Erie County Treasurer Caleb Stidham, who also chairs the Erie County Republican Party, was certified Monday as the Republican nominee in Ohio House District 89, according to a copy of the completed certification form. He was one of three people who applied for the vacancy. He was also one of six people the law entitled to vote on it.

The seat opened Tuesday, Aug. 4, when state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, delivered a letter to the Erie County Board of Elections withdrawing from the November ballot after four terms. Swearingen told the Ohio Capital Journal he is being considered for a role that appears to involve the federal government, and that seeking another term while pursuing it would not have been fair to voters.

That handed the decision to a body created by section 3513.31 of the Ohio Revised Code: because the district spans more than one county but fewer than all of them, the chairperson and the secretary of each county Republican central committee in the district fill the vacancy. Erie, Ottawa and Huron each get two seats. A majority of the members present decides. The statute assigns the job of calling the meeting to the chairman of the most populous county in the district, which is Erie — Stidham.

The vote breakdown was not available Monday. It is not known whether Stidham voted on his own application, whether he abstained, or who presided over the meeting. Ohio law contains no recusal requirement for a committee member who is also an applicant, and it does not say who runs the meeting once it is called.

The objections came first, in public

The dual role drew days of public criticism from Republicans in the district before the committee ever met, and none of it was quiet.

Ron Coop, who posted about the meeting publicly hours before it convened, framed the choice as a cost the party would pay statewide rather than locally. “The 89th District is a solid 10 point Republican district. A point or two of grassroots staying home will not change local results,” he wrote. “However, it takes away votes from State wide candidates. This year will be a tough election for Republicans. They need all the votes they can get.”

He predicted the fight would not end Monday. “If Caleb is the choice, the next 2 years in the district will be ugly. The grassroots will be vocal, and every vote will be scrutinized. It will probably lead to a well funded primary challenger. An expensive primary is never good for the party,” Coop wrote. He argued the committee could avoid all of it by picking someone without a conflict of interest, and put the decision on Huron County: “Huron County has no dog in the fight. Huron County must decide if they are going to upset the base and vote for Caleb, or unite the party and pick someone the entire party can get behind.”

Former state Rep. Steve Kraus, who has said he wanted the seat, was blunter. “Chairman Calab Stidham actually did us a favor and let the ‘smoke filled room’ door open so you, ‘John Q public’ could actually see how the sausage is really made,” he wrote, adding that Stidham is “Speakers Huffman’s ‘choice’ because, after all, he’s one of them.”

Kraus also said he was cut out of the process. He wrote that he and Stidham were on the phone at 8 a.m. Friday, Aug. 7, and that Stidham did not invite him to the Huron County Republican lunch held that day, where the applicants addressed party members. “And why did my own chairman not invite me?” he wrote. “This is politics as usual and how the sausage is made.”

Kraus held the 89th District seat for seven months in 2015 and was removed after a jury convicted him of theft, a fifth-degree felony carrying an elderly-victim specification. He was acquitted of breaking and entering. A court later sealed the conviction, and the Ohio Supreme Court cleared him to appear on the 2024 primary ballot, where Swearingen defeated him.

Stephanie Stock, president of the anti-vaccine-mandate group Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, ran an email campaign at the two Huron County committee members over the weekend, publishing their addresses and a suggested message. “Please do not bend to the wishes of House and Senate leadership,” the draft read. It asked them not to replace Swearingen “with someone who will do the special interest bidding of Columbus rather than your citizens.”

A 10-year-old interview, back in circulation

Within hours of the selection, Republicans in the district were passing around a decade-old interview in which Stidham criticized the man who now defines the party.

In July 2016, Stidham was a 19-year-old Miami University sophomore from Huron who had traveled to Cleveland for his first Republican National Convention. WCPO in Cincinnati sat down with him and three other Miami students and reported that none of the four had voted for Donald Trump in that year’s Ohio primary on March 15.

Asked what he would say with 30 seconds of Trump’s time, Stidham answered: “I don’t even think there’d be anything worth saying.” He went on to say Trump had demonstrated he would not take direction from advisers, friends or committed supporters who had urged him to soften how he talked and carried himself, and that urging him to drop the border wall would go nowhere. Earlier in the same interview, Stidham called the race unconventional and said he was let down by how negative both campaigns had turned.

The exchange resurfaced Monday in a Facebook post by Mark Pukita, a Dublin technology entrepreneur who ran in the 2022 Republican U.S. Senate primary and who had already objected publicly to Stidham voting on his own application.

Stidham has since built his political career inside the Trump-era party. He chairs a county Republican organization, was elected treasurer in 2024 and has been among the more visible county chairs backing Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump endorsed for governor within hours of Ramaswamy’s announcement.

What TiffinOhio.net reported before the vote

Speaker Matt Huffman and Sen. Bill Reineke were working privately to get Stidham the nomination, a person familiar with the discussions told TiffinOhio.net last week.

Stidham managed Reineke’s 2020 Ohio Senate primary campaign, a bruising race against conservative activist Melissa Ackison in which Stidham issued a run of press releases attacking her business record. Reineke is now the sole declared candidate for Ohio Senate president and is expected to take the chamber’s top job when the next General Assembly convenes in January. His Senate district covers Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Stidham, 29, hosted what the Erie County party called its largest event ever, a Ramaswamy appearance at a Sandusky resort.

The applicants who did not have a vote

The other two applicants were Ottawa County Auditor Jennifer Widmer and Ottawa County Clerk of Courts Christopher Enoch. Neither held a seat on the committee.

Enoch is vice chairman of the Ottawa County Republican Party, but the statute seats only the chair and the secretary — in Ottawa’s case, Chairman Jill Stinebaugh and Secretary Toni DeLuca. Widmer holds no current office in the county party.

Both are also on the Nov. 3 ballot for county office, and under R.C. 3513.052 neither could have held both spots. Selection would have forced one of them to abandon a county race and forced Ottawa County Republicans to fill that vacancy under the same 4 p.m. clock. Stidham’s treasurer term runs through December 2028 and he was not on this year’s ballot, so he was the only applicant the committee could choose without a second scramble.

The county next door handled it differently

Northwest Ohio Republicans faced a similar conflict four months ago and resolved it another way. In April, the Sandusky County Republican Party Central Committee appointed its own chairman, Justin Smith, to a vacant county commissioner seat — but barred him from chairing the meeting because he was a candidate. Vice Chairman Ben Decker presided as acting chair specifically to avoid a conflict of interest.

Nothing in state law required that. It was a choice.

What Republicans are running against

The Democratic nominee, Easton Retzke of Sandusky, has held the nomination since the May 5 primary and has spent the summer building a campaign while Republicans had no candidate at all. A political science graduate of Ohio State, Retzke has centered his campaign on public school funding, housing costs, utility rates and campaign finance transparency. He has picked up endorsements from the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the UAW Tri-County CAP Council.

Swearingen won the district with 58% of the vote in 2024. Stidham inherits that margin, a general election 85 days out, and a bloc of Republicans in his own district who spent the weekend telling anyone who would listen that the process was rigged against them.

Coop wrote his warning before the committee voted. “For people who constantly talk about party unity, this should be a no brainer,” he wrote. “The establishment always tell us we must all come together. However, the establishment also will cause turmoil to make sure their candidates get their shot.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

U.S. Rep. Max Miller is the Republican nominee in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, and now he is stuck there. Under state law, Republicans had until Monday to certify a replacement on the November ballot. Because the county party chairs who would pick that replacement must be given two days’ notice before they meet, Miller would have had to withdraw by Saturday for the process to finish in time. He did not. His campaign spokesperson, Abigail Angelos, told The New York Times on Saturday that he was staying in.

He can still leave. If he does now, Republicans have no nominee at all in a district President Donald Trump carried by about 11 points in 2024, against Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker.

All of that was decided by Miller. What was decided by Vivek Ramaswamy is a smaller thing, and it is the thing this newsroom has been watching since last weekend: a name on a web page.

The one variable he controls

As of Monday, Miller’s name still appeared on the endorsements page of Ramaswamy’s campaign for governor, listed under “Ohio Congressional Delegation” alongside U.S. Reps. Jim Jordan, Dave Taylor, Michael Rulli and Warren Davidson.

Two headings above him on the same page are U.S. Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted.

Moreno is Miller’s former father-in-law and the father of Emily Moreno, whose court filings and police reports accuse Miller of holding a gun to her head and injuring their toddler. Moreno said Miller is a danger to his daughter and should not serve in Congress. Husted, in the middle of his own November race against Sherrod Brown, called on Miller to step aside as a candidate and to resign from the House.

So Ramaswamy’s endorsements page currently collects, in one column, a congressman accused of domestic abuse and the two Ohio senators demanding he leave public life. Gov. Mike DeWine, who called the allegations troubling, is on it too.

Ramaswamy has not resolved the contradiction. Asked about Miller at the Ohio State Fair on Wednesday, he said: “I wish everybody’s family well. My prayers are with the granddaughter who’s involved in that situation. And I think that is the most important thing.”

He did not say whether Miller should resign. He did not say whether Miller should leave the ballot. He did not say whether the endorsement still stands. It is worth being precise about direction here: Ramaswamy has never endorsed Miller’s re-election. Miller endorsed him. What Ramaswamy has done is keep publishing it.

April proved how fast the page can move

An endorsements page is among the cheapest things a campaign can change, and this campaign has already shown how quickly it changes one when a name becomes inconvenient.

In April, TiffinOhio.net reported that Ramaswamy’s campaign was promoting the endorsement of state Rep. Rodney Creech, who was accused by a minor female relative of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents obtained by the Statehouse News Bureau. Creech denied wrongdoing and was never charged.

Two days later, Creech’s name was gone from the page — and so was state Rep. Gary Click’s. Web Archive snapshots captured both removals. The campaign announced nothing. Then Click’s name reappeared roughly two hours after this outlet documented the change, and Click told his Facebook followers that reports of his removal were greatly exaggerated. The archive said otherwise.

Creech has not been back on the page since. He is not on it today. That is the standard the campaign set for itself in April: a BCI file and a news story, and a name comes down inside 48 hours.

Since that standard was set, Miller has been the subject of a House Ethics Committee review, opened Tuesday at his own request, into whether he “may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use.” The committee noted that opening a review does not itself indicate a violation occurred. He has been publicly told to quit by two U.S. senators from his own party and his own state, one of them his former father-in-law. A Strongsville GOP rally featuring Miller and U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, scheduled for Monday, was canceled after chair Shannon Burns cited the number and nature of threats. Miller told The Wall Street Journal he would loan his campaign $1 million.

Miller denies every allegation. He has not been charged with a crime, and he is suing his ex-wife for defamation.

Through all of it, the page did not change. Whatever else Miller was hearing last week, from the top of his party’s statewide ticket he was hearing nothing at all — and he could look at vivekforohio.com and see the light still green.

Why a Seneca County reader should care

Nobody here votes in the 7th District. But the same page carries names that appear on ballots in this part of the state, and it carries them under the same logic.

State Rep. Gary Click, the Vickery Republican who represents House District 88, is listed among Ohio state legislators — the endorsement he lost in April and got back the same afternoon. Senate President Pro Tempore Bill Reineke of Tiffin is listed by title. Seneca County Sheriff Fred Stevens is listed under Ohio sheriffs.

The endorsements page is the closest thing a campaign publishes to a public statement of whose company it will keep. Voters in Seneca County are being asked in November to hand the governor’s office to the person maintaining that list.

The pattern the opposition is betting on

The Ohio Democratic Party has spent a week demanding Ramaswamy reject the endorsement outright. “Vivek Ramaswamy’s silence regarding the horrifying abuse allegations against Max Miller is disqualifying,” ODP spokeswoman Katie Seewer said in a statement. “If Ramaswamy can’t even condemn Miller’s violent behavior, let alone reject his endorsement, how can Ohioans trust him to protect their families?”

Democrats are pressing the point because Ramaswamy’s handling of sexual violence has already been an issue in this race. In April, after his allies circulated Democratic nominee Amy Acton’s disclosure that she had sought therapy for childhood sexual abuse, Ramaswamy posted a video saying she had no vision for the state other than to complain about what someone else did to her. Acton has spoken publicly for years about being molested between the ages of 9 and 12 by her mother’s husband. Her campaign manager, Phil Stein, called the remark shameful.

Ramaswamy has also declined for months to call for release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The Cook Political Report moved the Ohio governor’s race from Lean Republican to Toss Up in July. Spokespeople for the Ohio Republican Party and the Ramaswamy campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the USA TODAY Network last week.

What Monday actually settled

Ohio Republicans spent a week trying to get a different name onto the November ballot in the 7th District. Trump, who attended Miller and Emily Moreno’s wedding, told CBS News on Aug. 3 that Miller is a “very good person” and that he would let the families figure it out. Moreno and Husted said the opposite, loudly and by name. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood by Miller and pointed to the ethics process.

Miller listened to all of it and stayed. That was his call to make, and he made it.

Ramaswamy’s call was narrower and it was entirely his own. He did not have to hold a press conference or issue a statement or call for anything. He had to decide whether to leave a name up. He had until 4 p.m. Monday to make that decision quietly, the way he made the last one, and be able to say afterward that he had acted before the deadline rather than after it.

The deadline came. The name is still there.

Ohioans vote for governor on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Start with the instrument. House Bill 18, the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, is described almost everywhere as a bill that would let Ohio put 10% of certain funds into crypto. That description is half right, and the missing half is the part that matters.

The 10% ceiling applies to the treasurer of state. Under the bill, the treasurer could invest interim money from the general revenue fund, the rainy-day fund and the lottery’s deferred prizes trust in digital assets, capped in the aggregate at a tenth of the fund balance at the time of purchase. The bill also restricts what qualifies: the asset must be an exchange-traded product whose average market capitalization over the preceding twelve months is at least $750 billion. Bitcoin, at roughly $1.33 trillion, clears that bar comfortably. Ether, at about $233 billion, does not. The bill never says the word “bitcoin.” It does not need to.

The pension provisions are built differently. Rather than authorize a capped allocation, the bill amends the investment sections governing all five of Ohio’s retirement systems to declare that nothing in those sections prohibits a board from investing in a qualifying exchange-traded product. It is a permission slip, not a budget line. There is no percentage limit written into the pension language. There is no market-cap floor attached to it either.

That distinction has been lost in the coverage, including in the widely repeated estimate that HB 18 would open the door to $27.5 billion in public money. That figure comes from applying the treasurer’s 10% cap to pension assets. The bill text does no such thing. Ohio’s five systems held roughly $284 billion as of Jan. 1, 2026, according to the Ohio Retirement Study Council, and the statutory ceiling on how much of it could go into bitcoin funds under this bill is not 10%. It is whatever eleven trustees decide is prudent.

What Ramaswamy actually owns

Ramaswamy co-founded Strive in Ohio as an anti-ESG asset manager. It is now headquartered in Dallas, and it is a bitcoin treasury company — a firm whose central business is accumulating bitcoin and measuring itself against bitcoin. Matt Cole is chairman and chief executive. Ramaswamy holds no executive role; his most recent securities filing lists his occupation simply as entrepreneur.

He remains one of its largest shareholders. His latest amended Schedule 13D, filed June 1 and reflecting positions as of May 28, reports beneficial ownership of 5,693,897 shares assuming conversion of his Class B stock — 7.6% of the class. That is down from 8.8% six weeks earlier, diluted by the company’s continuous at-the-market share issuance. At Monday’s close of $12.16, the stake is worth roughly $69 million. A separate family trust reported 1,418,942 shares in an earlier filing, and an investment company he controls holds another 106,245.

His April financial disclosure to the Ohio Ethics Commission also shows he personally holds bitcoin and ether.

Here is where leverage enters. Strive does not merely hold bitcoin; it funds bitcoin purchases by issuing perpetual preferred stock that pays a dividend every business day at a 13% annualized rate, with a redemption value and liquidation preference of $783 million as of June 30. Preferred holders stand ahead of common shareholders. That structure is designed to amplify: when bitcoin rises, the gain accrues disproportionately to the common equity Ramaswamy owns, because the preferred claim is fixed. When bitcoin falls, the same math runs in reverse.

It has been running in reverse. Strive reported Monday that it lost $257.6 million in the second quarter, with 94.1% of that loss attributable to markdowns on its bitcoin and a preferred-stock position. Six-month losses came to $523.5 million. Accumulated deficit stands at $1.04 billion. At June 30 the company held 19,864 bitcoin acquired at a weighted average cost of $94,793 apiece — against a fair value of $58,631 per coin. The cost basis was $1.88 billion. The holding was worth $1.16 billion. The gap was $718.3 million.

Bitcoin has recovered since, closing near $65,000 on Monday. That still leaves Strive’s position roughly a third below what it paid. For the company to break even on the bitcoin it already owns, the price would need to rise about 46% from here.

Large institutional buying is one of the things that moves that price. A state deciding to allocate even a modest fraction of a quarter-trillion dollars would be exactly that kind of buyer — and the announcement effect alone tends to arrive before the first purchase settles.

The levers a governor holds

Ohio’s governor does not run the pension funds, and it is worth being precise about what the office actually controls. The governor appoints one investment-expert trustee to each of the five retirement boards. On four of those five boards, an appointed trustee holds the seat through the end of a four-year term.

The teachers’ system is the exception, and it became the exception recently. The state budget signed in June 2025 and effective Sept. 30 rewrote the composition of the State Teachers Retirement System board. Elected educators, who once held seven of eleven seats, now hold three. The director of education and workforce and the chancellor of higher education — both governor appointees who serve in the governor’s cabinet or at the governor’s pleasure — sit on the board or send designees. And the budget added a sentence that appears nowhere in the law governing the other four systems: every appointed member of the teachers’ board serves at the pleasure of the appointing authority.

An appointee who can be removed at will is a different kind of appointee. That change was made in a budget bill, not in standalone pension legislation, and it was made before anyone knew who would win this November. But it is the law a new governor inherits.

The treasurer’s office matters at least as much. Under HB 18 the treasurer, not the governor, decides whether the state buys crypto at all. Treasurer Robert Sprague has been the loudest official voice for Ohio’s crypto push — “We chose to lead instead of follow,” he said last fall — and he was asked directly about being Ramaswamy’s running mate. “I don’t know about that,” he answered. “But I can say this: I think Vivek is a bold innovator, and he’s looking at the future of the state.” Sprague, now running for secretary of state, said he owns no digital assets himself. Ramaswamy ultimately chose Senate President Rob McColley.

Where the money came from

Ramaswamy has never hidden his enthusiasm. In January 2025, while still co-leading the federal Department of Government Efficiency, he called HB 18 “a thoughtful & powerful bill” and urged Ohio to “think creatively about hedging against government-created inflation risks.” Speaking at the Bitcoin Policy Institute two months later, he framed the asset in almost civic terms: bitcoin, he said, “helps fill that void, fill that hunger for a symbol, a reminder of what American greatness was all about.”

The industry has returned the affection. V-PAC, the super PAC supporting his candidacy, has raised roughly $42 million, and a handful of donors account for most of it. Federal filings show Pennsylvania trading magnate Jeff Yass gave $20 million across three checks. Ross Stevens gave $6 million; he founded Stone Ridge and, in 2017, NYDIG, a bitcoin-only financial services firm. Ratmir Timashev and Elon Musk gave $5 million apiece, and Bill Ackman gave $1 million.

To the candidate’s own committee, TiffinOhio.net reported in June that founders of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, their spouses and the chief executive of a major stablecoin company routed roughly $116,000 in maximum-legal contributions to Ramaswamy’s campaign, nearly all of it on primary day or the morning after.

None of that is illegal, and Ohio’s ethics statute says so explicitly: absent bribery or a purpose to defraud, campaign contributions are treated as accruing to a candidate in the ordinary course. The point is not that the money bought a position. Ramaswamy held this position before the checks arrived. The point is that the people writing them understood what they were buying access to.

The case against alarm

Several things cut the other way, and they deserve to be said plainly.

HB 18 has gone nowhere. It received five hearings in the House Technology and Innovation Committee and has never been reported out. Speaker Matt Huffman, a Republican, has been openly cold to it: “I think these kinds of risky things, we need to have a long, hard look at… I’m still scratching my head over cryptocurrency,” he told reporters last fall. House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn was blunter: “We have to be very careful with the crypto industry. We’ve seen a lot of abuse; Because of a lack of oversight, we’ve seen a lot of people losing their livelihoods.”

The retirement boards are also not free agents. Ohio law requires trustees to discharge their duties solely in the interest of participants and beneficiaries, and to diversify investments so as to minimize the risk of large losses. A heavy allocation to a single volatile asset would sit uneasily against that standard, and trustees who tried it would be exposed. Ohio’s pension boards have lately been moving toward less exotic exposure, not more — the public employees’ system spent last year trimming its private equity holdings over fees and performance.

And Ramaswamy has been accused of nothing. He has not been charged, investigated, or found to have violated any rule. Backing legislation that happens to align with your portfolio is legal in Ohio, and common. Nothing in the state’s ethics chapter requires a governor to divest anything or to place assets in a blind trust. That is the actual gap: not a rule he has broken, but a rule that does not exist.

Why this is different from the data centers

Ramaswamy’s investments across the data center industry he would regulate raise a conventional conflict: he owns companies that benefit from policies he favors. The crypto position is sharper for three reasons.

First, it is directional and single-asset. A data center portfolio has many moving parts. A bitcoin treasury company has one. Second, it is leveraged, which means a given move in the underlying asset lands harder on his equity than on a plain holder’s. Third, and most important, it is currently underwater by hundreds of millions of dollars — which means the policy in question is not a way to grow a comfortable position. It is a way to close a hole.

We have written before about the echo of Coingate, the scandal in which Ohio workers’ compensation money flowed into rare coins controlled by a politically connected insider. The comparison has real limits: Coingate was theft, bitcoin is openly priced on public exchanges, and no one is alleging anything criminal here. But the structural lesson survives the differences. Ohio has been burned before when public money was steered toward a volatile asset class in which politically connected people already held positions.

The remedy available to Ramaswamy is not complicated, and it is entirely within his control. He could commit to divesting the Strive stake and the personal crypto holdings before taking office, or to a genuinely blind trust. He has not been asked to do so by any law, because Ohio has no such law. Voters get to decide on Tuesday, Nov. 3 whether that is good enough.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The grants will include $100 million from the Department of Energy spread across the 14 accredited mining schools in the U.S., while the Department of Defense will dedicate just over $80 million for three major schools of mining and metallurgy: the Colorado School of Mines, the South Dakota School of Mines and Johns Hopkins University. 

The Johns Hopkins University grant will help to create a new “multi-material recycling innovation hub,” while the South Dakota School of Mines’ funding will go toward establishing a consortium of workforce development programs alongside the University of Kentucky and Missouri S&T University.

Trump framed the announcement as part of his ongoing effort to rebuild the U.S. coal industry and reopen mines, a central pillar of his energy policy. He has previously sought to shorten the regulation process for new mines and limit the impact of environmental regulations. 

Trump stressed the national importance of funding mining programs, given that other countries, such as China, graduate students at a far higher rate. Accredited mining programs at U.S. educational institutions graduate less than 170 mining engineers each year, he said, while China graduates more than 3,000 annually. 

“We’re not doing you favors,” Trump told a crowd, including miners and many of the schools’ representatives, at a ceremony at the State Department building in Washington. “We’re doing ourselves favors. We need your industry.”

Half of the U.S. mining workforce is set to retire within the next three years, he added. 

“That’s why my administration is making an unprecedented financial commitment to our nation’s mining schools,” Trump said. “It’s going to keep us nice and young and vibrant.”

In addition to increasing support for mining education, Trump announced more than $2 billion worth of new mining contracts and projects. 

Those investments include $150 million for Minnesota-based Niron Magnetics to develop rare-earth-free magnets that are domestically produced to support the defense industrial base and $1.4 billion for Sila Nanotechnologies, a California-based firm, to “expand production of silicon-carbon battery anodes and build out a lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing facility to strengthen the supply chains of satellite operations, unmanned aerial systems, and munitions,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Several of the speakers during the ceremony Friday, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, highlighted the national security benefits of increasing U.S. mine production. 

“At the core of this is our industrial strength,” Rubio said. “But also our national sovereignty — that we never depend on other countries for things we need to prosper and to defend ourselves as a people.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Incumbent Republican Ohio U.S. Sen. Jon Husted played a pivotal role in bringing several billion-dollar data center projects to Ohio as lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025. He backed tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks for past projects and consistently defends new data center development, arguing that they create construction jobs and broaden the tax base for rural communities.

“If you’re connected to a wire, you’re using the data center,” Husted said in a July 22 appearance on a conservative podcast. “So, understand that when we look in the mirror, we are the problem.”

Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown slammed Husted’s record of supporting tax breaks for data center developers in two July ads. In a third ad, he promised to make data centers pay the full cost of their electricity use.

He has also said companies should safely process water used to run data systems and that local communities deserve more transparency when making decisions about new projects. Brown has strong support from construction unions, including many that support data center projects because of the jobs they provide. Brown has called to end the data center tax breaks and says that local communities should have a say on whether to allow data center construction.

“Ohioans shouldn’t be forced to subsidize these costs and Ohioans — not Jon Husted and his billionaire friends — should get to decide if data centers are built in their community,” Brown said in a statement for this story.

Husted did not respond when asked to comment for this story.

One day after Brown’s ad was released, Husted introduced the Ratepayer Protection Act, a U.S. Senate bill that would ask states to consider measures to make data centers pay for their electricity usage. Husted has otherwise said the federal government should not get involved, calling data centers a “local issue.”

Husted and Brown are part of a laundry list of politicians — including President Donald Trump, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, and both parties’ nominees to replace him — who have expressed support for “ratepayer protection” policies. The proposals are also backed by a major data center lobbying group and tech companies like Microsoft that own data centers.

Multiple experts said most of the power to lower utility bills lies with regional brokers and state commissions, and federal legislation would do little to move the needle. Even so, Case Western Reserve University energy policy professor Joshua Basseches said the symbolic unity on the issue is encouraging.

“There’s so much partisanship in this country right now that if this could be a bipartisan issue, I think that would be great,” he said.

A full 71% of Ohioans are in favor of a temporary ban, also known as a moratorium, on new data center construction, according to a Bowling Green State University poll.

The Libertarian candidate for governor, Don Kissick, has called for a moratorium. Republican governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said this week that if elected he wants to halt new projects until lawmakers require data centers to offer free electricity to nearby residents. Last month, Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton announced her support for a conditional moratorium on data centers if requirements on costs, union labor, transparency, environmental standards, community benefit agreements, and development are not met.

Austin Baurichter is a lawyer and volunteer for anti-data center advocacy group Conserve Ohio, which is gathering signatures to put a moratorium on data centers on the 2027 ballot. He compared Brown and Husted’s promises to regulate data centers to a politician handing an umbrella to someone drowning in a flood.

“Anything less than a full, 12-month moratorium on any advancement of any kind of a data center development falls short of what the people of this state are asking for,” he said.

Husted’s record on data centers

One month into Husted’s tenure as lieutenant governor, Google announced its first major data center in Ohio: a $600 million project in New Albany.

“Google investing in Ohio to open a new data center is great news for our state,” Husted said in a press release at the time. “Ohio is establishing itself as a premier destination for technology investment, and it further strengthens our case that Ohio is becoming the tech capital of the Midwest.”

The deal came with a reported 15-year, $43.5 million sales tax break from the state. Amazon got $81 million in state tax incentives for a data center in Hilliard in 2014, and Meta’s first data center in New Albany came with a 40-year, $37 million tax break in 2017.

The exemption on new equipment for large data centers flew under the radar when it was passed by the Ohio legislature in 2011.

Hyperscale data centers, or facilities that use more than 40 to 50 megawatts of power, were a small percentage of total data center electricity use at that time, according to an environmental advocacy group. Total electricity consumption across the U.S. grew at a slow 0.1% per year from 2005 to 2020.

A June 2023 press release by Husted touting a $7.8 billion investment by Amazon in the state cited a new use for data centers’ computing power: artificial intelligence.

The number of hyperscale data centers doubled worldwide between 2019 and 2024. Data centers could rise from accounting for 4% of total U.S. electricity consumption right now to 9% by 2030, according to projections by the Electric Power Research Institute.

Tech companies poured tens of billions of dollars into Ohio to build new data centers and expand existing campuses. That $600 million Google data center in 2019 has since ballooned into a project spanning sites in New Albany, Columbus, and Lancaster.

“Data centers are essential to our digital lives, and Google’s additional multibillion-dollar investment further establishes central Ohio as an important tech hub in America,” Husted said in June 2024 as Google announced another $2.3 billion investment in central Ohio.

His time as lieutenant governor ended when he was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2025, reducing his public appearances at data center groundbreakings and his say in Ohio’s tax code.

“If Ohio wants to be a leader, a leading edge tech state in the Midwest, having those kinds of investments in the state is important,” he said in an interview with Signal Ohio in 2025.

Signal Ohio later reported that the state lost out on $1.6 billion in taxes from data centers in 2025, more than 11 times what they expected. Gov. Mike DeWine has since paused applications for new tax exemptions for data centers.

Meanwhile, U.S. electricity consumption rose 1.7% per year from 2020 to 2026. The average Ohio electricity bill grew by more than 53% from June 2021 to June 2026, far more than the national average, according to the Electricity Price Hub from Heatmap and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brown’s record on data centers

Brown’s record on data centers started before Ohio had a sales tax exemption for them. As a first-term U.S. senator in 2010, Brown secured $2.8 million in funding for a Dayton-area research center to develop water cooling technology for large data centers.

Today, water cooling systems make large data centers more energy efficient, but they created another problem: A large data center can use up to five million gallons of water per day, according to a 2025 report by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

That water must be cooled before it is put back in the environment, Case Western Reserve University environmental law professor Victor Flatt explained, or it can affect local wildlife.

Brown acknowledged this in a June interview with Spectrum News, saying, “They’ve got to make sure that they process the water right and recirculate it.”

Brown did not specify any stance on environmental regulations for data centers in a statement for this story. As a congressman from 1993 to 2025, his only public statement on data centers was a press release welcoming Amazon Web Services to New Albany in 2015.

On the campaign trail 11 years later, Brown has repeatedly criticized the “out-of-control” tax breaks under Husted’s watch and labeled him “the face of data centers” in ads.

Would the Ratepayer Protection Act protect ratepayers?

Both candidates promise to make data centers pay the full cost of their electricity usage.

The White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which asks data center developers to pay for their utility usage, received commitments from about 200 entities and endorsements from several sitting governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

A companion bill to Husted’s Ratepayer Protection Act passed out of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce by a unanimous vote in July.

Even so, experts say relief from the federal government in the near future is unlikely.

Public utilities are generally regulated by state commissions like the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, consultant David M. Klaus said. Klaus worked in the U.S. Department of Energy under three Democratic administrations and wrote a report about the limits of federal action to regulate data centers’ utility bills.

Case Western energy policy professor Basseches said that this is why Congressional legislation like Husted’s Ratepayer Protection Act is narrow in scope.

