I don’t love term limits, but expanding them for Ohio’s gerrymandered Statehouse would be foolish

Left, Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens. Right, Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman. (Photos by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal. Republish only with original article.)

Term-limits sap legislative expertise and they artificially limit voter options. They may even cause an over-reliance by lawmakers on lobbyists. I don’t love any of that about them. But further entrenching Ohio Statehouse lawmakers without ending gerrymandering and enacting strict ethics and campaign finance reform would only further reward misrepresentation, corruption and extremism, which would be foolish.

Ending or expanding term limits would be a tremendous gift to Ohio lawmakers who have shown nothing but scorn, contempt, and open hostility toward Ohio voters and the power of Ohio voters. It would be a political present that they haven’t earned and do not deserve.

Both Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens and Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman have now expressed interest in changing term limits. Both men are currently leading chambers declared five times to be unconstitutionally gerrymandered by a bipartisan majority on the Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio voters have been forced by Trump judges on a federal court to suffer them regardless.

This past fall, threatening to make things even worse than they are now after having secured a new partisan Ohio Supreme Court rubber stamp, Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission extorted Democratic leaders to agree to longer-term, still-gerrymandered, but maybe perhaps very slightly less gerrymandered maps for the foreseeable future. They’ll keep their gerrymandered supermajorities. Depending on the specifics of any proposal on term limits, both Huffman and Stephens would stand to gain substantially by an expansion.

Term limits on Ohio lawmakers were established by 68% of voters in 1992 in a state constitutional amendment. The amendment sets limits for state senators of two four-year terms, for a total of eight years; and Ohio representatives to four two-year terms, for a total of eight years. Any change would require another constitutional amendment.

Lawmakers can, and often do, bounce from one chamber to the other, serving up to 16 years in the Ohio Statehouse between the two chambers. For instance, Huffman right now is term-limited out of the Ohio Senate, so he is running for the Ohio House this year to continue his legislative career, with an eye toward challenging Stephens for the Ohio House speakership in January 2025. Stephens has one two-year term left in the House before he’s term-limited out of that chamber.

As for what’s being proposed, Huffman has pointed to an idea for a 16-year term limit applying to service in both chambers of the General Assembly, instead of the current eight-years at a time restriction, but he didn’t commit to a specific set of changes.

Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was amping up an effort to change term-limits himself before he was disgraced in the largest money laundering and political bribery scandal in state history. Householder’s idea was for 16-year limits as well, with sitting lawmakers getting a clean slate . That might have opened the door to an 18-year term as House Speaker for Householder. Instead he’s now serving a 20-year term in federal prison.

This is illustrative of the dangers in taking away any of the few checks remaining on an already-unaccountable state legislature.

Time and again over the past decade, public corruption scandals have rocked the Ohio Statehouse. These include the massive utility company special interests robbing ratepayers of hundreds of millions of dollars ; charter school scam artists ripping off taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars ; drug companies that admitted defrauding Ohioans by tens of millions of dollars ; predatory payday lenders skirting accountability to fleece vulnerable Ohioans; a nursing home industry peddling campaign donations and influence for sweetheart lawmaking; special interest groups writing legislation ; lobbyists writing lawmakers’ testimony; and lawmakers creating standards that benefit their privately-owned businesses .

Meanwhile, corrupt, gerrymandered lawmakers have made relentless assaults on Ohio voters.

In 2011, Republicans met in a secret hotel room bunker to gerrymander themselves into Statehouse supermajorities . In 2014, they eliminated “Golden Week” where Ohioans could register to vote and cast early ballots. In 2021 and 2022, they defied voters, the Ohio Constitution, and a bipartisan Ohio Supreme Court five times to rig Ohio’s Statehouse maps with gerrymandering again, forcing voters to cast ballots in unconstitutional districts. Then they politicized the Ohio Supreme Court by adding party labels and gave Ohio one of the most restrictive voter laws in the nation . They shrunk the “cure” period for provisional ballots. They limited absentee ballot windows . And with State Issue 1 this past August, they became the first legislature in Ohio history to try to roll back the constitutional power of voters.

They have indulged massive pay-to-play corruption, repeatedly misrepresented the people of Ohio’s interests, repeatedly misrepresented the people of Ohio, and repeatedly attacked Ohio voters and our ability to hold them accountable. Now they want to be rewarded with another power grab for themselves, and less accountability? They ought to be laughed out of the room.

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