Early jockeying continues in the 2018 Ohio governor’s race. Activists continue their quest to chip away at abortion access in Ohio. And a Cleveland federal judge speaks his mind. Read more in today’s Ohio Politics Roundup, brought to you today by Andrew J. Tobias.
DeWine lands key backer: Columbiana County GOP Chairman Dave Johnson, an influential Ohio Republican, has thrown his support behind Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s expected 2018 gubernatorial bid, cleveland.com’s Henry J. Gomez writes.
In a letter to Ohio Republican activists, Johnson said DeWine is “one of the most successful and well-liked leaders in Ohio…And while others backed away from President Trump last fall, Mike DeWine never wavered.”
Johnson also cited polling by a Republican Super PAC showing DeWine has a sizable name identification lead over his possible 2018 rivals.
Why this matters: Johnson, according to Gomez, “was a vocal supporter of Jane Timken’s takeover of the Ohio Republican Party last month. Timken, with assistance from Trump and his political team, unseated Matt Borges, Gov. John Kasich’s handpicked chairman.”
In other words, Johnson’s support shows that DeWine isn’t obviously in Team Trump’s doghouse for picking the losing horse in the Ohio GOP fight. That doesn’t mean that Trump’s Ohio operation couldn’t still come out in support of another candidate.
PS: “Johnson’s letter drew a response from Coshocton County GOP Chairman Steve Hall, who wrote that he thinks DeWine has done a ‘fantastic job’ as attorney general but pledged his support last summer” to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, another possible 2018 gubernatorial candidate.
“As far as what the polls show, remember the polls also said Hillary Clinton was going to be the next President,” Hall wrote.
Ryan’s ruminations: On the Democratic side of the 2018 race, Youngstown-area U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan says he’s going to make a decision on whether to run for governor “in the next couple of weeks,” Gomez writes.
“I’m having a lot of conversations with my wife about it,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon. “We have three kids … and you’re talking about a commitment of checking out for two years in order to do it and what that looks like for the family.”
Ryan has flirted with running for statewide office in the past, only to opt to return to Congress. If nothing else, he has managed to increase his exposure as a Democrat who can help the party re-connect with blue-collar voters who flocked to Trump in 2016.
No hard feelings: Back in D.C., Ryan and some of his allies involved in his failed leadership challenge have found themselves with higher-ranking committee assignments, CQ-Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson writes.
“Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan, who challenged House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for her post, is now the ranking member of the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, a position that gives him oversight of Congress’ internal spending, including money spent on leadership offices and members’ salaries, as well as Capitol Police…Some of Ryan’s most vocal backers have also found themselves with new ranking member slots, like … Ohio Rep. Marcia L. Fudge, the top Democrat on the Agriculture Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry.”
Democrats told McPherson that committee assignments are made based on experience, not loyalty.
Feeling confident: Fudge had this to say when she was asked if she’d felt any blowback from her decision to back Ryan, according to McPherson: “No, not really. I mean, you got to realize, I got 80 percent of the vote in my district. There’s not a whole lot anybody can do to me.”
Undercard update: Democratic State Rep. Kathleen Clyde has proposed automatically registering Ohioans to vote when they renew their driver’s license, cleveland.com’s Jackie Borchardt writes.
Clyde is not the first to propose the idea, which faces an uphill battle in the GOP-controlled state legislature. Even if it doesn’t pass, the bill shows Clyde, considered a possible candidate for Ohio Secretary of State in 2018, is working to stake a claim on elections issues.
Federal judge unloads on Trump: OK, maybe “unloads” is a little strong. But longtime Cleveland U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, without mentioning Trump’s name, on Wednesday night “noted comments like the ones the new president made this week could be dangerous,” cleveland.com’s Eric Heisig writes.
“This is serious business, because you start calling into question the legitimacy of someone, that undermines the whole system, all right?” Polster said in response to a question on whether he was worried about the judiciary’s status under Trump.
Pollster, a 1998 appointee of then-President Bill Clinton, made the comments during a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League’s civil rights committee in Bratenahl. He was there to discuss his recent experiences in Las Cruces, New Mexico, near the U.S.-Mexico border, where he spent two weeks as a visiting judge, handing down sentences to people who pleaded guilty to entering the U.S. illegally.
And that’s not all: During the Wednesday meeting, Polster had this to say about his Las Cruces trip: “”I can tell you, out of the 200 people I sentenced, I did not see a single murderer, a single rapist, a single terrorist,” Polster said, according to Heisig. “These are just people who want to be with their family or support their family.”
Know your nominee: Cleveland.com’s Stephen Koff took a look at the next Trump nominee to face confirmation hearings in Congress: Tom Price, Trump’s pick to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“As secretary of health and human services, Price, a congressman and former orthopedic surgeon, would be the president’s point man on repealing and replacing Obamacare — a longtime Price goal,” Koff writes.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, spoke against Price on the Senate floor Thursday morning. Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican, already has said Price is qualified for the job.
