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.

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

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.

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

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.

Five days after the Republican nominee for Ohio governor walked off a Cincinnati stage to boos from a hall of young conservatives, the reaction has outrun the event itself. A Columbus Dispatch columnist put the appearance in a category usually reserved for campaign-ending moments. His Democratic opponent turned it into a message about billionaire entitlement. And the specific complaints shouted from the floor — data centers, energy prices — are the same ones that moved Tiffin City Council to act in April.

Ramaswamy spoke on Wednesday, July 29, at the 17th annual Young Americans for Liberty National Convention at Xavier University, in the city where he was born. The convention ran July 28 through 30.

“Hall of fame of embarrassing political performances”

Ray Marcano, a contributing columnist for the Columbus Dispatch, wrote that the speech “belongs in the hall of fame of embarrassing political performances.” Marcano wrote that Ramaswamy came off as a privileged know-it-all with no patience for the young crowd, and that when the room turned, he left.

Marcano is a longtime journalist and a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists. His column carried a date error, placing the speech on July 31 rather than July 29.

The turn came when Ramaswamy told the audience that his own generation had already secured its future. Multiple outlets transcribed the line consistently: “The truth of the matter is, you know no matter what happens in whichever direction we go, people in my generation have already made it. We’re gonna be fine. It’s going to be your generation that pays the price. That choice belongs to you.”

The booing escalated from there. Newsweek reported that one audience member shouted that the crowd did not want to hear his talking points, called him a political cretin and told him to leave. Other outlets transcribed that particular insult differently.

Ramaswamy closed by telling the room, “Peace out, see you guys,” and left to continued booing, according to the Daily Beast, which reviewed video of the full appearance.

Acton: Ramaswamy an “out-of-touch billionaire”

Democratic nominee Dr. Amy Acton amplified a clip of the speech on July 30 and wrote that Ramaswamy’s disdain for the people of Ohio is alarming, calling it the entitled mindset of an out-of-touch billionaire.

That line of attack is not new from her campaign. It is the same one Acton has used against his private jet travel and his roughly $25 million in personal loans to his own campaign. What changed on July 29 is that the argument was being made, loudly, by a room full of Republicans and libertarians.

Newsweek and the Daily Beast each reported contacting Ramaswamy’s campaign and Young Americans for Liberty for comment.

Why the venue matters

The room was the point. Young Americans for Liberty grew out of Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and organizes college students around limited government and free markets — the same principles Ramaswamy has built a national profile on. This was not a hostile crowd assembled by opponents. It was, on paper, his lane.

Attendees heckled him over Israel, immigration and H-1B visas, and over housing costs, energy prices and data centers. Ramaswamy told the room the real divide in America is not between Republicans and Democrats but between “winners and whiners.” When one attendee interrupted, he told him he could give a speech when the organizers gave him a slot, and to sit down until then.

The data center fight runs through Seneca County

The heckling over data centers and energy prices lands close to home. Tiffin City Council voted 6-0 in April to freeze data center development inside city limits for up to a year under Resolution 2026-42, giving officials time to write zoning rules or decide against the facilities entirely. No data center had been proposed in Tiffin. Findlay’s council passed its own 12-month pause the following day, after earlier moratoriums in Maumee and Waterville.

The two candidates for governor are on opposite sides of that question. Acton said in July she would back a conditional statewide moratorium unless new facilities cover their full utility costs, use exclusively union labor and locate on former industrial land. Ramaswamy has rejected a ban and campaigned on accelerating the buildout, arguing the industry should shoulder its own energy demand while construction continues.

Ohio’s data center sales-tax exemption cost the state an estimated $1.6 billion in 2025.

The numbers behind the moment

Ramaswamy won the May 5 Republican primary with 82.5% of the vote, sweeping all 88 counties. His only opponent on the ballot, northwest Ohio car designer Casey Putsch, took 17.5% while spending almost nothing.

The general election has been a different contest. The Cook Political Report moved Ohio’s governor race from Lean Republican to Toss Up in July. Cook analyst Jessica Taylor wrote that Ohio Republicans the outlet spoke with were not optimistic about Ramaswamy, quoting one GOP source saying he was the wrong candidate to gamble on in this environment. A New York Times/Siena College poll released in July had the race tied at 47%.

Ramaswamy has been booed by friendly-on-paper audiences before, including during the 2024 Republican primary debates and at the 2024 Libertarian Party convention.

A note on the record

Several national outlets got basic details of this story wrong. The New Republic and Yahoo placed the speech in Cleveland; it happened at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Raw Story reported it as Thursday; convention records and multiple accounts place it on Wednesday, July 29. Readers encountering competing versions online are seeing reporting errors, not competing accounts of what happened in the room.

Early voting in Ohio’s general election begins this fall ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“This isn’t about defending myself,” the Ohio Republican said. “I’m speaking up as a father, trying to protect our daughter.”

The folder he shared Sunday with his nearly 60,000 followers on X contained an image of that daughter, who is 2 years old, nude, CNN reported Tuesday. The image was publicly available for at least a day before it was taken down.

Miller’s personal attorney, Aaron Minc, has taken responsibility for it. “Unfortunately, I missed the last three pages of a 40+ page document with sensitive content,” Minc said in a statement to CNN. “It was completely unintentional and a mistake. The moment I discovered the issue on Monday morning, I corrected the file immediately.”

Minc said he made multiple passes through the material to strip out sensitive details, including the child’s name. CNN reported that an earlier version of the public file it reviewed included the child’s name dozens of times, along with payment records to medical providers and several images of her.

“I am truly sorry to Congressman Miller, Ms. Moreno, both of their families, and, especially, to their daughter,” Minc said. “I deeply regret the mistake.”

Where the image came from

The photograph was not created for the document release. According to CNN, it was part of a February 2025 exchange between Miller and his then-wife, Emily Moreno, as the two coordinated custody arrangements.

On Feb. 18, 2025, Moreno wrote that she had noticed a large bruise on their daughter while bathing her. Miller asked to see a picture. Moreno sent an image focused on the injury that also showed the child undressed. The injury was a broken collarbone.

That injury triggered the Bay Village police investigation TiffinOhio.net first reported in April. It ended with no charges filed.

The letter

Attorneys for Emily Moreno wrote to Minc on Monday demanding an explanation. In the letter, first circulated publicly by New York Times congressional correspondent Annie Karni and later obtained by CNN, attorney Subodh Chandra wrote that the first version of the folder left the child’s name unredacted and that at least one image “could be considered Child Sexual Abuse Material.”

The letter asks who assembled the folder, whether anyone reviewed the images before publication, who removed them from the second version, and how many people downloaded the material. Chandra’s letter says the post had drawn more than 204,000 views by Monday afternoon.

“We view this matter with the utmost seriousness and hope you and your client do as well,” Moreno’s attorneys wrote.

Minc, who said he is Miller’s personal counsel and is not paid by the campaign, called the decision by Moreno and her lawyers to publicize the error shameful.

Moreno: ‘to say “oops” is grotesque’

U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, Emily Moreno’s father, told reporters Tuesday that the release went beyond the litigation.

“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,” the senator said.

Moreno declined Tuesday to discuss President Donald Trump’s continued support for Miller’s campaign, telling reporters he does not care about the politics. “This is truly the seventh level of hell,” he said. “This has been a horrific experience for my entire family.”

The senator had said nothing publicly about his daughter’s allegations for months. He broke that silence Sunday, hours after Miller’s livestream, saying Miller “should not serve in the House of Representatives.” Moreno represents every Ohio county, including Seneca and Sandusky, until January 2031.

The document release

Miller posted the folder Sunday as part of a 20-minute livestream denying Moreno’s allegations that he threw hot water on her, held a gun to her head and injured their daughter. He has denied all of it, and no criminal charges have been filed against him in the case.

The material included recordings Miller said supported his account, among them audio in which Moreno says she found needles by his bed. Miller denies drug use and offered to be tested.

At one point Sunday, the folder went offline. “Apparently, there are people who don’t want this information out. Strange,” Miller wrote on X. “Don’t worry, Dropbox will be back up momentarily.” Minc dates his discovery of the image and his correction of the file to Monday morning.

Miller asks to be investigated

Miller said Tuesday he will request a House Ethics Committee investigation into himself.

“In light of all the renewed interest in my family affairs I am going to file my own paperwork for an ethics investigation into myself to clear my name from these horrific attacks on myself and family,” he wrote. “I have absolutely nothing to hide. We will be providing the committee all necessary documents needed for a detail examination. The accusations continue to change, but my facts stay the same. I am looking forward to my colleagues reading everything for themselves.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson has pointed to the ethics process before. In July, Johnson said the claims against Miller remained allegations and that the committee handles such matters through a process, Roll Call reported. Most House Republicans have avoided the subject entirely.

The deadline

All of it lands against a ballot clock. According to the Ohio secretary of state’s office, if Miller withdrew before the close of business Tuesday, a special primary would be held to fill the Republican nomination in the 7th District. If he withdraws after that, party leaders have a narrow window; the deadline to replace him on the ballot is Aug. 10, and two days’ notice is required before party officials could meet to pick a candidate.

Miller told CNN by text Tuesday morning that Trump called him Monday and “never asked me to drop out.” Asked whether he still plans to run, Miller said “nothing changed.” Trump told reporters Monday that he would “let the families figure that out.”

Miller faces Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, in November. The Cook Political Report moved the district from Solid Republican to Likely Republican on June 18.

A widening set of cases

The document release is one front among several. Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham filed for a temporary restraining order against Miller on Monday, her attorney Mark S. Zaid announced. Grisham, who dated Miller in 2019 and 2020, sued him last month over an alleged breach of the non-disparagement agreement that ended his 2021 defamation suit against her. “The settlement included certain promises that Congressman Miller made to our client Stephanie Grisham, and those promises were broken,” her lawyer Marc Dann said.

Emily Moreno separately asked a judge on July 31 to bar Miller from contacting her attorneys, alleging he put his hands on one of them at a courthouse hearing. Miller’s defamation suit against Moreno remains pending, as does her motion to dismiss it under Ohio’s anti-SLAPP law. He was accused in June of violating a mutual restraining order in the case.

TiffinOhio.net has covered this case since spring.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Most of the critical violations were marked corrected during the inspection. At six facilities — St. Catherine’s Manor of Fostoria, Hunan King in Tiffin, the Fostoria Dairy Queen, Mi Tequilas in Fostoria, Little Mexico Mexican Restaurant in Fostoria and Tavern 19 in Bloomville — at least one critical violation was not recorded as corrected on-site. That is up from four facilities in June.

Under Ohio’s food code, a critical violation is one directly linked to the risk of foodborne illness.

