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Ohio's Supreme Court has already ruled the state attorney general cannot reject potential statewide ballot initiatives based solely on their titles.
State lawmakers, many of whom are thinking no further ahead than state Attorney General Dave Yost, didn't like the ruling and are putting together a measure that would expand the state attorney general's authority to reject citizen ballot initiatives based on their title.
According to a report by the Dayton Daily News, the proposal to make the state AG even more powerful was slipped in as an amendment to an otherwise unrelated bill the state Senate approved last week. The House will take it up this week.
State Sen. Matt Huffman, R-12th Dist., dismissively suggested those who find the proposal problematic should worry more about the way titles are written. "It's like a lot of things, why would you give it a bad title? If you want to sell a book, you want to give it a good title. If legislators want their bill passed, they'll usually name it after somebody and talk about good things," Huffman said, according to the Daily News.
Cute. But clearly said with the assumption that the person sitting in the attorney general's office will always be a person with whom Huffman generally aligns, politically. Yost will not be state attorney general forever. Someday, the political winds will shift once again.
"We're talking about citizens' amendments, right, (that) they're bringing to the ballot because the legislature has not acted in a way that (citizens) agree with," Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, told the Daily News. "I do not believe it's appropriate, then, to have one of our state offices, the attorney general, be able to make some kind of arbitrary decision about what he thinks of the title."
Will Huffman and others aligned with him politically still be laughing when the shoe is on the other foot and they have handed to a different attorney general the tools to easily reject amendments supported by a significant number of Ohioans? Of course not. But, unless the House sees reason, by then it will be too late to undo the damage.