“The federal government has never been involved in this way, certainly not in a legislative capacity,” Basseches said. “If this thing were to ever cross the finish line and become law, I expect there would be a lot of legal challenges and a lot of fights over authority between different states and the feds.”

PUCO allowed major utility provider AEP Ohio to treat data centers differently in 2025, but a June bill in the state legislature that would have extended the practice across the state didn’t reach the finish line before the legislature’s summer recess.

Other concerns about data centers: the environment and transparency

More power demand from data centers means more power plants, Flatt said. PJM Interconnection, a regional broker that makes sure there is enough power supply to meet demand in Ohio and 12 other states, came up 6.8 gigawatts short in its most recent auction. It warned that data centers may face involuntary outages as a result.

Flatt said new plants in Ohio are likely to be powered by fossil fuels. A 10-gigawatt data center project in Piketon — expected to be the largest data center in the world — will be powered by a new $33.3 billion natural gas plant.

Husted has expressed support for fossil fuels and nuclear energy to power data centers since 2023. He has also criticized wind and solar energy, saying they are “inadequate” to meet increased demand.

In most places, Flatt said solar energy with battery power backup is the cheapest, easiest, fastest form of energy production to build and permit.

“But some states like Ohio and the federal government have put some roadblocks in front of developing solar and certainly in front of developing wind, which would be the second-cheapest,” he added. “That’s going to lead to increased air pollution.”

Chevron donated $200,000 to a super PAC supporting Husted’s election bid in June, and a super PAC that backs nuclear energy spent almost $75,000 on ads supporting him in the second quarter. He also has deep ties to Ohio’s utility lobby.

While Brown has not directly addressed the intersection of data centers and energy production, he consistently supported clean energy initiatives while in the Senate.

Both candidates have otherwise said they see data centers as a local issue. At a July 11 stop in Ironton, Brown said the approval process should be “a local decision with everyone knowing what is at stake.”

The failed June bill included a provision stating that public records requests can supersede nondisclosure agreements, a common tactic used by data center developers to keep plans secret.

While Husted backs data centers, Brown is silent on the prospect of a moratorium

Hyperscale data centers bring jobs to local communities, leading many prominent Ohio labor unions to support them.

Dorsey Hager, the executive secretary-treasurer of the Columbus-Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council, estimated in May that data centers make up at least 40% of work hours by union members.

The Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed Brown in March. The president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, another large union backing Brown’s election campaign, also defended data centers because of the jobs they create.

Democratic nominee for Ohio governor Amy Acton said she would not allow data centers into the state if they do not meet several requirements, including stipulations on union labor, environmental standards, and more. Brown did not respond to a question for this story asking for his reaction to the policy.

Andrew Gula, a volunteer who gathers signatures for Conserve Ohio’s proposed data center moratorium, said he hears a variety of opinions from people who work on building and powering AI data centers. Some have told him they feel like they’re helping automate others’ jobs, and for others, “it is what it is,” he said.

Baurichter, another volunteer for Conserve Ohio, lives in Higginsport, a small village on the Ohio River. He said support for data centers because of the jobs they create in rural Ohio reflects a “corporate-centric” mindset that puts people second.

The lack of support among top Ohio politicians for a moratorium has made him increasingly disillusioned with the political system, he said, adding that Conserve Ohio aims to “take things into our own hands” by collecting signatures for its 2027 ballot initiative.

Baurichter estimated that around 65% of Conserve Ohio’s members are conservative or voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. In Ohio’s U.S. Senate election this November, he said “any reasonable person” opposed to data centers would vote for the “lesser of two evils.”

“But that misses altogether that this is nothing but a perpetuation of the same dysfunction that this government has exhibited for decades, that people are waking up to,” he said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Derek Merrin, the Republican nominee and former state representative who is facing long-time Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur in the November election, voted for Ohio’s data center tax breaks when he was an Ohio state representative in 2017. Kaptur has spoken out against data centers for draining power and water from local communities, saying the companies should pay for that, not the citizens.

Ohio’s data centers have received $2.5 billion in state and local tax incentives between 2017 and 2024, according to a 2025 report by SRC EvalMetrics on behalf of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. 

Merrin, who served four terms as an Ohio state representative for the Toledo district from 2016 to 2024, did not respond to the Ohio Capital Journal’s questions for this story.

Merrin received a $1,000 political donation from the American Electric Power Ohio Committee for Responsible Government in 2021. AEP had received more than $6 million in data center tax breaks in Ohio as of September 2024, according to Policy Matters Ohio. 

Merrin received a $500 political donation from Windstream Holdings’ PAC in 2022. That same year, Windstream Holdings listed eight “key data center locations” in Ohio. 

One of the data center locations was operated by Cologix, which received more than $6 million in data center tax breaks as of September 2024, according to Policy Matters Ohio. 

Another one of Windstream’s Ohio data centers location was operated by CyrusOne, which received more than $5 million in data center break breaks as of September 2024, according to Policy Matters Ohio. 

Ohio has more than 200 data centers, the sixth-highest state in the country, according to Pew Research Center. Most of the data centers are in central Ohio. Cincinnati has 26 and Cleveland has 22, according to the Data Center Map. 

Ohioans are seeing increased electric bills. The average Ohio residential utility bills are projected to be about $800 for the summer — a 17% increase compared to last summer, according to a report by Third Way. 

Merrin lost a close race to Kaptur during the 2024 election and the Cook Political Report says Ohio’s 9th Congressional District race is a toss-up.

Kaptur raised concerns over data centers at the end of last year.

“How much more will our citizens be forced to pay for power and water?” Kaptur asked, speaking on the U.S. House floor. 

“They have a right to know. Will our building trades be true partners in economic growth or just temporary labor while facing higher utility bills at home? And how many permanent jobs will these largely opaque facilities actually provide? … The American people deserve to know how AI data centers will affect their communities.”

When the Ohio Capital Journal asked if Kaptur supports bringing more data centers to Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, Kaptur’s campaign spokesperson Kylie Blitzer responded.

“Economic development should strengthen our communities, not drain their resources, and put added burdens on our people.

“If data center companies want to do business here, they should pay their fair share — not force hardworking people and local municipalities to subsidize billions in tax breaks for wealthy CEOs and shareholders who can easily afford to pay their own way,” Blitzer said in an email. 

Ohio Democratic candidate for governor Amy Acton recently announced she supports a conditional moratorium on data centers “if requirements on costs, union labor, transparency, environmental standards, community benefit agreements, and development are not met,” she said in a statement.

Ohio Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s data center plan is three-fold.

“If a data center is built in your community, then (1) you will no longer have to pay for your home’s electricity, (2) you will pay lower property taxes, and (3) the data center will be required to abide by all air and water quality standards without exception, and we will take the necessary steps to protect Ohio’s fertile farmland,” he said in a statement.

Neither candidate has laid out exactly how they intend to accomplish their promises, whether that be using the limited powers of the governor’s office or some combination of working with the legislature, data center operators, utilities, or utility regulators.

Lawmakers at the Ohio Statehouse have yet to pass any data center legislation. 

Conserve Ohio, the grassroots organization behind a proposed constitutional amendment to ban new data centers, are collecting signatures to make the 2027 ballot.

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.

That plan relies heavily on states themselves, and the utilities they regulate, to force data centers to secure their own power supplies — or face the possibility of getting their power cut off during grid emergencies.

Last week, PJM’s board of managers sent proposals along these lines to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which must grant the grid operator permission before it can implement the new plan for its system, which serves about 67 million people from Virginia to Illinois. The multipart plan is PJM’s attempt to quiet down months of mounting pressure from state governors and the Trump administration to contain skyrocketing costs while staying within its regulatory limits.

“Historically, PJM has been very nervous to step into what it considered — or what are legally — the states’ rights,” said Julia Hoos, who leads coverage of Eastern U.S. power markets for Aurora Energy Research. But with its new proposals, PJM is ​“making a definitive request to the states to accomplish what it needs.”

PJM forecasts that data centers and other ​“large loads” will add 30 gigawatts to 34 gigawatts of new demand by the early 2030s and as much as 70 GW by 2038. Building enough new energy resources to meet that demand would push enormous costs onto utility customers.

State lawmakers and environmental and consumer advocates have been demanding that PJM instead require that new data centers get cut off from the grid when electricity demand is especially high, unless those facilities can pay for and build the resources required to keep them online.

But states, not PJM, are in charge of deciding which customers can connect to the grids operated by state-regulated utilities. That constraint played a role in PJM backing off last year’s proposal to create a ​“non-capacity-backed load” program to force new large loads to submit to being cut off during grid emergencies. Data center industry groups and other stakeholders warned that the plan could face legal challenges.

PJM’s new proposal, dubbed the Interim Resource Adequacy Service, or IRAS, largely re-creates that structure, only with states and utilities as the primary responsible parties, said Tom Rutigliano, senior advocate for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. In that sense, ​“it’s almost like they got to not too far off from where they started,” he said.

Data centers: Bring your own power or face cutoff 

The IRAS plan starts with an action within PJM’s authority: creating a registry of all large loads of at least 50 megawatts ​“by detailed site, service areas and whether they bring their own supply,” PJM explained. That registry will be used to determine how much new large load exists in each of PJM’s zones, which in turn determines how much capacity each zone requires.

IRAS would then give these large loads a chance to avoid being cut off during grid emergencies by securing their own capacity resources under a ​“bring your own new capacity” approach — which has the catchy acronym BYONC.

Under this approach, big power customers would sign bilateral contracts with sources of capacity, which can either supply more power or reduce power demand at the moments when summer heat waves and winter cold snaps push demand to its peak. Qualifying sources could include newly built or upgraded power plants, solar, and wind farms, battery projects, and demand-response aggregations and virtual power plants.

“If a large load shows up and has brought brand-new capacity to meet their needs, I think they’re good to go,” said Kent Chandler, a former chairman for the Kentucky Public Service Commission and a nonresident senior fellow at the free market–oriented think tank R Street Institute.

But starting in June 2027, those that can’t or won’t do that ​“will be subject to curtailment prior to deployment of Pre-Emergency Load Management,” PJM wrote. In other words, those data centers will be cut off to help the grid before other ​“pre-emergency” steps, such as triggering demand-response programs that pay customers to reduce their energy use.

Chandler said this aligns with PJM’s authority to ​“obligate the local utilities in the area to shed load for emergency and pre-emergency purposes” across their entire service territories. In contrast, ​“PJM cannot tell the utility which customers and which circuits to shed,” he said. ​“That is exclusively state jurisdiction under the Federal Power Act.”

In light of that constraint, this workaround may well be PJM’s ​“only defensible and sustainable way” to insulate customers from further utility bill spikes driven by its beleaguered energy capacity market, he said.

In a second proposal to FERC, PJM has also laid out a plan for how utilities can help data centers avoid curtailment by securing enough capacity resources in a new emergency ​“reliability backstop procurement” auction.

As recently as three weeks ago, it appeared this might be PJM’s primary approach to deal with the data center problem. A plan from utilities and the trade group Data Center Coalition was the sole proposal, out of dozens, to win a two-thirds vote from PJM stakeholders in June. That proposal would have potentially forced large loads to pay for the capacity they need.

But PJM’s board of directors didn’t use that exact plan. Instead, the board proposed a limited emergency auction to backfill the 6.8 GW shortfall in its last capacity auction. That may bring in enough new capacity for utilities to cover the power needs of proposed data centers, though it won’t force those data centers to pay for it.

That decision may also be based on PJM’s anticipation of legal challenges to stepping on state authority, said Jon Gordon, a director at clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United. ​“PJM stakeholders wanted PJM to take more responsibility for this,” he said, ​“but PJM decided they didn’t want to get into a jurisdictional fight.”

Can states and data centers pull it off? 

PJM’s latest proposals shift the pressure to state policymakers, regulators, and utilities. Some states have already taken action to try to control costs, but IRAS gives them a lot more work to do.

“We’ve been saying throughout this whole process that there is a role here for PJM, and there is a role here for the states,” Clara Summers, campaign manager for the Citizens Utility Board, an Illinois-based consumer-advocacy group, said during a July 30 webinar on the latest developments in PJM. But ​“no state that I know of yet is completely prepared.”

Summers cited some of the state-level policies that could lay the groundwork for making PJM’s IRAS plan a reality. In Illinois, her group is supporting the POWER Act, legislation that would require data centers to pay for clean energy to match their impacts on the grid, she said. A number of states in PJM have devised ​“large load tariffs” meant to tie grid and energy costs to the data centers responsible for them, and others are working on similar policies, she said.

But Summers said she hasn’t seen any state act as aggressively as her group and other consumer advocates feel is warranted. Prices in PJM’s capacity auction were again at a record high of $16.4 billion in June, matching those of the previous auction in December — and eight times more than they were a few years ago. Those costs are passed through to utility customers, driving up electricity rates and triggering public backlash.

Should FERC approve PJM’s proposals, it could mark the grid operator’s first ​“comprehensive proposal” for dealing with a number of persistent challenges, said Hoos of Aurora Energy Research. Those include ​“how to interconnect large load, how to solve for [capacity costs], and how to get long-term contracts for generators.”

That last part is vital. Despite the sky-high prices, PJM’s capacity auctions keep falling short of procuring enough capacity to meet peak demand in the coming years. PJM’s clogged-up process for bringing new energy projects online has also prevented new solar, wind, and batteries from replacing retiring fossil-fueled power plants. And while about 55 GW of proposed solar, battery, wind, and natural gas projects have cleared PJM’s interconnection queue, they still face permitting, financing, and grid upgrade hurdles.

Data center industry groups could challenge PJM’s proposals. But those tech giants have committed to a ​“ratepayer protection pledge” promoted by state governors and the Trump administration to ​“ensure the growth of data centers powering America’s AI dominance will not raise electricity bills for American households and businesses,” which complicates the politics of fighting those efforts.

If anything, forcing data centers to bring their own new capacity might help weed out those that can actually get built from those that can’t, Chandler said. Many parts of the grid in PJM and other data center hot spots simply can’t serve up the power that a full-scale buildout of forecasted large-load growth would require, he noted.

“Talking to data center folks, their commercial teams are engaged effectively 24–7 trying to find projects” that can meet their energy and capacity needs, he said. ​“Some of these guys have bigger cash piles that they can throw at the problem — and you’ll see folks more serious about it put the money behind it.”

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The practice of using electronic monitoring appears to only be happening in Springfield, Ohio, according to a half dozen advocates and immigration attorneys representing Haitians. 

Additionally, community leaders and lawyers from other cities with large Haitian immigrant populations such as Boston, Chicago and Miami have not seen the same tactic. One advocate has seen an increased presence of federal immigration agents in Brooklyn, New York, but so far no check-ins. The advocates and lawyers from Springfield said they do not know the exact number of Haitians under electronic monitoring. 

“It’s really just theater,” said Lynn Tramonte, the executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, an advocacy group. “They’re putting ankle monitors on people to make it look like they’re doing something, but it’s devastating for the people who are getting these placed on their ankle. They’re a constant reminder that you’re not free.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a detailed list of questions from States Newsroom regarding the use of ankle monitors. 

The use of ankle monitors for immigrants who have no criminal background and previously held legal status is a departure from standard practice. Typically an ankle monitor is used for immigrants with a criminal record, an order for deportation, or a missed appearance in immigration court. 

Springfield is home to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. The community became a focus of President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to conduct mass deportations in September 2024 when he falsely accused them of eating house pets and vowed to terminate their legal protections in order to deport them. 

The Supreme Court in June cleared the way for the Trump administration to end TPS for up to 350,000 Haitians. The case is now back at a lower court in the District of Columbia, which is litigating whether the government’s decision to end protections for Haitians was based on racial animus. 

Deportation or monitoring

Following the ruling, the DHS sent letters to Haitians in Springfield as early as July 22, said Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. States Newsroom has reviewed a copy of the letter that dozens of Haitians in Springfield received directing them to bring all their immigration documents to an appointment at an ICE office.

Then, on July 31, about 50 Haitians had check-in appointments at the Cincinnati ICE field office. At the appointments, they were pressured to accept $2,600 to self-deport or alternatively to wear an ankle monitor. 

All of them rejected the money, Jozef said. 

“Being deported to Haiti right now is a death sentence,” she said. 

Two days later, on Aug. 2, a dozen Haitians with TPS were summoned to check-ins and left with ankle monitors, said Katie Kersh, the managing attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to immigrants in Ohio.

“The people getting the ankle monitors are the people who are complying … and they’re getting this thing that we connote with criminality, which is an ankle monitor, when they’ve literally gotten that because they followed the orders of the call-in letter,” Kersh said.

The practice could ramp up following Wednesday’s order from a federal judge that lifted a stay in place since February that prevented the Trump administration from ending temporary protections for as many as 350,000 Haitians. 

On the same day the stay was lifted, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in an interview with NewsNation that the department was “going after (Haitians) right now.”

“We are giving them an opportunity to either leave on their own and we’ll help you, or we’ll arrest you and send you back,” he said. “Either way, you don’t have status inside this country anymore.”

Chaotic rollout

Immigration attorneys and advocates for Haitians in Ohio described to States Newsroom a disorganized scene at the ICE check-in appointments on July 31 and Aug. 2.

Kersh said she witnessed ICE officers taking out brand-new ankle monitors that weren’t charged. 

Instructions were only provided in English and Spanish, when the first language for many Haitians is usually Creole. A translator was nowhere to be found, she added, so she brought one along.

ICE personnel appeared unable to be flexible when issues arose. A Haitian woman who worked a night shift wouldn’t have time to charge the ankle monitor given to her Aug. 2, Kersh said.

An ICE officer told the woman “to just charge it while you’re sleeping,” and the woman, whom Kersh represented, again told the officer that she worked nights, Kersh said. 

Kersh said she tried to find other options for electronic monitoring for her clients, such as a daily facial recognition check-in or a wrist monitor, but said the immigration officials would not deviate.

She said an ICE officer told her that “we are being told from headquarters that we have to ankle monitor them specifically.” 

Permission to travel to court

Another issue is the ankle monitor’s 75-mile radius, Kersh said. 

Ohio’s only immigration court is located in Cleveland, 188 miles from Springfield. So a Haitian with an ankle monitor would first have to get permission from an ICE officer to travel to their court hearing. 

“It just sort of feels like the wheels are off the bus,” she said.

Getting to the appointments was its own hurdle. 

When Haitians received a letter directing them to attend ICE check-ins, many of them had to scramble to find a way to attend because of recently expired driver’s licenses. Ohio legislators passed a law that ties a valid driver’s license to immigration status.

Jozef said the Haitians fitted with ankle monitors last week were told by ICE officers that they would need to return several weeks later and were given no other information on what would happen at future check-ins.

“We are not sure what will happen to the people, but as of right now, the tactic that is being used is to have those call-ins to be able to control the movement of the people, and to be able to target them more easily,” Jozef said.

Longtime Trump goal

Revoking legal status for Haitians to open them up for removal has been a goal of Trump’s since his first administration, but he has ramped up the effort in his second term that began after he made mass deportations a central campaign theme. 

“They really, really, really, really want to target these people,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, the attorney who represented the Haitian TPS holders before the Supreme Court. 

During the first Trump administration, the government tried to end TPS for Haiti with an 18-month wind-down period, but courts blocked the termination. 

“We went from the first Trump administration giving these folks 18 months to get their affairs in order to now, their position is: We’re not even going to give you 32 days from the final judgment of the Supreme Court … as soon as the earliest possible time that we are legally allowed to start deporting people, that’s what we’re going to start doing,” Pipoly said.

After the Supreme Court’s decision in June, lower courts typically have a 32-day deadline to implement the high court’s ruling, meaning that the estimated date for the 6-3 decision regarding Haitians would go into effect July 27. But Haitians were already receiving letters from ICE dated July 22 to report for a check-in. 

16 years of protections

Congress created TPS in the 1990s as a way for nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, natural disasters or other destabilizing factors, to remain safely in the U.S. The status allows them to remain and work in the United States anywhere from six to 18 months. 

In order to qualify for the program, immigrants must go through a background check and pay application fees each renewal cycle. 

TPS does not provide a pathway to citizenship, but recipients can apply for another immigration status, such as asylum. 

Of the roughly 350,000 Haitians with TPS, about 200,000 of them are in the workforce, according to the immigration advocacy group FWD.us. Of that group, they work in industries like healthcare, retail, agriculture and manufacturing. 

Haiti was first granted TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. In 2021, President Joe Biden extended the protections after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. 

The State Department currently has a “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

While the Association is newly established, the community behind it is not. For years, Somalilanders in Ohio have organized cultural events, supported families, celebrated heritage, encouraged youth, and created networks to help community members succeed.

The launch creates a formal platform to expand that work and address the opportunities and challenges facing a growing community in Ohio.

As Ohio continues to grow and become more diverse, community-led organizations play an important role in helping families navigate the systems that impact their daily lives.

The Somaliland Ohio Association aims to support community members in areas such as education, workforce development, entrepreneurship, civic participation, and access to resources.

Education remains one of the community’s most important priorities. Many immigrant families face challenges understanding school systems, accessing educational opportunities, and finding resources that help children succeed.

By creating stronger networks between families, educators, and community leaders, the Association can help ensure that young people have the support they need to reach their full potential.

Small businesses are another important part of the Somaliland community’s contribution to Ohio. Like many immigrant communities, Somalilanders have built businesses, created jobs, and contributed to local economies.

The Association can help aspiring entrepreneurs by connecting them with information about business resources, financial literacy, licensing requirements, and opportunities available throughout Ohio.

Workforce integration is also an important part of building stronger communities. Many Somalilanders in Ohio work in essential industries, pursue professional careers, and contribute to the state’s economy.

Community organizations can help newcomers and established residents alike by providing connections, mentorship, and guidance that allow people to fully participate in Ohio’s workforce.

The launch of the Somaliland Ohio Association also represents an opportunity for greater civic engagement. A strong democracy depends on communities understanding how local and state government works and having a voice in decisions that affect their families.

The Association aims to encourage community members to become more engaged with schools, local government, and civic institutions throughout Ohio.

The Somaliland community’s story is part of the larger American story of immigrants building stronger communities while preserving their heritage.

Somalilanders have established communities in the United States for decades, contributing as professionals, entrepreneurs, workers, and citizens. In Ohio, they have become part of the state’s diverse fabric.

The official launch event brought together Somaliland elders, women, youth, community leaders, and guests from different backgrounds.

The presence of community partners, including Columbus City Council Member Mark Sigrist, reflected the importance of collaboration between local institutions and the diverse communities that make Ohio stronger.

The Association’s leadership team — President Faysal M. Suubane, Vice President Mohamed Fu.ad, Chief External Relations Officer Ibraahim Mohammad, and Treasurer Abdisalam Burale — represents a commitment to service and creating opportunities for future generations.

The Somaliland Ohio Association is not only about preserving culture. It is about building pathways to opportunity, strengthening civic participation, and ensuring that every member of Ohio’s growing communities has the resources and support needed to succeed.

Ohio’s future depends on communities working together. When immigrant communities are empowered to participate fully in education, business, civic life, and public conversations, the entire state benefits.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced the changes Thursday.

The federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs posted a notice that it intends to “significantly reduce regulatory requirements” for Head Start, effectively stripping the program of the unique features that have defined it since its creation in the mid 1960s.

That announcement came in late May and will likely go through a review process before becoming official in 2027.

The agency doesn’t specify what exactly it plans to cut, but reports indicate that it could be most of the program’s standards and guidelines. That may include low student-to-teacher ratios, minimum teacher qualifications, and stipulations that Head Start accept all income-eligible children regardless of whether they’re disabled or if their parents are citizens.

The agency also suggested it wants to shift Head Start funding to the states, although it didn’t specify how or when this would happen.

“The complete gutting of these goals ignores what we know really works in early childhood education,” said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Stanford School of Education who’s researched the topic. “If you’re going to spend money on something, wouldn’t you want it to have positive effects?”

The agency said in its announcement it expects the cuts to be “well-received by Head Start programs, since they will welcome reduced (administrative) burden and increased flexibility.”

It also said it would allow local Head Start programs to keep policies that “best address the needs of their communities.” But individual Head Start programs are unlikely to comply with standards that aren’t required, particularly if they’re facing pressure to serve more students, said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, a nonprofit that advocates for California’s 1,813 Head Start centers.

In the same announcement, the agency said it also planned to boost the nutrition and physical exercise components of Head Start, but didn’t offer further details.

‘It will be very different’

So far, Head Start has evaded major budget cuts, and the federal government doesn’t appear poised to slash funding now. A handful of California Head Start programs shuttered during the government shutdown last fall, but reopened when legislators returned to work.

But a reduction in standards would, eventually, have a significant impact, Cottrill said. It’s likely Head Start will have less qualified teachers, larger class sizes and fewer opportunities for parent involvement, she said.

“Those standards are what make Head Start a high quality program,” Cottrill said. “Head Start will still exist, but it will be very different from what it is today.”

Head Start, launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, is a federal childcare program that serves the country’s lowest-income families – those earning less than $33,000 a year for a family of four. The federal government issues grants directly to school districts, nonprofits or other organizations that run Head Start programs, sometimes in combination with other funding sources**.**

Head Start offers health screenings, meals, curriculum focused on literacy and math, and resources for parents such as parenting classes. Children who attend Head Start are more likely to go to college and hold professional jobs later in life, a 2022 study found.

In California, about 70,000 children are enrolled in Head Start. The number would be higher but programs have had to turn away families because they struggled to hire staff. Early childhood educators sometimes earn less than fast food workers and turnover is high, Cottrill noted.

Cost of losing disability screening

One Head Start standard that could be especially costly to eliminate is disability screening. Identifying and addressing disabilities such as dyslexia early can reduce the need for special education later on, potentially saving thousands of dollars, Stipek said.

Beth Meloy, an early childhood education consultant who worked on the federal government’s Head Start standards, said that simplifying and streamlining the standards is probably a good idea. Navigating too many standards may be overly burdensome for some local Head Start programs, she said.

But gutting them entirely would be a disaster, she said.

“Head Start is built around a mission of giving low-income children a path to sustained education and life outcomes,” Meloy said. “These changes lack the thoughtfulness that these children deserve.”

This story was originally published by CalMatters.

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 child endangerment case has recharged a national conversation around child marriage, which is defined by the United Nations as any marriage involving someone under age 18.

Earlier this year two Ohio state senators — one Democrat, one Republican — introduced a bill that would require Ohio residents to be at least 18 to get married. Current state law allows 17-year-olds to marry with court approval. The bill passed out of a Senate committee in June but didn’t get a full Senate vote before lawmakers adjourned for the summer.

Until the last decade, marriage under age 18 was legal in all 50 states. In 2018, Delaware and New Jersey became the first states to outright ban it. More states followed: Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Washington, D.C., Maine, Oregon, Missouri and most recently, Oklahoma, have banned it since 2020.

In May, Oklahoma passed a Republican-sponsored bill that removed all exceptions for a person under 18 to marry.

“Oklahoma children must be able to grow up free from coercion and exploitation, and it is our duty to guarantee those protections are enacted and enforced,” said Oklahoma state Sen. Warren Hamilton, a Republican who sponsored the bill, in a May statement.

Hamilton  said the law protects minors from forced marriage and helps prevent child trafficking and exploitation, ensuring “that no minor, even those who are close to adulthood, is placed in a marriage that puts their safety or well-being at risk.”

In 33 states, marriage under 18 is still allowed with varying restrictions, such as requiring parental consent or court approval for marriage involving someone aged 15-17. Only three states — California, Mississippi and New Mexico — do not specify a minimum age for marriage.

As of 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, Nevada, Idaho and Utah had the highest rates of child marriage, according to a 2025 study by Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that advocates for the end of child marriage. Nevada’s rate — 6 per 1,000 minors — was nearly twice that of Idaho and Utah. Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island had the lowest rates, at less than 0.2 per 1,000 minors. The U.S average was more than 2 per 1,000 girls and 0.31 per 1,000 boys.

Between 2000 and 2021, nearly 315,000 children under age 18 were legally wed, according to the group. Most of those were girls wed to adult men.

Advocates for ending child marriage point to research that has found lifelong consequences for those involved, including greater vulnerability to sexual and domestic violence, worse health outcomes, higher likelihood of dropping out of high school, greater risk of poverty and higher divorce rates.

A 2022 study from researchers at McGill University found that the proportion of child marriages that met the definition of a sex crime varied across states from 1% to more than 50%.

Oklahoma’s bipartisan bill sailed through the Senate earlier this year but encountered fierce opposition in the House, where it passed by a single vote.

Some Republican lawmakers argued that the measure amounted to government overreach and would increase the number of babies born out of wedlock. One Oklahoma Republican lawmaker who opposed the bill said it would take away parents’ rights to give permission for a teen to marry.

Republican lawmakers in states including Missouri have made similar arguments. One Missouri Republican legislator said he believed banning child marriage would result in more abortions, reported the Missouri Independent.

Oklahoma Democratic state Rep. Michelle McCane told her colleagues earlier this year that she gave birth at 15 and that her life would have been far different if her mother had let her marry the person she “picked in eighth grade.” She pointed out that married minors can’t legally seek a divorce or stay at a domestic violence shelter.

“I don’t know about you all, but please think back to who you picked in eighth, ninth, 10th grade, and I think many of you would be very disappointed to be saddled with that person for the rest of your life,” McCane said.

Children under 18 typically lack the legal rights that give adults agency in a marriage, such as being able to file for divorce or to file court actions in their own name.

While Republicans have been divided recently on the issue, underage marriage bans have drawn criticism from liberal groups in the past. The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood opposed a 2017 California bill to ban marriage before age 18, arguing it intruded on the fundamental rights of marriage.

This week, a bill in California that would raise the minimum marriage age to 18 with no exceptions is headed to a vote in the state Senate.

One of the advocates pushing for the bill this year in California is Courtney Stodden, a model and singer who, at age 16, married a 51-year-old actor.

“I cannot rewrite my childhood, but I can spend the rest of my life helping rewrite the future for children who deserve more freedom, more protection, and more choices than I had,” Stodden wrote on social media in a July post supporting the California bill.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

He said it in a comment on Click’s own campaign Facebook page Sunday afternoon.

“My focus is entirely on serving our community without partisan bias,” Roessner wrote. “Engaging with candidates and attending local events reflects standard civic participation, not an endorsement. I exercise independent judgment, decline to enter campaign disputes, and will not be endorsing any candidate in this race. Please adjust your messaging accordingly. Thank you.”

It is the second time in about two weeks that Roessner, who represents Tiffin’s 3rd Ward and chairs City Council’s Finance Committee, has said he did not endorse Click. The first came in a statement to TiffinOhio.net in late July, after Click’s campaign page posted a photo captioned: “I am honored to have the support of Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner.”

What Click posted

Roessner’s comment followed a post from the Click for Ohio page that expanded on the original claim rather than retreating from it.

“The Democrats have been peddling fake news for the last month that I somehow misled you about the support of Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner,” Click wrote. “A picture is worth a thousand words. No one forced him to wear my T-shirt and hat or to pass out my merch. In fact he was eager to do it. That is support.”