The skilled nursing and assisted living facility received two critical violations during a standard/critical control point inspection Friday, July 24, 2026. Neither was marked corrected during the inspection.

Health district inspectors ran the facility’s high-temperature dish machine through three cycles. According to the inspection record, the surface of the plate reached only 153°F. To sanitize effectively, the plate surface must reach 160°F and the final rinse gauge must reach 180°F. Inspectors recorded that the three-bin sink would be used until the dish machine is repaired.

Inspectors also cited the facility for a handwashing sink that was not accessible. The record states a rack was blocking the hand sink in the dish washing area and that the sink itself was full of utensil bins. Hand sinks must be kept accessible for use at all times.

Inspectors recorded one positive observation: handwashing facilities were properly supplied. The facility carries a Risk Level IV designation, the highest risk category assigned to food service operations.

The Tiffin restaurant received two critical and two non-critical violations during a standard inspection Thursday, July 23, 2026.

Both critical violations were cited under the same rule governing protection of food from contamination through separation, packaging and segregation. In the first — a repeat violation, and the one not marked corrected during the inspection — inspectors observed foods that were not covered. In the second, inspectors found raw chicken stored above raw beef in the walk-in cooler; the chicken was moved during the inspection.

Non-critical violations cited wet wiping cloths sitting out rather than being held in a sanitizing solution, and the absence of a sanitizer test kit — also a repeat violation — with inspectors noting the facility needs test strips for its quaternary ammonium sanitizer. Hunan King carries a Risk Level III designation.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/22-seneca-county-food-facilities-critical-violations-july-2026/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Justices should keep a stay pausing the order in place through Election Day, the Democrats, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, wrote. The court is compelled to keep voting rules in place this close to an election, but the executive order would force massive changes on state administrators, they wrote.

Neither the president nor the U.S. Postal Service has authority to administer elections under the U.S. Constitution, which assigns that responsibility to state governments, the Democrats wrote. 

Trump’s March 31 order directs USPS to collect lists of registered voters from each state and only mail ballots to registered voters, and the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state. 

That would insert the executive branch directly into elections administration and the administration has not defended the legality of that move, the Democrats wrote.

Worse, the officials said, the order would create mass confusion at this point in the election cycle, meaning that the court should delay considering whether it is legal until after the midterms.

“Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting—especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas—would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised,” the state officials said. “Many more voters would be confused—either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation.”

Bonta signed the brief along with the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also signed on.

Their filing was the Democrats’ response to the Justice Department request that the Supreme Court overturn an appeals court decision against lifting a district court stay of the executive order. The court is considering the issue on its emergency docket that allows for speedy decisions.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department did not return a message seeking comment Monday.

No final rule 

The administration argued that the states’ challenge was premature because the Postal Service and DHS had not yet written the rules the executive order directed.

While a three-judge panel of the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Democratic states, a separate case at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the administration that the states could not yet challenge the policy because there was no final rule. The case under consideration at the Supreme Court is from the 1st Circuit.

In an amicus brief supporting the federal government, a coalition of conservative groups led by attorney William Olson said Monday that the district court stay was possibly the first time a judge has blocked a notice of proposed rulemaking, which “is the very definition of an agency action which is not a final agency action.”

Sowing voter confusion

The states said Monday the order itself, even without final rules from the affected agencies, would impose significant burdens on their election administrators. And the administration has detailed in court the steps the agencies must take to finalize the order’s mandates.

Forcing the states to wait until there is an actual rule in place, especially when the steps agencies have taken “do not materially differ” from the order, would mean state election officials could face an untenable situation of needing to prepare for the new requirements.

“If litigation challenging final implementation of the EO does not even begin for several more weeks, it would be extremely difficult—if not impossible—to obtain a definitive judicial resolution with enough time remaining for States to redesign and reorder their ballot mail, train elections officials, and adequately educate the public before the November midterms,” the state officials wrote.

That would drain significant resources from overworked election offices at a busy campaign time, and leave voters “confused about which rules govern,” they added.

Support for states

Several friend-of-the-court briefs weighed in on the states’ side. 

Scores of state and local election officials and the nonprofit voting rights group Center for Election Innovation wrote in one amicus brief that if the executive order is allowed to proceed, it would put them in the “untenable position” of updating their mail-voting procedures in the midst of primaries and just weeks before a general election.

And Democratic campaign groups said the order was plainly unconstitutional and rejected the administration’s argument, saying it “makes little sense.” 

In part, the administration argued the district court injunction caused irreparable harm because the administration was running out of time to implement the policy before the midterms, attorney Marc Elias wrote for the Democratic National Committee, three campaign groups and the Democratic leaders of each chamber of Congress.

“When the President launches an unconstitutional seizure of sensitive election powers during an election year, he may not avoid an injunction by insisting he is in a rush,” Elias wrote.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Blanche’s signed statement that an order establishing the fund is “rescinded” and accompanying unsigned memo, released via social media late Sunday, comes after two Republican senators on the committee, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, withheld support for Blanche’s nomination to lead the Department of Justice.

The late-night announcement of a deal appeared to be enough to secure both senators’ support ahead of a crucial Tuesday vote on Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Neither the Blanche statement or the memo was signed by President Donald Trump.

The memo Blanche posted to the X platform just after 11 p.m. Eastern also contains a line regarding Cornyn’s concerns about an IRS settlement agreement provision that releases Trump and some of his family members from future tax audits and enforcement. That deal only applies “retroactively,” according to the memo.

Cornyn and Tillis issued a joint statement Monday morning expressing they were “pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund.” 

“Additionally, the Department has acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury, addressing concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share.”

“We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this, and we look forward to voting to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee soon,” Cornyn and Tillis said.

Court ruling

Blanche and the department had so far declined to issue a written order, even when directed by a federal judge, to formally end Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund created in exchange for the president voluntarily dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. 

Rather, Blanche, who worked as Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, maintained that his previous statements during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in June amounted to the fund’s formal end.

“For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in his Order is intended to contradict or otherwise be contrary to prior representations by the Department of Justice that the fund is not operative,” according to Blanche’s two-paragraph signed statement on Sunday night.

“No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid. Nevertheless, several frivolous lawsuits have been filed challenging the Fund, and at least one court has declined to dismiss those claims as moot,” the statement continued.

Almost immediately after Trump’s May 18 settlement with the IRS, the fund became a lightning rod for criticism and legal challenges because of the potential for pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted law enforcement to reap financial compensation from the government. 

The fund attracted numerous lawsuits, including from two police officers who deployed to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, and by a former Justice Department official who prosecuted Jan. 6 and was subsequently fired under the Trump administration.

Trump defended the “anti-weaponization” fund Friday online and during his Cabinet meeting. His personal lawyers on Friday also appealed a court order from a Florida federal judge who did not recognize the validity of Trump’s settlement with his own administration — but rather said that he used his presidency to “manipulate” the courts.

Blanche’s Sunday night statement defended his earlier comments about the fund. “The Acting Attorney General stands by all of his July 15, 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, including answers to questions asked by Senator Cornyn related to the scope and applicability of the May 19, 2026 order,” according to the statement, which refers to Blanche’s hourslong confirmation hearing before the committee.

Blanche did not post a copy of the original settlement agreement displaying any modifications to the original language. 

IRS deal

Blanche did not sign the May 18 settlement agreement that was negotiated with the personal lawyers representing Trump, his two sons Eric and Don Jr. and the Trump Organization. The Trumps and their private venture sued the Internal Revenue Service last year over a 2019 leak of tax returns by a government contractor, who was already convicted and sentenced in 2024.

Rather, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. and Frank Bisignano, IRS chief executive officer, a position created by Trump, signed the nine-page settlement that created the nearly $1.8 billion fund to be run by five commissioners. The panel members were to be chosen by the attorney general — one with the input of Congress — and could be removed by Trump at any time without cause.

Per the agreement, commissioners would accept and decide claims through Dec. 15, 2028 from victims who allege the government subjected them to “Lawfare and/or Weaponization.” Any money left in the settlement fund at the sunset date would automatically transfer to the Department of Commerce, according to the agreement.

Blanche signed a two-page May 18 order setting the fund in motion, with a directive that the U.S. Treasury provide $1.776 billion within 60 days to a “designated account.”

On May 19, Blanche issued a sweeping order enacting part of the settlement agreement that indefinitely absolves Trump, his sons and the Trump organization from any tax audits or enforcement related to the tax returns and information leaked in 2019.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has rescheduled a committee vote to advance Blanche’s nomination for Tuesday morning. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Without legal representation, fewer than 10% of immigrant children win the right to remain in the United States while their case goes through immigration court. Immigration attorneys and advocates worry the loss in legal aid will put children on a fast track to deportations.

“Right now we’re all in the dark, and the secrecy is a big part of the problem,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, which previously held the contract that expired July 31.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which issues the contract, did not respond to several emails from States Newsroom asking which new organization will take over legal services in immigration courts for unaccompanied kids. 

HHS has also not submitted any request for new contractors to provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, according to a States Newsroom review of the federal government’s website for contracts.

Additionally, Scott Ehlers, the director of the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, an organization that the Trump administration was initially eyeing to take over legal services for unaccompanied minors, told States Newsroom it had not been awarded a contract from HHS and had not been contacted by the department regarding one. 

Aber said that HHS has not informed Acacia who the new contractor will be, implemented a transition of children’s cases to new attorneys, or paid the organization for completed legal work since December. 

HHS has not reimbursed $65 million to Acacia, which distributes the federal funding to roughly 100 organizations across the country who provide legal representation to unaccompanied children in immigration cases. 

Struggle over sensitive information

The Trump administration let the contract with Acacia expire after attorneys refused to hand over sensitive case information about their clients, such as whether a child has a pending visa. 

Aber said since January, immigration attorneys have seen government attorneys try to use visa information in order to place children in deportation proceedings. 

“The government has come up with this novel idea that they’re using in the immigration court proceedings that if a visa is pending for a child, that means it’s purely speculative that the child would ever have status, and therefore they are ordering deportations for kids who actually have pending T visas, that’s a trafficking visa, kids who have pending special immigrant juvenile status, kids with U visas,” she said. “All of those kids are being ordered removed by the courts, even as their visas are awaiting them.”

U nonimmigrant status, or U visas, are set aside for immigrants 21 and younger who were the victim of a crime, or helped provide information to prosecutors about criminal activity. 

Separately, a special immigrant juvenile status is extended to immigrant children who have been “abandoned, abused, or neglected” by a parent, and that visa provides a pathway for a green card. 