Rosenberger et al travel the world: Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, along with three other current and former state lawmakers, are among the 150-plus legislators across the country who accepted trips to Turkey provided by an opposition group there, according to a collaboration between the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Center for Public Integrity.
Rosenberger, Rep. Bob Peterson and former Reps. Peter Beck and Tracey Heard all accepted trips in 2011 from a group associated with the powerful Turkish religious movement headed by Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive Islamic cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and owns a network of Cincinnati-area charter schools.
“It was related to trying to get more livestock exchange, so a very policy-based trip,” said Rosenberger spokesman Brad Miller.
At the time, Gulen was an accepted figure in Turkish politics. Since then, Gulen and his backers have had a falling out with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, who now blames Gulen’s movement for an unsuccessful 2016 coup attempt.
LeBron opposes travel ban: In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James said he opposes Trump’s proposed restrictions on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries.
“I am not in favor of this policy or any policy that divides and excludes people,” James told the magazine. “I stand with the many, many Americans who believe this does not represent what the United States is all about. And we should continue to speak out about it.”
A federal appeals court on Thursday night refused to reinstate that ban, which had been halted after a district court judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order last week, the Associated Press reports.
James, 32, was a high-profile backer of Hillary Clinton’s, and regularly speaks his mind on social and political issues.
Ethics groups say Conway broke the law: Two prominent good-government groups in Washington, D.C. — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Public Citizen –wasted no time filing complaints on Thursday after White House employee Kellyanne Conway urged the public to buy a product line marketed by Ivanka Trump.
“The exchange came when Conway was asked about the Nordstrom department store chain’s decision to stop selling Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing and accessories, and a tweet from President Trump that chided the retailer’s decision,” writes cleveland.com’s Sabrina Eaton.
Worth watching: A Ku Klux Klan leader says she plans to expand her group’s public activities in Ohio and other states in 2017, writes the Columbus Dispatch’s Holly Zachariah.
“We have people all over Ohio already. There is a large membership of Loyal White Knights there,” Amanda Lee, the national imperial commander for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, told Zachariah. “When things start going wrong, it’s time for us to start retaliating. It’s time for us to get active.”
Mandel’s hot take: On the official social media accounts for his 2018 Senate campaign, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel cited an interesting source in calling out a prominent civil-rights group that advocates for American Muslims.
“If Council on American Islamic Relations is for it, it’s probably bad for America. What a horrible organization,” Mandel wrote, linking to an article written by the Center for Security Policy that linked the group to Hamas, the radical Islamist group in the Middle East.
The Center for Security Policy is a far-right group that advances anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Center for Security Policy as an “extremist” group. The Anti-Defamation League describes the group as bigoted against Muslims.
Mandel’s post attracted attention this week from WCMH, a Columbus TV station. Mandel, who is staking out a Trump-esque hardline stance on Islamic terrorism since declaring his Senate run, told WCMH he stands by his post.
That didn’t take long: A low-level county Republican Party official in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has resigned his position in response to public outcry involving his references to the 1970 Kent State University shooting, cleveland.com’s Karen Farkas writes.
In case you missed it, Marquette County Republican Party secretary Dan Adamini wrote on Twitter last week: “Violent protesters who shut down free speech? Time for another Kent State perhaps. One bullet stops a lot of thuggery.”
He told the Detroit News on Wednesday he has received hundreds of death threats over the uproar and he resigned hoping the move will satisfy those outraged by his statement, which referred to campus protests that disrupted a controversial visitor’s scheduled appearance at the University of California Berkeley.
“Whenever you’re involved in an organization, you want to be an asset,” he said. “At the moment I’ve become a distraction, and that’s not helping anybody. I stepped aside so hopefully the people that are so angry will feel that they’ve accomplished what they set out to do, and maybe we can all get on with our lives.”
Anti-abortion activism update: Ohio Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group, is seeking to ban most abortions after 13 weeks, Borchardt writes.
“Ohio Right to Life…wants to eliminate dilation and evacuation, an abortion method typically used between 13 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. The proposed ‘Dismemberment Abortion Ban’ is one of six pieces of abortion legislation the group plans to work on with lawmakers in the GOP-controlled General Assembly.”
Ohio legislators recently banned all abortions in the state for women who are more than 20 weeks pregnant.
You can’t win ’em all: An Ohio state legislator and Trump supporter disagrees with Trump’s apparent stance on civil asset forfeiture, writes the Columbus Dispatch’s Jim Siegel.
During a meeting with law enforcement officials in Texas earlier this week, Trump “semi-joked about destroying the career of a Texas state senator who planned to introduce an asset forfeiture bill that would require a conviction before law enforcement can keep private property,” as Siegel put it.
Rep. Rob McColley, who happened to be a leader of a pro-Trump group in Western Ohio, was the sponsor of a similar bill, that was signed into law earlier this year.
McColley said that while he campaigned for and voted for Trump, “and I think he’s doing a hell of a job, I happen to disagree with him on this.”
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