In July, Roessner told TiffinOhio.net that the shirt had been supplied by the campaign for a community event. Click’s post added the hat and the distribution of campaign merchandise, and characterized Roessner as eager.

Click also gave a public account of a private conversation he said the two men had afterward.

“He was upset with how they were misrepresenting him but hated conflict and confrontation,” Click wrote. “He asked me what to do. I told him that I could not tell him what to do other than to be honest. If he lets the fake blog, my opponent, or the Democrats bully him now, they will own him forever. But it was not my place to tell him what to do.”

Click continued: “He thanked me and said that he hated how they misrepresented him but he didn’t know what to do when Dylan Poe emailed him. He concluded that if they did it just one more time, he would make a statement. Kevin is free to support whoever he wishes. I did not twist his arm. This race does not hinge on who he supports but he needs to be honest and stand on integrity.”

Click’s post names TiffinOhio.net publisher Dylan Poe and refers to this outlet as “the fake blog.” TiffinOhio.net reported the original endorsement dispute in July and is a subject of the post described in this article.

By Click’s own account, then, Roessner had set a condition: one more time, and he would speak. Click posted. Roessner spoke.

What Roessner did not say

Roessner’s comment is a general statement about endorsements. It does not respond to Click’s specific new assertions.

He did not address the hat. He did not say whether he distributed campaign merchandise. He did not respond to Click’s characterization of him as “eager,” and he neither confirmed nor disputed Click’s account of their private conversation, including the statement Click attributed to him about what he would do if the matter came up again.

The photos attached to Click’s post show Roessner in a white T-shirt reading “America 250” and “Gary Click / State Rep.” and a white cap, carrying red drawstring bags and a red disc that appear to be campaign items.

In his July statement, Roessner said: “My goal was simply to participate in the historic 250th celebration alongside fellow community leaders, not to campaign—the shirt was offered solely for the event from a patriotic perspective.” He said then that he had no plans to make endorsements and would “continue to keep my voting choices personal.”

Roessner is listed among Tiffin’s elected officials on the Seneca County Republican Party’s website. Tiffin council seats are filed on a non-partisan basis under the city’s open primary system. He serves on council with Aaron Jones, the Democrat challenging Click in November.

The race

The post drew a mix of reactions and several comments, including one supporter who wrote, “Looks like support to me! Keep the fight up Gary.”

Click won his May Republican primary by fewer than 600 votes and lost Seneca County, where Roessner and Jones both serve on council. He faces Jones, an Army veteran and manufacturing supervisor, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in what would be his final term under Ohio’s term limits.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A national survey released July 30 by Politico and the polling firm Public First put voters in a hypothetical U.S. House race and told them a former partner had accused the Republican of sexual assault. Among self-identified MAGA voters who backed President Donald Trump in 2024, 66% said they would vote for that Republican anyway. Another 25% said they would sit the race out. Nine percent said they would vote for the Democrat.

That is the finding in full: an accusation of sexual assault moved fewer than one in 10 of Trump’s most committed supporters to the other party.

The loyalty gap widens the closer you get to Trump

The MAGA number is not the Republican number. Among Trump’s 2024 voters as a whole, including those who do not describe themselves as MAGA, support for the accused Republican dropped to 53%. Among Republican-leaning respondents generally, it fell to 42%, with 11% choosing the Democrat and 47% choosing neither.

The same pattern held on domestic violence. Seventy-two percent of MAGA voters said they would stay with a Republican accused of it, against 61% of Trump 2024 voters overall.

Democratic voters were more willing to walk. Forty percent of Kamala Harris’s 2024 voters said they would keep backing a Democrat accused of sexual assault, and 39% said the same about a Democrat accused of domestic violence. On those scenarios, more Harris voters said they would stay home or cross over than said they would stick with their own nominee.

The same accusation, judged twice

The survey then asked whether a candidate facing a given scandal ought to leave the race, and varied the candidate’s party.

Seventy-one percent of Republicans said a Democrat accused of sexual assault should drop out. Asked about a Republican accused of the identical thing, that figure fell to 52%. The accusation did not change. The party did, and 19 points of moral urgency went with it.

Democratic respondents showed a gap in the same direction, judging Republicans more harshly than Democrats, but a much smaller one — roughly 5 points.

Twelve scandals, no floor

Pollsters tested a dozen scenarios in all, running from the survivable to the disqualifying: exploiting tax loopholes, a DUI conviction, taking gifts from lobbyists, exaggerating a military record, concealing a terminal illness, posting antisemitic content, passing classified information to a foreign government, domestic violence, sexual assault.

Majorities of MAGA voters stayed with the Republican in every single one. Trump’s wider 2024 coalition also leaned toward staying in most scenarios, breaking only on antisemitic comments.

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told Politico the rules of the game have changed and Republican voters know it, describing modern politics as closer to “more UFC than civics class” than to a debate over conduct.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist who studies political scandal, framed the shift as a change in what scandal is for. It has stopped functioning as a verdict, he told Politico, and become one input among many in a partisan calculation.

What the poll can and cannot tell you

The survey measured stated intent in a hypothetical race with no name attached, which is a cleaner test of partisan reflex than of real-world behavior. Voters answering an abstraction are not weighing a specific candidate’s record, a specific opponent, or the specific facts of a specific allegation.

It also surveyed adults nationally rather than voters in any one district, and Politico noted that smaller subgroups, including the MAGA bloc that produced the headline number, carry higher margins of error than the sample as a whole.

What it does establish is a rank order, and the rank order is consistent across all 12 scenarios: the closer a voter sits to Trump, the less a scandal costs.

Ohio is running the live version

The poll was in the field July 12 to 15. Within three weeks, Ohio produced a real race that asks the same question.

U.S. Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, whose 7th Congressional District covers Cleveland’s western suburbs plus Medina, Wayne and Ashland counties, has spent August refusing calls from his own party to leave the ballot. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has alleged in court filings that he threw hot water on her, shoved her against a wall and held a gun to her head, and has raised concerns about their 2-year-old daughter’s fractured collarbone. Miller denies all of it and has sued Moreno for defamation. He has not been criminally charged; prosecutors declined to take the matter to a grand jury, citing insufficient admissible evidence, and a county child-welfare inquiry did not substantiate abuse.

Moreno is the daughter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who broke months of public silence on August 2 to say his former son-in-law fails any basic standard of character for office. Miller then asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him, and the panel opened a review on August 4 into whether he “may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use,” noting that opening a review does not itself indicate a violation occurred.

Asked that day on CNN whether he would resign or withdraw, Miller told Jake Tapper: “My answer to you, Jake, is no.” He let the withdrawal deadline pass and stayed on the November 3 ballot.

Two days later, Ohio’s other senator, Jon Husted, who is on the ballot himself this fall, called for Miller to resign. “Anyone who commits domestic violence is not fit to serve in Congress,” Husted wrote on X.

The contrast with the other party is a matter of record. When an ex-girlfriend accused Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner of sexual assault, an allegation he denies, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed him to withdraw, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pulled its money, and Platner left the race.

Ohio Republicans, facing the same category of allegation, are testing whether 66% is enough.

About the survey

The Politico poll was conducted online by Public First from July 12 to July 15, 2026, among 2,061 U.S. adults. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 2.16 percentage points. Subgroups carry higher margins of error. Figures may not total 100% because of rounding. The Hill reported the sexual assault findings on July 30.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Miller has said, repeatedly and on camera, that he is not doing it.

His former father-in-law, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, has said he is unfit for Congress. Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, has called on him to resign and leave the race. The House Ethics Committee has opened an investigation into whether he committed domestic violence. A local Republican group canceled a rally with him over threats.

One thing has not changed. Miller’s name is still listed as an endorser on the campaign website of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor.

As of Saturday, “Rep. Max Miller” appears under “Ohio Congressional Delegation” on Ramaswamy’s endorsements page, alongside U.S. Reps. Dave Taylor, Jim Jordan, Michael Rulli and Warren Davidson. Moreno and Husted are on the same page, under national leaders.

That page is not hard to edit. Ramaswamy’s campaign has proved it.

What Miller is accused of

Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, is the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno. In court filings and police reports, she has accused Miller of holding a gun to her head, throwing her against a wall and throwing hot water on her. The Ohio Capital Journal reports Miller faces accusations of abuse from three women.

Miller denies all of it. He has never been criminally charged in connection with the allegations. He has sued Emily Moreno for defamation; her lawyers have moved to dismiss the suit. In an Aug. 2 livestream on X, he acknowledged spraying her with the sink sprayer during a 2024 argument but said the water was not scalding and called the incident “horseplay.”

The couple’s 2-year-old daughter suffered a fractured collarbone and bruising. The cause was disputed and was investigated by police in February 2026. Emily Moreno did not accuse Miller of causing the injury but said she could not rule it out. Miller says the child was in a nanny’s care at the time. A child-welfare agency deemed two reports of abuse unsubstantiated. One report recorded an “indicated” finding of physical abuse, meaning investigators saw signs of abuse but lacked sufficient evidence and could not determine who caused it. A court has continued to grant Miller joint custody.

“No court, no agency has ever substantiated any allegation of abuse against me,” Miller said in the livestream. “No criminal charge has ever been filed against me.”

The document dump

Alongside that livestream, Miller posted a link to a folder of hundreds of messages, recordings and images from the divorce. It contained an unredacted photograph of his 2-year-old daughter, with her name visible.

Miller’s personal attorney, Aaron Minc, took responsibility two days later. “I am solely responsible for what happened,” Minc said in a statement, calling the inclusion completely unintentional and a mistake. He apologized to both families and to the child.

Emily Moreno’s attorney, Subodh Chandra, wrote that at least one image could be considered child sexual abuse material because the child’s genitals appeared visible, and demanded an explanation for how it happened. Minc disputed that description, telling Politico the images showed the child without a shirt and that no genitals were visible. He also said it was shameful for Moreno’s lawyers to make a public spectacle of the error.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, the child’s grandfather, did not accept the explanation.

“On Sunday, when he went out and did what he did, including releasing photos of my granddaughter completely naked, that now you have hundreds and thousands of psychotic human beings that have that, and to say ‘oops’ is grotesque,” Moreno told reporters. “This is truly the seventh level of hell.”

TiffinOhio.net reported the details of that release and the responses to it earlier this week.

Two senators, one answer

Moreno went public on Aug. 2, hours after the livestream.

“Out of concern for the safety of my family, I hoped to keep this matter private but Max Miller’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior has made that impossible,” he wrote. “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help. He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.”

He added: “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Husted, who had said a week earlier that he did not have information about the matter, reversed course Thursday.

“Anyone who commits domestic violence is not fit to serve in Congress,” Husted wrote. “The House Ethics Committee should thoroughly investigate any credible allegations, and any member found to have committed domestic violence should resign from Congress immediately.”

Husted stopped short of judging the allegations themselves. “Given everything they are facing, I do not see how a campaign for Congress benefits any of them,” he wrote in a statement reported by the Ohio Capital Journal. “I believe Max would be making the right decision to step aside as a candidate and resign from Congress to focus on what is in the best interest of his daughter.”

Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana called Miller a “degenerate sociopath.” Donovan O’Neil, state director of Americans for Prosperity-Ohio, called him unfit to serve. Gov. Mike DeWine called the allegations serious and troubling but said the decision belongs to voters. House Speaker Mike Johnson has declined to call for Miller to step down. President Donald Trump, asked whether Miller should resign, said he would look at it, and later told Miller by phone that the race would be tough.

Miller’s answer

Miller filed an ethics complaint against himself. The House Ethics Committee announced Tuesday it had opened an investigation into whether he “may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use.” TiffinOhio.net covered the committee’s announcement when it was made.

He then let the Wednesday deadline pass — the one that would have allowed Republicans to hold a special primary to replace him. TiffinOhio.net reported that deadline coming and going with no withdrawal.

“People have asked me, what are you going to do? Are you going to drop out of this race? Are you going to resign? Are you going to get out before the deadline?” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And my answer to you, Jake, is no.”

He has since loaned his campaign $1 million in two installments. “I am in this for the long haul,” he said. “I know there are some people that are concerned about my ability to win this race right now, but I don’t share that.”

The concern is measurable. A Co/efficient survey of 615 likely general-election voters in the district, conducted Aug. 5 and 6 with a margin of error of 3.94 points, put Democrat Brian Poindexter at 47 percent and Miller at 33. A survey from the previous week had the margin at five points. Miller’s unfavorable rating moved from 41 percent to 57 percent in that span. Awareness of the domestic violence allegations went from 53 percent to 86 percent.

Poindexter, a union ironworker and Brook Park city council member, has not softened. “No one credibly accused of holding a gun to his wife’s head and breaking their 2-year-old daughter’s collarbone belongs in the halls of power,” he said after the livestream. He told Politico the allegations are credible and outrageous, and that if they prove true, Miller should be in jail.

On Friday, the Strongsville GOP canceled a rally it had scheduled for Monday featuring Miller and U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. Chair Shannon Burns cited threats, writing that their number and nature had made the event untenable. The group blamed Miller’s political opponents.

The page Ramaswamy already knows how to change

Asked about Miller at the Ohio State Fair on Wednesday, Ramaswamy did not weigh in.

“I wish everybody’s family well,” he said. “My prayers are with the granddaughter who’s involved in that situation. And I think that is the most important thing.”

He did not say whether Miller should resign, whether Miller should leave the ballot, or whether the endorsement still stands. The Ohio Democratic Party has called on him to reject it.

The reason the endorsements page matters is that Ramaswamy’s campaign has already demonstrated how quickly it can be edited when reporting makes a name inconvenient.

In April, TiffinOhio.net reported that the campaign was promoting the endorsement of state Rep. Rodney Creech, who was accused by a minor female relative of climbing into bed with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, according to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents. Two days later, Creech’s name vanished from the page — along with that of state Rep. Gary Click. Web Archive snapshots captured both removals. The campaign announced nothing.

Click’s name reappeared roughly two hours after TiffinOhio.net documented the change. He then told followers on Facebook that reports of his removal were “greatly exaggerated,” a claim TiffinOhio.net checked against the archive.

Creech’s name was never restored. It is still absent from the page today, four months later.

So the campaign has a record on this. When reporting attached a cost to a name, the name came off within 48 hours. When the cost eased, another name went back on within two hours. Miller’s name has now survived a week that included a sitting senator calling him a danger to his own daughter, a second senator calling on him to resign, an ethics investigation, and the release of a nude photograph of a 2-year-old. TiffinOhio.net first reported that the endorsement remained live a week ago.

Creech is still on the ballot too

Creech offers the closest available comparison, and it is not a reassuring one for anyone expecting the party to police itself.

The allegations against him date to 2023 and became public in May 2025. According to Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation documents, a minor female relative said Creech climbed into bed and under the covers with her while erect and wearing only his underwear, along with other inappropriate touching. Creech acknowledged to investigators that he had gotten into bed with her in his underwear. He denied the sexual nature of the allegations and has called them “demonstrably false.”

The accuser is his daughter. In February 2026, she spoke publicly about the alleged conduct, and Creech responded on his official Facebook page by calling her account “textbook parental alienation” and saying she was trying to make him look bad.

The Preble County sheriff and the county prosecutor both recused themselves because of personal relationships with Creech, and BCI did not open its investigation until four months after the allegations were first reported. Clark County Prosecutor Daniel Driscoll, a Republican brought in as special prosecutor, closed the case in October 2024 without charges.

“After a full review I find that (Creech’s) behavior during the time of the investigation was concerning and suspicious,” Driscoll wrote. “However, the evidence falls short of the threshold needed for prosecution.” He added: “I find the statements of (the victim) to be persuasive but find no independent evidence to support their claims.”

House Speaker Matt Huffman stripped Creech of four committee assignments, removed him as chair of House Agriculture, and asked him to consider resigning. “I told him that this, on its face, was very serious and I did not think that he could fill out his duties effectively as a legislator,” Huffman said at the time.

Creech did not resign.

Nine months later, Huffman restored his committee seats, explaining that no state or local authorities had taken action, and signed a letter asking the Ohio Republican Party to endorse Creech for reelection. The party obliged. He won the May 5 Republican primary in House District 40, defeating former state Rep. J. Todd Smith 58 percent to 42 percent. No Democrat filed for the seat. He is the party’s nominee on the Nov. 3 ballot, facing a Democratic write-in candidate and Libertarian Joshua Umbaugh.

State Rep. Phil Plummer, who is now Creech’s rival in Republican politics, told BCI investigators that Creech’s comments about the allegations were appalling. Plummer and Creech both appeared on the same Ramaswamy endorsement graphic in March 2026.

TiffinOhio.net has tracked the full arc of the party’s reversal on Creech and the way his endorsement moved on and off Republican websites in the weeks before the primary.

Gary Click never walked away

The Republican who represents Tiffin and Fremont has been Creech’s legislative partner throughout.

In a June 2021 Facebook post celebrating House Resolution 57, state Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery) thanked “my good friend Rep. Rodney Creech” for photobombing his testimony.

It was not a one-off. Two months earlier, Click posted about House Bill 248: “What the Heck? Not on our watch! I’m with you Rodney Creech & Jennifer Sherwood Gross #HB248.” In July 2021 he commented on a Creech post: “My Grandparents used to take me there to see the Christmas lights each year! Great job Rep Creech!” In a December 2021 exchange he wrote “same here bud!” and “Rodney Creech you make my cut every day!”

Those posts predate the public release of the BCI records by more than three years. One item does not. In January 2025 — after the conduct BCI investigated, and after the special prosecutor closed the case — an inauguration-related Instagram caption named Creech alongside Click, state Rep. Thomas Hall and Vivek Ramaswamy.

What Click has not said, in the years since, is anything else. He has not publicly called on Creech to resign, has not criticized his conduct, and has not said whether his view of his good friend changed after the investigative records and the special prosecutor’s findings became public. No such statement appears in the endorsement materials, campaign statements or public reporting TiffinOhio.net has reviewed.

What is on the record is the opposite: a legislative partnership that continued after Huffman stripped Creech of every committee assignment and asked him to quit.

Click and Creech are both cosponsors of House Bill 649, the Child Care Fraud Prevention Act, which would require video surveillance of every licensed child care center in Ohio with live remote access for state officials and establish an online portal tracking child care attendance. Both are also cosponsors of House Bill 249, the Indecent Exposure Modernization Act, which its Republican sponsors described as a child protection measure and which critics call a public drag ban. The House passed it 63-30 on March 25. It is pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Three weeks after Creech dismissed his own daughter’s account as “textbook parental alienation,” Click introduced House Bill 693, the Affirming Families First Act, which would write a version of that same framework into Ohio statute. Parental alienation is a disputed concept that a 2023 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women described as unfounded and unscientific, and which is frequently raised in custody disputes to undercut abuse allegations.

Click has built his political brand on protecting children. He was the primary sponsor of House Bill 68, the law restricting gender-affirming care for minors. TiffinOhio.net has documented the pattern of the two men’s shared bills and shared endorsements since April.

Seneca County Democratic Party Chair Gina Grandillo raised the question publicly in July, noting that Creech admitted getting into bed with his minor daughter, that a Republican speaker stripped his committees and asked him to resign, and that Click has continued to campaign on child protection while saying nothing about it.

Why this reaches Seneca and Sandusky counties

Voters here do not cast ballots in the 7th Congressional District or in House District 40. They cast ballots for governor, and they cast ballots in House District 88, which covers all of Sandusky and Seneca counties.

Click is on Ramaswamy’s endorsements page today. His name came off it in April, two days after TiffinOhio.net reported on the Creech allegations, and went back on the same afternoon the outlet published the removal. Creech’s name never returned. Miller’s has not moved.

Ohioans vote Tuesday, Nov. 3. Ramaswamy faces Democrat Amy Acton in a race the Cook Political Report moved from Lean Republican to Toss Up in July.

An endorsements page is one of the cheapest things a campaign can change, and this campaign has changed it inside of two days when it wanted to. Whatever happens to Miller’s candidacy between now and 4 p.m. Monday, the page is a decision, and it is being made in public.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The newest television ad applies that method to a hip injury and a family joke about a television remote.

Acton’s campaign said Saturday that the spot recycles the medical-board and police-report material that has anchored three previous rounds of attacks, then adds two new items: a CDC communications training Acton missed, and a clip in which she says she cannot work her own TV remote. She missed the training, the campaign said, because she had fractured her hip and was in prescribed physical therapy. The remote-control line, it said, comes from a clip in which she describes being too consumed by the pandemic response to keep up with internet trends.

An operation with $25.8 million in the bank does not reach for a joke about a remote control because the joke is damaging.

“Vivek Ramaswamy and his allies are grasping at straws as they continue to spread desperate lies about Dr. Acton. No matter how hard he tries, Ramaswamy cannot escape the fact that his campaign is struggling under the weight of an unlikeable, billionaire scam artist who calls Ohioans ‘whiners,’ ‘lazy,’ and ‘mediocre,’ says Medicaid and Medicare are a ‘mistake,’ and proposes tax scams that would raise costs on working families,” said Acton campaign manager Philip Stein.

What the record actually holds

The load-bearing claim is the oldest one: that Acton shut Ohio’s schools and businesses during the pandemic. We examined that claim in June, when a V-PAC spot branded her “the liberal who shut down Ohio.”

Acton did sign the orders. She was director of the Ohio Department of Health from February 2019 to June 2020, and she signed under emergency authority the governor delegated to her. The person who held that authority has been unusually direct about who decided what.

“The decisions that were made during COVID, they were my decisions, so no one should blame someone else if they don’t like it. The buck stops with me,” Gov. Mike DeWine told NBC4 in December.

DeWine has since endorsed Ramaswamy. He has not withdrawn the statement. A super PAC supporting the candidate the governor endorsed is running ads that require the governor to be wrong about his own decisions.

The medical-board material has a similar shape. As we reported when the July spot went on the air, the “insufficient” characterization and the “excellent” one both appear to come from evaluator reference forms submitted with Acton’s 1994 licensure application — not from any finding by the State Medical Board of Ohio. Her campaign says the first covered a four-month partial internship and the second came three years later at the end of her residency. She has held an Ohio medical license since 1994.

The police-report material is real and it is also narrower than the ads suggest. Bexley officers responded to a reported domestic dispute at Acton’s home in August 2019. According to the report obtained by NBC News, Acton told officers she had been drinking and had taken prescription medication. Officers found no evidence of physical violence, classified the incident as a verbal argument, and made no arrest. No charges were filed. Her campaign says she had one drink and that the medications were long-prescribed.

None of the newer material touches her medical judgment or her conduct in office at all.

Who is paying, and what they get for it

V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims reported to the Federal Election Commission that it raised $41,774,674.63 for the 2026 cycle through June 30 and finished the quarter with $25,852,229.95 on hand.

Five donors account for $37 million of that — roughly 88 cents of every dollar. Pennsylvania investor Jeff Yass gave $20 million across three contributions. New York financier Ross Stevens gave $6 million. Ratmir Timashev, listing a Connecticut address, gave $5 million. Elon Musk, Ramaswamy’s former partner at the federal cost-cutting initiative, gave $5 million in May. William Ackman gave $1 million in June.

None of the five lists an Ohio address.

What they bought shows up in the same filings. V-PAC reported $8,211,114.50 in disbursements described as opposing Acton — every dollar of it inside June 2026, including a single $7,963,282 payment to Flexpoint Media on June 5. Over the same cycle it reported roughly $6 million in spending described as supporting Ramaswamy. The group has now spent more attacking his opponent in one month than it spent promoting him in the eighteen before it.

What Ohio’s own records don’t say

Here is the part that deserves more attention than it gets.

V-PAC is a federal committee spending on a state race. Ohio law permits that and attaches conditions. Under R.C. 3517.107, a federal political committee must register with the Secretary of State before it spends a dollar in an Ohio election, and must then file copies of the pages from its federal reports that itemize what it spent here.

Note what that captures and what it leaves out. The state gets the spending. It does not get the donors. An Ohioan who wants to know that a Pennsylvania investor supplied nearly half this operation’s money, or that Elon Musk wrote a $5 million check in May, will not find it in Ohio’s campaign finance system. That information lives in the federal filing only.

The statute contains one provision that would surface donor names at the state level, and it does not reach this case. It applies to contributors who are Ohio residents. None of the five men who supplied 88 cents of every V-PAC dollar lives in Ohio.

Then there is what the state record does with the spending it does capture. Ohio’s file on V-PAC lists $14,057,771.16 in Ohio-related expenditures across four reports. Just over $10 million of that — including the $7,963,282 Flexpoint Media payment on June 5, the largest single line in the file — appears with the purpose field blank. The federal version of that same transaction describes it plainly: media opposing Amy Acton.

The change is easy to date. Every Ohio entry through June 17, 2025 carries a stated purpose, most of them some variation of support for Ramaswamy. Every entry from July 17, 2025 forward is blank. The switch happened months before the anti-Acton buy, and it covers all of it.

Whether that reflects what the committee submitted or what the state’s system retains is not clear from the records themselves. What is clear is the result: a voter reading Ohio’s own database sees eight million dollars leaving a super PAC in June with nothing indicating it was spent attacking a candidate for governor.

The federal side offers no faster route. V-PAC has filed no independent expenditure reports with the FEC this cycle — the near-real-time disclosures that would apply if it were spending against a candidate for federal office. Because Ohio ties its deadline to the federal one, both records update on the same day: October 15, for the quarter covering July, August and September. Nineteen days before the election.

Ohio voters will watch two and a half more months of advertising before either filing shows what it cost.

Why northwest Ohio should care about a Columbus press release

Seneca County will not decide this race, but it will be counted in it. The Cook Political Report moved the governor’s contest from Lean Republican to Toss Up on Friday, July 10, and polling since has shown the two candidates within a point or two of each other. In a race that close, a few thousand votes across a handful of rural counties is the whole margin.

Those votes are being courted almost entirely through paid television, funded by five men who do not live here, in a race where the state’s own public record does not say what the ads were for.

Ramaswamy said of Acton in June, after the first V-PAC ad aired, that her handling of the pandemic “disqualifies her.” His allies have now spent $8.2 million making that argument, and the Republican governor who actually made the decisions has said, on the record and more than once, that they were his.

The ads do not have to be false to be misleading. They only have to leave things out. So far, that has been enough.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

State Rep. D.J. Swearingen, R-Huron, delivered a letter to the Erie County Board of Elections on Tuesday, Aug. 4, withdrawing his candidacy for a fourth term in Ohio House District 89. Swearingen, who has held the seat since 2019, told the Ohio Capital Journal he is being considered for a new role that appears to involve the federal government, and that pursuing it while asking voters for another term would not have been fair to them.

His exit handed the choice of a replacement to a body most voters in the district have never heard of.

How six people came to hold the pen

Because House District 89 spans more than one county but fewer than all of them, section 3513.31 of the Ohio Revised Code hands the decision to a district committee made up of the chairperson and the secretary of each county Republican central committee in the district. Erie, Ottawa and Huron each get two seats. Six votes total.

The math is worth sitting with. Erie County had 75,622 residents at the 2020 census. Ottawa had 40,364. Under this statute, they carry equal weight. A majority of the members present can name the nominee, which means as few as four people showing up and three of them agreeing could settle who appears on the ballot for a district of roughly 175,000 people.

The law also designates who convenes the meeting: the chairperson of the county central committee in the most populous county in the district. That is Erie County. And the chairman of the Erie County Republican Party is 29-year-old Caleb Stidham, who is also the sitting Erie County treasurer.

Stidham is one of the people applying for the seat.

Three applicants, one of them a voter

The Huron County Republican Party said in a public post that members met at noon Friday, Aug. 7, and heard from Swearingen and from three people willing to be placed on the ballot: Ottawa County Clerk of Courts Christopher Enoch, an attorney and volunteer firefighter and EMT; Stidham; and Ottawa County Auditor Jennifer Widmer. Each was given five minutes, followed by questions.

Of the three, only Stidham holds one of the six votes.

Enoch serves as vice chairman of the Ottawa County Republican Party, but the statute seats only the chair and the secretary — in Ottawa’s case, Chairman Jill Stinebaugh and Secretary Toni DeLuca. Widmer is a former Ottawa County Republican treasurer and holds no current office in the party. Neither will be in the room as a voting member. Stidham will.

Nothing about that is illegal. The statute assigns the convening role to the Erie chairman by population, not by choice, and it contains no recusal requirement. Ohio law is silent on whether a committee member may vote on his own application.

Who will actually preside Monday is unsettled. The Huron County party’s post said its central committee chair, Sven Stahl, and secretary, Mary Ann Lamb, will chair the meeting. Critics writing online have described Stidham as chairman of the committee. The statute says only that the Erie chairman calls the meeting and that “the chairperson and secretary of the meeting” certify the result to the Erie County Board of Elections — leaving the choice of who runs it to the committee itself.

The deadline is real, and it is Monday

Under the statute, the certification must reach the board of elections in the most populous county in the district no later than 4 p.m. on the 86th day before the general election. For the Nov. 3 general, that day is Sunday, Aug. 9. Because state offices are closed, the deadline rolls to Monday, Aug. 10 — a date the Ohio Secretary of State’s 2026 elections calendar lists explicitly.

The meeting is set for Monday afternoon, hours before the certification is due.

If the committee does not certify a name in time, Republicans have no candidate on the November ballot in a district Swearingen carried with 58% of the vote in 2024. The Democratic nominee, 21-year-old political newcomer Easton Retzke, would face no Republican opponent.

A second problem hiding inside the first

Two of the three applicants are already on the Nov. 3 ballot for county office. Widmer is the Republican nominee for Ottawa County auditor against Democrat Michelle Kreager. Enoch is the Republican nominee for the unexpired term as Ottawa County clerk of courts.

Ohio law does not let them do both. Under R.C. 3513.052, no person may seek a state office and a county office at the same election, including by being named to fill a vacancy. The Secretary of State’s candidate guide describes one exception: a timely withdrawal, which for these purposes means withdrawing before the vacancy-filling deadline itself. If either is selected Monday, they would have to abandon their county race — and Ottawa County Republicans would have to fill that ballot vacancy under the same 4 p.m. clock.

Stidham faces no such constraint. His treasurer’s term runs through December 2028, and he is not on this year’s ballot.

Conservatives are calling for a recusal

The scheduling and Stidham’s dual role have drawn public objections from the party’s right flank.

Conservative activist Cal Kildow wrote that “Ohio House District 89’s representation is in the process of being stolen from its constituents,” arguing that the meeting was pushed from Saturday to Monday afternoon to allow additional votes to be gathered, and that Stidham should not be running the process while asking the committee to put his own name on the ballot. Kildow endorsed Widmer.

Mark Pukita, a Dublin technology entrepreneur who ran in the 2022 Republican U.S. Senate primary, made a narrower version of the same argument. He wrote that the meeting was originally scheduled for Saturday and was moved because the Erie County party secretary was out of town, and that the effect was to preserve both of Erie County’s votes. Pukita was explicit about the limits of his complaint: “Is any of this illegal? No.” He added that it “creates the appearance of a glaring conflict of interest,” and said the obvious course would have been for Stidham to step aside once he became a candidate.

