Ohio’s oversold gerrymandering solutions are complicated by GOP’s lock on rural

The Ohio redistricting mess — as to Ohio General Assembly seats — may end up where Statehouse Republicans arguably always aimed to put it: In front of three federal judges, rather than in front of the Ohio Supreme Court. Or, based on a federal court hearing Wednesday, the dispute may still remain the state court’s hottest potato.

Meanwhile, Ohioans will be expected to nominate U.S. House candidates at the May 3 primary election, assuming that’s when the primary is held, even though the nominees will arguably be running in gerrymandered congressional districts, at least until the state Supreme Court manages to review them.

This tangle was made inevitable thanks to a couple of misconceived or at least misunderstood state constitutional amendments — and political mulishness, and political geography.

As a few bystanders quietly predicted at the time, the 2015 and 2018 amendments aimed at reforming how Ohio draws its General Assembly and congressional districts, respectively, promised more than they could deliver. Or more than they seem to deliver.

The November 2015 ballot issue, overwhelmingly OK’d by Ohio voters, was officially said to create “a bipartisan, public process for drawing [General Assembly] districts.” The May 2018 ballot issue, according to its description, would “end the partisan process for drawing [Ohio] congressional districts.” Voters agreed to that, too.

In fact, the amendments really did two concrete things.

First, they derailed what likely would have been far stronger voter-petitioned (“initiated”) ballot issues to reform reapportionment (legislature) and “redistricting” (Congress) plans. Second, as a practical matter, the amendments still allow gerrymandering, but for four years at a time, instead of 10.

Split hairs till the cows come home, but those are the facts: This year, there was nothing bipartisan, and little public, about how the Ohio Redistricting Commission fashioned districts.

Meanwhile, General Assembly Gerrymander No. 4, approved 4-3 by the redistricting commissioners late on Monday, will be junked or OK’d by the state Supreme Court or by a (possibly) GOP-friendlier panel of three federal judges.

More dithering will follow if, as could happen, the state Supreme Court rejects Gerrymander No. 4 and the three-judge federal panel approves it, which seems like the bet that key Statehouse Republicans (Senate President Matt Huffman, House Speaker Robert Cupp, Gov. Mike DeWine and Secretary of State Frank LaRose) placed Monday night.

The three-judge panel is composed of Chief U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley, of the U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio; Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amul Thapar; and U.S. District Judge Benjamin Beaton, of Western Kentucky. Marbley was appointed by a Democratic president, Thapar and Beaton by Republican presidents.

In fairness, something said by the GOP’s Huffman and others appears to be a genuine factor in the state Redistricting Commission’s claimed difficulty in drawing “enough” (as in “a fair number of”) Democratic seats in the Ohio House and Senate.

The last time Democrats controlled the state Senate was in 1984. The last time Democrats controlled the Ohio House of Representatives was in December 2010, during the House speakership of suburban Cleveland Democrat Armond Budish.

There’s a good reason for the dearth of Democrats at the Ohio Statehouse, and it’s partly geopolitical. For instance: Review a list of Ohio House members and state senators from the 1970s and 1980s – 20-year Democratic Speaker Vern Riffe’s era – and you’ll find a fair number of Democratic legislators who hailed from such rural Ohio towns as Botkins (Shelby County), Mount Orab (Brown County) or Senecaville (Guernsey County). Riffe himself was from Scioto County’s New Boston (population: roughly 2,000). But in recent years, Democrats’ district state House and state Senate candidates have mostly lost the rural vote in Ohio, Athens County excepted.

That makes statewide map-drawing even more challenging if your aim is to draw 54 Republican Ohio House seats and 45 Democratic House seats (one idealistic goal) and still follow the Ohio Constitution’s rules about not splitting (or not excessively splitting) Ohio’s 88 counties, its 250 cities and 676 villages, and its 1,308 townships, among 99 House and 33 Senate districts. That makes for a Rubik’s Cube – or for a federal case. Take your pick.

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