A nonprofit in Pennsylvania, the Jewish Family and Community Services of Pittsburgh, recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of several immigrant children against the Trump administration’s practice of targeting children with pending visas for deportation.

Aber said she is worried that the next organization to obtain the contract will hand over that sensitive information to the Trump administration.  

“We are very concerned about any agreement that the government has entered into with a new contractor about sharing confidential details or privileged information contrary to children’s interests,” she said.

Confusion about legal services

Aber said HHS is still working on accepting a transition proposal, meaning that Acacia and providers in its network cannot even begin having conversations with children to inform them that someone else will be representing them in immigration court. 

“To have those really sensitive conversations with the child, where you’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m not going to be able to represent you anymore, or like these are your options in terms of representation’ …. we can’t start having those conversations with kids without that information,” she said. 

She added that officials at the Office of Refugee and Resettlement, the agency within HHS that houses some unaccompanied immigrant children, are still reaching out to Acacia and its legal services providers even after the contract expired, asking for legal services for newly arrived children. Almost 1,800 children are in ORR’s care, according to agency data from June. 

“They keep on reaching out to our legal service services network, asking if someone could please go over on their own dime to talk to new arriving children,” Aber said. 

Some of the organizations that partner with Acacia have been able to dip into reserves to continue providing services to kids, but others have had to stop providing the services altogether, Aber 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 agreement — which Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Vice Chair Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, released Sunday — would avoid an Oct. 1 government shutdown and keep federal spending at current levels, punting debates about full-year spending past the midterm elections. It would also extend authorization for the federal fund for highway and transit.

The Senate bill, which advanced 89-4, differs considerably from the more partisan stopgap spending measure the House passed last month, with Republicans providing nearly all the votes in support.

The Senate was scheduled to take a procedural vote Monday evening to advance the bill and, if that attracts more than 60 yes votes, would likely consider final passage this week.

In a statement, Collins said she worked with committee members of both parties and that the measure, known as a continuing resolution, or CR, excludes provisions that would doom its chances in the consensus-driven Senate.

“This CR is straightforward,” Collins wrote. “It continues current government funding levels until December 11th and includes necessary adjustments for programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), vital national security programs, including shipbuilding across multiple vessels, and the Disaster Relief Fund. The CR also avoids any poison pills.”

Murray championed Democrats’ success in blocking provisions of the House bill that would increase spending for military action in Iran and allow transfers for immigration enforcement, while adding sections to extend housing and food assistance programs and a section blocking the proposed rule on grant funding.

“This bill includes important extensions and language that House Republicans’ CR did not, and it rejects Trump’s frivolous war spending wish list,” Murray wrote. “Importantly, we closed the loophole in House Republicans’ CR that would have allowed the Trump administration to transfer funding provided for other programs to Border Patrol, which desperately needs reform, not more money.”

The Senate bill would keep nearly all federal spending steady until Dec. 11, which would save lawmakers from the painstaking work of cobbling together the 12 annual spending bills — and taking potentially difficult votes on them — while freeing more time to campaign ahead of the November elections.

OMB proposal paused

It would also freeze until Dec. 11 the White House Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule that Democrats have criticized for giving immense decisionmaking power to executive branch political appointees who would be empowered to confirm that federal grants align with the administration’s policy priorities.

House Appropriations ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro said she was pleased to see the Senate bill block the rule from taking effect into December, but wanted a more permanent ban.

“While the bill temporarily blocks the proposed OMB rule, the fight must continue,” she wrote Sunday. “The Senate bill forces OMB to continue reviewing the half-million comments that were submitted, but Congress must permanently prevent this corrupt, harmful power grab before the new deadline of December 11.”

A draft of the rule, posted May 29, said the policy aims to downplay criteria based on diversity, equity and inclusion goals “and make merit-based decisions.”

Some Democrats, including those in Maryland’s congressional delegation, criticized the policy, saying it would create “arbitrary standards that are ripe for abuse” and “seeks to prohibit freedom of association, speech, and … international collaboration.”

More broadly, Democrats and some moderate Republicans objected to the power the rule would centralize in OMB and other executive agencies. 

“The proposed rule would systematically politicize federal funding and allow Trump officials to cancel grants at any time for any reason,” Murray wrote. “Enabling this rule would only give Trump the greenlight to take even more federal funding hostage.”

In a July letter to OMB Director Russ Vought, Collins said she agreed with the principles of awarding grants based on merit, but that the rule would add a level of bureaucracy to grants that have already been approved by the scientific community and weaken Congress’ power over spending decisions.

“While I agree these principles should guide the administration and oversight of Federal funds, the rule would impose new, burdensome requirements on award recipients that would harm small and rural communities, undermine scientific and biomedical research, and conflict with Congress’ control over the federal funding process,” Collins wrote.

Road funding extended

The stopgap measure would also extend the major federal transportation trust fund through the duration of the bill.

The Highway Trust Fund sends set funding to state departments of transportation and local authorities to finance road and transit infrastructure. 

Its authority to collect revenue, mostly through the federal gas tax, and send it to states is set to expire at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. The continuing resolution would keep in place the contract authority level, about $80.2 billion per year, Congress approved in a 2021 law.

It would not, however, include the “advance appropriations” from the 2021 law that provided additional funding to several Transportation Department programs that disperse money to states and local governments.

Murray said she sought to have the $36.8 billion annual program extended, but was rebuffed by committee Republicans.

White House spokespeople did not immediately return a message seeking comment Monday.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

As electricity and grocery bills continue to spike, low-income families’ need for such benefits seems likely to intensify. But why they might be eligible and still not get them isn’t as straightforward.

“Eligibility depends on national and state eligibility policies and the demographic and income characteristics of the population,” the Urban Institute said in its State of the Safety Net report, which was published last week.

“Participation rates among those eligible for a program depend on many factors, including funding levels, administrative procedures, awareness of programs and their policies, and the decisions made by individuals in the context of their family situations.”

In other words, some eligible people might not be taking advantage of the programs because they can’t or don’t want to. But many others might not know about them, there might not be enough money to provide benefits to all who are eligible, or the paperwork hassle is too much to overcome, the analysis said.

In any case, millions are not getting help in Ohio who theoretically could, it showed.

For example, in 2023 just 1 in 5 of the 1.4 million households eligible for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program participated.

That compares to one-third in Pennsylvania, 20% in West Virginia, one-fourth in Kentucky, 17% in Indiana, and two-thirds in Michigan.

Energy assistance is critical to vulnerable populations. Policy Matters Ohio reports that in the Buckeye State, nearly half — 46.5% — of households receiving assistance in 2023 included a person with a disability. In addition, 39.5% had at least one person 60 or older and 14% had a child under 6.

Research has shown that states that administer block grants for things like energy assistance through active outreach have higher participation rates than those that simply wait for people to apply.

There were smaller variations in federal housing assistance. In 2023 in Ohio, 30.2% of 653,000 eligible households received it. That compares to 29.4% in Pennsylvania, 36.7% in West Virginia, 31.9% in Kentucky, 25.7% in Indiana, and 28.6% in Michigan.

Perhaps explaining the greater consistency, the Urban Institute report said the housing program is underfunded, so the available funding might be exhausted by providing benefits to similar shares of states’ eligible populations.

Also serving just a fraction of those eligible is Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

It’s cash assistance to those with very low incomes. To qualify in 2023, a family of three must have made less than $12,432 that year. 

In Ohio, just over a fifth of the 190,000 eligible families received benefits in 2023. In Pennsylvania, 17.8% did. In West Virginia, just 15.1% did, followed by 14.7% in Kentucky, 8.5% in Michigan, and just 5.9% in Indiana.

In a 2023 report, the Urban Institute said participation rates in the program have plummeted since it was converted into a block grant in 1996.

Often to control growth in the cost of safety-net programs, the federal government converted some into block grants and gave states much control over how to administer them.

In 2023, 57.2% of the 2.3 million Ohioans eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program received benefits. In Pennsylvania, 59.9% did. In West Virginia, it was 49.9%. In Kentucky, it was 55.2%. In Indiana, 59.2% and in Michigan 56.3%,

That means millions of eligible people in those and other states aren’t getting modest nutrition assistance as food costs continue to rise.

Many more are likely to lose help. 

President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that was passed last summer made the deepest cuts in the history of the program — $186 billion over 10 years.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

As a petroleum geologist, my job is to understand the rock layers deep underground and how fluids move through them.

In Washington County, Ohio, toxic, radioactive waste from failed fracking waste disposal wells is surfacing where it should never be — near homes, farms, natural gas wells, streams, and schools. State leaders need to treat this like the emergency it is.

Fracking wastewater is not ordinary water. It carries heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and radioactive material — not things that people, animals, plants, or waterways should be exposed to.

Safely injecting it underground requires rock that is deep, porous, and sealed off from drinking water and the surface. This means a reservoir with room for the waste, a trap to keep it enclosed, and a seal that ensures it cannot escape.

In Washington County, those basic conditions do not appear to exist, and the consequences are now measurable.

The evidence indicates there are fractures allowing the injected wastewater to flow up into shallower layers and to the surface.

What’s unfolding in Southeastern Ohio is a manmade geological disaster, and it is getting worse.

The evidence: rising pressure and invaded wells

The clearest warning sign is pressure. Fluids underground flow from high pressure towards low pressure.

Gas wells producing from a shallower layer, the Berea Sandstone, have seen pressures climb from roughly 50 pounds per square inch (psi) to more than 350 psi in under a year, to the point where they are in danger of blowing out.

That is a dangerous signal. Producing gas wells lose pressure over time as they deplete — they don’t gain it. The rising pressures mean something is pushing fluid into these layers.

Tests indicate that that something is fracking wastewater. It has infiltrated more than 100 gas wells in the area, some over five miles from the disposal wells themselves, destroying gas production and the livelihoods of the well operators — our neighbors and friends — who depend on it.

This toxic waste also threatens our drinking water sources.

Two things the state must do now:

First, take control of the pressure. The state needs to take over both the injection wells and the invaded gas wells and begin actively drawing fluids out.

Pulling pressure down creates a low-pressure sink that draws contaminated fluid back away from the surrounding aquifers and producing wells, stranding it before it can migrate further.

Once the spread is under control, the dozens of well operators and landowners who have already lost their livelihoods will need to be compensated.

Second, protect the drinking water. This is the piece that should alarm everyone, because it isn’t a local problem — it’s a regional one.

The migrating waste threatens the freshwater aquifers supplying drinking water to more than a dozen communities: Beverly, Lowell, Devola, Marietta, Belpre, Little Hocking, Coolville, and Cutler, Ohio, along with Williamstown, Boaz, Vienna, Parkersburg, Blennerhassett, and Lubeck, West Virginia.