In the comment threads under those posts, other Republicans called on Stidham to recuse himself. Defenders responded that the process is spelled out in statute and is being followed.

Stephanie Stock, president of Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom, an anti-vaccine-mandate group, went further, telling supporters to email the committee’s members and urging them to back Widmer, Enoch or former state Rep. Steve Kraus instead. Stock’s group has a direct stake: Swearingen is a joint sponsor of House Bill 12, the Jeff, Dave, and Angie Patient Right to Try Act, which was referred to the House Health Committee in January 2025 and has not reached the floor. Stock’s post also asserted that Huffman is working to install Stidham. Her post offered no evidence for that claim, and it is separate from what TiffinOhio.net was told independently by a person familiar with the discussions.

Kraus held the 89th District seat for seven months in 2015 and was removed after a jury convicted him of theft, a fifth-degree felony carrying an elderly-victim specification. He was acquitted of breaking and entering. A court later sealed the conviction, and the Ohio Supreme Court cleared him to appear on the 2024 primary ballot, where Swearingen defeated him. Neither Kraus nor anyone else has confirmed he applied for the current vacancy; the Huron County party’s account named three applicants, and he was not among them.

The county next door already answered this question

Northwest Ohio Republicans faced an almost identical conflict four months ago and resolved it differently.

In April, the Sandusky County Republican Party Central Committee appointed its own chairman, Justin Smith, to a vacant county commissioner seat. Smith was barred from chairing that meeting because he was one of the candidates. Vice Chairman Ben Decker presided as acting chair specifically to avoid a conflict of interest. Smith won on the third ballot and now faces voters in November for a seat he holds by party appointment.

That arrangement was not required by statute either. It was a choice.

The Statehouse has a preference

Speaker of the House Matt Huffman and state Sen. Bill Reineke are privately urging committee members to back Stidham, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke to TiffinOhio.net on the condition of anonymity.

Reineke’s interest is not hard to trace. Stidham ran his 2020 Ohio Senate primary campaign against conservative activist Melissa Ackison — a race so vicious that pundits at the time called it the nastiest legislative primary in Ohio history.

Stidham was the public face of the attacks. He called Ackison’s candidacy “a sham from the very beginning” and issued a run of press releases targeting her surveying company, which had been fined $4,000 by a state licensing board. The campaign bought the domain MelissaAckison.com to host a site calling her “shameful” and “deceitful,” and circulated a photo labeling her supporters “REAL Democrats, REAL Criminals, FAKE Conservatives.” Stidham also announced that the campaign had turned over to authorities a secretly recorded audio clip from an Ackison strategy meeting; Ackison said the recording came from a woman the Reineke team had planted inside her campaign, calling it “completely criminal and disgusting.”

Ackison, for her part, called Reineke a “spoiled brat” and Stidham an “inept buffoon.” In a Facebook post attacking the campaign, she also mocked Stidham’s appearance, describing him as a campaign manager who “walks around with food smeared all over his shirt at every event.” She publicly accused him of making false and malicious statements about her; no record of a lawsuit against Stidham could be found. Reineke won the primary.

Six years later, Reineke is the sole declared candidate to become president of the Ohio Senate. Jerry Cirino, the Senate Finance chairman, abandoned his own bid in May and told Gongwer News Service he lacked the support of his Republican colleagues. Barring a challenger, Reineke takes the chamber’s top job when the next General Assembly convenes in January, replacing Rob McColley, who is term-limited and is running for lieutenant governor on Ramaswamy’s ticket. Reineke’s Senate district covers Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Stidham has also been among the more visible county chairs backing Ramaswamy for governor, hosting what the Erie County party called its largest event ever at a Sandusky resort.

None of that is disqualifying, and none of it is secret. What makes it matter is the arithmetic. Statehouse leaders have no vote on this committee. They do not need one. Persuading three of six county officers is a far smaller task than persuading a district of 175,000 people — and one of the six is the candidate.

The Democrat already has a campaign

Whoever the six certify Monday will step into a general election already under way.

Easton Retzke, the Democratic nominee, is a 21-year-old lifelong Sandusky resident and an Ohio State political science graduate who won his party’s nomination in the May primary. He has campaigned on public school funding and opposition to Ohio’s private school voucher expansion, on utility rates and the tax treatment of data centers, and on overhauling JobsOhio. He has been endorsed by the Ohio Federation of Teachers and by the UAW’s Tri-County CAP Council.

The district’s recent history is not encouraging for him. Swearingen took 58% of the vote in 2024. In 2022 he defeated Jim Obergefell — the Sandusky native and named plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, who came into the race with national name recognition and national fundraising.

What has changed is the calendar. Retzke has spent the summer campaigning as a nominee. The Republican who emerges from Monday’s meeting will have roughly 12 weeks to assemble a general election campaign, without having faced a single voter in the district — and, if the objections of the last several days are any measure, without the united support of the party that picked him.

What voters get to decide

Whoever the six certify Monday will appear on the ballot as the Republican nominee and, in a district that has not elected a Democrat to this seat in years, is the heavy favorite to win in November. Voters in Erie, Ottawa and Huron counties will get a say in the general election. They will have no say in the choice that effectively makes it — and neither will the Republicans among them who turned out to vote in May’s primary.

Swearingen, announcing his exit, framed his own decision around exactly that principle. Voters of the district, he said, “deserve to have a voice in voting for a Republican nominee” who will serve a full term.

Six people will make that choice for them Monday afternoon.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It was not the first time a Click claim collapsed under a document.

Since February, five separate public claims by Click — a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and former community theater actor who quietly stepped down from his church in 2025 — have been contradicted by records or disputed on the record by the person or organization they described. The contradicting evidence in each case was ordinary and checkable: a church website, an internet archive snapshot, a nonprofit board’s own calendar, a councilman’s statement, the state’s campaign finance database.

What connects them is not the claims. It is what happens next. In four of the five, Click disputed the reporting, reframed it, or left the post standing. Friday was the exception — and even then, the correction named none of the three people the original post named.

February: the church website

TiffinOhio.net reported on Monday, Feb. 16, that Click had stepped down as pastor of Fremont Baptist Temple in 2025, a role he had held for 19 years, with no public announcement identified. At the time of publication the church’s website still listed him in active leadership.

Click disputed the report on social media within hours, then gave an interview to a local newspaper days later. The church website was updated only after the story ran.

His own official Ohio House biography stated that he “served through 2025” and had “recently stepped down and assumed the honorary title of pastor Emeritus.”

March: the League of Women Voters calendar

Click did not attend the League of Women Voters of the Tiffin Area candidates night on Wednesday, March 18. Afterward he wrote on Facebook that the organization had “boxed me and others out” by scheduling the forum on a day the Ohio House was in session. He described the event as something that “resembled what it would look like if the Democrat blog Tiffin dot net had a podcast.”

“Fake News with a dash of rumors and liberal, unverified Click bashing all day long,” he wrote. “Voters are smarter than that.”

The League’s board answered with a timeline. The event had been scheduled in the summer of 2025. Click was invited by email and did not respond. He was personally re-invited at a public event on Feb. 21. He was notified on March 9 that both of his opponents had confirmed. He did not respond until the morning of the forum, to say he would not attend.

The board also said Click had misdescribed a redistricting lawsuit, noting it was brought by the state League chapter against the state government rather than against the Republican Party, and that the Tiffin chapter had no part in it.

April: the archive snapshots

TiffinOhio.net reported on Monday, April 13, that Click’s name had been removed from Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial endorsements page. Web Archive snapshots showed his name present on Feb. 20 and gone by April 11. Roughly two hours after publication, it reappeared.

Click responded by posting a screenshot of himself back on the page and telling followers that “rumors that I have been removed from a list of endorsements Vivek Ramaswamy are greatly exaggerated” — a paraphrase of a line commonly attributed to Mark Twain, with a grinning emoji.

He did not address the archive snapshots, say who had removed his name, or say who had restored it.

July: the councilman

On Friday, July 3, Click’s campaign page posted a photo of two men in matching shirts reading “America 250” and “Gary Click / State Rep.” The caption: “I am honored to have the support of Tiffin City Councilman Kevin Roessner.”

Roessner, who represents Tiffin’s 3rd Ward, chairs the Finance Committee and is listed among the county’s elected officials by the Seneca County Republican Party, said he had not endorsed anyone — and that the shirt had come from the campaign.

“My goal was simply to participate in the historic 250th celebration alongside fellow community leaders, not to campaign—the shirt was offered solely for the event from a patriotic perspective,” Roessner told TiffinOhio.net. He said he would “continue to keep my voting choices personal.”

Roessner did not dispute that he appeared in the photo or wore the shirt, and the caption used the word “support” rather than “endorsement.” He reshared the post three days later with text that mentioned the anniversary celebration and made no reference to Click, the House race or endorsements.

The campaign post stood unedited for three weeks.

August: the filings

Click’s post last week asked followers to speculate about why Seneca County Democratic Party Chair Gina Grandillo, his Democratic opponent Aaron Jones and Fremont City Councilwoman Angie Ruiz “would have donated to my primary opponent.” Sharing it from his personal account, he added: “But D’s TOLD us that they were crossing over and now we know that they donated too.”

Eric Watson’s campaign finance filings show 104 contributions totaling $17,488.05. None came from Grandillo, Jones or Ruiz. Click’s own filings do not show them either. All three denied the claim.

The post came down. In its place:

“Correction: Because I do believe in a campaign based on facts rather than fiction, I will say that my prior post was made in error. However, my error was not inconsistent with posts such as this made during the primary. Nevertheless, if I make a mistake, I will admit it. The opposition, however, has been consistent with intentional misinformation, which I routinely ignore. That’s fine. I will not lower myself to that standard. I look forward to serving one more term in the House.”

Click attached a screenshot to the correction showing a genuine public post urging Democrats and independents to request Republican ballots in the May primary. That screenshot supports the crossover half of his original claim. It does not address the donation half, which is the part he retracted.

What isn’t on this list

Two frequently cited disputes are excluded here, for different reasons.

In April, Click accused Ohio Gun Owners executive director Chris Dorr of altering survey answers and of stalking female legislators in a parking garage. Dorr denied each allegation in a 28-minute video. TiffinOhio.net was unable to independently verify either Click’s allegations or Dorr’s denials, and an unresolved dispute is not evidence of anything.

Separately, less than a day after telling voters he wanted to “turn down the rhetoric” and that they would not see him “posting about” his opponents, Click returned to Facebook to brand Watson “the Arizona Kid.” Watson’s family has been in Seneca County since 1832; Click moved to Ohio from Indiana in 2006. That is a contradiction between what a candidate said he would do and what he did, which is a different thing from a claim a record disproves.

The pattern of deletion, though, recurs. On primary day in May, Click deleted a Facebook attack on state Rep. Jay Edwards over Edwards’ ties to convicted former Speaker Larry Householder. Click’s own 2019 campaign had paid for a Facebook ad defending House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout at the center of the $60 million bribery scheme Householder is serving 20 years for running.

The record voters have

A politician who gets something wrong and fixes it is doing what the job requires. Friday’s correction is the closest Click has come to that this year, and it is worth saying plainly that he made it voluntarily and quickly.

But the correction named no one. Grandillo, Jones and Ruiz were named in the accusation and are absent from the retraction, and none was offered an apology. The same post that admitted error accused “the opposition” of “intentional misinformation,” without an example.

In the other four cases, the record was corrected by someone else — a church updating its website, a nonprofit board publishing a timeline, an archive service that keeps snapshots whether or not anyone wants them, a councilman answering a reporter’s email.

Click survived his May primary by fewer than 600 votes and lost Seneca County to Watson, who has since declined to endorse him. He faces Jones, a Tiffin city councilman, Army veteran and manufacturing supervisor, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in what would be his final term under Ohio’s term limits.

Voters in Seneca and Sandusky counties will decide what the past six months are worth. The documents are public.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Blanche, the acting attorney general, won approval to take the role permanently after GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he would back him, a turning point for Blanche’s nomination push. The vote at about 4:30 a.m. Eastern was 50-49, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., absent due to health issues.

Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined all Democrats in opposing the confirmation of Blanche, Trump’s personal defense attorney before joining the government at the start of Trump’s second term. 

“I am deeply honored by the trust and confidence President Trump has placed in me to lead the Department of Justice as our great nation’s 88th Attorney General.  I am grateful to the Senate for staying late to complete this process. To the dedicated public servants of the Department of Justice, thank you for your work each day to uphold the law and keep our country safe,” Blanche said in a statement on social media following the vote. “God bless America.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., blasted Blanche’s confirmation.

“Senate Republicans have handed Trump an excuse on a silver platter to keep up his pervasive, breathtaking corruption,” he said in a statement.  “If you want to wipe out corruption, you can’t have the president’s personal attorney as the Attorney General. You don’t need a PhD in political science to know that.

“Todd Blanche has no intention of stopping Trump’s corruption. He advanced his career enabling it. Every senator who voted to confirm him has now branded themselves as an enabler, too.”

The Senate adjourned for its summer recess about an hour after the vote and will not return to regular session until Sept. 14.

Cassidy explanation

Cassidy, who has long clashed with Trump, said in a Friday floor speech his vote was not a reflection of that relationship, but about the importance of having a Senate-confirmed attorney general who had the backing of U.S. attorneys in Louisiana and former Attorney General Bill Barr.

“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this, but the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche,” he said. “It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump… All considered, I will vote for Mr. Blanche.”

Cassidy held the determinative vote on Blanche following Murkowski’s announcement earlier Friday she would oppose his confirmation. Collins had said earlier in the week she would vote against confirmation. 

Trump announced Blanche in June as his pick for the top role at the Justice Department, replacing Pam Bondi.

Cassidy alluded to his strained relationship with Trump. He voted to convict in Trump’s second impeachment trial that covered Trump’s conduct leading to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cassidy lost his primary race to a Trump-backed challenger this year.

“I have a history with Mr. Trump,” he said. “But that history does not matter one bit.”

Murkowski opposition

In a social media post, Murkowski — another Republican at whom Trump has leveled strong criticism, including as recently as a podcast interview published early Friday morning — said the country needed an attorney general able to “check the worst impulses of this administration,” and that she lacked confidence in Blanche to do that.

Cassidy seemed to hold a similar objective, but reached a different conclusion about Blanche’s ability.

Trump is often unwilling to take advice, Cassidy said, but a competent, Senate-confirmed attorney general with whom Trump has a close relationship might be better equipped than whoever else Trump would choose to run the department.

Cassidy said that in a recent conversation with Barr, who had his own clashes with the president during and after his time as attorney general in Trump’s first term, the former attorney general endorsed Blanche as someone who could “run the department as effectively as anyone can under President Trump.” 

“Some have called that faint praise,” Cassidy said. “I don’t think that it is. I think it is a reality.”

Trump has expanded presidential decision-making at the Department of Justice, which, at least since the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, has been viewed as operating independently from the White House.

Ultimately, the attorney general answers to the president, Cassidy said.

‘Slush fund’ concerns

Cassidy criticized Blanche’s role in creating a fund for “victims of lawfare,” including those convicted of Jan. 6-related charges, and in approving a settlement with the IRS that gave Trump and his family broad immunity from tax prosecution.

“Mr. Blanche showed poor judgment in approving the anti-weaponization slush fund and exempting the president from IRS audits,” Cassidy said.

Blanche acknowledged those “mistakes” and “made efforts to kill the slush fund,” Cassidy said.

Blanche wrote a memo this week that said the fund would not move forward and that the IRS agreement only applied retroactively, not to future prosecutions. That move was enough to win over Republican holdouts on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas.

Murkowski on Friday raised doubts that the fund would be dissolved if the Senate voted to confirm Blanche and loses leverage with the administration, but again, Cassidy appeared to reach a different conclusion.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, praised the confirmation vote and spoke in favor of Blanche’s nomination on the Senate floor.

“Beyond his obvious qualifications and successful track record, Blanche has demonstrated extraordinary patience, compassion and tenacity as he’s made his way through the gauntlet of the Senate’s advice and consent process,” Grassley said in a statement. “He’s been forthcoming and responsive to my colleagues and has proven himself to be a steadfast advocate for the rule of law. Today, the United States Senate voted to confirm Todd Blanche’s nomination and advance the safety and security of Americans nationwide.”  

Confirmation bestows legitimacy

Cassidy noted that Blanche did not need Senate approval, and that he could continue doing the job in an acting capacity.

But a major factor in voting to confirm Blanche was that people within the department viewed Senate confirmation as crucial to an attorney general’s influence.

“I am told that Senate confirmation is important in interactions with the president, with others in the Cabinet and is important to DOJ employees in general,” Cassidy said. “Being Senate-confirmed gives him greater leverage to push for things that should be pushed for.”

Cassidy also said he spoke to Louisiana U.S. Attorneys David Courcelle and Kurt Wall, who told him having a Senate-confirmed attorney general was important and that Blanche was more than capable. 

They praised Blanche for quickly providing resources when they asked, Cassidy said.

“I cannot overstate Mr. Walls’ and Mr. Courcelle’s support for Mr. Blanche,” he said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio’s ban on processed forms of kratom will remain in place after a Franklin County judge rejected a preliminary injunction Tuesday sought by some sellers of the drug. 

And with the federal government moving toward prohibition as well, the ruling could mean the end of the legal era for kratom, an increasingly popular drug marketed for purported medical benefits. 

Public health officials have dubbed kratom and its derivative products as “gas station heroin” given a flood of calls to poison control centers and people who say they became addicted or overdosed on it. 

Part of Common Pleas Judge Mark Serrott’s legal reasoning comes down to the “addictive effects” and “possibility for abuse” of kratom, an herbal drug that interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors and can produce a range of effects from stimulant to depressant pending the dosage. 

“[The Ohio Board of Pharmacy] followed the proper procedure in promulgating the rule, and its plain interpretation – while detrimental to plaintiff’s business interests – appears to be beneficial to the public in attempting to prevent the ill effects that may arise from abuse of products containing natural leaf kratom,” Serrott wrote. 

Serrott added that the industry’s own legal expert, a U.K. citizen, conceded on cross-examination that the sale of kratom in any form is banned in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe for public health reasons. 

His ruling keeps the Ohio Board of Pharmacy’s rule prohibiting the sale of processed kratom in place until trial. 

Botanic Tonics, a manufacturer of a popular kratom beverage that brought the lawsuit, said in a statement the company plans to appeal. It said studies show that its drink presents no “significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury when used as directed.”

What is kratom?

Gov. Mike DeWine, a religious conservative with a skeptical eye toward vices and public policy, last year began a push through his emergency rulemaking authority to restrict sales of all processed forms of kratom. This spans liquid, candy and pill products made from the plant. 

However, he said he still has “deep concerns” about sales of kratom as a raw plant material and has sought prohibition through the traditional rulemaking process, though that hasn’t passed or taken formal effect. 

Public health experts have watched with alarm as sales of kratom have surged, as have reports of addiction and withdrawal symptoms among its customers. New research from the CDC found that poison control centers nationally reported about 3,400 exposure reports last year, a 1200% increase from 2015. In roughly the same time frame, the Ohio Department of Health says kratom has contributed to 200 unintentional, fatal overdoses. 

Some critics have taken to the courts. A Franklin County woman filed a wrongful death lawsuit in April against kratom companies in Ohio after her son fatally overdosed. The case is ongoing and the companies haven’t admitted to wrongdoing. A Florida woman recently won an $11 million settlement in a similar lawsuit. The family of a deceased Washington state man who overdosed won a $2.5 million jury award in 2023. And Botanic Tonics, a prominent company named in the regulatory lawsuit, recently paid an $8.75 million class action settlement in California.

Much of the legal arguments have revolved around a product called “Feel Free,” made by Botanic Tonics, from kratom and kava root. Its marketing says it’s best used when you “want to feel more social, need a clean boost of energy, or need to lock in and focus.”

The fine print warns the tonic can become habit-forming and harmful to your health if consumed irresponsibly. 

“DO NOT USE if you have a history of substance abuse,” it states. “When consumed as directed, feel free CLASSIC has not been shown to cause any serious physical harm.”

State and federal governments pursuing kratom bans

Industry retailers and manufacturers said in their lawsuit challenging Ohio’s ban that kratom has historically been used to treat headaches, diarrhea, insomnia, anxiety, and opioid use withdrawal. They tried several legal arguments, including that the Board of Pharmacy’s rules were impermissibly vague and that the agency acted outside the scope of its authority. All failed. 

Several plaintiffs dropped their lawsuit once the Board of Pharmacy clarified that the new rule only applies to “synthetic” uses of kratom and not the plant in its raw form. 

Botanic Tonics and Krazy Daze, the remaining plaintiffs, will still have an opportunity to make their case at trial, scheduled for June 2027, but Serrott’s ruling means the rule can stand until then. 

An attorney representing Krazy Daze didn’t return a phone call. 

The federal government may beat Ohio courts to the punch. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration last month began the bureaucratic process of scheduling kratom and related substances as a Schedule 1 substance, reserved for drugs with a high risk of abuse and no accepted medical use. Other such substances include heroin and LSD.  

In the meantime, states have taken different approaches around the drug. Six (Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Vermont, Connecticut and Louisiana) have effectively banned it outright, according to research from the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University. 

About twenty others have taken a more permissive approach, allowing the sale of kratom with age restrictions ranging from 18 to 21, labeling requirements and other consumer protections.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In the original post to his campaign Facebook page, Click, a Vickery Republican, former community theater actor and former fundamentalist Baptist preacher wrote: “Just curious: does anyone want to speculate why the Seneca County Democratic Party Chair, Gina Grandillo, my Democratic opponent [Aaron Jones], Democratic City Councilwoman Angie Ruiz, and other Dems would have donated to my primary opponent, while other Dems were encouraging Democrats to cross over and vote for him in the primary? I have a clue and it wasn’t because they agreed on policy!”

Sharing it from his personal account, Click added: “But D’s TOLD us that they were crossing over and now we know that they donated too. They don’t believe in their candidate or they would not stoop to such low measures.” He closed with the hashtag #DesperateDemocrats.

The post was no longer visible on the Click for Ohio page a short time later. In its place, Click wrote:

“Correction: Because I do believe in a campaign based on facts rather than fiction, I will say that my prior post was made in error. However, my error was not inconsistent with posts such as this made during the primary. Nevertheless, if I make a mistake, I will admit it. The opposition, however, has been consistent with intentional misinformation, which I routinely ignore. That’s fine. I will not lower myself to that standard. I look forward to serving one more term in the House. Thank you and God bless.”

Click has repeatedly accused the Seneca County Democratic Party of spreading “misinformation” about his record, but has not yet produced any examples.

He shared the correction from his personal account with the comment: “Leadership is not the absence of mistakes but ensuring that they are honest mistakes and correcting them when discovered.”

Neither the correction nor the personal post names Grandillo, Jones or Ruiz, and neither offers an apology to them.

A TiffinOhio.net review of the contributions Eric Watson’s committee reported to the Ohio Secretary of State found no donation from Grandillo, from Democratic nominee Aaron Jones, or from Fremont City Councilwoman Angie Ruiz, a Democrat.

Watson’s reports cover 104 contributions from 72 donors totaling $17,488.05, dated from Oct. 31, 2025 through June 5, 2026, and span his 2025 annual, pre-primary and post-primary filings. Ninety-seven of the 104 contributions came from Ohio addresses. Roughly $12,570 came from communities inside the 88th District.

None of the three names Click used appears in any of them. They do not appear in Click’s own contribution filings either, which run from 2019 through his June post-primary report and list 1,055 contributions.

“Eric Watson’s campaign finance reports are public. Aaron Jones isn’t on them, I’m not on them, and Angie Ruiz isn’t on them — not one dollar, from any of the three people Representative Click named,” Seneca County Democratic Party Chair Gina Grandillo said in a statement. “He could have checked in ten minutes before he posted, and he didn’t.”

Grandillo added: “Incumbents who feel secure don’t spend August posting about their opponents. This just adds to a concerning pattern of Gary Click lying to his constituents.”

Watson, who lost the May 5 primary by 599 votes and has since said he is moving out of the district, rejected the accusation and questioned its internal logic.

“Gary Click loves to lie, but the math doesn’t add up here,” Watson said. “The number of voters who pulled a Democratic ballot in the district actually increased this year. If Democrats were supposedly crossing over in significant numbers to vote for me in the Republican primary, you’d expect the opposite. Gary is also publicly claiming that specific Democratic officials donated to my campaign. None of the people he named ever contributed to my campaign committee. The campaign-finance reports are public. Anyone—including Gary—can look at them.”

Watson also pointed to how Click characterized him during the primary. “Throughout the campaign, Gary portrayed me as ‘further to the right and in the ditch,’” he said. “Now he wants everyone to believe Democrats were secretly trying to help elect the candidate he claimed was even further to the right than himself. Which is it?”

The phrasing tracks. Click told the Fremont News-Messenger during the race: “You move to the right of Gary Click and you’re in the ditch.”

Watson attributed his showing to Republican voters. “The truth is much simpler: nearly half of Republican primary voters rejected Gary Click,” he said. “We took Seneca County strongly, beating an incumbent state representative in his own backyard, and came within roughly 600 votes of defeating him districtwide despite being massively outspent. That wasn’t Democrats—it was Republican voters who wanted a change. Instead of confronting why so many Republicans rejected him, Gary would rather invent a story and blame Democrats.”

On that last point, the filings show a wider money gap than a spending gap. Click’s committee reported $69,461.37 in contributions in 2026 through primary day, about four times the $17,488.05 Watson reported across all of his filings. Committee spending was closer: $53,662.58 for Click through May 5 against $42,128.99 for Watson. Of Click’s total, $45,000 consisted of two donations to the Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee, the chamber’s Republican caucus fund — $25,000 on Jan. 21 and $20,000 on April 23. Excluding those transfers, Click’s committee reported $8,662.58 in other spending through primary day. OHROC reported contributing $38,611.62 back to Click’s committee between March 9 and April 22.

Jones, a Tiffin city councilman, Army veteran and manufacturing supervisor, was brief.

“I didn’t donate to any Republican primary campaign, and the public filings show that,” Jones said. “I’m spending my time knocking doors and listening to what people here are worried about: their electric bills, their property taxes, their schools. That’s what I’m going to keep doing.”

Not the first disputed claim

Friday’s correction is the first time this year Click has publicly retracted a claim about a named local figure. It is not the first time one of his claims has been disputed by the person or organization it described.

In July, a Tiffin city councilman said Click had falsely portrayed him as a supporter. Kevin Roessner, a fellow Republican, said he had only worn a campaign-supplied shirt at a Tiffin 250th anniversary celebration and had never endorsed Click. The campaign post stood unedited for three weeks.

In April, after TiffinOhio.net documented that Click had been removed from Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial endorsements page, Click told followers the reports were “greatly exaggerated” and posted a screenshot of himself back on the page. Web Archive snapshots showed otherwise: his name was present on Feb. 20, absent on April 11, and restored roughly two hours after this outlet published. He did not address the archive evidence, say who removed his name, or say who restored it.

In March, the League of Women Voters of the Tiffin Area issued a statement rebutting Click’s Facebook claim that the group had “boxed me and others out” of a District 88 candidates night. The board said the March 18 event was scheduled in summer 2025, that Click was invited by email, personally re-invited at a public event on Feb. 21, and notified on March 9 that both of his opponents had confirmed — and that he did not respond until the morning of the forum to say he would not attend. The board also said Click had misrepresented a redistricting lawsuit, which was filed by the state League chapter against the state government, not against the Republican Party, and in which the Tiffin chapter had no involvement.

And in February, Click disputed this outlet’s reporting that he had quietly stepped down as pastor of Fremont Baptist Temple. No public announcement of the transition has been identified, and the church updated its website only after the story published. Click later said he became pastor emeritus at the end of March 2025.

In each of those cases, Click disputed the reporting or let the claim stand. Friday was the first time he took a post down.

The turnout numbers

Watson’s turnout argument echoes figures the Seneca County Democratic Party itself released after the primary. In a May 7 statement, the party said Democratic ballot requests in Seneca County rose 43 percent over the 2022 midterm primary while Republican requests rose 3 percent, and said Republican turnout in the county declined by roughly 300 voters.

Click finished the primary with 6,859 votes to Watson’s 6,260, according to unofficial returns from the Sandusky and Seneca county boards of elections. He carried his home county of Sandusky by 15.4 points and lost Seneca County, where Jones lives, by 8.5 points.

Click faces Jones in the Nov. 3 general election in the 88th District, which covers Seneca and Sandusky counties.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump said the Supreme Court ruling was “an unfortunate decision” so “we’re making adjustments” to birthright citizenship, which is included in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. 

Both executive orders are likely to face swift legal challenges, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court again.

The Supreme Court in June rejected Trump’s executive order, signed on the first day of his second term, that would deny citizenship to children born to parents who either do not have legal status, or hold temporary legal visas. The justices ruled the executive order violated the 14th Amendment.

One of Thursday’s executive orders seeks to expand the narrow exemptions to birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. 

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, gave an overview of the orders in the Oval Office. 

The Trump administration wants to deny citizenship to children born to parents who belong to groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations; children born to foreign diplomatic staff; and children born in U.S. territories where Congress has not passed a law granting citizenship, which is only American Samoa.

The children of diplomats are already exempt from birthright citizenship, but the executive order aims to expand that exemption to include the children of noncitizen staff. 

Historically, the other exemption to birthright citizenship was meant to apply to Indigenous people who resided in Native nations — part of their tribal governments until Congress in 1924 specifically passed the Indian Citizenship Act to grant birthright citizenship to Indigenous people, regardless of their residence in Native nations. 

Guidance in 30 days

Thursday’s order directs all executive departments and agencies to issue public guidance within 30 days on implementing the executive order.

Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, in which nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. 

The text of the clause in the 14th Amendment is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Birth tourism

The second executive order aims to end birth tourism, which is a term for the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the U.S. only for the purpose of giving birth in order to obtain citizenship for the baby. 

The order directs the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to adopt rules and guidelines to put the order in place. 

Some of those actions can include denying visas to foreign nationals suspected of coming to the U.S. for the sole purpose of having a child.

“If you’re telling a consular officer you’re here as a tourist, but your true purpose and intent is to go to a baby mill and give birth and try to mint an American citizen while you’re here, then you’re committing fraud against the American government,” Miller said. 

The most expansive estimates from U.S. Census Bureau data shows that about 26,000 babies are born annually through birth tourism, compared to more than 3.5 million U.S. births each year overall, according to the Migration Policy Institute, which is a think tank that tracks migration.

‘It’s the same Constitution’

In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that birthright citizenship incentivized pregnant women to travel to the United States for the purpose of obtaining citizenship. 

The justices pushed back and called the issue of birth tourism “marginal” and pressed Sauer for an answer of how frequently it happened. 

