Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall insider corruption term limits

The Limits of Corruption

Another corrupt, term-​limits-​hating, careerist politician bites the dust. 

“Federal prosecutors say Republican Speaker Larry Householder and four others — including a former state GOP chairman — perpetrated a $60 million federal bribery scheme,” reports the Dayton Daily News, “connected to a taxpayer-​funded bailout of Ohio’s two nuclear power plants.”

Last year, a citizen-​initiated referendum campaign sought to give voters the final say on the legislature’s $1.5 billion baby. “The relentless machinations of HB 6’s backers,” Cleveland Plain-​Dealer columnist Thomas Suddes points out, “kept [that] repeal effort launched against the bill off Ohio’s ballot.”

At a news conference to explain the arrest of Householder and his co-​conspirators on racketeering charges, federal prosecutors detailed some of the ways the scheme illegally blocked last year’s referendum effort. 

Now, the rush is on to repeal House Bill 6.

Mr. Suddes is correct that “[t]he legislature also won’t be OK till voters amend the Ohio Constitution to make it easier to place issues on the statewide ballot for up-​or-​down votes.” 

But when he goes on to argue that term limits are “part of that problem”?

The only thing Ohio’s term limits need is to make the limits lifetime — forbidding legislators from returning after a timeout. Householder had previously been speaker from 2001 to 2004. “While he officially left office due to term limits,” informs the Plain-​Dealer, “he departed Columbus amid an FBI investigation that closed without charges.”

Householder also came to our attention back in March, when he called Ohio’s eight-​year limits “pretty oppressive.” Before the pandemic, he was pushing a ballot measure designed to weaken the term limits law and serve until 2036 — foreshadowing what Putin* did later in Russia. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* I referred to them as “two pols in a pod,” but now, Householder reminds me more of former Arkansas State Sen. Jon Woods, who after sponsoring a deceptive ballot measure to weaken term limits was convicted on multiple felony charges and is serving his current term in prison.

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Categories
Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling insider corruption local leaders responsibility

Schooled in Corruption

Michigan’s governor just signed a $49 million emergency funding bill, designed by legislators to keep Detroit’s public schools open.

Open for what?

Will any of that dough actually make it to the classroom, where children might possibly be educated?

Or, as I inquired at Townhall yesterday, is it merely another opening for … graft?

Less than a week after the rescue bill, U. S. Attorney Barbara McQuade brought criminal charges against more than a dozen DPS principals and administrators, as well as a vendor of school supplies. Their kickback scheme was simple: school officials received big, fat bribes from the vendor for school supplies that, as the Detroit Free Press put it, “were rarely ever delivered.”

The scam involved at least twelve separate Detroit schools over as long as 13 years. During that time, more than $900,000 was paid in bribes to DPS officials.

The newspaper highlighted how “shocked” teachers were that their principals had been indicted. “It’s pitiful that they’re going after principals who are probably just doing what they need to do even if it might be a little bit unethical in order to provide the students in their schools with the supplies and materials that they need that district and the state should be providing us,” was the excuse one teacher offered.

“A little bit unethical”?

Frankly, the fraud didn’t deliver, but deny “supplies and materials” to students — supplies taxpayers had sacrificed to provide.

This same teacher added that her indicted principal is “always putting students’ interests first. It’s not just rhetoric with her. It’s actual practice.”

Except for the graft.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Detroit, kickbacks, bribes, crime, education, schools

 


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