That’s more than a hundred thousand people whose water supply stands to be impacted by this problem.

A first step, but not enough

Recently, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources finally acted, requesting voluntary suspension of operations at four injection wells.

After months — arguably years — of inaction in the face of residents begging for help on the issue, that acknowledgment matters.

But “voluntary” and “four wells” are not proportional to a problem spreading across a region.

There seems to be an inability to face the fact that there is a catastrophic escape of the waste — indicating a total failure of the fracking waste injection program. 

The governor should declare a state of emergency in the impacted part of Washington County.

The cost of waiting

This will cost money. Waiting will cost far more.

If radioactive brine reaches the drinking-water aquifers, cleanup costs could jump from millions of dollars to hundreds of millions — or billions.

Families, farmers, small operators, and entire towns would pay for a failure they didn’t cause.

Communities across the region are united on this because the stakes are simple — clean water, safe homes, and honest government.

Ohioans should be able to trust that state agencies will act when the facts are in front of them.

Washington County is sounding the alarm. Columbus needs to listen — before our drinking water is tainted by toxic waste.

Stop the injection. Lower the pressure. Protect the aquifers. Do it now.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The broad tax and spending law President Donald Trump signed last summer, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, requires states that have expanded Medicaid to cover more adults under the Affordable Care Act — 42  states plus the District of Columbia — to mandate that those adults work, go to school or volunteer for at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage.

On June 29, the Democratic-led states sued the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), taking aim at new federal guidance, published earlier that month, that narrows the definition of who can qualify as “medically frail.” That designation excuses Medicaid recipients from work requirements if they have serious disabilities or illnesses.

The plaintiffs argued that the new exemption is too narrow, and would force patients with severe illnesses and disabilities to “jump through unnecessary administrative hoops” to keep their coverage. They also asserted that implementation would be costly and time-consuming, and noted that the new guidance came months after they’d already begun consulting with the federal government on how to implement the work requirements.

But United States District Judge Richard Stearns of Massachusetts noted in a ruling issued on Wednesday that CMS has said it will reimburse states for 90% of the costs associated with designing and executing the requirements. Stearns said he wasn’t convinced that states would be unable to cover the remaining 10%, and pointed out that the Jan. 1 deadline was set by Congress, not CMS.

“Because injunctive relief is the exception, not the rule, there is a certain point at which damages fail to justify the issuance of such an extraordinary measure,” he wrote. “Plaintiffs have not shown that their damages rise above that minimal threshold here. Moreover, the additional costs that may be incurred by the States are unlikely to bloom disproportionately given the familiarity of the responsible state agencies with the tasks to be performed.”

The court acknowledged that the case presents “difficult issues” about the scope of what Congress delegated to HHS. It also raises questions about CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz’s “faithfulness to Congressional intent,” the judge wrote.

Between 3 million and 7 million people could lose coverage as a result of the new work requirements, the Urban Institute estimated earlier this year. With the addition of more frequent eligibility checks, up to 10 million people could lose coverage over the next decade.

Along with the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, the complaint was brought by Democratic attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.

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

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The Ohio Association of Professional Fire Fighters announced the endorsement Monday morning and made it official later in the day during an Acton campaign stop in Cincinnati. The OAPFF says it represents more than 14,000 full-time professional firefighters and retirees in more than 300 locals across Ohio.

“The OAPFF is enthusiastically endorsing Dr. Amy Acton’s campaign for governor of Ohio,” said Jon Harvey, president of the Ohio Association of Professional Fire Fighters. “Dr. Acton is the only candidate in this race who will protect unions in Ohio, stand up for working people, and make life more affordable for everyone. We know she will always have our backs.”

Harvey, a Middletown fire captain elected OAPFF president in 2022, told WCPO in Cincinnati that the union’s endorsement process is bipartisan, and that it looks for the candidate who cares most about firefighter issues rather than a candidate of a particular party. He said Acton understands what collective bargaining means to the state and has stood on picket lines with union members.

Acton, in the announcement, tied the endorsement to the policy fight that has defined organized labor’s relationship with Ohio state government for 15 years.

“I am so grateful to receive the endorsement of the Ohio Association of Professional Fire Fighters,” Acton said. “Ohio’s professional fire fighters work tirelessly to keep us safe, and as governor, I will do my part to protect them and their families. I am committed to standing up and advocating for our public safety officers, keeping right-to-work laws out of our state, and lowering costs for working families. I will fight to build an Ohio where working people don’t just get by, but thrive.”

Why collective bargaining is the firefighters’ issue

Firefighters were among the public employees covered by Senate Bill 5, the 2011 law that would have stripped collective bargaining rights from teachers, police officers, firefighters, dispatchers and other public workers. Ohio voters repealed it 61% to 39%, and the OAPFF was central to the repeal campaign. The union still features a documentary about the fight on its homepage.

That history sits directly in this year’s race. Ramaswamy’s chief strategist and his campaign spokeswoman both worked to defend Senate Bill 5 at the time. Public-sector unions the bill targeted have largely lined up behind Acton, including four of Ohio’s largest public service unions, the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Nurses Association.

Right-to-work is the other line. Ohio has not enacted such a law, which blocks mandatory union membership and dues; every state bordering Ohio except Pennsylvania has one, according to the Dayton Daily News. That outlet sent both campaigns identical questions last week about right to work, prevailing wage and project labor agreements. Each replied with a written statement rather than an interview. Acton’s statement committed her to keeping right-to-work out of Ohio and to defending prevailing wage and project labor agreements.

What it means in Tiffin

The OAPFF is the Ohio state association of International Association of Fire Fighters locals. Tiffin’s full-time firefighters are represented by IAFF Local 322, which holds a collective bargaining agreement with the city on file with the State Employment Relations Board.

The Tiffin Fire/Rescue Division has provided full-time protection to the city since 1894 and merged with EMS in 1997. At full staffing it has 36 firefighters and two chief officers, with a minimum of nine on duty, operating out of two stations.

Union households remain a meaningful share of the northwest Ohio electorate, though a shrinking one. Ohio had roughly 987,000 union workers in 1989, or 21.3% of the workforce, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Dayton Daily News. By 2025 that had fallen to about 610,000, or 11.6%. Locally, the North Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council has endorsed Acton; the Northwest Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council is backing Ramaswamy. Acton campaigned in Tiffin in October, before the primary.

Cost of living, and a lopsided budget

Acton told WCPO in Cincinnati that affordability drives the rest of her platform, describing Ohioans who are working harder than ever and doing everything right while the math still does not add up. Her working families tax cut is capped at $85,000 in household income. She has also said she would require union labor at new data centers as one of six conditions before allowing them to be built in Ohio.

She is running at a steep financial disadvantage. Ramaswamy has loaned his campaign $25 million, and the pro-Ramaswamy super PAC V PAC: Victors not Victims has reported spending about $14.5 million on advertising, funded largely by out-of-state billionaires including Elon Musk, who gave $5 million in May. Combined spending on Ramaswamy’s behalf totals about $32.4 million, roughly eight times the $4.4 million Acton’s campaign has spent on digital advertising and direct mail, Signal Ohio reported.

Acton drew on that gap in Cincinnati, telling WCPO her plan cuts taxes for working families rather than for billionaires like Musk.

The money has not settled the race. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report moved Ohio’s governor contest from Lean Republican to Toss Up in July.

Ohioans vote Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

“Gotta be blunt: Vivek is a terrible candidate to have at the top of the ticket. He’s dragging down the Senate candidate. I think Vivek’s down by 5 or 6 points and he’ll lose by more if he continues with what he’s been saying on the campaign trail,” Bannon said.

U.S. Sen. Jon Husted is the Republican nominee in Ohio’s Senate race, running against Democrat Sherrod Brown. Ramaswamy faces Democrat Dr. Amy Acton for governor. Both contests are on the November ballot, and the Senate seat is one of a handful that will decide control of the chamber.

The criticism lands on a candidate President Donald Trump endorsed within hours of his campaign launch, and whose bid is bankrolled by a super PAC that has raised roughly $42 million — more than 88% of it from five billionaires who do not live in Ohio, including Elon Musk, Jeff Yass and Bill Ackman.

Bannon’s number is worse than the public polling

Bannon put Ramaswamy down 5 or 6 points. Recent public surveys show a tighter race.

A bipartisan AARP poll of 800 likely Ohio voters conducted June 14 through 16 by Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research found Acton ahead 47% to 44%, with Brown leading Husted 48% to 45%. A New York Times/Siena survey released in early July had the governor’s race tied at 47%, with Acton leading among independents. In February, an EMC Research poll commissioned by the Ohio Environment Council found Acton ahead by 10 points and Ramaswamy drawing only 65% support from Republicans.

On July 10, Cook Political Report analyst Jessica Taylor moved the race from Lean Republican to Toss Up, citing a favorable national climate for Democrats despite Ramaswamy’s spending advantage. It was the first time the contest had carried that rating since 2018.

Bannon has been writing off Ohio since June

This is not Bannon’s first shot at the state’s Republican ticket. On a Thursday, June 4, episode of War Room, he predicted the party would lose its Senate majority outright, telling listeners grassroots volunteers had gone flat.

“Here’s the reason: We’re going to lose the Senate in the fall anyway,” he said then. He named Ohio directly in a list of states where he said the movement should stop working: “We’re telling everybody to put their freaking pencils down in North Carolina, in Maine, in Ohio, all of it.”

Husted, appointed to the seat by Gov. Mike DeWine in January 2025 and running for the first time to finish Vice President JD Vance’s unexpired term, was outraised roughly 2-to-1 by Brown in the second quarter.

A pattern of hostile receptions on the right

Bannon’s complaint about what Ramaswamy has been “saying on the campaign trail” follows a run of rough audiences among conservatives and libertarians.

On Wednesday, July 29, Ramaswamy left the stage roughly 16 minutes early at the Young Americans for Liberty convention at Xavier University in Cincinnati, the city where he was born, after attendees booed him for saying his generation had already made it while theirs would pay the price. He was scheduled for 30 minutes and used 14.

In the May 5 primary, Ramaswamy took 82.5% against Casey Putsch, a car designer who runs the Genius Garage nonprofit, lives in Perrysburg and describes himself as a Tiffin native. Putsch spent almost nothing and still drew 17.5%. Cook Political Report later pointed to that near-20% protest vote as a measure of Ramaswamy’s weakness inside his own party.

A report released in July found Ramaswamy had spent 79 days outside Ohio this year, including 14 international travel legs.