Sauer said “no one knows for sure,” and argued that “we’re in a new world now, … where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument. 

“Well, it’s a new world, it’s the same Constitution,” Roberts said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

That leaves Trump depending on one Republican senator to vote for Blanche: Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, who lost his primary this year after Trump endorsed a challenger following years of strained relations.

Murkowski, a key moderate voice in the Senate, wrote in a social media post that she opposed several policies the Justice Department has undertaken during President Donald Trump’s second term. 

Blanche has been either the DOJ’s No. 2 official or the acting attorney general since Trump returned to the White House, and she cast doubt that he would be the leader to reverse those policies.

“The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” she wrote. “I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”

In an interview posted to YouTube early Friday morning, Trump disparaged Murkowski.

“I’m against Murkowski,” he said on Punchbowl News’ “Fly Out Day” podcast. “I do more for Alaska than any president in history. No president’s done for Alaska what I’ve done. She’s not good.”

Senate math

Murkwoski’s statement puts increased pressure on the last remaining Senate Republican holdout on Blanche: Cassidy. 

With Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell away from Washington recovering from a fall, 49 Republicans are expected to support Blanche’s confirmation. Murkowksi and Susan Collins of Maine have said they will vote no. 

Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego, who has missed votes this week attending to a family matter, said he would return for a vote, presumably against, on Blanche.

That leaves only Cassidy.

Blanche’s confirmation took a major step this week when the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced it on a party-line vote. 

That came only after Blanche wrote a memo that a nearly $1.8 billion fund for victims of political prosecutions — widely expected to benefit people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and an IRS immunity deal for Trump and his family would not go forward.

That commitment secured the support of Republicans Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has not scheduled a floor vote on Blanche’s confirmation. 

Murkowski’s objections

In a lengthy post Friday morning, Murkowksi thanked Blanche for visiting Alaska and for making “several noteworthy decisions” she said would help the state and nation.

But she raised a list of concerns about how the department has operated under his leadership.

“The politicization—even weaponization—of the Department did not start with this administration but has accelerated during it,” she wrote. “I take issue with the handling of the release of the Epstein files; the sweeping immunity protections granted to the President, his family, and their businesses; the statements that have been made to anti-abortion groups; and the repeated targeting of individuals ranging from former administration staff to sitting U.S. Senators.”

She also said she was not confident the letter dissolving the “anti-weaponization” fund would be effective.

“I am also keenly aware that the Department’s nearly $2-billion dollar slush fund—which likely would have rewarded January 6 protesters—is only off the table because this nomination is pending and the Senate has leverage,” she said. “Once we vote, that will end, and there is no telling what the future holds.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines to approve a resolution referring to the Justice Department charges that Fauci, a top public health official during the pandemic, violated a congressional subpoena when he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer any questions at a July 29 committee hearing.

Fauci asserted his Fifth Amendment right 111 times, even in response to Republicans’ questions about his tie color or the day of the week meant to test his strategy.

Chairman Rand Paul of Kentucky and other committee Republicans said Thursday that was a misuse of the privilege, in part because President Joe Biden issued a broad pardon to Fauci covering any conduct from 2014 to 2025.

“We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence,” Paul said.

Walking into a ‘trap’?

Democrats raised a host of objections to the contempt resolution.

They said, as Fauci argued during the hearing, that Paul sought to trap Fauci. Biden’s pardon of Fauci would not cover new misstatements to Congress, Sen. Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, said. 

“The goal was to wait for Dr. Fauci to make any kind of misstatement and then have a weaponized Department of Justice file criminal charges for that new statement that would not have been covered by the pardon, leaving Dr. Fauci little choice but to invoke his constitutional right to not walk directly into a trap,” Hassan said.

Fauci said during an opening statement at last week’s hearing that he believed “any reasonable person” would conclude that Paul’s objective was to trip him up.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something — anything — that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars,’” he said. 

Weakening future investigations

Ranking Democrat Gary Peters of Michigan also said the partisan vote undermined the panel’s legitimacy.

He took particular exception to Paul’s intention to send the resolution directly to federal prosecutors without gaining approval from the full Senate, which would require a bipartisan vote to meet the chamber’s 60-vote threshold.

“No individual senator and no committee speaks for the entire Senate,” he said. “Institutional powers belong to the full body. Allowing one chairman to unilaterally assert those powers would invite future chairs in both parties to bypass the Senate whenever they cannot secure the support of their colleagues.”

Future witnesses could use the vote to justify not appearing before congressional committees, Peters said.

Highly public role

The July 29 hearing was a departure for Fauci, who, as one of the nation’s most visible public health officials during the pandemic, spoke publicly about it on a daily basis for several months. 

He has testified before congressional committees two dozen times since January 2020 and had never declined to answer lawmaker questions before last week. 

Fauci was a member of the coronavirus task force during President Donald Trump’s first administration and a chief medical adviser on COVID-19 during Biden’s term. He headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under presidents of both parties for nearly four decades.

As the pandemic response turned increasingly political in the months following nationwide containment efforts in early 2020, Republicans became more critical of measures that caused significant economic problems.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who chaired the panel in 2020, said Thursday that learning what officials like Fauci knew at the time was key to understanding what led to the response he considered an overreaction.

“It’s been six years since the pandemic began,” he said. “We have not had a reckoning of what happened.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

But the chairman of its board is a lobbyist who represented Intel just as the board of which he was a member disbursed more than $2 million to the company as part of a package of grants for what is now a severely delayed megaproject.

The lobbyist, Josh Rubin, was being paid to promote Intel’s agenda to the governor’s office in September 2023 when Gov. Mike DeWine appointed him to the JobsOhio board, which he had also actively lobbied on Intel’s behalf as recently as a year earlier.

Earlier that year, JobsOhio had awarded the chipmaker a $25 million workforce-development grant before DeWine gave Rubin the top spot at Ohio’s controversial, quasi-private economic-development agency.

The workforce-development and other grants were part of a $150 million package JobsOhio pledged toward the Intel job. For its part, the state pledged more than $2 billion for the chip-making project.

Even after Rubin joined the JobsOhio board in September 2023, he and other members of his firm were paid by Intel to lobby DeWine, then-Lieutenant governor Jon Husted, and other executive agencies on the $20 billion project near New Albany, state lobbying disclosures show. 

That’s an arrangement that Paul Nick, executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission, said appeared to violate assurances that Rubin gave DeWine’s office before his appointment that his lobby firm would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio. 

Nick said that if Rubin were a state employee, it would be illegal for him to lobby for a company with business before the state. But because of JobsOhio’s legal status as a private nonprofit corporation, it’s exempt from Ohio ethics law, he said. 

Despite assuring DeWine that he and his firm would avoid all conflicts, Rubin and several partners renewed their annual registrations to lobby JobsOhio for Intel and other clients until the start of this year, when the registrations were terminated. 

All except one. In December, that partner renewed her registration to lobby JobsOhio through 2026.

Suspicions that Rubin’s lobbying might conflict with his role on the JobsOhio board have already been raised. Last month, John Kulewicz, the Democratic nominee for Ohio attorney general, asked the state inspector general to investigate whether Rubin’s representation of utility giant AEP conflicted with the fact that JobsOhio will soon be handing out $100 million to develop small-modular nuclear reactors.

JobsOhio denied that it did. Rubin didn’t respond to calls and emails for this story or a Capital Journal story about Kulewicz’s request.

JobsOhio also said that it has strong policies in place to ensure that board members recuse themselves from matters in which they might have a conflict.

A JobsOhio spokesperson said, “Any board member with an actual or possible conflict of interest on specific grant or loan proposals for a company must disclose it and… will recuse themselves from discussions and voting on such proposal.”

Questions of conflict

The revelations about dual roles come in a scandal-plagued state where megabusinesses have paid Capital Square insiders and then have gotten large sums from taxpayers and electricity ratepayers. 

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said Rubin’s presence atop JobsOhio only deepens suspicions about the organization’s transparency and freedom from conflict. 

Lobbyists are paid by corporate clients to help them get contracts and other considerations from the government. As chairman of the JobsOhio board, Rubin has a top decision-making role in an organization whose job is to distribute billions of what used to be taxpayer dollars to such businesses.

“Because JobsOhio is being run by a lobbyist, we have to question everything,” Turcer said. “I’m sure some of those development dollars were reasonably spent. But we have to question everything. And because there’s such a lack of transparency, we are left imagining the absolute worst.”

Promises made

On July 26, 2023, a lawyer in the governor’s office wrote to the Ohio Ethics Commission seeking guidance.

“Mr. Rubin is a registered lobbyist in the State of Ohio and has, to date, regularly lobbied the executive branch, the legislative branch, and JobsOhio,” it said. “If appointed he has affirmed to me that both he and (Rubin’s firm) The CJR Group would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio and would fully comply with the separate JobsOhio conflicts policy as to any current or past clients.”

State lobbying disclosures show that at that time Rubin was registered to lobby the governor’s office and JobsOhio on behalf of Intel. 

Activity and expense reports also show he was actively lobbying the governor on the company’s behalf. As recently as April this year, Rubin still was, according to his state disclosures.

Despite filing annual registrations to lobby JobsOhio through 2025, Rubin hasn’t filed any “activity and expense reports” saying he was actively lobbying the agency for Intel since 2022 — a year before he joined the board.

He has continued to lobby the government for the company, and Intel has continued to receive money from the state and from JobsOhio.

Tax documents filed by JobsOhio for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 show that JobsOhio gave Intel more than $2 million during that period. 

Just before Rubin joined the board, JobsOhio gave Intel a $25 million workforce-development grant — part of $150 million JobsOhio has committed to the now-delayed project.

Asked about the grants, JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said it wasn’t a conflict for Rubin because the board had already decided to award the funds before Rubin joined the board.

“JobsOhio’s offer of JobsOhio incentives to Intel were approved by the JobsOhio Board in December 2021 — before Mr. Rubin was appointed by Governor DeWine to the JobsOhio’s Board of Directors on Sept. 1, 2023,” Englehart said in an email. “Disbursement of funds is a staff function, based on 2021 approval by the JobsOhio Board.”

As chairman of the JobsOhio board, Rubin is in a position of authority over that staff. JobsOhio also places performance requirements on its grants and says it can claw the money back if they’re not met. That’s a process in which Rubin could have a say.

The massive Intel project was to receive more than $2 billion in state incentives, and factories were supposed to begin production last year. With the company facing economic hardship, production has been pushed back to at least 2030. 

The state has already given Intel a $600 million “onshoring” grant, and it’s unclear whether the state will claw any of that money back when the company misses a 2028 deadline.

As a member of the JobsOhio board, Rubin — whom Intel continues to pay to lobby DeWine — presumably could weigh in on whether to claw back any part of the more than $150 million JobsOhio committed to Intel. 

JobsOhio didn’t respond when asked whether its board has any say in decisions to recover money from companies that don’t deliver on their promises.

Intel didn’t respond to questions for this story — including how much it has paid Rubin and other members of his firm.

Keeping his promise?

According to his state disclosures, Rubin continues to lobby the governor on the delayed Intel project, a matter that JobsOhio is also dealing with.

Is that consistent with what Rubin promised DeWine’s legal team — that “The CJR Group would cease services for any clients on matters in front of JobsOhio…”?

DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney said it was.

“Lobbying an agency that is not JobsOhio on behalf of Intel does not qualify as having business before JobsOhio on Intel,” he said in an email. “Our office is not JobsOhio. You are conflating two separate issues that produce different legal and ethical obligations.”

Paul Nick, the executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission, had a different answer to the same question. He said the fact that Rubin and his partners kept registering to lobby JobsOhio after Rubin joined the board appeared to violate the lobbyist’s pledge.

And the fact that Rubin this year was still actively lobbying DeWine on the Intel project?

“That would also appear to contradict his representation to the Governor’s office,” Nick said in an email.

He explained that the Ethics Commission plays a role in helping identify potential conflicts of JobsOhio board members. But other than to compel complete financial disclosures, his office didn’t have power over Rubin and other members of the JobsOhio board, he said.

“Because Rubin is not subject to the Ethics Law, none of his actions could be potential violations of these laws,” Nick said. He later added that they would be if Rubin was a state employee.

In answer to the governor’s 2023 query, Nick encouraged Rubin to seek an advisory opinion of his own from the Ethics Commission to ensure he steered clear of conflicts. Rubin never did, Nick said.

Rules of its own

The Ethics Commission advocated against exempting members of the JobsOhio board from ethics and transparency laws when then-Gov. John Kasich and his allies in 2011 said JobsOhio should be exempt so it could “move at the speed of business.”

“During the legislation that enacted JobsOhio, the Commission encouraged that all of the Ethics Laws should apply to JobsOhio and its board,” Nick said. “Instead, the final legislation required that JobsOhio create its own conflict of interest policy.”

Members of the JobsOhio board are subject to what Tierney, DeWine’s spokesman, called “a strong policy to ethically address conflicts.”

And Englehart, the JobsOhio spokesman said, “Any board member with an actual or possible conflict of interest on specific grant or loan proposals for a company must disclose it and… will recuse themselves from discussions and voting on such proposal.”

He added, “Yet this entire process is often unnecessary because a potentially conflicted member will typically recuse themselves from any discussion and voting by the Board on the matter involved.”

JobsOhio board meeting minutes going back to 2021 appear to contain no mention of the words “conflict” or “recuse.” They also show that on at least one occasion — June 13, 2024 — JobsOhio CEO J.P. Nauseef discussed how he wanted to “…capture the Intel supply chain” while Rubin was in the meeting.

A review of minutes going back to through Rubin’s tenure indicates that much of the sessions have been devoted to celebrating JobsOhio. But initial decisions about individual awards to companies are made in committee meetings which are not required to be open to the public. 

“Conflict acknowledgments from the prior year” are required to be made public. But records produced by the Ohio Department of Development in response to an open-records request appear only to contain documents in which officials acknowledged they were aware of JobsOhio’s ethics policy.

Englehart didn’t respond when asked if Rubin, a lobbyist with dozens of clients, had ever declared a conflict or recused himself since joining the JobsOhio board in 2023.

Possible conflicts for members of the JobsOhio board have been identified in the past.

In 2014, the Ohio Ethics Commission notified two Marathon Petroleum Corp. executives who sat on the JobsOhio board that they had potential conflicts because Marathon was receiving benefits from JobsOhio. Other corporations enjoying JobsOhio largesse who have had employees on the board include Sherwin-Williams, Bob Evans, and Procter & Gamble. 

Last year, Youngstown’s WFMJ reported that JobsOhio granted more than $2 million to a company run by a man who headed up a regional entity created by JobsOhio. 

Private company?

Then-Gov. Kasich oversaw the birth of JobsOhio in 2011. Even then, it was controversial.

The legislature created it, the governor appoints the board, and it was allowed to make the sole bid to lease the state’s liquor franchise for much less than it was worth. It spends the difference on its large staff, marketing and making grants, and providing other things of value to businesses.

Despite the fact that it and its funding are rooted entirely in the state government, its supporters call JobsOhio a private nonprofit corporation that spends money from a private source. They say that rightly exempts JobsOhio from the ethics and transparency rules state employees were subject to when the Ohio Department of Commerce controlled the liquor franchise. 

JobsOhio has since disbursed just over $2 billion in grants, loans, and other incentives, Englehart, the JobsOhio spokesman, said.

As critics warned, in some cases that money has appeared to go to the well-connected for questionable economic-development reasons.

For example, Ohio State fired then-President Ted Carter in March. When it did, the public learned that JobsOhio paid a woman with whom Carter had an “inappropriate relationship” $60,000 to make a podcast.

JobsOhio justified the spending on economic-development grounds, but it refused to say whether it had sponsored other podcasts or how much it had paid for them. A spokesman said he couldn’t answer because any podcast would be part of its “marketing playbook” and that “other states try to replicate what we do.”

In 2020, Ohioans were stunned by news of a dark-money scandal in which Akron-based FirstEnergy paid more than $60 million in bribes for a $1.3-billion bailout. FirstEnergy admitted to paying Sam Randazzo — DeWine’s pick to be the state’s top utility regulator — a $4.3 million bribe. Among other services, Randazzo helped write the corrupt legislation. He died by suicide after he was charged.

Rubin, who would within weeks become a FirstEnergy lobbyist, attended a December 2018 dinner with Gov.-elect DeWine, Lt. Gov.-elect Husted and FirstEnergy’s top executives. They discussed Randazzo’s suitability to be Ohio’s top utility regulator. 

Rubin advised the executives not to tell DeWine that they were going straight from the dinner to meet with Randazzo, the Associated Press reported in February. It was at that meeting that Randazzo’s bribe was negotiated, prosecutors said.

JobsOhio had already lent a hand to the struggling utility a few years before the bribes began to flow. In 2015, it forgave a $12 million loan to help FirstEnergy clean up one of its money-losing coal plants.

Private money?

Good government advocates have also raised questions about how fair JobsOhio’s deal has been to taxpayers.

JobsOhio paid the state $1.4 billion for its initial lease of the state liquor franchise. Last year, a DeWine-controlled board extended that lease to 2053 without taxpayers getting any additional money.

Even though all that money used to flow into the state general fund, JobsOhio insists that “absolutely no tax dollars or other public dollars are used to support it.”

Turcer of Common Cause scoffs at the claim.

“Of course it’s taxpayer money,” she said.

DeWine himself didn’t dispute it being called taxpayer money in a TV appearance earlier this month, despite his spokesman’s insistence that JobsOhio and its funding are private.

CNBC had declared Ohio the Best State for Business — a designation about which JobsOhio is crowing.

During an interview with CNBC reporter Scott Cohn, DeWine quickly credited JobsOhio for the state’s success and touted data-center development as a big win for the Buckeye State.

“I think one thing we have is what we call JobsOhio,” he said. “We basically privatized a number of years ago under Gov. Kasich… we privatized our economic development… It gives us, I think, a strategic advantage.”

But Cohn pushed back on the governor’s praise of Ohio’s “privatized” economic development operation.

“You mentioned that you privatized the jobs agency and of all the economic development organizations that we deal with as we’re coming up with (state rankings), it is one of the most opaque,” Cohn said. 

“And it’s gotten a lot of criticism for that. I know there’s a bill pending to make JobsOhio more transparent, because this is taxpayer money ultimately. What do you do about that to keep the deals coming in, but also make sure the taxpayers are being looked out for?”

DeWine didn’t dispute Cohn’s description of JobsOhio as a nontransparent organization spending taxpayer dollars.

“I think there’s a happy medium that can be reached,” he said. “I think what JobsOhio has done is give us a competitive advantage.” 

Still lobbying

Despite promises to avoid conflicts, Rubin and other members of his firm paid $25 each year to register to lobby JobsOhio even after he was on the board.

Then, according to documents obtained through an open-records request, Rubin on Jan. 27 emailed the Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee, the agency that handles lobby disclosures. 

“Please find below my executive registrations for 2026,” it said. “We need to make sure JobsOhio is no longer listed in any of them.”

He added that the commission should be receiving similar emails from other members of his firm, including Brittany Warner. But no such email ever came. 

Instead, Warner is currently registered to lobby JobsOhio on behalf of Intel and other clients.

“My quarterly activity and expenditure reports plainly show that I have not lobbied JobsOhio since 2023,” Warner said in an email to the Capital Journal. “The registration reports you are separately looking at are created at the beginning of an engagement with a new client, and those all pre-date September 2023. Those ‘initial filings’ you are referencing were all created in 2019-2022.”

Warner’s email did not address the fact that, according to the Ohio Lobbying Handbook, agents have to register each year and pay $25 for each client and name the agencies they might lobby on its behalf.

Warner filed her most recent annual registration saying she might lobby JobsOhio for Intel on Dec. 12, 2025.

As with Rubin, Warner’s activity-and-expense reports show she continued this year to lobby the governor and lieutenant governor for Intel. 

Tony Bledsoe, the Ohio Legislative inspector general, said that as with the state Ethics Commission, the JobsOhio board operates largely outside of his agency’s jurisdiction.

The Ohio Joint Legislative Ethics Committee “handles lobbying reporting (disclosure) relative to those lobbying JobsOhio as well as JobsOhio’s lobbying reporting relative to their legislative advocacy,” Bledsoe said in an email. “Beyond that, we have no jurisdiction concerning JobsOhio.”

Turcer of Common Cause Ohio said one doesn’t need the niceties of Ohio ethics law to see problems inherent in Rubin’s dual roles.

“One of the things we know is that you can’t serve two bosses well,” she said. “So Josh Rubin-lobbyist and Josh Rubin-the-chair-of-JobsOhio is only serving one of them.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The survey reviewed free speech policies at nearly 500 public and private colleges and universities nationwide and 13.2% of colleges and universities received a “red light” rating in FIRE’s 20th edition of the state of free speech on college campuses — an all-time low. 

In FIRE’s first report back in 2006, 68.6% of all institutions earned a red light rating. 

“In general, private schools maintain more restrictive speech codes than their public counterparts: Private schools are significantly less likely to earn green light ratings and more likely to earn red light ratings than public schools,” FIRE said in their report. 

A “red light” rating means an institution has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or bars public access to its speech-related policies by requiring a university login and password for access,” according to FIRE.

No Ohio universities received a “red light” rating. Nationally, 65 colleges and universities received a “red light” ranking. 

“This gulf widens at public schools, where the number of public schools earning a green light rating (68) eclipses the number of private schools earning a red light rating (37) by over 30,” according to the report. 

About 340 colleges and universities (69.4%) earned a “yellow light” rating, meaning a higher education institution has policies that “could too easily be applied to suppress protected speech or maintains policies that, while clearly restricting freedom of speech, restrict it in more narrow circumstances,” according to FIRE.

Bowling Green State University, Case Western Reserve University, Kent State University, Kenyon College, Miami University of Ohio, Oberlin College, Ohio University, Shawnee State University, Ohio State University, University of Akron, University of Cincinnati, University of Toledo, Wright State University, and Youngstown State University all received a “yellow light” ranking. 

FIRE gives a university a “green light” rating if the written policy does not “seriously threaten student expression,” according to FIRE. 76 universities received a “green light” rating. 

Cleveland State University was the only school in Ohio to receive a “green light” rating, according to the report. 

Ohio Senate Bill 1 took effect last summer that bans diversity efforts, regulates classroom discussion, prohibits faculty strikes, creates post-tenure reviews, puts diversity scholarships at risk, and creates a retrenchment provision that blocks unions from negotiating on tenure, among other things.

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In announcing his campaign for state auditor, LaRose said that he plans to bring the same “focus on transparency, efficiency, and accountability” he says he has as Secretary of State to the auditor’s office.

The Ohio Capital Journal made multiple requests for an interview with the Republican former state senator and current secretary of state. Requests made both through his campaign website and directly to a campaign communications representative went unanswered.

During campaigns for reelection to his secretary of state seat, LaRose touted the support of President Donald Trump, and he currently has the endorsement of the Ohio Republican Party in his bid for auditor of state.

LaRose attempted to gain a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2024, but came in third in a Republican primary, behind fellow former state senator Matt Dolan, and the winner, now-Ohio U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

The auditor of state is an elected statewide executive office that works as a check for local governments, like cities, schools, public libraries, and state boards and commissions.

Performance audits are regularly conducted by the auditor of state to ensure local entities are maintaining clean financial books, to investigate potential fraud, and to assist governments in coming back from financial issues.

The state auditor also sits on the Ohio Redistricting Commission alongside the governor and secretary of state, as well as four lawmakers including one member from each party from each chamber of the legislature.

LaRose will face Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell in the Nov. 3 general election. Blackwell had a career in banking before she became mayor in 2014. Amid her tenure as mayor, she helped bring the city out of fiscal emergency, working closely with the auditor’s office as she did so.

LaRose credits the leader of his Boy Scout troop as the first inspiration in his life of service, a military veteran who led LaRose to join the U.S. Army. Because of his military service, LaRose didn’t go to college until later in life, but he sees that as a positive.

“I guess I’m glad I knew myself well enough at that point to know that I maybe wouldn’t have been the most serious student at 18 years old, but I was a serious student when I did finally go to college in my late 20s,” LaRose told a gathering of the Akron Press Club in May.

His run for the auditor’s office comes at a time when he says government agencies and other entities need to work on regaining the public’s confidence.

“Trust is at an all-time low in institutions of all kinds: the government, the churches, the press, businesses, civic organizations,” LaRose said in his press club speech. “People are not as trusting of those institutions as they once were, and in some ways that’s well-founded.”

But in other ways, he said that lack of trust is held up by a “chaotic information ecosystem,” where access to information, true or false, good or bad, is always available in bulk.

“We’ve got more access to information than we’ve ever had … but in so many ways are more misinformed than we’ve ever been,” the secretary of state said in May.

The auditor’s role is to “make sure that taxpayers are empowered with accurate information about how their local, county, and state government entities are operating,” according to LaRose.

The secretary supports efforts to battle fraud, specifically pointing to allegations of Medicaid fraud and other topics that have come up in the headlines over the past year.

The auditor’s office wouldn’t be investigating individuals for certain fraud crimes, but instead is tasked with “going after public officials that are engaging in fraud,” as LaRose put it to the press club.

Other agencies like the Ohio Attorney General’s Office look into individual allegations of fraud, and the legislature and the governor’s office need to work together to maintain enforcement models that prevent fraud.

“There’s a whole-of-government approach, if you will, that needs to be taken as it relates to dealing with this,” LaRose said.

As secretary of state, LaRose made headlines as a member of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which spent the better part of four years attempting to redraw Statehouse and congressional district lines, with multiple maps rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

Part of his role as chief elections officer is to head up the Ohio Ballot Board, which saw contentious hearings and criticism over board-approved ballot language for a constitutional amendment on abortion rights, and a proposed amendment to reform the redistricting commission, with critics saying the ballot board was putting its thumb on the scale with biased and confusing language.

LaRose led the charge to attempt to change the threshold for voters to pass constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%, but the proposal was rejected by Ohio voters.

LaRose also supported legislation last year to remove the absentee ballot grace period in Ohio and invalidate ballots that arrive to their boards of election after Election Day.

As secretary of state, he has pledged to crack down on voter fraud, creating an “Election Integrity Unit.” At the same time, he has made it clear in various public comments and numbers from his office that even potential cases of voter fraud, let alone actual proven cases, are rare in Ohio. In 2024, an audit LaRose did of noncitizen voter registration rolled in naturalized citizens, causing confusion for those citizens who had taken the necessary steps to be registered.

Addressing the issue at the Akron Press Club, LaRose said voter fraud is “exceedingly rare, but it’s impactful when it does happen.”

The general election in Ohio is Nov. 3, with early voting scheduled from Oct. 6 and Nov. 1. The voter registration deadline for the November election is Oct. 5, and requests for absentee ballots must be received by the boards of elections by Oct. 27.

Absentee ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 2, received in a dropbox by Nov. 3, or received by the boards of elections by Nov. 7.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

I knew something about that risk.

Before Ohio’s universities were navigating Senate Bill 1, I spent eight years fighting the federal government over my band’s name. The issue was never whether officials liked the name. It was whether the government had the authority to decide what our words meant. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that it did not.

Now, with S.B. 1 in effect, Ohio offers a real-world test of that same question — and the early results are telling.

Start with the sheer machinery.

Across the state, public universities have stood up implementation committees, compliance websites, complaint portals, and reporting forms to interpret a single statute.

Kent State estimates compliance will cost it between $1.5 and $2 million every year.

The University of Toledo created forms for reporting “intellectual diversity” complaints.

Bowling Green opened a new compliance office.

Before anyone asks whether a professor has crossed a line, universities first have to spend enormous energy (and real money) determining where the line even is.

This is the pattern emerging from Ohio’s early implementation of the law.

When the government claims the authority to decide what speech means — what it intends, what it implies — it doesn’t need to punish anyone. The uncertainty does the work.

The evidence is already visible in how faculty behave.

This spring, a Kent State journalism class surveyed 38 faculty members about the new law.

More than a third said they had already changed how they teach in order to comply. A quarter said they worried a student might report them for something said in class. One professor described taking long pauses mid-lecture and second-guessing his words.

At the University of Cincinnati, the faculty union has said some professors are now reluctant to teach courses like African American history, for fear the subject is too controversial to risk.

No one banned those lectures. No one had to. The law produced the result that censorship usually requires a prosecutor to achieve — and it did so without charging anyone at all.

This is the part we consistently misunderstand about free speech.

We imagine its violations as dramatic: a banned book, a fired professor, a courtroom. But the most durable restrictions on speech are quieter.

They show up as a syllabus revised out of caution, a topic skipped rather than defended, a sentence rephrased so it can’t be misread.

As one Cincinnati faculty leader put it, professors are now spending their time figuring out how to comply with state mandates rather than teaching and doing research.

The First Amendment isn’t tested only when someone is punished for speaking.

It’s tested when institutions grow so busy interpreting government language that the operative question in every classroom shifts from “Is this true?” or “Is this worth teaching?” to “Will this get me in trouble?”

Supporters of S.B. 1 say it protects open inquiry. But you cannot foster free expression by making educators afraid of their own words.

Ohio has created a system in which professors must constantly consider how the state may interpret the meaning of their teaching — and, understandably, many are flinching.

Legislatures across the country are watching Ohio, weighing versions of the same law. So this is worth stating plainly, before it spreads: a free society does not lose its liberties only when the government forbids speech outright.

Sometimes it loses them when the rules become so uncertain that people begin censoring themselves before anyone asks them to.

The question is not whether Ohio’s professors are still allowed to speak. The question is how many ideas disappear — not because someone banned them, but because no one wanted to be the person who tested the boundary.

Simon Tam is the founder of The Slants and the central figure in Matal v. Tam (2017), the unanimous Supreme Court decision addressing viewpoint discrimination in trademark law. He speaks nationally on First Amendment issues.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Stone has a rare genetic movement disorder, dystonia-parkinsonism, that limits his mobility and speech. Setting specific goals would help him construct the life he wanted, and help his family identify the services he would need to live it to the fullest.

His parents suggested goals like “going on lots of walks” or “visiting state parks.” Stone just looked at them like they were ridiculous, said his mom, Jeneva Stone.

“We eventually discovered, through the right series of questions, that Robert wanted to protest,” she said. He’d watched disabled protesters dragged out of their wheelchairs from then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office at the U.S. Capitol the year before, as they demanded the preservation of the Affordable Care Act.

Now 29, Rob has been a fixture on Capitol Hill and at the Maryland State House ever since, advocating alongside his parents for disability rights and healthcare. Earlier this year, he joined with other advocates to lobby the state legislature not to cut funding for services that help him and others live in their communities.

They weren’t able to prevent the cuts, but they did succeed in limiting them.

Disability advocates around the country are fighting a surge of federal and state actions that have eroded protections meant to keep people with disabilities living and working in their communities, rather than in institutions.

The federal government has walked away from decades-old requirements that states deliver disability services to people where they live. At the same time, state leaders, citing budget shortfalls, have rolled back community services the feds don’t require them to fund.

