Senator: "Republicans sometimes forget that they're Republicans''
By William Hershey
COLUMBUS BUREAU
Dayton Daily News
December 13, 2003
COLUMBUS -- Peace at the Statehouse? Good will toward fellow Republicans? Bah, humbug.'
It should be the season to be jolly for Gov. Bob Taft, House Speaker Larry Householder, Senate President Doug White, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and the rest of the Republican crew.
All their seasons should be full of ho-ho-hos.
They've got more control of state government than Santa has of his reindeer. But these days they don't spend much time walking under each other's mistletoe.
Taft says he'll veto the bill passed by the House and Senate giving law-abiding Ohioans the right to carry concealed weapons. It should provide more public access to information about permit holders, the governor says.
The veto threat is a lump of coal in the stockings of advocates -- including big crowds of Republicans from Akron to Zanesville, not to mention Moraine -- who've been pushing for the right to carry concealed handguns for 20 years, at least.
Householder is ready to try to override the veto.
"The people of Ohio have given us this tool because they feel at times it's necessary to do that and this could be one of those times," said the speaker.
White, meanwhile, doesn't know if he has the votes.
"We tried to eliminate this confrontation," he said. Senate Republicans and Taft agreed to a compromise on the public access issue -- providing a little less than Taft demanded and more than legislators wanted to give. House Republicans wouldn't go along.
Bickering over concealed carry is just the warm-up for the Republicans' major holiday non-celebration.
Most of them consider Blackwell the grinch who's trying to steal their good cheer.
Before Christmas, Citizens for Tax Repeal, the group headed by Blackwell, expects to turn in petitions with 96,870 signatures from registered voters demanding that the legislature repeal the temporary one percentage point increase in the state sales tax.
(The group must turn the petitions into Blackwell in his position as Secretary of State, Ohio's top elections official. He could become the first Secretary of State to hand such petitions over to himself, but that might be too much publicity even for Blackwell.)
The legislature would have four months to act. If lawmakers didn't, Blackwell and his group could gather 96,870 additional signatures and put the repeal proposal on the Nov. 2, 2004, ballot.
Since Taft, Householder and White collaborated on the temporary sales tax increase as the way to get the state through a tough two-year budget cycle, they don't think much of Blackwell's plan. They like to downplay the tax increase as the "penny," since it increases the price of something that costs a dollar by just one cent.
Blackwell, however, calls it the "20 percent" increase since it hikes the tax statewide from 5 percent to 6 percent.
Back in 1994, when Republicans gained control of the Ohio House and completed their virtual lock on state government, party leaders made an unofficial decision to show that they could govern the state.
That means paying lots of attention to stuff like passing budgets, building highways and taking care of citizens who need government help and as little attention as possible to political grandstanding and hot-button issues like concealed-carry legislation that defy consensus.
The problem, state Sen. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, said last week is that, at least from his standpoint, Republicans sometimes forget that they're Republicans. Republicans, he said, stand for lower taxes, upholding Ohioans' right to carry concealed handguns and other stuff that somehow has been put on the backburner since 1994.
Householder probably would have made a deal on concealed carry with Taft if he could have gotten fellow House Republicans to go along. He's being forced from office at the end of next year because of term limits, however. He wants to run for statewide office in 2006 and picking a fight with an unpopular governor is one way to raise a profile.
Speaking of profile-raising, the tax repeal campaign has helped Blackwell. He plans to run for governor in 2006, along with two other Republicans: Attorney General Jim Petro and Auditor Betty Montgomery.
Meanwhile, White, the Senate president, is back on his Adams County farm, waxing nostalgic for times that may be slipping away.
"I'm for getting things done. I'm not for passing bills out of committee . . . I'm for government," he said.
Bah, humbug.
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