What it means for northwest Ohio

Bannon’s argument is a turnout argument, and turnout arguments hit hardest in counties where Republican margins are built. Seneca, Sandusky and surrounding counties supply the volunteer base and the raw vote totals that statewide Republicans depend on. If the movement’s most-followed strategist is telling that base to put its pencils down, the effect is felt first in places like Tiffin and Fostoria — and it is felt by every Republican on the ballot, from the Senate race down to the statewide executive offices and two Ohio Supreme Court seats also up this November.

Ohio voters go to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

The note came due Dec. 31, 2024. It was not paid. To collect, the Kergs sued twice, and when a magistrate ordered Windsor to appear and answer questions under oath about his property, Windsor filed for federal bankruptcy protection 24 days before the scheduled examination.

Under the repayment plan he has proposed, Kerg would recover about 5 cents on the dollar.

The case is a public accounting of one Ohio media venture — who financed it, the debt that followed, and what its owner reported owning once collection began. Windsor markets himself as an investigative reporter. His initial bankruptcy filing runs 94 pages.

Two lawsuits to collect one debt

The Kergs sued Windsor personally in Franklin County Common Pleas Court in September 2025, seeking $185,457.60. Certified mail sent to the address listed for him in that complaint came back in January marked not deliverable as addressed, and the case stalled.

Eight days later they filed again, this time against both Windsor and his company, and invoked a clause Windsor had signed in 2022. The note was a cognovit instrument — a commercial agreement in which the borrower waives the right to advance notice and a trial and consents in advance to judgment being entered against him. Ohio voids such clauses in consumer transactions. In commercial transactions they can be enforced if statutory requirements are met.

Judge Sheryl Munson entered judgment nine days after that second case was filed, finding that the requirements for a cognovit judgment were met and that the note did not arise from a consumer transaction. Windsor and Media Dynamics Group were held jointly and severally liable for $185,457.60, plus post-judgment interest and collection costs. The Kergs then dismissed their original lawsuit.

With judgment in hand, they moved to collect. In March, a magistrate ordered Windsor to appear at 9 a.m. on April 24 to answer under oath concerning his property.

On March 31, Windsor filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in Columbus. The automatic stay that accompanies a bankruptcy filing halted further collection activity before that examination could take place.

A company with $4 in the bank

Windsor’s petition identifies four business or trade names: Media Dynamics Group, Red Straw Marketing, Windsor Brands, and his own name. He reported that Media Dynamics Group — the company the Kergs financed — had taken in no income and paid no expenses over the previous six months. He valued his ownership interest in it at $1,750 and reported that its bank account held $4.

He scheduled more than $305,000 in debts. Beyond the Kergs, they include roughly $69,800 owed to the U.S. Department of Education, $30,000 to the Internal Revenue Service, and several thousand dollars across credit cards and collection accounts. He also listed $4,100 owed to Gongwer News Service, the subscription state-government news service that has covered the Ohio Statehouse since 1906. Windsor is a Statehouse correspondent for a Cleveland radio station.

It is his second known bankruptcy. A court-generated notice of prior filings shows he filed a Chapter 7 case in northern Ohio in October 2005 and received a discharge in February 2006 — far outside the four-year window that can bar a debtor from receiving a Chapter 13 discharge after a Chapter 7 discharge.

Five cents on the dollar

As of Aug. 3, five creditors had filed six claims totaling $216,037.05. Kerg’s claim, filed in his name alone for $189,197.41, is roughly 88 percent of that. Gongwer did not file. The Department of Education has not filed either, but as a federal agency it has until Sept. 28, the later deadline that applies to government creditors.

A creditor that neither files a claim nor has one filed on its behalf — the debtor or trustee may do so after the creditor’s deadline passes — generally receives nothing through the plan. But failing to file does not by itself erase a debt. Most federal student-loan debt survives a Chapter 13 discharge no matter what the lender collects, unless the borrower wins a separate court finding of undue hardship.

The plan Windsor filed in April proposes paying $890 a month for five years, with general unsecured creditors receiving 5 percent of their allowed claims. If Kerg’s $189,197.41 claim is allowed in full, the plan is approved on those terms and Windsor completes it, Kerg would collect about $9,460 — five cents for every dollar. The 5 percent applies only to general unsecured claims; the plan must separately provide for full payment of allowed priority debts, including allowed priority tax claims, unless those creditors agree otherwise, and must account for trustee compensation and any allowed attorney fees.

If Windsor finishes a confirmed plan, the unpaid portions of dischargeable debts covered by it could be wiped out. Statutory exceptions, including most student loans and certain taxes, can survive.

Nothing has been approved. Chapter 13 trustee Faye D. English objected to confirmation in May, seeking tax returns, profit-and-loss statements and business bank records, and asking the court to deny confirmation and dismiss or convert the case if the gaps were not filled. She filed a second objection in June challenging property Windsor claimed as exempt from creditors, including his interests in Media Dynamics Group and Red Straw Marketing. Windsor amended two schedules on July 17. No order resolving either objection appeared on the docket as of Aug. 3.

Confirmation hearings set for June and July were each continued. The matter now goes before Judge Tiffany Strelow Cobb on Aug. 18.

As of Aug. 3, no adversary complaint had been filed seeking to keep the Kerg debt out of a completed Chapter 13 discharge. The July 13 deadline for complaints under the potentially relevant fraud and fiduciary-misconduct provisions passed without a filing. The state pleadings alleged breach and default, not fraud. Whether Kerg ultimately collects 5 percent or something else depends on the confirmation ruling, the trustee’s objections, any amended plan, allowance of his claim and whether Windsor completes the case.

Windsor was sent 14 written questions about the note, the judgment and his bankruptcy filings, with a deadline of 5 p.m. Aug. 3. He responded twice without answering any of them — first asking to schedule a phone call, and then, on Monday at 4:59 p.m., one minute before the deadline, asking that it be extended and posing his own questions about TiffinOhio.net’s ownership, funding and staffing. Marczewski and Garvine did not respond to requests for comment.

The men involved

Windsor is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Ohio Press Network and hosts a weekday program on a Columbus talk radio station. He gained a following in conservative media during the COVID-19 pandemic, pressing Gov. Mike DeWine, then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and former state health director Dr. Amy Acton over the state’s response, and he previously served as managing editor of The Ohio Star. His Facebook page, titled “Jack Windsor – Investigative Reporter,” had more than 41,000 followers as of Aug. 2.

Media Bias/Fact Check, which rates news outlets for political lean and reliability, classifies the Ohio Press Network as right-biased with mixed factual reporting. That rating rests on one-sided framing and a lack of transparency rather than on any false report; the group lists no failed fact checks for the outlet and said it found no explicit evidence of misinformation in the articles it reviewed. In its March 2025 assessment, it noted the site disclosed neither its ownership nor its funding, which it said raised the possibility of “an undisclosed ideological affiliation or external funding influence.” The court records in Windsor’s bankruptcy identify one source of that financing. The Ohio Star, where Windsor was managing editor, carries the same right-biased, mixed rating; it is owned by Star News Digital Media, not by Windsor.

Kerg is a longtime Republican strategist and fundraiser. According to his biography on the Ohio Value Voters website, he has advised state legislative and congressional campaigns for more than three decades and has owned and run an Ohio aerospace-components manufacturer since 1990. He sits on the group’s board; Ohio Value Voters endorses candidates and campaigns on social-conservative issues. Kerg served on the Shelby County Board of Elections from 2019 until 2023, including a term as its chairman, and was a member of that board when he and his wife financed Windsor’s company.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Fremont Prosecuting Attorney and Law Director Jim Melle moved to dismiss the charge against Ronald E. Callahan, 69, on Wednesday, July 29. Judge Daniel L. Brudzinski granted the motion the following day. The dismissal is without prejudice, meaning the state may refile the charge. Costs were assessed to the state, and the $5,000 surety bond Callahan posted in March was released Friday, July 31.

The judgment entry gives no reasoning beyond the standard formulation that the case was dismissed “for good cause shown and upon motion of the state.” Neither the motion nor the entry states why the state sought dismissal.

On Tuesday, July 21, Melle and defense attorney John M. Kahler II filed a joint set of stipulations alongside a defense motion to compel compliance. The court took up that filing a week later.

In a journal entry dated Tuesday, July 28, the court wrote that the parties represented “that the group Dads Against Predators (DAP) destroyed evidence for use by prosecuting attorney & material to preparation of defense.”

The wording is significant in both directions. The evidence the parties described as destroyed was material to the state’s ability to prove the charge and to Callahan’s ability to defend against it. The court record does not describe what the evidence was, when it was destroyed, or under what circumstances.

Based on those stipulations, the court denied Callahan’s motion to compel — the only evidentiary ruling issued in the case, and one that went against him. The same day, Kahler withdrew a motion to suppress evidence and a motion in limine he had filed June 1, and a suppression hearing scheduled for that afternoon was vacated. The state’s dismissal motion followed the next day.

A dismissal without prejudice is not an acquittal and carries no finding on the merits. No judge or jury weighed the allegations against Callahan, and he was not convicted of anything. The charge remains available to prosecutors to refile.

The charge itself was a first-degree misdemeanor, according to the court’s case record — the most serious misdemeanor level in Ohio, punishable by up to 180 days in jail. Under Ohio law an attempted offense is graded one degree below the completed offense, and completed importuning under the provision Callahan was charged with is a fifth-degree felony.

Callahan was arrested March 12, a day after members of Dads Against Predators confronted him inside the Denny’s at 1750 Cedar St. in Fremont. The group said its decoy had posed as a teenage boy online and arranged to meet him at the restaurant. No actual minor was involved; the purported teen was an adult member of the group.

Read the full story at https://tiffinohio.net/posts/dads-against-predators-case-dismissed-destroyed-evidence/.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Moreno did not publicly address the domestic abuse allegations against Miller, also an Ohio Republican, when new details of them were reported in mid-July. But in a post on X Sunday, he wrote that Miller “needs serious psychological help” and is a danger to his daughter. 

“I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them.”

Miller has emphatically denied allegations of abuse against both Moreno and the couple’s daughter. He also pushed back against his former father-in-law’s statement on social media later Sunday, questioning its timing and denouncing it as “all political.”

“If my daughter said the same thing to me, I personally wouldn’t wait two years before holding him accountable,” Miller wrote, referring to Moreno’s comment in the social media post that “the last two years have been pure hell” for his family.

Abuse allegations

In court documents obtained and first reported in mid-July by Mother Jones, Emily Moreno told police detectives in Ohio that the second-term Republican had pushed her, thrown hot water from a pan at her and pointed a gun at her head during their relationship. 