“It’s really hard,” said Rob Gorski, an Ohio father of three sons with autism who runs a popular social media account called TheAutismDad. “You try to wrap your head around one thing, and by the time you even figure out a path forward from there, they’ve thrown more stuff at you.”

In Maryland, state lawmakers were weighing cuts to Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that covers much of Rob’s care, which he receives at home. The federal government will be reducing its share of Medicaid funding as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed last summer.

Maryland ended up cutting $126 million from the agency that administers Medicaid for people with developmental disabilities — but that was less than the $150 million reduction that Democratic Gov. Wes Moore originally proposed. The final budget also scrapped a proposed cap on how much state funding a person in the program could receive per year.

“Medicaid itself isn’t just a budget line item,” Jeneva said. “It’s the mechanism through which the federal government ensures that people with disabilities have the civil right to live in their communities.”

Other threats to community-based disability services have emerged in Washington, D.C., and across the nation.

In June, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an opinion memo that says states don’t have to fund in-home or community-based services for people with disabilities who don’t want to live in institutions. The memo is a significant reinterpretation of federal law and represents a shift away from decades of civil rights protection.

The memo doesn’t change federal law, but it does signal a new focus for the DOJ, which is the primary enforcer of disability rights. Without enforcement, advocates worry, the civil rights protections they rely on could become moot.

In July, the DOJ published another notice saying it would no longer enforce its longstanding guidance on how to implement a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Olmstead v. L.C., that requires public entities to provide community-based services, rather than institutional care, to people with disabilities whenever possible.

The federal spending reductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are likely to spur more cash-strapped states to cut home- and community-based services, since the federal Medicaid law only requires them to provide institutional care. More than half a dozen states have already moved to limit such services for people with disabilities, according to an analysis of state actions by researchers at George Washington University.

And at least three states are suing to dismantle a section of disability law that requires states to provide community-based services.

Defenders of the changes say they will allow states to refocus their limited dollars on people with the most serious medical needs.

New Medicaid work requirements in the Trump law, which are expected to drop between 3 million and 7 million people from the rolls, “will free up more state funding for (home- and community-based services) recipients,” said Rachel Barkley, director of the Able Americans disability policy think tank, which is housed inside the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research.

But Jeneva Stone says the cuts in Maryland threaten her son’s ability to get the nursing and other services he needs to be able to live at home. She worries families like hers will be the first to face forced institutionalization.

“More and more burden falls on family caregivers to fill in the gaps, and that leads to unsustainable economic situations for families,” she said. “Once your job situation falls apart, your savings are gone, you’re faced with this ugly choice: I believe strongly in my son’s civil right to stay in his community, but I can’t keep a roof over his head.”

Everything feels uncertain, she said, as longstanding protections seem to be dissolving for her son and others like him.

“They’re happy, they’re living great lives,” she said. “Are they medically complicated? Yeah. But do they deserve to spend the rest of their lives lying in a bed in a facility just because it’s easier to care for them in a congregate setting?”

‘That’s what people want’

In the middle of the 20th century, disabled activists and their family members demanded an end to systemic abuses suffered by many of the hundreds of thousands of disabled people who were hidden away in sprawling state institutions around the country.

In the following decades, presidents and lawmakers of both parties championed a national shift away from segregating disabled people in huge facilities and toward the provision of services — such as home health nurses, physical therapy or adaptive tools — that would enable them to live at home or in their communities.

The two most consequential landmark federal disability rights laws were signed by Republican presidents: Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act in 1973, and George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Then, in its 1999 Olmstead ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the unjustified institutionalization of people with disabilities was a form of discrimination.

“For decades we have very intentionally been shifting resources away from institutional care and into the community, because that’s what people want, and it’s more cost effective,” said Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor and director of the Hirsh Health Law & Policy Program at George Washington University.

“We can serve, generally, three people in the community for every one person in an institution. And it leads to better outcomes.”

More than 8 million Medicaid users receive such home- and community-based services across the country, while 1.5 million get services in institutions, such as nursing homes. Federal law requires state Medicaid programs to provide medical care and other support for people with disabilities.

People who live in institutions cost Medicaid an average of $54,462 per year, compared with $17,298 for people who get home and community services, according to the most recent Medicaid data.

State investments in home- and community-based services often result in short-term spending increases, but over time lead to long-term cost savings and a reduction in institutional spending, according to research from Brandeis University’s Community Living Policy Center.

The national shift to community-based services has been overwhelmingly popular. About 82% of people who receive community-based services prefer to live at home rather than in an institution, according to the most recent survey by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission.

That’s why, said Barkoff, “it is incredibly shocking, the approach that this administration is taking to something that has been so bipartisan and so much a part of American culture for decades.”

Some Republican-led states now want courts to adopt the Trump administration’s new interpretation of the Olmstead decision. Texas has already used the June DOJ memo in its lawsuit challenging federal requirements to provide community-based services. Florida also has used the memo as part of its appeal of a case involving medically complex children who were forced into nursing homes because the state refused to pay for in-home services.

Conservative state leaders say the federal government shouldn’t dictate how states offer support for people with disabilities, and argue that nursing shortages and other issues make it too difficult for states to care for some people outside of institutions.

Left behind

Barkley of Able Americans supports the shift away from institutionalization, but she says there should be more public investment in group homes or smaller facilities that can provide 24/7 oversight for people with more complex needs who can’t live safely at home.

“Unfortunately, it’s only when somebody with a serious mental illness hits the criminal justice system that they’re able to receive care,” she said. “And so for this sliver of the serious mental illness population, this movement has left them behind.”

VOR, a national disability rights nonprofit that supports “a full continuum of care options” for people with disabilities, argues that overly aggressive enforcement of the Olmstead decision and related federal law has, in some cases, resulted in people with disabilities being moved into community settings without adequate support. That broad-strokes application has contributed to poor outcomes, including homelessness, for some people.

The DOJ memo and other federal actions reducing community care have been driven in part by the Trump administration’s push to address homelessness, said Barkoff. Trump issued an executive order last July giving states a green light to commit people experiencing homelessness to treatment centers or hospitals, whether they want to go or not.

“They have created this narrative that Olmstead created this problem” of not enough beds for people who need higher levels of care, said Barkoff. But without Olmstead, “there was just a hollow promise to close institutions,” she said.

“What Olmstead did was create a tool to require states to follow through on that commitment.”

Gorski said it’s been more apparent this year than ever that there are people and families, particularly those with complex care needs, who feel that the shift away from institutional care hasn’t helped them.

Recent efforts by the Trump administration to roll back protections are “exploiting where we’ve failed to ensure that we’re taking care of our own people,” he said. “Everyone in this community should feel seen and heard and like they have a place at the table.”

But even VOR warned in a June statement that the DOJ memo “substantially weakens” protections and federal pressure on states to fund the community-based services many people with intellectual or developmental disabilities depend on.

States on their own

In June, Republican lawmakers in Ohio swiftly backtracked on a proposal that would have barred Medicaid recipients’ family members from being paid as caregivers. They pulled the controversial portion of the bill after backlash from residents who said it would hurt people with developmental disabilities whose caregivers are often relatives whose caregiving duties prevent them from taking other jobs.

Some states have recently expanded home and community-based services, including Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Wyoming, according to George Washington University’s analysis. Others, including California, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota and Nebraska, have limited services.

Some, like Kansas and Virginia, have done both.

Ultimately, as the feds back away from enforcing civil rights protections, states are left to figure out how to offer services for people with disabilities in a way that balances civil rights with budget realities.

“At this point it’s kind of a state-by-state effort,” said Illinois state Sen. Julie Morrison, a Democrat who sponsored a bill this year, now law, that turned Illinois’s state disability commission into a cabinet-level agency.

“But at the end of the day we are obligated, morally I believe, to make sure we are taking care of people who need these services and who want to live in an independent environment.”

Rob Stone and his parents plan to continue meeting with state legislators in Maryland to push back against deeper cuts to services that help him remain with his family. His mother said she’s been doing a lot of explaining to lawmakers about how civil rights for people with disabilities fit into existing law.

“There’s a tremendous need for advocates to educate legislators at the state level about this because they’ve never had to think about these things before,” she said.

“It’s always been something the federal government takes care of.”

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

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

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Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

It is a large promise, and it rests entirely on one thing: a governor’s willingness to squeeze the industry on Ohioans’ behalf. There is no statute behind it. There is no rule. In an op-ed published the same week, Ramaswamy said delivering it takes “the acumen of a businessman, not a bureaucrat, at the top.” The mechanism is his own judgment.

Which makes it worth knowing who has been paying for access to that judgment.

Campaign finance reports filed with the Ohio Secretary of State show that political action committees tied to electric utilities, gas distributors, oil and gas producers, pipeline companies and solar developers gave Ramaswamy’s campaign $94,096.34 in cash during 2026, plus another $3,372.57 in-kind — food, beverages and facility rental provided by the Ohio Oil and Gas Producers Fund. Combined value: $97,468.91.

The money kept coming after it became a story

On Monday, May 18, the Energy and Policy Institute reported that six of Ohio’s largest investor-owned electric and gas utilities had sent more than $2 million to the Republican and Democratic governors associations, and that corporate PACs for five of the six had given more than $68,000 directly to Ramaswamy, his running mate Rob McColley, or both, going back to January 2025. Amy Acton’s campaign received nothing from those PACs.

That report is the reason this one exists. After it published, $65,603.24 more arrived from energy interests — nearly as much again as the watchdog group had found in the first place, from a broader set of companies, in the space of ten weeks.

The largest checks came last. On Friday, July 31 — the final day covered by the campaign’s most recent filing — three arrived at once:

• $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio PAC, the trade association for utility-scale solar developers. It is the only energy contribution in the file that matches Ohio’s per-election ceiling to the penny.

• $16,615 from the employee PAC of Vistra Corp.

• $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil Corporation’s PAC.

Two weeks earlier, on Wednesday, July 15, Energy Transfer’s PAC gave $5,000 in two installments. Apex Clean Energy’s PAC added $5,000 on July 31. NiSource, the parent of Columbia Gas of Ohio, gave $6,615.67 in February and $3,000 on May 29. Chesapeake Utilities gave $3,000. AES Ohio’s Dayton Power & Light fund gave $1,000 in April.

AEP’s Committee for Responsible Government gave $17,000 in two pieces — $16,000 on Tuesday, May 5, and $1,000 on Saturday, June 27. Ohio treats the primary and general as separate contribution periods, so those two are not additive against a single limit.

What a governor actually controls

The reason this matters is not that $97,000 buys anything in a race where Ramaswamy has loaned himself $25 million. It doesn’t. It is that every promise in his data center plan runs through agencies the governor staffs.

Under Ohio law, the governor appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, subject to Senate confirmation, choosing from lists produced by a nominating council. The governor also designates the chair, who serves in that role at the governor’s pleasure. PUCO decides rate cases. It decides how the cost of new transmission and generation gets divided between data centers and everyone else. It approved the data center tariff that AEP Ohio now operates under, and it would build the statewide data center rate class contemplated in pending legislation.

Free electricity for households near a data center is not something a governor can order. It is something a governor can push a commission and a utility toward — or not. The people who would be pushed have made themselves known to him.

The Ottawa County connection

Vistra’s check carries particular weight in northwest Ohio, because Vistra owns Davis-Besse.

The plant sits in Oak Harbor, about 45 minutes north of Tiffin. Along with the Perry plant in Lake County, it was the reason House Bill 6 existed — the 2019 law that charged Ohio ratepayers roughly $150 million a year to keep the two reactors running and that produced the largest corruption prosecution in state history.

Vistra is entitled to a distinction here, and it is a real one. Vistra did not receive the bailout. It was part of the coalition that fought HB 6. It acquired Davis-Besse and Perry from Energy Harbor in 2024, years after the subsidies were repealed and the indictments came down. Nothing about that history is Vistra’s conduct.

But Ohio’s experience with utility money in politics is not a matter of one company’s record. It is a matter of what the arrangement looks like from the outside — and Ohio has spent six years learning what it looks like when the companies that generate power and the officials who regulate it get comfortable with one another.

What Ohioans are paying while this happens

The bills are the part that isn’t complicated.

Ohio utilities disconnected service to roughly 345,000 customers in the year ending May 31, the highest rate in four reporting periods. AEP’s Ohio Power had the worst rate of any utility in the state at 15% — more than four times FirstEnergy’s 3.6%, according to reporting by Canary Media. Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021.

Over the same stretch, the chief executives of Ohio’s four investor-owned electric utilities collectively took home $81 million in 2025. AEP’s Bill Fehrman accounted for $36.6 million of it. AEP has said generation costs, which Ohio law bars distribution utilities from controlling, are the primary driver of the increases, and that its average customer’s generation bill has risen 103% in five years.

Both things are true at once. The structural explanation for high bills is real. So is the fact that the industry offering it is funding the man who will appoint its regulators.

The case for the defense

Ramaswamy’s plan is not an industry wish list, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It would end future property tax abatements for data centers — a break that has cost Ohio billions and that developers have fought hard to keep. It would require full environmental compliance, closed-loop water recycling, and construction on brownfields rather than farmland. It includes a temporary pause on new approvals. Those are real commitments, and several of them cut directly against the interests of companies writing him checks.

The solar coalition’s contribution complicates the picture further. USSEC represents developers who are frequently on the opposite side of AEP and the gas producers in siting and rate fights, and whose projects Ohio regulators have repeatedly blocked. Calling this a single bloc would be wrong.

There is also no evidence — none — that any contribution was solicited in exchange for anything, or that Ramaswamy has taken any action for any donor. He holds no office. He has cast no vote. The campaign is entitled to say, accurately, that legal contributions from lawfully registered PACs are how American campaigns are funded, and that Acton’s donors have interests too.

What remains

The strongest argument against reading anything into this money is that it is small — a rounding error against $25 million of the candidate’s own cash and a super PAC that has raised $29.5 million.

That argument would be more persuasive if the money had stopped when it was noticed. It didn’t. It roughly doubled, broadened to companies outside the original six, and the biggest checks were written on the last day of the reporting period, seven weeks after Ohio’s utility spending in this race became a documented story.

Ramaswamy has investments across the data center supply chain and would appoint the boards that fund, site, tax and regulate it. He has now also accepted approaching $100,000 from the energy sector that powers it. He is asking Ohioans to trust that when he sits down across the table from these companies, he will squeeze them until residential electricity near their facilities is free.

Voters decide Tuesday, Nov. 3 whether that is a reasonable thing to take on faith.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

In January he co-launched a Senate task force on fraud in federal spending, saying it is the job of senators to find bad actors and hold them accountable. In February he introduced a bill to cancel unspent pandemic unemployment money, warning that distributing it now would be a fraudster’s paradise. In a March newsletter to constituents he wrote that every dollar taken by fraudsters is a dollar taken from working taxpayers. And in late March he forced a floor vote on a national photo ID mandate, staking the argument on his eight years running Ohio’s elections, where his stated mission was to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.

He is also holding $10,600 from John J. Cafaro.

Cafaro is the Youngstown-area developer whose firm, Greenwater Services of Brookfield, received a $1.7 million no-bid federal contract in April to install a water purification system in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — the pool that turned bright green with algae days after President Donald Trump declared the renovation finished on June 6. He is also a two-time federal felon. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bribe then-U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., a Youngstown Democrat, and drew 15 months of probation and a $150,000 fine. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to a felony count of making a materially false statement to the government — for concealing a $10,000 loan to a staffer on his daughter Capri Cafaro’s 2004 congressional campaign so it would not surface on a federal campaign finance report. He served three years of probation and paid a $250,000 fine.

Set that beside Husted’s résumé. Ohio’s former chief elections officer — the official responsible from 2011 to 2019 for administering the state’s campaign finance disclosure system — is banking money from a man with a federal felony conviction for hiding a campaign contribution.

What the filings show

Federal Election Commission records reviewed by TiffinOhio.net show that Team Husted, the senator’s joint fundraising committee, received $28,100 from four members of the Cafaro family on four dates between March 2025 and March 2026.

John J. Cafaro, listing a Brookfield address and Cafaro Investments as his employer, gave $7,500 on Aug. 26, 2025, and $3,100 on March 1, 2026 — $10,600 in all. Janet S. Cafaro, listing the same Brookfield address, gave $7,500 the same August day. Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., John’s older brother and the retired president of the Cafaro Company, and Phyllis C. Cafaro each gave $2,500 on March 24, 2025, and $2,500 more on Sept. 30, 2025.

Joint fundraising committees split their receipts by formula among the participants. Of the $28,100, $24,000 was allocated to Husted for Senate, the senator’s principal campaign committee, and $4,100 to Jobs Opportunity Now, his leadership PAC. Of John J. Cafaro’s $10,600, $7,000 landed in the campaign account and $3,600 in the leadership PAC, the latter reported as an in-kind food and beverage contribution.

Nothing has gone back. A review of disbursements by all three committees through June 30, 2026 — the most recent period on file — turns up no refund, no return and no redesignation to any Cafaro. The only outgoing entry naming one is the offsetting in-kind line. Husted for Senate closed that period with $9.4 million in the bank.

The part that isn’t explainable

None of the above answers the actual question, which is not how the money arrived. It is why it is still there.

We know Husted’s campaign has a mechanism for this, because we have watched him use it. TiffinOhio.net previously reported that Husted accepted $116,892 from billionaire Les Wexner between 2001 and 2025, including a $3,500 maximum contribution two months before he voted to block a Senate amendment directing the release of Jeffrey Epstein records. When the Justice Department unredacted an FBI document naming Wexner as an Epstein co-conspirator, and after months of gatherings in Ohio towns demanding answers, Husted’s campaign announced it would give the Wexner money away, later reporting $34,300 to a Columbus nonprofit serving human-trafficking survivors.

So the campaign is capable of deciding a donor’s record makes his money unwelcome. It has done the paperwork. It has issued the statement.

Which means the standard being applied to Cafaro is not a legal standard. It is a political one. Wexner became a liability when the story went national and Ohioans started showing up at events with signs. Cafaro has not — not yet — and the money stays.

That is a defensible position for a campaign operative. It is a harder one for a senator whose central pitch is that he can tell a bad actor from a good one, and whose signature legislative demand is that a retired teacher in Fostoria produce a government photo ID before she is allowed to cast a ballot.

Husted’s April op-ed on election integrity argues that public trust in the system is the whole point — that this is about more than policy. He is right that it is. Trust in campaign finance rules does not come from the rules being followed at the minimum legal threshold. It comes from candidates treating disclosure as something more than a filing deadline. Cafaro’s second felony was, precisely, a disclosure crime. Husted spent eight years as the state officer charged with running that system in Ohio.

Why northwest Ohio should care

Because this is the second time this cycle Ohioans have had to ask Jon Husted what his threshold is.

Husted testified in March as a defense witness in the criminal trial of two former FirstEnergy executives, telling the court he had no knowledge of Sam Randazzo’s financial ties to the utility before Randazzo was installed atop the Public Utilities Commission — testimony that documents from the investigations contradict. His official calendars show repeated contact with the central figures in the House Bill 6 scheme across the arc of the bill’s passage. He has denied meaningful involvement throughout, and he has not been charged. What the record establishes is proximity.

Meanwhile the bill for that bailout keeps arriving in Seneca County mailboxes. Ohio households pay an estimated $663 more per year in electricity costs as a result of HB 6, and ratepayers have continued paying hundreds of millions for a law born in a bribery scheme. Residents in Toledo turned out in June with handmade signs over exactly that, as FirstEnergy sought another rate increase.

Husted’s answer in every one of these episodes has been the same answer, delivered in the same register: no one has charged me, the contributions were legal, the process was followed. It is a lawyer’s answer, and it has so far been an accurate one.

It is not, however, what he is asking of anyone else. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to Cafaro and Greenwater in June demanding records, saying the sequence of events raises questions about whether taxpayer dollars are being diverted to unqualified friends of the president. Husted, who co-chairs a task force on fraud in federal spending, has said nothing about a $1.7 million no-bid contract awarded to an Ohio company owned by one of his own donors.

He does not have to. He is favored by no one to lose the argument by staying quiet, and with $9.4 million banked and Election Day on Tuesday, Nov. 3, the incentive runs toward silence.

But the standard he keeps proposing for everyone else is not silence. It is documentation. It is proving you are who you say you are before you are permitted to participate. Applied to his own donor list, that standard has an obvious first test, and it costs $28,100 to pass.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, said on Monday, July 27, that new projects should be stopped unless developers cover their own utility costs, meet environmental and labor standards, abandon nondisclosure agreements with local governments and deliver something to the communities hosting them. Her running mate, David Pepper, called it a conditional moratorium. Ohio’s answer would be no until a developer earned a yes.

Ramaswamy spokesperson Evan Machan told the Statehouse News Bureau that Acton “finally spoke up, only to parrot ideas Vivek has shared for months and pretend it’s new. Let’s see if the media falls for it.”

Ohioans do not have to take anyone’s word for what Ramaswamy has been saying. He said it on camera, repeatedly, for five straight weeks.

Ten times, in his own voice

Between March 27 and April 26, 2025 — before data center opposition became a serious political problem in Ohio — Ramaswamy described the boom as good in at least 10 recorded appearances and posts.

March 27: “We’ve got AI data centers moving to our state. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. I want the sectors of the future to come here.”

March 27, in a separate post the same day: “We’re seeing an AI data center boom (which is good), right at the time when we face supply constraints on baseload power generation.”

March 29: “The AI data center boom is good for our region.”

March 31, at the Lawrence County Lincoln Day Dinner: “We have an AI data center boom of all kinds of manufacturing and AI data centers that are being constructed across our state. That’s an opportunity and it’s a good thing.”

April 1: “We’ve got an AI data center boom, which is great, that’s coming.”

April 3: “We now have a boom of AI data centers moving into our state. That’s a good thing. I want economic development in the state. I want a boom in the sectors of the future.”

April 5: “We have an AI data center boom in the state of Ohio, which is great. I’m all for it, I’m strongly in favor of it.”

April 10: “There are AI data centers, and that’s a good thing, coming to our state.”

April 15: “We’ve got a demand surge with AI data centers moving to our state, that part’s good.”

April 26: “We’ve got a data center boom coming to our state, which all else equals a good thing.”

The line was not a slip. It was the setup for the argument that followed it every time.

His complaint was never that they take too much

In each of those appearances, the data center boom is the good news and the electric grid is the problem. His concern was that Ohio could approve the facilities faster than it could permit the plants and pipelines to serve them.

“I’ll unshackle energy production in Ohio, from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, without apology,” he wrote on March 27.

That is a supply argument, not a restraint argument. It does not ask whether Ohio should host the buildout. It assumes the buildout and asks how to power it.

Ohio is now home to more than 200 data centers, roughly fifth in the country by count.

The tone changed as the politics did

On Friday, June 5, at the Buckeye Career Center in New Philadelphia, Ramaswamy said data centers should pay for the resources they use. He also said this: “I don’t want to go the other way then and say, ‘OK, here’s this thing and kind of not doing things quite the right way right now. Let’s ban it.’ I think it would be a terrible idea.”

He compared restricting them to COVID-era public health orders, telling the audience that “more people were harmed because of restrictive COVID policies than were actually harmed by the virus itself.” Acton ran the Ohio Department of Health through the first months of the pandemic.

Those caveats arrived as the ground moved. Ohio’s data center sales tax exemption cost an estimated $1.6 billion in 2025, roughly 11 times the state’s earlier projection. Gov. Mike DeWine paused new approvals. Communities began imposing moratoriums, Tiffin among them. A citizen campaign started pursuing statewide restrictions.

On Thursday, Aug. 6, Ramaswamy published a pledge promising free residential electricity, lower property taxes and a day-one executive order halting new approvals until the legislature passes a framework he expects in early 2027. He did not say how he would get one. Lawmakers spent this summer trying and failing: a data center package stalled in June when Republicans could not agree on the future of the tax incentives, and the sales tax exemption survived the last budget intact.

He is not just moving. He is claiming a record he does not have.

Machan said Acton was parroting ideas Ramaswamy had “shared for months.” In Thursday’s pledge, Ramaswamy wrote that her ratepayer position was “a concept that I advocated for in early 2025 long before she started parroting the same.”

What he advocated in early 2025 is on video, and it was not that. It was that the boom was good, that Ohio should welcome it, and that the state should build power faster to keep up with it. There is no conditional moratorium in the March and April 2025 record. There is no proposal to halt approvals, no ratepayer guarantee, no environmental condition, no farmland protection.

The test of a reversal is what did not change. Ramaswamy has not withdrawn his support for expansion. He has not called for ending the sales tax exemption — the largest subsidy in play — though he would bar the smaller local abatements. His premise is still that Ohio can host the industry by making developers pay more and by building far more power.

The running mate voted for it

Ramaswamy chose Ohio Senate President Rob McColley as his running mate in January 2026.

In 2019, McColley voted for House Bill 166, the budget bill that amended Section 122.175 of the Revised Code to extend sales tax breaks to data centers. In 2025 he cosponsored and voted for House Bill 15, which enacted Section 5727.76, exempting from taxation property dedicated to transmitting electricity or natural gas in designated priority investment areas. The Electric Power Supply Association, an industry trade group, described HB 15 and its Senate companion as making Ohio more attractive to data centers and energy-intensive industry.

After the bill passed his chamber, McColley told reporters plainly who it was for.

“It’s to Ohio’s benefit to have data centers,” he said. “And it’s also to Ohio’s benefit to make sure that they’re not taking up more than their fair share of the precious resources we have on the grid.”

He added that operators had already signaled the law would trigger large Ohio investments, “because they’ll be able to do it kind of on their own terms.”

Both bills passed with wide margins, and McColley has broken with his caucus on energy before — in 2019 he was among the few Senate Republicans to vote against House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout at the center of Ohio’s largest corruption prosecution. But Ramaswamy did not pick a running mate known for resisting the data center industry. He picked the one who voted for its tax breaks twice and said out loud that Ohio benefits from having it.

The free electricity runs into his running mate’s law

The centerpiece of Thursday’s pledge is that data centers would generate power on site and credit the surplus to nearby households, zeroing out their electric charges.

House Bill 15 — the law McColley cosponsored — is what opened Ohio to that kind of on-site generation. It was built so the power stays off the public grid. Behind-the-meter plants serve the customer that owns them and bypass the utility system entirely, which is the feature that made them attractive to data center developers in the first place. The Electric Power Supply Association reports Ohio had no behind-the-meter data center projects before 2025. The Ohio Power Siting Board has permitted more than 2 gigawatts since, with roughly 2.5 gigawatts pending. None of it is credited to residential customers.

Ramaswamy has not explained how electricity built to bypass the grid reaches a house on it.

The arithmetic of a bill is a second problem. The Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel puts generation at roughly half a residential electric bill. Transmission and distribution make up the rest, and those delivery charges are owed as long as a home is connected to the grid, even if it uses almost no electricity. The pledge offers to eliminate “electric charges.” It does not say who pays for the poles and wires.

What the promise would require is a law. The legislature could not agree on data center tax breaks in June, and Ramaswamy’s pledge names no mechanism, no sponsor and no votes.

He flew to Utah to help accelerate it

In May 2026, three months before promising to halt new approvals, Ramaswamy keynoted the Operation Gigawatt Summit in Park City, Utah — an industry-sponsored working session built around accelerating the AI data center buildout, nuclear deployment and grid expansion. The published agenda listed energy production at scale, grid modernization, and “policy that enables building.” Sponsors included NVIDIA and Oracle. Speakers came from CoreWeave, Google, Fervo Energy and Rocky Mountain Power.

He took the invitation while running for the office that decides how fast Ohio builds it.

The money

Ramaswamy’s campaign accepted $16,615 from the Vistra Employee PAC in July 2025, according to Ohio Secretary of State records. That is the maximum a PAC may give a statewide Ohio campaign. Vistra is an energy company that has expanded its gas capacity and signed multibillion-dollar power deals aimed at AI data centers.

One maxed-out PAC check does not finance a campaign that has raised tens of millions of dollars. It is the most the industry was legally permitted to give.

His holdings are broader. A 2023 federal disclosure showed between $1 million and $5 million in the Strive U.S. Semiconductor ETF alone, a fund built for concentrated exposure to the U.S. chip sector. His April 2026 Ohio Ethics Commission filing shows positions including NVIDIA, Microsoft and Amazon. Innovation Ohio catalogued holdings across every tier of the supply chain in a May 2026 report, and TiffinOhio.net covered it at the time. Shares in a chipmaker are not a stake in a proposed Ohio data center, and a diversified sector fund is not a wager on any one county.

The authority is not in dispute. As governor, Ramaswamy would appoint the nine-member board of JobsOhio, which assembles incentive packages; the Ohio Power Siting Board, which approves where large energy projects go; the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which sets utility rules; and the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, which grants the industry’s exemptions.

He has not divested. Thursday’s pledge does not mention his holdings.

It is a choice about who carries the burden

Acton says developers should be blocked unless they satisfy Ohio’s conditions.

Ramaswamy says the boom is good, that banning it would be terrible, that government should speed the infrastructure to serve it, and that the state can manage the consequences by making companies pay their share.

Those are not the same position, and no amount of shared vocabulary about ratepayers makes them one.

Ramaswamy may keep adopting the language of ratepayer protection as opposition grows. Ohioans can measure it against the record he built when he believed the boom was an uncomplicated political asset — 10 times in five weeks, on video, in his own voice.

Voters decide Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The estimate from Jules Hurst III, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the Pentagon’s comptroller, came in response to a series of questions from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as a part of Hurt’s confirmation process.

“While American families are getting flattened by skyrocketing costs, Donald Trump is spending $1.4 billion to keep troops on the streets in Washington for years on end. The National Guard are not pawns and taxpayer dollars are not a piggy bank for Trump’s political stunts,” Warren wrote in a statement.

According to the information provided by Hurst, the National Guard deployment is planned to continue until January 2029, the end of Trump’s second term.

D.C. mission

Under Trump’s requested budget for the next fiscal year, his Make DC Safe and Beautiful mission — which has led renovation efforts of many of the city’s iconic landmarks and sought to reduce crime —  would receive $605 million in funding. That would include more than $375 million for payroll expenses and travel allowances and nearly $230 million for operational expenses, such as housing and meals.

Trump first deployed around 800 National Guard troops in Washington in August 2025, an effort to tackle what he called a “crime emergency” in the city. The move came after similar deployments in many Democratic-led cities across the country, including in Los Angeles and Chicago.

He also sought to federalize and deploy troops in Portland, Oregon, but was later blocked in the federal courts. He threatened similar actions in locations including New York and Baltimore, often following with political battles with those states’ Democratic leaders.

National Guard deployments across the country cost nearly $500 million in 2025, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  In general, the office estimated, deploying 1,000 National Guard troops to a U.S. city costs between $18 million and $21 million each month.

D.C. deployment grows 

The initial deployment in Washington has since grown, with thousands of troops from states all across the country now deployed in the nation’s capital.

As of Aug. 1, there are more than 4,600 National Guard members deployed in Washington. About 680 of those guardsmen are from the District itself, while most are predominantly from the South.

Georgia, South Carolina and Mississippi have sent the most guard members.

