence of his qualifications.

Every vote cast in Ohio is already documented by either paper ballot or a voter-verified paper audit trail.

Toledo resident Tom Pruss ran on the Libertarian ticket, and received about 1,000 votes.

Sprague and Russo now begin their campaigns for Ohio’s general election Nov. 3.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That sets up a general-election race between Brown and Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, whom Gov. Mike DeWine last year appointed to fill a seat that was vacated when J.D. Vance became vice president.

Brown defeated Columbus software developer Ron Kincaid in the Democratic Primary.

Husted faced no primary challenger on the ballot and has secured the Republican nomination.

Brown in 2024 lost his seat after three terms. Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno beat him in a climate in which voters were upset over inflation and the economy.

With war and tariffs spurring further inflation — and with cuts to healthcare causing economic insecurity — the Ohio U.S. Senate race is one of 11 that are being closely watched because the outcome of each could determine control of the U.S. Senate.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.