Miller and Emily Moreno married in 2022, but Miller filed for divorce in 2024, according to the report. The two have since been locked in a custody battle over their only daughter, who was born in 2023, and currently retain joint custody, it said. 

The detectives were investigating why the couple’s 2-year-old daughter had broken her collarbone, the Mother Jones report said. Neither Moreno nor Miller said they knew the source of their daughter’s injury, it said.

But, according to Mother Jones’ report, local authorities and child protection experts investigating the case determined that the bruising, which they said was similar to that of a handprint, around the injury made it suspicious, and that such an injury would have necessitated a “high degree of impact to occur.”

The magazine also reported that Moreno told the police that, given the congressman’s past, she couldn’t rule out Miller was the cause, and had further recounted her daughter saying that “daddy’s house is scary.” 

No charges have been filed against Miller, and there has been no official determination that any child abuse has occurred. 

But this is not the first time Miller has been accused of abuse. 

Stephanie Grisham, who served as White House press secretary toward the end of President Donald Trump’s first term, accused him in 2021 of abusing her while they were dating several years ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. He denied those allegations as well, and filed a defamation lawsuit against her — which he ultimately dropped in 2023. 

Miller pushes back 

Miller, an ally of Trump’s and former adviser during his first term, has also released a DropBox page containing scores of documents compiled by his personal lawyers. They detail various aspects of the couple’s divorce and custody proceedings, containing personal communications, selected court filings and audio transcripts. He pointed to the documents as evidence against the domestic and child abuse claims. 

In a 20-minute livestream on X Sunday, Miller again defended himself against the allegations and said he plans to stay in the race for reelection and win in November. Since he already has won his primary election, Ohio Republicans would only have until Wednesday to find a replacement candidate. 

Miller has also filed a lawsuit against Emily Moreno, alleging that she has defamed him and portrayed him in false light. 

In his initial complaint filed in May, Miller argued that the allegations were part of a “defamatory campaign” against him to “falsely portray him as a violent and abusive father and husband.” 

Moreno’s lawyers have described Miller’s defamation suit in a court filing as a “bad-faith, scorched-earth litigation strategy seeking to punish Ms. Moreno.” 

Trump doesn’t call for resignation

Bernie Moreno’s calls for Miller to resign have so far not been echoed by much of the Republican establishment. 

Many of Miller’s fellow Ohio Republicans have yet to weigh in, including the state’s junior senator, Jon Husted. The senator did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

After an executive order signing ceremony Monday, Trump called Miller a “very good person” and said that he will let the families work it out. “It’s accusations, and I’m gonna let them figure that out,” he said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said in May, before the allegations of child abuse were further detailed, that he doesn’t “get involved in the personal lives of members,” NBC News reported. 

“You know, he’s refuted some of these allegations, and he’s got to work that out,” he said. 

Asked last week why allegations against former Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner pressured him to drop out of the race there, but allegations against Miller and fellow Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida have yet not resulted in either being removed from the conference, Johnson said “the key word there is ‘allegation.’”

He added that the House Ethics Committee has its own process for investigating allegations. But no formal investigation has been announced into Miller. 

Johnson’s office did not return a request for comment Monday afternoon. 

Democrats jump in

With Miller facing intense public scrutiny, some congressional Democrats are looking for an opportunity to flip his seat amid what’s poised to be a highly competitive battle for control of the House in this November’s midterms. 

He is facing Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter, an ironworker and local city councilman in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District. Poindexter has received endorsements from several national labor unions and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but he still lags far behind in campaign fundraising. 

Miller, first elected in 2022, received just more than 51% of the vote in 2024. 

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Electric bills will likely hit record highs for millions of Ohioans when July bills go out this month, driven by rising rates, new systemic demand and a heat dome that lingered over much of the Midwest. 

New data from the Ohio Utility Rate Survey – a state publication based on cost data from utilities – shows the electric bill for a residential electric customer using an average amount of power hit record levels in Cleveland ($189), Dayton ($188) and Akron ($184) in July. 

It’s not much better elsewhere. Columbus’ July ($198.53) is $1 from the high watermark in May 2024. Toledo ($175) was about $6 off from its June 2023 record. Cincinnati’s July bill ($171) is just $1 short of the local record set last June.

On a statewide basis, that means July bills are 12% higher than last year and a whopping 62% higher than they were a decade ago. 

“Is this a new normal? Probably, at least for the near future,” said Tom Bullock, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit that advocates for lower electric rates for residential customers. 

These figures assume what the federal government considers to be an average household’s use of 900 kilowatt-hours. Real consumption will vary based on different factors like efficiency and household size, but a stretch of intense heat early in the month spurred heavy demand on electricity-intensive air conditioners. 

Experts said a complex mix of factors are pushing prices upward. Hot weather means more demand all at the same time. A development boom for data centers, the energy-intensive megafacilities serving the artificial intelligence sector, adds to that demand systemically. Coal-fired power plants have gone offline. Grid operators have been slow to allow new power producers into the system. And some have accused utilities of either inflating or at least relying on speculative assumptions of data center building to boost their own bottom lines. 

Whatever the cause, the effect is palpable on the monthly bills. For a Columbus household, in American Electric Power Ohio’s service territory, 900 kilowatt-hours in July 2016 cost $118. Today, that’s about $199. That’s a difference of $81 more for the month. The 10-year spike is similarly seen across the state. 

Three components drive electric bills: generation costs (the power you use), transmission costs (sending huge amounts of power across long distances from the power plant), and distribution costs (the last poles and wires before the end user). The data show that while transmission and distribution costs, both of which are set by regulators, have increased modestly, generation charges are behind most of the cost increase. 

There are some limits to the data. It only goes back to 2015. And it doesn’t reflect rates paid by those who have chosen their own electricity supplier, or those on a municipal aggregation program. 

Why are Ohio electric costs increasing?

Signal Statewide asked a variety of industry players the same basic question: why have electric bills gotten so out of control?

None offered simple answers. All blamed a mix of culprits.

Several singled out PJM, which operates the regional electric grid, spanning 13 states including Ohio. PJM hosts capacity auctions, where a price is set for a reserve of power to ensure reliability when demand hits its highest. Those auctions have seen massive price spikes year over year since 2024. 

Among the biggest causes is the failure of PJM and state regulators to quickly let new electrons into the system, said Nolan Rutschilling, the managing director of energy policy at the Ohio Environmental Council.  

Besides a queue backlog, he said natural gas has gotten preferential regulatory treatment in terms of navigating the permitting bureaucracy. But gas turbines are in short supply these days, meaning new plants can take five to seven years to get to the market. Renewable energy sources can be built much faster, but are subjected to far more regulatory scrutiny in Ohio. 

This supply crunch, coupled with the new demand from more than 200 operational or planned data centers and huge industrial projects like Intel’s $28 billion chip fabrication plant or Anduril’s $1 billion advanced weapons factory in central Ohio, means higher costs. 

“We’ve got really high prices because we aren’t bringing enough energy online,” Rutschilling said. 

Bullock, from Citizens Utility Board, said President Donald Trump’s administration’s tariffs have worsened the effect, hiking the costs of steel that make up much of the physical power grid. And that grid, he said, has lacked proper maintenance, causing inefficient performance and likely warranting an expensive upgrade sometime in the future. 

He lives in Lakewood, Ohio, and has personally seen the effects of an under-maintained electric grid and the unusually high rate and duration of the blackouts that come from it. 

There’s also a U.S. war against Iran driving up the cost of raw fuels, an effect that tends to spill into electricity markets. And PJM, Bullock said, has been slow-footed allowing new generators – especially renewables – onto the grid. 

That pressure is all mounting cumulatively, and there’s no obvious dynamic that would change things in the near term. 

“You could easily see prices not letting up for the next five years,” he said. 

There’s reason for more scrutiny, if not skepticism, around some of the finger pointing at data centers, said John Seryak, an engineer who works as a technical consultant to the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association. In an interview, he said utilities are making speculative and rosy assumptions about how likely a planned data center is to come to fruition. But they’re treating those assumptions as fact when making grid investment decisions. 

And on the supply side, he said some technocratic changes have left PJM overestimating the impact of several coal-fired power plants during the 2010s. This would mean PJM is overestimating the drop in supply, which produces a price increase. 

Ohio can make policy changes to mitigate the damage in the medium- to long term. But until then, he said people should expect higher bills, seek energy efficiencies where possible, and budget accordingly. 

“I think right now, between transmission and capacity, I wouldn’t count on prices to come down between now and 2030,” he said.

Transmission costs are rising too, another trend driven by data centers, said Jon Blackwood, a spokesperson for the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel. And part of the problem is the murkiness around what costs can be shifted to customers.

“Forecasting issues include lack of transparency, potential double counting, and accuracy,” he said.

What do the utilities say?

Signal Statewide reached out to Ohio’s major, investor-owned electric utility companies that own utilities in Ohio: American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, AES, and Duke Energy. 

By AEP’s own calculations, its distribution rates have increased 36%, the company said in a statement. Those increases are primarily tied to the increased cost for equipment, gas and labor flowing into the grid.

The company emphasized that the price hikes stem from the generation side of the ledger, and Ohio laws don’t allow distribution utilities like AEP Ohio to own power plants. And the company noted its recent regulatory effort to force data centers to absorb more risk in grid investments.

“Generation costs are the primary reason electric bills have increased in Ohio, and in Ohio, utilities like AEP Ohio are not permitted to own generation,” the company said.

“The average AEP Ohio customer’s generation bill has increased 103% in the last five years. That is material for Ohioans, and we are very concerned by it … In the PJM territory, there is an imbalance between the supply of electrons on the grid and demand for them. And since we cannot own generation, we are with our customers, waiting for the market to respond.”

FirstEnergy responded as well, noting – as have its competitors in the past – that utilities don’t set unit prices for electricity. However, utilities do set, pending regulatory approval, the transmission and distribution costs, which have increased over the decade. 

Will Boye, a FirstEnergy spokesperson, said the company understands that even small cost increases can have big impacts in an inflationary economy.

“We must continue investing in our system in order to provide the safe, reliable service our customers count on,” he said. “We know that costs matter, which is why these investments are carefully planned and focused on delivering real, lasting value for the communities we serve.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Ohio Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Clyde used a baseball metaphor to describe the scenario facing Democrats this November.

Addressing attendees at the state party’s annual fundraising dinner in Columbus Saturday night, she said the upcoming election is like a Cleveland Guardians player stepping up to the plate in the ninth inning with a chance to be a hero.

“We haven’t won yet. But we’re at bat and the bases are loaded,” Clyde said, addressing hundreds who filled a ballroom in the Columbus Convention Center. “Let’s hit a grand slam.”