But that total headcount has risen as many states and territories sent additional troops to help support events as part of the Trump-led Freedom250 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial in July.

For some states, their National Guard members have been deployed quietly to the nation’s capital, including in Idaho, where the state made no formal announcement of the move.

The Department of Defense’s budget estimates for fiscal years 2028 and 2029 assume a total headcount of approximately 2,500 National Guard personnel in Washington through January 2029. Future funding includes a planned $625.8 million for fiscal 2028 and $198.3 million for fiscal 2029.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The notice, which HHS is scheduled to officially publish Thursday, comes after the department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for unaccompanied children, let a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice for such services expire. The center has a network of roughly 100 organizations it works with that provided legal aid and representation to immigrant children across the country, including in immigration court appearances.

Lawyers from Acacia said the Trump administration did not renew the contract because attorneys refused to hand over sensitive information about their clients. 

Burke Law Group, a Houston-based law firm founded in 2023, “advises companies on complex environmental, regulatory, and enforcement matters,” according to its website.

The firm will be tasked with representing as many as 24,000 unaccompanied immigrant children through their court proceedings.

The founder, Marcella Burke, during the first Donald Trump administration worked at the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior. From 2017-2018 she served as the deputy general counsel for EPA and from 2018 to 2020 worked at Interior as deputy solicitor and senior counsel, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The Burke Law Group did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

Of the nearly 30 lawyers on the law firm’s website, only two list experience in immigration and asylum law.

The multi-million-dollar contract is set to start Aug. 15 and run through August 14, 2027. Because it’s a “single-source cooperative agreement” contract, it gives the law firm the flexibility to subcontract work out to other firms at its discretion.

Since Monday, unaccompanied minors have lost access to their legal representation. Without it, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their case goes through immigration court. 

A handful of legal organizations have been able to dip into savings to continue legal coverage. But some have had to stop altogether, especially after the Trump administration since December has refused to reimburse more than $65 million in completed legal work.

A federal judge on Thursday is set to hear arguments whether to hold the Trump administration in contempt for violating an April 2025 court order that ordered the government to continue funding legal representation for unaccompanied children.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

A bipartisan bill passed the House in July but faces hurdles in the Senate, where members from both parties have pushed back against ending the semiannual clock changes. 

“People are sick and tired of having to change their clocks twice a year,” Trump wrote in a social media post Tuesday night, adding that “it is foolish, inconvenient and, in some cases, very costly.” 

Trump said “this is an issue that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents can unite behind” while asking GOP senators to “release their holds, and allow the hotline to clear on the Republican side.” Members of the Senate are scheduled to adjourn for an August recess later this week, though it’s also possible they may get delayed by pending legislation.

The president also flexed the benefits of ceasing the semiannual clock changes, saying “leading Medical, Crime, and Economic Studies” show it would help decrease robbery and murder rates, reduce car accidents, lower risk for cardiac issues, stroke and seasonal depression and also make it safer for children to get home from school, among other advantages. 

Florida GOP Rep. Vern Buchanan introduced the measure in the House — dubbed the Sunshine Protection Act — which passed it, 308-117. 

But the Senate has yet to take up the legislation, with at least one fierce critic of the move, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, having argued in a floor speech last year that making daylight saving time permanent would “push winter sunrises to an absurdly late hour, depriving Americans of morning sunshine that’s essential for our safety and well-being.” 

Cotton also noted that the darkness from making daylight saving time permanent would be “especially harmful for schoolchildren and working Americans.” 

Meanwhile, GOP Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who sponsored a companion bill in January 2025, celebrated the House’s passage and urged the Senate to “take it up NOW and send it to President Trump’s desk,” per a July social media post. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Senate confirmed, 51-44, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the national public health agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, which has taken heat over the vaccine-skeptical agenda pursued by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That agenda marked a central theme of Schwartz’s tense confirmation hearing in July before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pressed her on how she would deal with any political interference from the Trump administration when it comes to vaccine policy. 

Schwartz ultimately scored the backing of the panel’s chair, Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had appeared dissatisfied with her responses at her confirmation hearing.

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Schwartz’s bid.

Five senators did not vote, including GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, along with Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. 

Schwartz worked as an occupational medicine physician in the U.S. Navy. She transferred to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, where she achieved the rank of rear admiral. 

Schwartz also served as the chief medical officer of the U.S Coast Guard and later as deputy surgeon general of the United States.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Despite the hard work, weird hours, and low pay, it was her favorite job, she said.

“I loved my residents,” Valentine said. “I always spoiled them. I almost got fired for spoiling my residents. I love people.”

Valentine, 80, spoke last week surrounded by medicines and medical devices in the living room of her modest duplex just west of downtown Dayton.

She said that as much as she loved caring for people in nursing homes in Ohio and Texas, she dreads being in one herself because she knows how the quality of care can slip.

So, suffering from several serious infirmities, Valentine hopes to spend the rest of her days at home, with a son caring for her full-time and receiving other services as needed.

But, along with the rest of the nearly 140,000 Ohioans getting Medicaid-supported community care, she faces uncertainty. 

Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over 10 years.

The most drastic provisions take effect Jan. 1. Before they do, Republican officials are highlighting what they say is rampant fraud in Medicaid-supported home care programs.

So, forced to find savings, those programs might seem a likely place for state Medicaid officials to start, which is what is worrying residents of their own homes like Valentine.

Polling shows that 62% of Americans think Medicare, the federal retirement program, pays for long-term nursing-home care, but it doesn’t. Medicaid does.

That’s why millions of American families with loved ones in the nursing home are forced to spend down their wealth until they qualify for Medicaid and then the federal-state health program foots the bill. 

The University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics in July reported that it is mandatory for states receiving Medicaid dollars to finance nursing-home care, but not in-home care. 

Home-based care has become increasingly popular in recent decades. In 2022 it represented 65% of all Medicaid expenditures on long-term care, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported.

“Either more people are going to go into nursing homes, which may not be consistent with their preferences, or people who stay at home may have to get their needs met by their family members or close friends who don’t get paid to do it,” the University of Pennsylvania quoted Rachel M. Werner, executive director of its Institute for Health Economics, as saying.

In addition to not being preferred by some seniors, nursing-home care is significantly more expensive than home-based care.

A Place for Mom, a care-referral company based in New York, estimates that a semi-private room in a nursing home is 48% more expensive than the median cost of full-time, home-based care.

Even if it is more expensive and she doesn’t want to be there, nursing homes might be where people like Valentine are headed.

“I don’t want to be in no nursing home because of the way they treat you,” she said. “They don’t change you. I used to change my patients every two hours whether they needed it or not. I always cleaned them up.”

As it is now, her 63-year-old son Clifford lives with her and provides around-the-clock care. His mother’s respiratory and heart problems are acute enough that even trips to the store have to be kept brief as possible because he doesn’t want his mother to be alone, he said.

Ohio provides support through Medicaid waivers for family members who care for their loved ones. But Clifford hasn’t applied for it out of fear that household income will exceed limits for other benefits such as his mother’s Social Security or federal food assistance.

The Roosevelt Institute in April published a report saying that such unpaid caregivers provided $600 billion worth of services in 2021 and stunted their own economic prospects in the process.

Clifford Valentine said he nursed his wife through a terminal illness before caring for his mother.

“It’s kind of rough, but I’ve always done it,” he said.

Some Republican political leaders say Medicaid programs for home care are the object of rampant fraud. In June, acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and other cabinet officials came to Ohio to highlight what they said was massive fraud in Medicaid generally.

And in a May radio interview, Ohio Auditor and state AG nominee Keith Faber said massive Medicaid home-care fraud isn’t being detected because “grandma’s never going to rat out” relatives who are being paid to care for her but are neglecting her instead. His campaign didn’t respond when asked to document an instance in which that actually happened.

With all the politics around the issue, people receiving and providing Medicaid support for home-based care are keeping their heads down.

In Dorothy Valentine’s case, she has Cityblock coordinating care on behalf of Molina Healthcare, which operates managed-care programs for Medicaid patients and those who, like Valentine, are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare.

Cityblock is paid a flat, per-member fee to coordinate services with an eye toward limiting costs through things like keeping them healthy enough to avoid hospital stays. The more savings it creates, the more money it makes.

Jenny Edelston, a spokeswoman, said policymakers should think hard about what might be lost by cutting funding for such programs. They help keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes, she said.

“Without particular attention to the impact of cuts on high-value (home-and community-based) health services, reduced funding can lead to short term pressure on Medicaid (managed-care organizations) — which may in turn cause (the care organizations) to pull back on investing in partnerships that leverage (home-and-community-based services) to avoid acute care down the line,” Edelston said in an email.

For Valentine, it’s a question of where she’ll spend her remaining days.

“This is where I want to be,” she said. “If it wasn’t for Cityblock, I don’t know what I’d do.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Department of Health shows the state has seen nearly 4,000 cases since June 1.

The highest numbers come out of Lucas County, which has 553 cases to date since the beginning of the summer. Cuyahoga County has a reported 457 cases, and Wood County comes in third with 446 cases since June 1.

While Ohio hasn’t caught up to the numbers seen in Michigan, considered one of the biggest states in the cyclosporiasis outbreak, the numbers are getting close, according to the state’s health director, Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff.

“We have just seen over the course of the last couple of months a fairly steady and alarming increase in the number of cases,” Vanderhoff said in a Tuesday press conference.

“What it is telling us is that we have reason for continued concern about the risk people face from cyclosporiasis.”

Vanderhoff encouraged anyone who has been sick to respond to calls from health departments seeking to interview those who have been infected.

“These interviews provide crucial data … and help find commonalities among those who have been sick,” Vanderhoff said.

While the state is deferring to the FDA and the CDC to identify potential sources of the outbreak, the state has been collecting information they’ve passed on to federal agencies, according to Vanderhoff.

The CDC has traced infections back to iceberg lettuce in nine states including Ohio, and produce company Taylor Farms has recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico, according to the federal agency.

The investigation into the outbreak is still ongoing, as the CDC is also investigating other cases it says are unrelated to the outbreak hitting Ohio and surrounding states.

The Ohio health director dismissed ideas that fresh produce should be avoided entirely, pushing for more diligent cleaning practices instead.

“Prevention really begins not with avoiding … things our bodies need, but taking a sound approach to how we prepare fruits and vegetables every single day,” he said.

Proper washing of produce includes a thorough rinse under running water, and scrubbing fruits and vegetables with tougher skins with a brush.

Dr. Robert Frenck, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, was mainly on the press conference to discuss child vaccines as a new school year approaches, but also served to dissuade ideas that cyclosporiasis is bigger than it is.

“In the greater scheme of things, it’s still a rather unusual infection,” Frenck said, adding that norovirus sees far more incidence rates annually than the parasitic infection that’s covering major news headlines this year.

The hallmark of cyclosporiasis is the lasting effects, Frenck said, with symptoms like diarrhea lasting weeks, sometimes months.

Treatment is possible through antibiotics, but Frenck said it’s important to know when to alert the doctor (after about a week of symptoms), and for physicians to make sure lab tests look for the parasite. Routine lab work wouldn’t normally cover that type of infection, according to the pediatrician.

Both Frenck and Vanderhoff said deaths are not typical from the infection.

Reported deaths in Michigan were connected to individuals with unrelated significant health problems, but Vanderhoff said that does give reason for immunocompromised, elderly, or very young individuals to keep medical professionals involved in their care.

“The caution that I would remind people about is if you’re vulnerable because your immune system is not working optimally … and you develop diarrhea, you should be reaching out to your provider immediately for guidance and direction,” Vanderhoff said.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The order from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes means that between 330,000 to 350,000 Haitians living in the United States have lost their Temporary Protected Status, even while legal arguments on a racial discrimination claim continue. 

Reyes’ order, in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, brought the case into compliance with a 6-3 Supreme Court decision that Haitians and Syrians were not entitled to postponements of their status while litigation continues.

The June Supreme Court ruling also said courts could not review the Homeland Security secretary’s decision to end TPS.

As part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, the administration has moved to revoke the legal status of millions of immigrants, including those with TPS, which is given to nationals who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return to. 

The State Department has a “do not travel” advisory for Haiti due to gang violence and kidnappings. 

Work authorization for Haitians expired last week, along with some driver’s licenses for immigrants residing in Ohio and Florida, two states that have passed laws that tie eligibility for a driver’s license to immigration status.

Racial animus

The remaining legal argument is whether the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for Haiti was based on racial animus, which would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. 

On the campaign trail, then-presidential candidate Trump singled out Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, claiming that their legal protections were illegitimate and falsely accusing them of eating house pets. 

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision in June, said that the Haitians’ arguments that their equal protection claim that their protections were terminated on a racial animus were unlikely to prevail in court.

Discovery issues 

The attorney who represented the Haitian TPS holders before the Supreme Court, Geoffrey Pipoly, told States Newsroom this week that he was not expecting Reyes to issue a new stay to halt the ending of protections. 

Pipoly and his team had not yet obtained enough evidence through discovery, a process that can take months, to try and secure another stay, he said. 

Pipoly said the documents produced by the Department of Justice so far were limited and heavily redacted.

“They’re just taking this exceptionally robust view of privilege in a way that I’ve never seen a government defendant exert privileges before,” he said. “What’s behind those redactions is going to influence the scope of our ongoing equal protection claim. But we’re going to have to litigate what’s behind those redactions.”

Reyes in her Wednesday order also denied the administration’s request to issue a stay on the discovery process and ordered both parties to submit a briefing schedule.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The laws in Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey take different approaches to which retailers and products they cover, the discount exceptions they allow and how violations are enforced. 

Lawmakers in at least 11 states considered similar bills this year, but often faced opposition from business groups that say some of the legislation is overly broad.

Maryland’s new law, which was the first in the country and takes effect Oct. 1, applies to grocery stores of at least 15,000 square feet and third-party food delivery services. Under the law, these businesses are prohibited from using personal data to set a price for a specific shopper for most groceries. It does, however, allow loyalty programs, subscription prices and differences based on supply, location or operating costs. Businesses also have 45 days to correct a violation before the state can bring an enforcement action. 

New Jersey’s new law, signed by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill in July, prohibits retailers from using personal data to set individualized prices for groceries and placed a one-year moratorium on the installation of new electronic shelf labels while the state studies their effects. Retailers with these shelf labels already installed can continue to use them and maintain them. 

“New Jersey families are already feeling the pressure of higher costs,” Sherrill said in a statement. “The last thing they need is companies secretly using their personal data to charge them more than someone else for the exact same product.”

Connecticut’s law, signed by Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont in June, broadly prohibits retailers and third-party delivery services from using surveillance pricing. It includes exceptions for discounts and certain price differences unrelated to a shopper’s personal data. 

Consumer advocates say surveillance pricing is difficult to detect because shoppers generally cannot see what another customer is being charged. Retail and technology groups have argued that overly broad restrictions could interfere with discounts and rewards programs and be expensive for businesses to comply.

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

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

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

Law and order.

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

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

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

Family values.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rule of law.

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

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

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

The party of Lincoln.

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

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

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

The party of balanced budgets.

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

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

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

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

It kept them all.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The deadline came and went with no withdrawal, killing any possibility of a special primary to replace Miller as the Republican nominee in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District. One lever is left, and it is a short one: if Miller withdraws by the close of business Monday, county Republican chairs can pick a replacement at a meeting they must give two days’ notice to hold. After that his name is on the November ballot and it stays there.

Two days before the clock ran out, volunteers hung a banner over Interstate 90 in Cleveland. NO MORE MILLER. NO MORE CREECH. The second name belongs to state Rep. Rodney Creech, and the two men have this in common: their own party’s leadership asked each of them to step aside, each refused, and both are on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Miller says he is not going anywhere, and he denies all of it. “No court, no agency has ever substantiated any allegation of abuse against me. No criminal charge has ever been filed against me,” he said in a livestream Sunday, according to Roll Call. “Every single one of these allegations were already investigated, and I cooperated fully every single time because I had nothing to hide and I have nothing to hide now.” That is accurate as far as it goes. He has not been charged with a crime, and a court has continued to grant him joint custody of his daughter — a point his campaign has repeatedly pressed.

What is also true is that a sitting Republican U.S. senator spent Sunday telling the country that Miller is dangerous, and that six days later Miller is still his party’s nominee.

The pressure that produced nothing

Bernie Moreno is Miller’s former father-in-law. He had said nothing publicly for months. Then, hours after Miller’s livestream, he posted this: “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.” Moreno added that Miller “needs serious psychological help” and that he holds his breath “every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” according to The Associated Press. On Tuesday he told reporters the past stretch had been the “seventh level of hell” for his family.

Miller’s answer, within hours: “If my daughter said the same thing to me, I personally wouldn’t wait two years before holding him accountable. You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus. This is all political.”

President Donald Trump called Miller on Monday and, per CBS News, told him the race would be tough. Publicly, Trump said only that Miller is “a good person” and that he would “let the families figure that out.” Speaker Mike Johnson said in July that allegations are allegations and the Ethics Committee has a process. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, asked Tuesday whether members facing domestic violence allegations should step down, would not say. “It is a family matter; I don’t have any observations beyond that,” he told reporters. Those decisions, he added, “are going to be made ultimately by the people of Ohio.”

They will be. That is what the deadline was for.

The investigation he asked for

On Tuesday morning Miller announced he was filing paperwork requesting a congressional ethics investigation into himself. “I have absolutely nothing to hide,” he wrote. The House Ethics Committee opened one that afternoon, into whether Miller may have engaged in “domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use,” while noting that opening a review “does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.”

It is worth knowing what that panel is. Ethics is the only standing House committee split evenly — five Republicans, five Democrats — which by design hands either party a veto over anything it does. The chair comes from the majority. It is also a committee that has drawn public criticism this year over how long its work takes. Miller asked for a referee whose rules make a tie the likeliest outcome, and got one, roughly 32 hours before the deadline that could have removed him from the ballot.

The other name on the banner

Creech represents West Alexandria, roughly three and a half hours southwest of that overpass. His path is the one Miller is currently walking, except Creech already reached the end of it — and it ended well for him.

In May 2025, Speaker Matt Huffman stripped Creech of all four of his committee assignments, including the chairmanship of House Agriculture, and asked him to consider resigning. The trigger was Bureau of Criminal Investigation records reported by the Statehouse News Bureau, in which a minor relative accused Creech in 2023 of climbing into bed with her while wearing only his underwear. Creech told investigators he had gotten into bed with her in his underwear. He denied the sexual nature of the allegations. “This, on its face, was very serious,” Huffman said at the time.

Creech was never charged. The Clark County prosecutor declined in October 2024 to take it further, writing that Creech’s “behavior during the time of the investigation was concerning” but that “the evidence falls short of the threshold needed for prosecution.” Creech has called the allegations “demonstrably false.”

He did not resign. And ten months later, Huffman handed everything back. In February, the speaker restored Creech’s committee seats and signed a letter asking the Ohio Republican Party to endorse his re-election. The party obliged. Huffman’s explanation was that nothing had come of it: the allegations “either weren’t true” or “it wasn’t clear if they were true,” and “there are no authorities taking any action.” Creech said he was “stronger, wiser and more committed than ever.” In May he won his primary with 58 percent.

He sits on the House Public Safety Committee.

Along the way Creech dismissed his own daughter’s public statements about his conduct as “textbook parental alienation” — a theory researchers and child welfare advocates have described as pseudoscience used in family court to discredit children who report abuse. She pushed back publicly: “You continue to post trying to nail my mother and blame her, instead of taking blame for your own inappropriate actions.” In the closing weeks of the primary, a super PAC funded by DraftKings’ parent company mailed voters material boosting Creech, one piece of which featured a photograph of a young girl. His daughter said the group used family photos of children he “has not contacted or seen in years.”

Why this lands in Seneca and Sandusky counties

Creech is a frequent legislative partner of state Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery), who represents House District 88 covering Sandusky County and part of Seneca County. Both men were listed as endorsers on Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign website until April, when both names vanished from the page after this outlet reported on them. Click’s name reappeared within about two hours. Creech’s did not.

Which is its own kind of answer. Ramaswamy’s campaign could work out quickly enough that one of those names was a problem. The speaker of the Ohio House, the Ohio Republican Party, and a DraftKings-funded super PAC reached the opposite conclusion and spent money on it.

What is actually on the ballot

Miller faces Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker with Ironworkers Local 17 and a five-term Brook Park city councilman. Inside Elections rates the Cleveland-area district Likely Republican; Trump carried it by 11 points in 2024 while Miller won a second term by 15. Poindexter’s post Sunday: “No one credibly accused of holding a gun to his wife’s head and breaking their two-year-old daughter’s collarbone belongs in the halls of power.”

In House District 40 — Preble County and parts of Butler and Montgomery — Creech faces Democrat Timothy Hornbacker, who took the nomination as a write-in, and Libertarian Joshua A. Umbaugh.

The people on the overpass

The Burning River Brigade describes itself as the Northeast Ohio chapter of the national Visibility Brigade, volunteers who put messages on highway bridges. In a public post with photographs of Monday’s display, the group said Creech had blocked its Facebook page the previous morning, complaining that it is not in his district.

Creech’s district is 88 counties wide when he is voting on public safety policy and one county wide when someone objects.

Every institution with the power to move these two men off a ballot declined to use it. What went up over I-90 on Monday was a bedsheet.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Then the video came down.

Nine months later, the episode has not gone away. Democratic nominee Amy Acton still raises it on the campaign trail. Ramaswamy has never publicly explained why the video was deleted, and the proposal has not resurfaced in the education agenda his campaign describes to voters.

What he said

On Monday, Nov. 24, 2025, Ramaswamy posted a video titled “How to ACTUALLY make life affordable,” running through ways he said state government could lower costs for Ohioans across housing, energy, property taxes, health care and child care.

“I’m a dad,” Ramaswamy said in the video. “Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going til 4 o’clock instead of 3 o’clock so you don’t have to pay for child care.”

The video did not address what a longer school year or school day would cost districts, or who would pay for the additional instructional days, staff time, transportation and building operations.

Acton’s campaign clipped the education portion and posted it. The clip spread quickly.

The video disappears

Ramaswamy deleted the original post. A new version went up without the education section.

Some Republicans responded by claiming the clip Acton’s campaign had saved was generated with artificial intelligence. It was not. Ramaswamy’s campaign confirmed to the Columbus Dispatch that the video was authentic, and Snopes independently traced the deleted post to Ramaswamy’s own feed.

The campaign did not dispute that Ramaswamy said it. It disputed that he meant it as policy.

“Parents across Ohio are demanding a better education system for their children – and that is exactly who Vivek is listening to. A casual back-and-forth on TikTok is not a policy rollout; it’s a conversation with voters, despite Democrats pretending otherwise,” campaign spokesperson Connie Luck told The Center Square.

“They’re trying to manufacture an issue because they know Amy Acton’s education agenda amounts to the same failed policies that continue to let down our children,” Luck said. “Vivek will keep listening to parents across the state and remains open to any option that gives our children a real chance at a better future.”

Ramaswamy posted a follow-up video defending himself and attacking Acton’s record on pandemic-era school closures.

“We want an education system that lifts every child up. We’re going to think creatively on how we deliver it. That’s the answer,” Ramaswamy said in that video, according to 13abc. “If Democrats want to distort my position, let them. My opponent, Amy Acton, has absolutely zero vision for how to help education in Ohio.”

Acton’s campaign manager, Phil Stein, said in a statement to 10TV that forcing teachers and students into year-round school would blow a hole in public school budgets and showed Ramaswamy was out of touch with Ohioans.

Where the idea stands now

Ramaswamy has not restated the proposal since. Asked about it later in an interview with Signal Statewide, he did not explain why he posted and then deleted it, describing the idea instead as a way of being “open-minded” about improving education in the state.

The education platform his campaign has described to voters since does not include a year-round calendar or a longer school day. His campaign has told outlets his priorities are raising academic standards, giving parents more control, expanding career-technical pathways and moving teachers to merit-based pay. At an education forum in Hilliard before the video, he emphasized reading and math standards and teacher compensation.

Acton has kept the episode alive. She brought it up again this year while appearing on Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s podcast, citing it among what she called Ramaswamy’s “interesting policy ideas.”

“That’s been a lot of our campaign — it’s literally just been pointing out his own words,” Acton said.

Why it matters in Seneca County

The question the video skipped — who pays — is not hypothetical for districts in northwest Ohio.

Three weeks before Ramaswamy posted the video, Tiffin voters approved a 0.75% earned income tax levy, the district’s first operating levy since 2012, generating roughly $3.2 million a year for salaries, student programs, transportation and day-to-day operations. Superintendent Jerry Nadeau thanked voters for making it possible to continue providing existing programs and services.

That levy was not an expansion. It was a backfill. Tiffin City Schools Treasurer Anne Spence has identified state property tax legislation as directly responsible for a projected $1.2 million annual revenue loss that took effect in March 2026.

A mandated longer school year and longer school day would land on districts already in that position. Additional instructional days carry costs in staff contracts, busing, utilities and building maintenance. Neither the original video nor the campaign’s response addressed where that money would come from.

Ramaswamy is simultaneously campaigning on deep tax cuts that analysts say would reduce the revenue schools rely on. Innovation Ohio, a progressive policy group, has estimated that his property tax rollback would cut $6.6 billion a year from local budgets, including roughly $4 billion from school districts, and that eliminating the state income tax could force a roughly 20% statewide property tax increase to replace lost school funding. Ramaswamy has not identified replacement revenue for either proposal.

A recurring pattern

The year-round school episode was not isolated.

Ramaswamy vowed to abolish property taxes at his campaign launch, then clarified this spring that he wants to reduce them. In March, a campaign post revived a 2025 speech in which he said Ohio has too many public universities and that they need to be consolidated; he named Cleveland State University, the University of Akron, Kent State University and Central State University in a March 27 Columbus Dispatch opinion column. After Gov. Mike DeWine, state Sen. Jerry Cirino and university presidents publicly rejected the idea, Ramaswamy told a Strongsville town hall it was “incorrect” that he wanted to shut down universities — a shift TiffinOhio.net documented against his own video.

His campaign frames that willingness to float big ideas as a virtue. Spokesperson Evan Machan told Signal Statewide that Ramaswamy is not a career politician reading from a script and is unafraid to have open, unfiltered dialogue with Ohioans, while his opponent offers no solutions.

Nonpartisan analysts have read it differently. The Cook Political Report cited the rollout of the university proposal as an example of the recurring controversies Ramaswamy has handed Democrats, and analyst Jessica Taylor moved the governor’s race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on July 10.

Ramaswamy and Acton meet in the general election on Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii convened a panel of advocates and former department officials in Republican and Democratic administrations to blast the department’s moves, which represent a key step in President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department. 

Education announced in June that the Department of Health and Human Services would administer programs under Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, while civil rights enforcement under its Office for Civil Rights would be transferred to the Justice Department.

Democrats have been highly critical of the moves since they were announced. 

Families of students with disabilities “deserve an educational system that is going to provide their kids with the education services that (are) required under IDEA,” Hirono said Tuesday. 

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, guarantees a free public education for students with disabilities. OSERS is responsible for managing and supporting IDEA. The umbrella unit includes the Office of the Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education Programs and the Rehabilitation Services Administration. 

Meanwhile, Education’s Office for Civil Rights is tasked with investigating discrimination complaints from students and families.

Lacking expertise

Democratic critics of the interagency agreements say the Education Department is best equipped to deal with special education programs and civil rights enforcement.

“In my view, neither of these other agencies or departments have the expertise to really be able to handle their piece of this,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen said.  

The Maryland Democrat noted that he’d “much rather be in a position where we’re trying to make good things happen than trying to prevent harm to the Department of Education and the effort to make sure that we address the civil rights of students and make sure that people have the special education opportunity that the law requires, but here we are.” 

The Education Department announced 10 earlier interagency agreements with HHS, Labor, Interior, State and Treasury in an effort to shift several of its major functions to those agencies. 

‘One consistent answer’

Valerie C. Williams, who served as director of the Office of Special Education Programs, or OSEP, under the Biden administration, said the deteriorating quality of special education may not be immediately noticed, but would have significant consequences for the students.

“Here’s what worries me most, as someone who ran this office: The damage does not announce itself,” she said. “The erosion of enforcement and support does not show up the week it happens. It shows up months later, as a state that quietly stops getting monitored, a complaint that just sits, or a phone call that never gets answered.”

Laurie VanderPloeg, associate executive director for professional affairs at the Council for Exceptional Children, called on members of Congress across the aisle to “stand up for infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities by preserving the Department of Education and protecting special education programs from being transferred to another agency.” 

VanderPloeg served as director of OSEP during the first Trump administration. 

“We must resist the urge to make the fate of children with disabilities political, and urgently remain focused on supporting outcomes for all children,” she said. 

Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law said “there’s a reason that Congress kept OCR and OSERS in the same building.” 

Galanter, who served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for civil rights during the Obama and Biden administrations, said “school districts need one consistent answer on disability rights, not two agencies pulling in different directions.” 

Administration defends transfer

Tuesday’s forum came just days after a Senate education panel advanced a bipartisan bill to rein in Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department and would block interagency agreements that transfer programs regarding special education, elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education and Native American education. 

That legislation notably would not apply to the administration’s efforts to shift civil rights enforcement under OCR to the Justice Department. 

Savannah Newhouse, a spokesperson for the Education Department, doubled down on the administration’s efforts, in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Tuesday. 

Newhouse said Hirono and her Democratic colleagues “are either completely ignorant to the collapse of American education, or they are actively rooting for the bureaucracy over our children,” adding that “their desperate fearmongering, claiming students will lose guaranteed federal support, is flatly false.” 

Newhouse added that under Education’s partnership with Justice, “families retain the exact same direct line to staff for civil rights complaints.” 

Regarding Education’s agreement with HHS surrounding special education programs, Newhouse said “OSERS staff remain fully committed to protecting the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) with bolstered support from HHS — an agency that already successfully manages grants and programs that serve individuals with disabilities.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which authorized highway and transit programs for five years, expires Sept. 30. Roughly $38.6 billion per year in extra federal transportation funding is set to expire with it, even if the continuing resolution the Senate advanced 89-4 Monday becomes law.

The stopgap measure, a version of which has also passed the House, would keep the government funded mostly at current levels, and reauthorize highway and transit programs through Dec. 11. 

But it would not renew the advance appropriations that provided $184 billion over five years for a host of transportation programs under the infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed in his first year in office.

Ben Gilsdorf, an associate legislative director for transportation at the National Association of Counties, said in a Tuesday interview that the advance appropriations funded many of the group’s top transportation priorities.

“It’s not all of the programs under (the infrastructure law) that would stop without an extension,” he said. “But for us, it’s several of the most impactful ones.”

The National Association of Counties was part of a broad range of advocacy groups representing business, labor, cities, state departments of transportation and every mode of transportation that signed a letter last month asking Congress to extend the supplemental funding.

Funding for Transportation Department programs makes up a bit more than half of the total advance appropriations in the infrastructure law, which also includes major funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Energy Department and telecommunications program. 