Like the long-suffering Guardians, Ohio Democrats are in the midst of a prolonged period without much success. Unfortunately for the metaphor’s sake, the Guardians also have a long history of falling short in the biggest moments. Still, the notes Clyde and other Democrats sounded Saturday night were the most convincingly optimistic the party has sounded in years as they hope to benefit from voter dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living and the traditional mid-term backlash against Republican President Donald Trump.

Democrats are trying to rebound from their lowest point: the 2024 presidential election. Longtime party standard-bearer Sherrod Brown lost his U.S. Senate seat to Republican Bernie Moreno that year as Donald Trump was reelected to the White House while winning by double digits in Ohio. Brown’s the party’s Senate nominee again this year, and was among the speakers Saturday night.

“There’s so much excitement in this room tonight,” Brown said to cheers from the audience. “I feel the same enthusiasm in our cities. I feel the same enthusiasm in our suburbs. I feel it in farm country, and we see people showing up like never before.” 

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Brunner is the only remaining Democrat to hold a statewide office. Serving as a warm-up speaker Saturday, she described her lonely status on the court. 

“I have been holding my finger in the dike,” said Brunner, “and I’m waiting for my colleagues to get here.”

Brunner is being challenged this November by Republican Colleen O’Donnell, while Democratic appellate judge Marilyn Zayas is challenging Republican Justice Dan Hawkins.

Ohio Democrats digging out of a hole

Since Trump emerged as the country’s dominant political force a decade ago, Ohio has shifted from the quintessential presidential swing state to a Republican stronghold. 

But polling shows Brown and governor nominee Amy Acton running head-to-head with their Republican opponents this year. Even though political polls have consistently undermeasured Republican support in Ohio over the past decade, Democrats have been encouraged nonetheless, especially as nonpartisan analysts have reassessed Ohio’s governor and U.S. Senate races as toss-ups rather than likely Republican wins.

In her own speech Saturday, Acton, the former state health director under outgoing Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, said Republican Vivek Ramaswamy and his allies have spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads targeting her since March. 

They “haven’t moved the needle,” Acton said, alluding to polls that suggest the race is tied. 

“It’s actually driven his negatives up more,” Acton said, using political polling jargon that references how positively or negatively voters view a political candidate. “And right now guys, the gloves are definitely off.”

Acton went on to rip Ramaswamy as a self-interested billionaire, criticizing him for spending tens of millions of his own money on his campaign and referencing the tens of millions a pro-Ramaswamy political action committee has raised from Elon Musk and other billionaires. 

“All of us in this room, and everyone we know, we’re linking arms. We’re pushing back. And we are going to tell Mr. Ramaswamy in no uncertain terms: You cannot buy this state,” Acton said.

The pro-Ramaswamy ads have portrayed Acton as erratic and unqualified, saying she made incorrect statements about the COVID-19 pandemic during the early months of the 2020 pandemic as DeWine’s health director. DeWine, who has endorsed Ramaswamy, has said Acton provided him with good advice, and that he alone is responsible for his administration’s decisions.

In line with the attacks, Ramaswamy’s campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, mocked Acton on social media Saturday night over a photo that showed her reading off a teleprompter. In another post, he referenced a 2019 incident in which police were called to Acton’s home after she got in an argument with her husband, an episode that has been a staple of the anti-Acton attack ads this year. The Ohio Republican Party chimed in: “Wow. Amy Acton won’t take public questions and can’t speak without a teleprompter.”

Possible 2028 contender stumps for Brown

The headlining speaker on Saturday was Arizona U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, who spent the weekend campaigning with Brown. Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and Navy pilot who was reelected in 2024, has expanded his national profile since Trump called for his arrest and execution over a post in which Kelly encouraged military members not to follow “illegal orders” – which the president and his allies viewed as treasonous.

“Donald Trump said I should be hanged, executed, prosecuted,” Kelly said. “I mean, this guy can’t even get the order right. And then, and then he tried to indict me and put me in jail. But really, all of the bull—t was not about me. It’s about silencing people who are willing to speak out.”

Kelly appeared with Brown in Cincinnati and Cleveland over the weekend, and told the audience he hopes his “friend” will return to the Senate. 

“He’s always fought for better health care, for fair wages, and protections for Ohio families with courage and conviction. God knows we need more of that in Washington right now,” Kelly said.

National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Nick Puglia issued a statement about Kelly’s visit:  “Sherrod Brown fought for open borders alongside radical leftists like Mark Kelly for 32 years in Washington, and now they want to raise Ohioans’ taxes to give free healthcare to illegal aliens.”

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Over roughly the same stretch, the oil giant put $200,000 into a super PAC that exists for one purpose: reelecting Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted.

And across 2026, Husted has voted 13 times against measures that would have directed the removal of U.S. forces from the war — every such vote the Senate has taken, according to a review of federal roll call records by TiffinOhio.net.

There is no evidence in the public record that the contributions influenced how Husted voted. The donations are legal, publicly disclosed, and of a kind that flows routinely to senators in competitive races from industries with business before Congress. Husted has said repeatedly that he wants the conflict finished. Speaking to reporters in Dayton on March 6, eight days into the fighting, he said his goal for the operation “is that it should be brief and successful,” adding: “We don’t want to have hostilities linger on any longer than they need to, but if we’re going to undertake this, let’s finish it.” He has since acknowledged that the war’s end is not clear.

What the records do establish is the scale of the oil industry’s financial stake in keeping him in office, and the consistency of his voting record on the war that has enriched it.

Thirteen votes, thirteen times no

The Senate has taken 13 roll call votes in 2026 on resolutions directing the president to withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran that Congress never authorized. Husted voted against every one.

The most recent came on Thursday, July 30, when the Senate rejected a motion to discharge Senate Joint Resolution 181 from committee, 49 to 50. Husted voted no. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky crossed over to support it, and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted against.

The pattern runs back to the war’s early weeks. Husted voted no on March 4, March 18 and March 24; on April 15, April 22 and April 30; on May 13 and May 19; on June 16, June 23 and June 24; and on July 23 and July 30. Two of those measures cleared anyway without him — a May 19 discharge motion that passed 50 to 47 and a June 23 concurrent resolution that passed 50 to 48.

Husted’s July 23 vote came a day after he told CNN he wanted the war over. That measure failed 47 to 49.

Where the oil money went

Federal Election Commission filings show three separate streams of oil industry money supporting Husted’s campaign. It is not the first industry to concentrate money on his race: insurers and their executives have given his campaigns more than $679,000 over his career, and he voted in June against two amendments directing federal investigations into insurance denials.

The largest by far is a single $200,000 contribution from Chevron Corporation, recorded on Monday, June 1, to Ohio Flyer PAC. The committee is registered with the FEC as an independent-expenditure-only super PAC and is dedicated solely to supporting Husted’s election. Super PACs face no contribution limits and may accept corporate treasury money directly, but are barred from coordinating with the candidate’s campaign. Chevron’s gift was the fourth-largest the committee reported this cycle.

Separately, two corporate PACs gave the maximum allowed to Husted’s campaign committee itself. Chevron Employees Political Action Committee gave Husted for Senate $5,000 in March 2025 and another $5,000 in February 2026. ExxonMobil’s PAC gave $10,000 across four contributions between May and October 2025. Both totals represent the ceiling a multicandidate PAC may give a Senate candidate for a primary and general election combined.

Taken together, Chevron-affiliated money supporting Husted’s reelection totals $210,000. Adding ExxonMobil’s contributions brings the figure from the two companies to $220,000.

A record quarter, built on a war

Both companies reported second-quarter results on Friday, July 31, and both credited the market disruption the war produced.

Chevron told the Securities and Exchange Commission it earned $12.1 billion, or $6.11 per diluted share, compared with $2.5 billion in the same quarter of 2025. The company reported record U.S. production, worldwide output up 20 percent, and U.S. refinery crude unit utilization above 97 percent.

ExxonMobil reported earnings of $14.5 billion, or $3.48 per share, roughly double its year-earlier result and its strongest quarter since 2022. Chairman and chief executive Darren Woods said the quarter “was shaped by disruption, but defined by execution.”

What Ohio drivers are actually paying

The pain at the pump is real, though the Ohio picture is more moderate than the national one.

Ohio’s average price for a gallon of regular was $3.86 on Tuesday, July 28, up from $3.07 a year earlier — an increase of 79 cents, according to AAA. The national average that day stood at $4.09, having risen 15 cents in a week from $3.16 a year earlier. Ohio drivers are paying less than the national average, not more.

AAA attributed the increase to the war. Prices in the United States are set on a global market, which is why a blocked shipping lane 7,000 miles away shows up at Ohio pumps. “Volatility along the Strait of Hormuz and instability in the region have pushed crude oil prices into the $90 per barrel range and could continue driving up costs during the second half of summer,” the association said.

Ohio prices climbed considerably higher earlier in the conflict, reaching $4.78 a gallon in May. It was at that level that Husted, asked on the Northeast Ohio podcast “Strictly Speaking Unfiltered” on Tuesday, May 19, what he was doing about gas prices, replied: “What do you want me to do?” Hours later he voted against the war powers resolution that passed anyway, 50 to 47.

The race

Husted was appointed to the Senate in January 2025 by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. The former Ohio lieutenant governor and secretary of state now faces Democrat Sherrod Brown, a three-term former senator, in a special election on Tuesday, Nov. 3. The Cook Political Report rates the contest a toss-up.

Brown has made the war central to his comeback bid, echoing the anti-Iraq-war message that first sent him to the Senate in 2006. He raised $14.1 million in direct contributions from April through June, more than double Husted’s $3.4 million, though Husted’s campaign said the figure was the largest second-quarter total ever posted by an Ohio Republican Senate candidate. Outside groups have committed more than $174 million to the race.

The Ohio Democratic Party seized on the oil contributions. In a statement, Senior Communications Advisor Tony Wen said:

“As Jon Husted votes time and time again to continue the war in Iran, massive oil companies are making billions in profit while Ohio families get crushed by skyrocketing gas prices. Husted has taken maximum contributions from both Chevron and Exxon corporate PACs, and Ohioans deserve to know why he keeps siding with his billionaire donors instead of fighting to lower costs at home.”

The party’s statement did not mention the $200,000 Chevron gave to the super PAC backing Husted, which dwarfs the direct PAC contributions it cited.

Why it matters here

Northwest Ohio households and farm operations absorb fuel costs directly, through commuting, freight, diesel and fertilizer. Regular gas in Tiffin ran as high as $4.99 a gallon at the peak in May. When a senator casts the same vote 13 times on a conflict that moves those prices, the public has a straightforward interest in knowing who is financing his campaign and what they stand to gain — regardless of whether any connection between the two can be drawn.