The total advance appropriations for fiscal 2026 were about $66.2 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Bridges, airports, transit and more

The DOT funding largely flows to state departments of transportation. 

Returning to pre-2021 baseline infrastructure spending would leave every state with less federal funding to cover varied transportation needs.

About 30%, $10.8 billion per year, of the extra transportation funding is determined by formula, meaning the amounts sent to each state vary based on population, highway miles and other factors.

California is the only state that would lose 10 figures worth of funding, at nearly $1.1 billion. 

But even Vermont, the state with the lowest total funding lost, would see $55.6 million less in formula funds if the funding is not extended, according to data Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray of Washington sent to her fellow Democratic senators last month.

A total of 10 formula programs representing different modes of transportation would be affected, according to the fact sheet from Murray’s office.

More than half of the formula funding, $5.5 billion, is slated for the Federal Highway Administration’s bridge repair program. 

Airport construction funds represent the next-greatest funding at $3 billion per year. The Federal Transit Administration’s grant program to maintain transit system infrastructure would lose $950 million and state transportation departments would lose another $900 million in federal funding for electric vehicle charging stations.

Other affected programs are for highways in Appalachian states, truck safety inspections, ferry boats and terminals, FTA grants for senior passengers and those with disabilities and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration programs.

In addition to formula funds, the remaining 70% of advance appropriations is distributed via 25 competitive grant programs, according to the Murray document.

Grant programs to fund ports, large highway and rail projects, transit station upgrades, roadway safety and other projects would be among those losing funding.

Complicating spending negotiations 

While the law that initiated the additional funding was bipartisan, there are indications an extension could be a more partisan issue.

Murray said ahead of the Senate floor vote Monday that Republicans did not “agree to our efforts to extend critical advance appropriations for infrastructure” and vowed to continue pursuing the additional funds.

Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, did not reference advance appropriations in a press release announcing a deal on the stopgap bill. 

Republicans, who hold majorities in both chambers of Congress, may prefer to settle the future of the funding through a long-term surface transportation bill or full-year appropriations measure, Gilsdorf said.

Even if the Senate bill is enacted, there will be an opportunity when it expires to revisit the issue, he said.

“There’d be another bite at the apple,” he said.

A person familiar with negotiations who was not authorized to speak on the record said Tuesday that the advance appropriations in the 2021 law were meant to be one-time funding, and that extending them in a stopgap measure meant to preserve the status quo would be inappropriate.

The funding is part of a larger policy debate than is usually considered in a continuing resolution, the person said.

The issue could hang over negotiations for full-year spending bills, likely to begin in earnest after November’s elections. 

Senate appropriators have not reached a deal for top-line spending levels for fiscal 2027. 

Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s urging, are seeking a massive boost to defense programs. 

Democrats historically seek parity between non-defense and defense spending, but have relaxed that stance while the extra infrastructure funds have been flowing. Without that additional funding, Democrats might be less amenable to compromise.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had been withholding support for Blanche, voted with other members of the committee along party lines, 12-10, to send Blanche’s nomination to the full Senate. It is unclear how soon the Senate will vote on the confirmation.

Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, issued a brief signed statement on social media Sunday night promising the fund is “rescinded,” and an attached unsigned memo stated the tax immunity deal for Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization only applies “retroactively.” 

Trump did not sign the documents, and the president has defended the fund in recent days.

Cornyn said ahead of the vote Tuesday he and Tillis came to an agreement with Justice Department officials on an “agency interpretive guidance document that reaffirms what Mr. Blanche said in his sworn testimony” that the tax audit immunity is limited to the parties and subject matter in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his administration’s own IRS.

Trump voluntarily dropped the lawsuit in May in exchange for tax enforcement immunity for him, his sons Eric and Don Jr., and the Trump Organization, as well as the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that could potentially pay out to violent, but now pardoned, Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted police.

“Given this agreement with Mr. Blanche, I expect the department to live up to this in future litigation, and I will vote to advance him out of the committee today,” Cornyn said at the opening of Tuesday’s meeting.

Tillis said the question over the “payout pot for punks” was settled.

“I’ve never liked this 1776 fund. It made no sense to me, and I thought it was an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th. It’s done, it’s been rescinded, and I am satisfied,” Tillis said.

Tillis argued “both (sides) have a problem” and he hopes Blanche will attempt “a bending of the curve of this absurdity.”

“If you want to talk about weaponization, take a look at the Biden administration … Maybe it’s a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one, and that a little bit more intense than the prior administration, and so on and so forth. But folks, we’ve got to end this stuff,” he said.

He added the “bonehead” DOJ official in North Carolina who is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for a social media post of seashells on a beach spelling out “8647” — a nod to a restaurant kitchen term to get rid of something — “better damn sure have information to back it up because if all it is is a picture, that person should lose his or her job.” 

Dems united in opposition

All committee Democrats followed ranking member Dick Durbin of Illinois in delivering remarks opposing Blanche’s nomination. 

The panel’s minority members hammered concerns about Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files and meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, federal lawsuits for states’ voter records and a promise to faith leaders that the DOJ will make the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn federal abortion protections “permanent in every single state.”

A Department of Justice spokesperson told States Newsroom Tuesday Blanche’s comments have been “mischaracterized and need to be understood in their full context, which was with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states.”

On the criticism of DOJ’s legal intervention to obtain state voter records, the spokesperson said the department “will continue to fight for the integrity of American elections. Ensuring that only eligible citizens vote is a core function of government, and states have an obligation to maintain accurate voter rolls. Where states refuse to comply with lawful requests for voter data, DOJ will pursue every legal avenue available.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey chastised his Republican counterparts for comparing the Trump administration’s actions to the Biden administration, including President Joe Biden’s pardons of his son Hunter and other officials just hours before leaving office.

“That is like being obsessed and using a magnifying glass to study the stain on the living room carpet when behind you is a mountain of excrement covering the living room couch and coffee table,” Booker said. 

He added that Trump’s recent financial disclosure revealed he made nearly $2 billion in crypto and foreign investments, and pointed to his sons’ Eric and Don Jr.’s backing of defense tech business ventures.

“The lack of proportionality going on (by) my colleagues, it is laughable,” he said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse described Blanche’s two-paragraph signed statement and unsigned memo in response to Cornyn and Tillis’ concerns as “decorative.”

The Rhode Island Democrat said the Trump administration could reverse course and create a similar fund.

“Nothing in this document prevents anything like that from happening,” Whitehouse said.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said Whitehouse’s claim is “untrue” and said the department “has released all responsive documents required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” 

“The Department erred on the side of over-collecting from its components to ensure collection of everything necessary under the Act, resulting in over six million pages collected, almost three million of which are responsive and have been produced. The remaining items were non-responsive, meaning entirely unrelated, privileged, or duplicative. This administration has been more transparent on the Epstein matter than any past administration, including the Biden administration,” the spokesperson said in a written response to States Newsroom.

Durbin accused Blanche of lying under oath when he denied during his confirmation hearing a comment he made about the “anti-weaponization” fund during a pre-hearing meeting with Durbin.

“Mr. Blanche told me he made, quote, ‘a mistake,’ end quote, by creating the January 6th slush fund. Where did he say it? In my office, with witnesses on my staff to what I’m about to say. When I asked him about this under oath, Mr. Blanche falsely claimed that he never made this statement,” Durbin said.

A department spokesperson told States Newsroom in a statement that the senator’s accusation is “false and he knows it.”

“The Acting AG signed an order on August 2nd that rescinds the May 18th Order establishing an Anti-Weaponization Fund. He restated and incorporated testimony he gave under oath that the May 19th Order has effect only on plaintiffs and defendants, and that the release is retroactive only. As Acting AG Blanche said at the hearing, the fund is dead. This has been relayed before the House and Senate under oath and in multiple court filings,” according to the spokesperson.

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., slammed Trump for suing the Internal Revenue Service in the first place. The contractor who leaked Trump and his sons’ and organization’s tax information to reporters in 2019 was sentenced for the crime in 2024.

“He waits til he’s president. He sues the IRS for $10 billion. In a stunning act of self-dealing, he purports to settle with himself. He’s represented by his personal lawyers on the one hand, and by his other lawyers at the Department of Justice on the other hand,” Schiff said, highlighting the Florida federal judge’s order that Trump used his presidency to “manipulate” the court for his benefit. 

“Now there was an effort, and I appreciate my colleagues from Texas and North Carolina making an effort to try to rein in this tax settlement. But what they attempted to achieve has not been achieved,” Schiff said.

Epstein survivors disappointed

Blanche’s nomination vote drew criticism from outside the committee as well.

In an open letter Tuesday, 18 survivors of abuse by the now deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and convicted sex trafficker Maxwell called the vote “a profound disappointment.”

Survivors have slammed Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files release, which unmasked several survivors’ names and images in the process “while he concealed the identities of alleged abusers and others connected to Epstein’s trafficking network,” the letter stated.

“When we met with Blanche (after his confirmation hearing), he interrupted us. He told us to ‘get to the point.’ He told us to report what happened to us to the FBI. We already have. Some of us have been reporting these crimes for decades,” the survivors wrote.

In another line of criticism, the legal advocacy organization Democracy Forward said in a letter to the Justice Department Monday that Blanche has refused to provide a sworn statement in federal court that the “anti-weaponization” fund will not accept and pay out claims.

Democracy Forward is representing several plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the fund, including a former federal prosecutor who alleges he was fired in June 2025 for his involvement in Jan. 6 prosecutions.

“The American people are not fooled by this latest move, and neither are we. The Trump-Vance administration cannot ask the public or our clients to accept a late-night social media post in place of legally binding action,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward in a statement Monday.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Mayor Annette Blackwell says every opportunity she’s had has come from her ability to ask questions and surround herself with people from whom she can learn.

Her path to the mayor’s office twisted and turned through various jobs and activities. Blackwell worked as a property tax analyst, helped adults gain the skills to transition out of welfare, processed tax bills for major national shopping centers, and led the charge for a school levy to bring Maple Heights five new schools.

“My resumé never said I could do the job,” Blackwell said. “I’ve been given opportunity after opportunity. I’ve got transferrable skills that I can build upon.”

A Clevelander since childhood, Blackwell became Maple Heights mayor in 2014. Before being elected to lead the city, she spent more than a decade with financial companies, also working at University Hospitals, along with many boards and commissions.

Mayor Blackwell

As the first African American and first woman to lead Maple Heights, but even more so because of her roots as the granddaughter of Alabama sharecroppers, Blackwell said she appreciates the importance of hard work.

Her grandmother was a cook for a third-generation plantation owner, and her family eventually became sharecroppers of that land, picking cotton, growing their own vegetables, and raising their own meat. Blackwell and her sister went back to Alabama while her grandmother still worked as a cook.

_Annette Blackwell.

(Photo courtesy of the Blackwell campaign)_

“We didn’t go to camp, we went back to the farm,” she said.

When her grandmother’s arthritis progressed, making it hard for her to do the daily work, Blackwell stepped in.

“I helped set the table, because if they had seen her not being able to set the table, it would have cost her her housing,” the mayor said.

A family history connected to slavery as well as her career rising the ranks as a woman of color means representation is an important part of her job and her life.

“Representation, because of the way I was socialized, is very important to me,” Blackwell said. “I understand the importance of that because of where I came from: red dirt.”

When she became Mayor Blackwell, she inherited a fiscal emergency that made her very familiar with the Ohio Auditor of State’s office very quickly.

The auditor of state is an elected office that works as a check for local governments, like cities, schools, public libraries, and state boards and commissions.

The state auditor also sits on the Ohio Redistricting Commission alongside the governor and secretary of state, as well as four lawmakers including one member from each party from each chamber of the legislature.

Performance audits are regularly conducted by the auditor of state to ensure local entities are maintaining clean financial books, to investigate potential fraud, and to assist governments in coming back from financial issues.

As is typical for an entity in fiscal emergency, Maple Heights was tasked with putting together a five-year plan to get out of it, a task Blackwell said she took upon herself.

She was told there was the possibility for renewals of the fiscal emergency, something she didn’t want to have to implement.

“Nobody wants to come here if they don’t think you are a good business risk, they can’t get a good return on their investment,” Blackwell said.

So the recovery plan was implemented, and since then, Maple Heights has received several awards for clean audits from the auditor’s office, as recently as February of 2026.

To receive the award, local governments and school districts have to file financial reports on time, and receive an audit report that “does not contain any findings for recovery, material citations, material weakness, significant deficiencies,” and also avoids ethics referrals, questioned costs, or public meetings/public records issues, according to the state auditor’s website.

Having seen the city through fiscal troubles, along with the COVID pandemic and other issues, it wasn’t until the 2026 election was on the horizon that Blackwell thought of anything else.

“I hadn’t given myself permission to think beyond Maple Heights,” she said.

Now, she faces a battle against a known opponent, current Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

LaRose is a former state senator, and has been Secretary of State since 2019.

The secretary of state ran to become a U.S. senator in the 2024 election, coming in third in the GOP primary behind fellow former lawmakers Matt Dolan and the winner, current U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno.

A new auditor’s office

Her background of corporate experience, plus her work in local government have brought nuance that Blackwell believes will fit with the auditor’s office.

There’s a return-on-investment demanded from a company, but the same demand comes from town residents, even if it’s in a different form, she said.

“They want to know before they get up to go to work in the morning – got to be at work at 7 o’clock – the streets are going to be clear, right, and that every week waste management is going to pick up their refuse, and the streetlights are going to be repaired if it’s dark,” Blackwell said.

The fact that she’s dealt with the auditor’s office throughout the years in and out of Maple Heights’ fiscal emergency has given Blackwell a perspective on what the office could have under her leadership: more outreach and a positive outlook.

“I just think that the auditor’s office, with this diversity and this huge workforce and it’s regional offices, can become something it has not been seen as,” Blackwell said. “The auditor doesn’t have to be the bad news, maybe the auditor can be good news.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Online hatred and hostility, directed at Haitian immigrants in Ohio and around the country, is surging.

“There’s a lot of hate coming to Springfield,” said Denise Williams, longtime president of the city’s NAACP. “There’s a lot of like, get out, you don’t belong here. This is 2026 and we are here?”

The 72-year-old civil rights leader was shaken.

“These are our Haitian brothers and sisters, the most lovable, kindest people you can meet. But the haters, oh my gosh. This is a whole different feeling. And when you hear how the President talks about what he wants to do to Springfield, we are in danger.”

Lives are in the balance, said Williams, and “it’s like no one cares.”

Roughy 15,000 vetted Haitians living and working in the area, who followed every rule, every law, came to Ohio legally, paid for their flights, had sponsors, were lawful residents of Springfield until they woke up illegal last week.

On July 27 they lost their humanitarian safety net. The Trump administration ended their Temporary Protected Status (TPS). 

Congress specifically created the immigration relief program to provide safe haven and legal protections to foreign nationals who cannot safely return to their home countries — the indisputable reality for over 330,000 Haitian TPS holders in the United States.

Ground conditions in Haiti remain horrific. The country is on the verge of famine and in the throes of violent anarchy. Murderous gangs continue to kidnap and rape their way to territorial control.

Haitians in the U.S. are terrified of being deported back to hell. Callous indifference by Americas who can’t relate or the growing online/in-person venom — driven by political rhetoric from the highest levels of government — could seal their fate. 

“I don’t think people realize how real life these stakes are,” said Springfield resident Tim Voltz. “How would you feel if you find out that the people who lived here amongst you were raped or killed upon their return to Haiti, or if they starved to death, or died of malnutrition or disease in a detainment camp, or they never saw their children again? Is that what you wanted? Is that the thing you were looking for?”

Voltz, an elder at Champion City Church in Springfield, is focused on the fallout of mass family separations that could affect around 1,400 U.S.-born children of Haitian parents in the city.

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine quietly initiated contingency plans for that possibility, Voltz helped facilitate efforts to recruit local families willing to temporarily house children separated from their parents when ICE sweeps into the city.

Without a short-term solution to provide a stable home environment in the community he said, “those children become wards of the state and shipped to Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, wherever the state can find foster care. They would not only be removed from their parents “but from the only community they have known.”

The goal is to mitigate the trauma for distraught children if worse comes to worse.

“We don’t know how many people ICE will detain or deport or how many of those people will have children,” Voltz stressed. “All we can do is wait and hope we are working very hard on something that won’t be needed.”

It is the not knowing that has Springfield organizer Marjory Wentworth tied up in knots. She works with a coalition of local faith and community leaders that strives to support and protect Haitian families and individuals.

“It’s awful. Trying to make plans. Many have children born here. Is ICE coming? What does that mean? Some are getting ankle monitors put on them. Why suddenly criminalize a group of people who haven’t broken any laws? These are human beings with families who are a part of our everyday lives here, whether it’s your work situation, or your kids who play soccer in school together, or somebody you sit with in church. I mean those people are all gonna disappear at once? I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

This is not happening in some far away place to far away people. It is happening in Ohio, near Dayton. You could drive there.

The governor was born in Springfield — the city under siege since Donald Trump and JD Vance dehumanized its immigrant population for political gain.

They spewed lies about cat-and-dog-eating Haitians to terrorize the community.

Their cruelty invited members of the far-right Proud Boys and other white supremacy groups to march in Springfield’s streets while bomb threats closed schools and government buildings.

Every black and brown skinned person here has a target on their backs, said the NAACP’s Williams: “People who look like me, as well as the Haitians, are not safe. I’m telling people of color don’t be out after dark.” 

Anti-black racism, Haitian American activist Guerline Jozef added, “has always been in this country” and it is “at the heart” of all these policies to revoke black immigrants’ TPS status and mass deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians to a deadly homeland.

“None of this surprises me,” said Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

“I know the system very well. I’ve experienced it. But to be honest with you, I did not think we, as a country, would be on this path of destruction by not prioritizing the lives of people who are paying taxes, who have businesses, children born in the U.S., who work in the health care industry, the hospitality industry, the farming industry, literally keeping us fed and cared for. They will be losing everything; they will be losing their actual lives.”

Jozef is adamant. Those lives must be saved. Somehow. From Springfield to Miami, she stressed, humanity must trump hate and cruelty.

One beleaguered city in Clark County, Ohio, bracing for ugly, could lead the way.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Those extreme weather conditions fueled disaster in Eastern Washington Saturday when a fast-moving wildfire jumped the Spokane River and swept through neighborhoods of Spokane, destroying more than 600 structures and forcing 60,000 residents to evacuate. Incident Commander Tom Clemo called the blaze “probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington’s history.” 

No deaths have yet been reported in Spokane, but Mayor Lisa Brown told local journalists the city is “still assessing the potential for lives to be lost.”

“There is not a fire department in the U.S. that can handle a wind-driven event this size,” said Spokane Assistant Fire Chief Lance Dahl to the Spokane Spokesman-Review. 

Leading up to this year’s fire season, federal officials with the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department directed their wildfire crews to use a “full suppression” strategy and attack wildfires urgently. Following a hot, dry winter that left much of the West parched, federal land managers said it was imperative to contain fires quickly before they get out of control.

But following several dangerous incidents, including the deaths of four federal firefighters in Colorado in June, some longtime wildland fire leaders are questioning that strategy. Many see it as a return to the Forest Service’s decades-old “10 a.m.” policy, which sought to suppress all fires by the morning after they were reported. 

While many states also adhere to “full suppression” policies that aim to keep blazes contained, federal officials have previously had more discretion to let fires burn under supervision if they’re not threatening communities. More concerning, wildfire veterans say, is the possibility that rhetoric from Trump administration officials is putting pressure on fire crews to use aggressive tactics to meet those suppression goals.   

Federal policies that sought to extinguish all fires quickly over much of the past century are now understood by foresters to be a major contributor to the current wildfire crisis. In many places, forests that used to experience fire at regular intervals have grown denser than historical norms, with trees competing for water and thick underbrush covering the forest floor. That gives fuel to the fires and contributes to fast-moving blazes.

“No one in the agencies have said it, but it sure looks like (a return to the 10 a.m. policy) when you read the directions,” said Jane Darnell, who has worked in administrative roles supporting wildfire response and spent more than 30 years with the Forest Service before retiring in 2020. “We lived with the 10 a.m. policy for 100 years, and we got here. This full suppression promise to the public is a promise that can’t be kept.”

Many wildfire leaders say they’ve seen extreme, unprecedented fire behavior this season that only adds to the risk of deploying crews aggressively. 

‘Full suppression’

In April, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent directions to agency leaders in preparation for the summer wildfire season. Both called for a “full suppression” strategy.

“Accelerate initial attack and use a full suppression strategy, in coordination with our interagency partners, across all land jurisdictions to suppress fires early and limit growth,” Rollins wrote. 

Burgum called for “prompt, decisive” suppression of fires, adding that decisions should be “balanced with firefighter safety and a clear assessment of probability of success.”

While both letters mention safety, some wildland fire veterans say agency leaders have put a clear emphasis on attacking fires aggressively. Some fear that crew leaders are being pressured to deploy close to the fire line, rather than choosing the safest place to make a stand. 

“I found it disturbing,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief who served more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. “You’ve got somebody in a suit in an office who’s never fought fires saying you’ve got to go direct attack.” 

Duncan serves as president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of wildfire professionals.

In addition to the agency directives, wildfire veterans noted the rhetoric from President Donald Trump, who has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada as retaliation for wildfire smoke. 

“If managers and leaders are hearing from the politicos, ‘put them all out, put them all out,’ are we putting people in where we shouldn’t be?” said Bobbie Scopa, who had a 45-year career as a firefighter and now serves as vice president with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “I’m hearing from some young firefighters who feel like they are getting pressure to take actions. It’s stupid and you’re scratching your head and people are getting hurt.”

The Interior Department did not respond to a Stateline interview request. The Forest Service declined to comment, saying its resources are focused on fire response.

Dangerous incidents

Already this year, fire crews across the country have been involved in a number of dangerous incidents, including the tragedy in Colorado that left four firefighters dead after a fast-moving blaze overran their position. 

“We’ve already had nine entrapments (firefighters having their position surrounded by fire) this year. That’s crazy,” Duncan said. “That suggests to me that fires are moving quickly and growing so fast.”

Federal officials have said an investigation team is reviewing the Colorado incident. 

“I do trace the tragedy in Colorado to that policy that compelled them to go out and aggressively attack the fires even when conditions did not favor safety or success,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who now serves as executive director for Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology, a group that advocates for ecological fire management. 

I’m hearing from some young firefighters who feel like they are getting pressure to take actions.

– Bobbie Scopa, vice president, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters

“This policy that compels crews to blindly rush out and attack all fires is just not smart and it’s very unsafe,” Ingalsbee said. “They’re throwing back to the policy of the 1930s, ignoring everything we’ve learned about fire ecology and fire behavior”

Other wildland fire veterans say they need to see more details before blaming the deaths in Colorado on federal strategy.

“It’s just really hard to connect that at this time,” Duncan said. “I have faith that the investigation team is looking at that.”

But many former firefighters decried the feds’ abandonment of “managed fire” as a tool. Under that approach, federal land managers in previous years have been given the discretion to let some fires burn under supervision, so long as they didn’t threaten homes or infrastructure. In those cases, advocates say, agency leaders recognized the ecological benefits of fire, along with the potential to reduce the risk of catastrophic blazes in the future. 

“The problem is not fire itself, it’s our relationship with it,” said Darnell, the retired Forest Service administrator. “We can work with these fires that are highly unlikely to have catastrophic effects on infrastructure, keep them on there until the weather puts them out.”

Ingalsbee, with the firefighter safety group, shared a similar sentiment. 

“Excluding fire from the landscape and attacking all fires, that policy ended in the ’70s because it was failing,” he said. “It’s performative firefighting, it’s failing to accomplish tangible goals and it’s putting lives in danger. Fire is nature’s recycling.”

State leaders respond

At the state level, foresters in the Pacific Northwest — the region hardest hit by fires this year — say they have not yet seen evidence that federal agency directives are causing firefighters to take more risks. 

Most state agencies are required by state law to suppress, rather than manage, fires. Oregon state forester Kacey KC said the state’s landscape is too parched this year to safely manage fires for ecological benefits. 

“Every fire we can keep small is good,” she said. “Especially in conditions like this, there is not good fire right now on this landscape.”

In Washington, state forester George Geissler said he had not heard of federal crews taking extra risks. But he cautioned that federal leaders should be careful of their rhetoric.

“If you set goals, but you don’t set a good leadership tone related to safety, you can have those type of decisions being made,” he said.

Geissler said the bigger concern this year has been chaos within the leadership of the federal agencies. Under Trump, the Forest Service and Department of the Interior have been hit with severe staff reductions. The Forest Service is in the midst of a major reorganization. And firefighting operations from multiple agencies within the Interior Department have been consolidated into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, established by Trump this year without congressional approval. 

“In the past, you knew who to go to, you knew which position had what,” Geissler said. “Now with the rapid changes, the loss of personnel, it’s a little bit scattered.”

Federal crews aren’t the only ones that have been involved in dangerous wildfire situations this year. Two separate incidents in Washington state left firefighters injured as a fire overran their position. One of those incidents, the Lyons Ferry Fire, involved a Washington Department of Natural Resources helicopter crew. Geissler said that was a wakeup call for the agency that fire conditions are extreme this year. 

“When the weather is this bad, all of those (safety protocols) become more and more critical,” he said. “We did a full safety standdown over it, because that was an extremely close call for those firefighters.” 

Darnell, the retired Forest Service administrator, said she would not be surprised to hear of more incidents in which firefighters deploy their individual emergency shelters — last-resort devices that can save lives but do not offer full protection in extreme scenarios. 

“We’ve got conditions on the ground that are so explosive, it really begs us to be really careful about where we put people,” Darnell said. “I hope we don’t see any significant loss of life for firefighters.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@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.

Officials with 24 states and the District of Columbia say in the complaint that a regulatory change proposed by the U.S. Administration for Children and Families and set to take effect Aug. 11 greatly exceeds the federal government’s assigned role in overseeing the antipoverty program called TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and violates multiple privacy laws.

The change, first announced in June, will also cost states extra time and money and chill participation in a program that benefits some 2.4 million people nationwide, according to the 60-page lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in D.C. The states are calling for the court to throw out the proposed rule and ensure the confidentiality of this information.

New Jersey Attorney General Jen Davenport said in a statement that the regulatory change would “obliterate” existing guardrails on sensitive data and “violate the privacy of families that are just trying to make ends meet.”

“The Trump Administration has tried time and again to weaponize every aspect of government as part of their reckless immigration enforcement efforts. Now, they want to misuse a program intended to help vulnerable families and children as a tool for harassing immigrants,” Davenport said.

States have the right to “protect critically needed services for families in their time of greatest need,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a statement.

“Families turn to these programs because they’re doing everything they can to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table — these programs are a literal lifeline for struggling parents and their kids,” Rayfield said. “But the Trump Administration is trying to weaponize these emergency assistance programs, taking families’ private, personal data and using it to advance a partisan political agenda that is tearing communities apart.”

The lawsuit alleges the change is part of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to target immigrants by tightening the rules around various social service programs. Administration officials say they are trying to root out fraud and abuse, but critics say the new rules are designed to force out people who were born outside the U.S.

The Administration for Children and Families declined to comment on Monday. According to the lawsuit, the administration said it will share the data it obtains with other government agencies or private entities as part of its quest to verify that states are properly spending taxpayer dollars.

Nothing in the law supports the federal department’s “extravagant claims of authority and gross breach of personal privacy,” the lawsuit says.

“The sharing of such information runs afoul of a thicket of federal privacy protections,” it says.

When TANF was created as part of a federal welfare overhaul in 1996, it was purposely designed to limit the federal government’s role and give states wide control over the program’s design, operation, and information verification, according to the lawsuit. The Trump administration has insisted problems with the program require greater federal scrutiny.

The regulatory change announced in June would force states to provide additional details on participants, including Social Security numbers, country of origin, and immigration status, even though 95% of children and 85% of adults receiving benefits are U.S. citizens, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleges that the Trump administration has not specified how they plan to keep program participants’ data safe, that the change would place a “direct and significant” cost on states, and that releasing data to the federal government would erode trust state agencies have developed with participants.

The plaintiffs are New York, D.C., California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

This story was originally produced by New Jersey Monitor, 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 announcement came shortly after Miller said on X earlier Tuesday he was planning on filing paperwork requesting that the committee investigate him, as he has “nothing to hide” and wants to “clear (his) name from these horrific attacks” on him and his family.  

“We will be providing the committee all necessary documents needed for a detail(ed) examination,” he wrote. “The accusations continue to change, but my facts stay the same. I am looking forward to my colleagues reading everything for themselves.”

The second-term lawmaker is facing intense public scrutiny over allegations that he abused his ex-wife, who is the daughter of fellow Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, and the couple’s 2-year-old daughter. Miller strongly denies the allegations. 

In a statement Sunday, his former father-in-law said Miller “needs serious psychological help” and should not serve in Congress.

After filing for divorce from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, in 2024, Miller has been embroiled in divorce proceedings and a custody battle over their child. The allegations have been public for several months. But in July, the magazine Mother Jones reported on court documents in which Moreno told police detectives investigating their daughter’s broken collarbone that he was abusive and may have been responsible for the injury. 

According to the report, Moreno said that Miller had thrown scalding water from a pan at her, pushed her and pointed a gun at her head during an argument. 

‘Total and complete depravity’

Speaking to reporters in Washington Tuesday, Bernie Moreno said his daughter Emily “lives in constant fear” of Miller, CBS News reported. 

“Deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of,” he said. 

Moreno said that he picked up his granddaughter from Miller this week at a police station so Emily Moreno didn’t have to interact with him. He said Miller wouldn’t hand over their toddler’s favorite stuffed animal, and she spent the next couple days unable to sleep. 

“This is the level of total and complete depravity,” he said. 

The remarks came after Moreno spoke publicly about his former son-in-law for the first time on Sunday, issuing a scathing indictment of Miller, who he described as a danger to his daughter who should not be serving in Congress. Miller is currently running for reelection in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District. 

Moreno has received criticism of his own — including from Miller — for not publicly addressing the allegations sooner. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Moreno said his daughter had explicitly asked him to turn down the temperature and avoid drawing attention. 

But since rising again in mid-July, the attention on Miller has reached a fever pitch as the allegations mounted.

Miller has been vocal about it on his social media pages. He hosted a 20-minute livestream on X in which he defended himself from the allegations and announced he had no intention of dropping his reelection bid. He also released a DropBox page containing scores of documents he said were proof against the allegations. 

But some of those documents contained deeply personal information, including sensitive photos of the child, Politico reported Tuesday. A lawyer for Miller has taken responsibility for the inadvertent inclusion of the photos in the documents, Politico reported, and has apologized to Emily Moreno. 

In his remarks to reporters, Bernie Moreno said he believes the publication of the photo is a felony, and anyone that touched it or transmitted it electronically should be jailed. 

“Now you have hundreds of thousands of psychotic human beings that have that,” he said. “To say, ‘Oops’ is grotesque.” 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.