Those disclosures are the mechanism the public has. The next federal campaign finance reports are due Oct. 15, three weeks before the election.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Miller’s legal team distributed it as evidence in his own defense, and Miller directed viewers to the files himself during his livestream.

On the recording, he laughs at the accusation, repeatedly denies it and offers to be tested.

“Okay. Go for it,” he says. “Test for me whatever you would like.”

Miller has not been publicly charged with possessing or distributing illegal drugs. He was charged with operating a vehicle impaired after a 2011 crash into a light pole while a student at Miami University, and has long maintained he was not impaired; Mother Jones reported last month that newly obtained toxicology records from that crash showed MDMA and Klonopin in his system. Mother Jones reported that Miller’s spokesperson did not answer its questions about those findings.

TiffinOhio.net found no drug-test result in the 67-file package or in the public court records it reviewed, and no photograph of a needle appears in the files distributed Sunday. The recordings do not establish what Moreno photographed, who placed it there, or whether Miller used illegal drugs.

What is on the recording

TiffinOhio.net is not publishing the package or the audio. The quotations below come from transcripts TiffinOhio.net produced from the recordings Miller released.

The exchange begins as an argument about privacy. Miller says he has never gone into Emily Moreno’s phone, computer or bag. She cuts in.

“I have gone into your backpack because I truly do believe you have a drug problem,” she says.

“Okay. What drugs?” Miller answers.

“Uh, well, first it was weed, and then I found needles next to your bed,” she says.

“You found needles?”

“Yes, I did. And I took a picture of it. You can try to deny it to me.”

Miller laughs. “Okay.”

“I don’t know why that’s funny,” Moreno says. “That’s actually really fuckin’ scary.”

What follows is a sustained denial. Miller tells her the needle was not his and was not by his bed. She asks whose it was, then, if it was in the bedroom drawer.

“No idea, but I can tell you 1,000%, I’ve never had a needle in my bedroom drawer, 1,000%,” Miller says. Moments later: “I have never had a needle in my bedroom drawer and that is not a lie.”

“Well, then where are they, Max? Because that’s where I found it,” Moreno says.

“Nope. I don’t have needles in the house. You can come check,” he says.

She says she will send him a photograph. “Please, do,” Miller says. “I would love to see what this looks like.”

A few minutes later in the same conversation, in a second excerpt Miller also released, he goes further.

“I am super happy to go take any drug test, and to take any type of test that you would like me to take, uh, in or out of court,” he says.

“I don’t know why you’d be thrilled with that, Max,” Moreno replies. “I’m not tryin’ to screw you. I’m honest to God scared.”

Why Miller released it

The summary his lawyers wrote to guide reporters through the exhibits presents the recording as evidence that Moreno manufactures allegations against him on a schedule set by money and custody rather than by events.

The packet says the needle claim surfaced one day after Miller told Moreno, in another recorded conversation, that he would stop paying her car insurance and condominium fees. It says Moreno later acknowledged in a September 2024 recording that she had already decided to leave the marriage before the needle claim, that she told no one about it except her attorney, and that she had known for months there was an innocent explanation — prescribed testosterone-replacement therapy.

Two of those three claims hold up against the recording. The third does not.

Moreno does say she had already decided to leave, and she gives that as her reason for not raising the needle with him at the time. “That freaked me out, but I had already made that decision that I was going, which is why I didn’t bring it up to you,” she says. She also says she told only her attorney, sent no photograph and tried to research it herself online.

But on the innocent explanation, the recording does not support what the summary says it does.

Miller raises the therapy himself, telling Moreno he had disclosed it to her eight months earlier and that she had acknowledged it. “I told you I was doing TRT and that I had stopped,” he says.

“What’s TRT?” Moreno asks.

Miller explains that it stands for testosterone replacement therapy. Moreno tells him what she understood at the time: “What you told me was you did it several times, and that was it.”

“Correct,” Miller says.

“Right, so when I found a needle, I had no idea what the fuck it was,” she says. “I also asked you several times if you were still doing it, and you said no.”

The recording establishes that Miller raised the therapy as context. It does not establish that anything Moreno says she found was connected to it.

Miller’s account also shifts between the two recordings. On Aug. 20 he denied having needles in the house: “Nope. I don’t have needles in the house. You can come check.” By Sept. 2 he no longer disputed that Moreno may have found something, but denied putting it there.

“I didn’t put that in there, okay?” he says. “I’m telling the honest to God truth. That shocked the fuck outta me.”

He also tells her he had prepared for the question: “I already have a test for everything that you guys are gonna ask for.” No such test result appears in the package.

Drug allegations have followed Miller through this case. Mother Jones reported last month, based on more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police records obtained through public-records requests, that the file includes allegations of drug use alongside allegations of violence against multiple women. Miller has strenuously denied all of it. In court papers, Miller alleged that Moreno used drug-use claims to limit his time alone with their daughter.

Where this fits

The recording is one of 22 audio and video files in a 199-megabyte package that Miller’s side distributed on Sunday, the same morning he went live on X for roughly 20 minutes to deny abusing his ex-wife or their 2-year-old daughter and to say he would not leave his re-election race.

Within the hour, U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno — Miller’s former father-in-law — said Miller is a danger to his daughter and should not serve in the House. Miller replied on X that Moreno was hiding from his own media circus and that the statement was “all political.”

A TiffinOhio.net review of all 67 files found several defects. The summary written for reporters cites Exhibit 517, but no file corresponding to that exhibit appears in the package. In the section on the hot-water allegation, a citation ends with the apparent drafting note “with exhibit cite]” where the reference should be. The package states that personal identifiers including home addresses and dates of birth have been removed; TiffinOhio.net found dates of birth in seven files and residential addresses, phone numbers and email addresses in ten.

Republican officials cannot remove Miller from the ballot themselves. Under Ohio law, a nominee for Congress must withdraw before the 90th day ahead of the general election to create a vacancy; county boards of elections in the district then hold a special election on a date set by the secretary of state, or, if only one candidate files, the secretary certifies that person as the party’s nominee. The 90th day before the Nov. 3 general election is Wednesday, Aug. 5.

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that the fund, in exchange for him dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, would not benefit him, but rather “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration” after they participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

On the first day of his second term, Trump commuted the prison sentences of 14 of the attack’s ringleaders and members of the paramilitary groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. The president granted a “full, complete and unconditional pardon” to all others charged with crimes after the attack.

“Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history. They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them,” Trump continued in a 254-word post.

He also attacked Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn and said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should be “immediately approved” as attorney general.

Cornyn and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, both members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, have refused to advance Blanche’s nomination from committee to the full Senate until Blanche, also Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, formally ends the “anti-weaponization” fund in writing. 

Blanche, of Florida, maintains his comments before a House Appropriations subcommittee in June prove the administration ended the fund.

‘Legal and political albatross’

In a late morning statement on X, Tillis said Trump “made it clear today that the so-called Anti Weaponization Fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it.”

“While I never disagreed that the Biden Administration pursued a number of vindictive prosecutions related to January 6, the criminals who assaulted police officers and defiled our nation’s Capitol are not ‘great American patriots’ who are ‘victims of government abuse.’ Anyone who attacked law enforcement should still be in prison, not getting a check from the federal government,” Tillis wrote.

He added he and Cornyn are working with Blanche, whom he described as “forthright, thoughtful and patient,” on ending the fund. 

“It’s a shame his confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the President refuses to amend the bogus settlement. I will continue working in good faith to put an end this legal and political albatross and prevent any potential misallocation of taxpayer dollars,” Tillis wrote.

Tillis’ office did not respond to a question about the identity of the adviser the senator mentioned in the statement.

When being questioned by reporters at the Cabinet meeting at Camp David just over an hour later, Trump said Blanche should be confirmed as attorney general “forthwith” and that the fund is “dead.”

“But you know, I wish it weren’t. To be honest with you, I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused. … and I’d like to see them compensated for the pain.”

The White House press office on Friday issued a press release linking to statements and quotes in support of Blanche from dozens of law enforcement associations, former Justice Department officials and Republican lawmakers.

Trump, Cornyn and Tillis

On Thursday, Trump threatened to pull Blanche’s nomination and leave him in an acting capacity until both Cornyn and Tillis leave office at year’s end.

Cornyn’s career in the Senate is ending after he lost in a runoff election in May to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump endorsed.

Tillis announced last year he would not seek reelection after Trump threatened to find primary opponents to challenge the North Carolina Republican after he refused to support Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, had scheduled a committee vote on Blanche’s nomination for Thursday morning, but postponed the vote late Wednesday when it was clear Cornyn and Tillis were not yet satisfied.

The Judiciary Committee is split between 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. All Democrats are expected to oppose Blanche, and a majority vote is required to advance Blanche’s nomination to the full Senate for confirmation.

Judge slammed Trump settlement

Trump’s settlement with the IRS faced opposition on multiple fronts, including in court.

In a July 13 order, the Florida federal judge in Trump’s IRS case slammed the president’s settlement with his own administration as using the presidency to “manipulate” the courts.

Lawyers for Trump, his two sons and the Trump Organization made public in a federal court filing Friday their plans to appeal a lower court order that bars them “from referring to the purported ‘settlement agreement’ … as evidence of a ‘settlement’ reached in this matter.”

The Justice Department’s announcement of the “anti-weaponization” fund in May immediately drew scrutiny from both sides of the aisle for the possibility that Jan. 6 defendants who assaulted police officers could reap a reward.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. and Frank Bisignano, the Internal Revenue Service’s chief executive officer, a position created by Trump, signed the settlement that Trump negotiated with his own administration officials for himself, his sons and the private Trump Organization.

Like Blanche, Woodward also had ties to Trump’s criminal cases prior to the president’s second term. Woodward represented Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta in the government’s 2023 case regarding classified material found at Mar-a-Lago.

Opposition to the “anti-weaponization” fund among Republicans snarled quick passage of an immigration enforcement package to fund Trump’s mass deportation agenda for the remainder of his term.

The settlement deal also includes immunity for Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization from tax audits and enforcement connected to any tax information leaked by a government contractor in 2019. The contractor was prosecuted and sentenced to jail time in 2024.

Cornyn pressed Blanche on the tax immunity portion of the deal during a July 15 confirmation hearing. Blanche defended the terms as “typical” of settlements with the IRS.

Cornyn wrote on social media Thursday the president is “mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis.”

Former Department of Justice officials told committee Democrats the IRS settlement language was “mind-boggling,” during a July 22 forum hosted by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. 

Amelia Twyman contributed to this report.

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

Originally published on TiffinOhio.net.