Despite former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder's arrest for bribery and corruption charges, despite evidence that the Ohio GOP received millions in slush fund money in order to vote for a corrupt energy bill that made Ohio's largest energy company billions of dollars at direct taxpayer expense, Ohio voters simply reelected everyone involved in the mess, and actually gave even larger margins to the state's GOP supermajority.
The scandal surrounding House Bill 6 took out the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. It has dominated the news pages and airwaves for months. It was the subject of countless campaign attack ads.
In the end, voters didn’t seem to care.
The scandal implicating former Speaker Larry Householder and his effort to get a nuclear bailout enacted into law emerged as a major theme in the 2020 Statehouse elections, but seemingly had little impact on the results.
In total, there were 46 lawmakers who voted for House Bill 6 and were on the ballot this November for a seat in the Ohio House or Ohio Senate. The unofficial results show that every single one of them won their election: 46-for-46. That includes Householder himself, who won reelection to his 72nd District over a slate of write-in opponents.
In contrast, there were 35 “no” votes who were up for election. Four of them have been voted out, and a fifth lawmaker’s race is too close to call.
That’s a striking result considering the extent to which the scandal has enveloped Ohio politics since the July arrests of Householder and four political operatives.
In recent months, news outlets have extensively covered an 81-page affidavit outlining the years of alleged corruption and bribery that went into HB 6 being enacted to benefit the former FirstEnergy Solutions of Akron. So too did news stories highlight the vote to remove Householder as the House leader; the ensuing trials; and the ongoing effort to get HB 6 repealed.
Voters got one last reminder last week, when two people charged in the alleged scheme pleaded guilty.
The yearslong plot, as alleged by federal investigators, involved FirstEnergy Solutions funneling “dark money” toward a group controlled by Householder. These resources were used to get Householder and a number of other Republican allies elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. These allies joined with more than two-dozen Democrats to elevate Householder as House speaker in 2019.
In fact, even more Ohio lawmakers have been arrested by the FBI over the FirstEnergy Solutions scam, including Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Pastor, just this week, as the guilty pleas and evidence pile up.
Cincinnati Councilman Jeff Pastor has been arrested, according to sources. Pastor, a Republican, is expected to face federal charges including bribery, extortion and money laundering.
A press conference is scheduled at the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati at 2:30 p.m. featuring U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers and Chris Hoffman, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI’s field office.
As previously reported by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, the FBI may have been running an operation in Cincinnati last year involving two mysterious men identifying themselves as real-estate developers. The two men made the rounds there, seeking help from local public officials with a planned hotel project.
They also ended up hiring Columbus lobbyist Neil Clark, ostensibly for his help changing state law to benefit the planned hotel by amending a pending sports-betting legalization. But the amendment ultimately did not make its way into the bill. Chinedum Ndukwe, a former Cincinnati Bengals player who now is a real-estate developer in Cincinnati, was involved with the hotel project and attended some of the meetings, which Clark said he felt appeared to give it legitimacy.
After his and others' arrest in July on corruption charges linked to the passage of a nuclear bailout bill, Clark said quotes of his that appeared in the indictment were recorded during meetings he held with the Cincinnati hotel developers. He said he suspects they were either undercover FBI agents, or at the least, informants working with the FBI. Clark has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Efforts by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer to locate the men who hired Clark were unsuccessful. Officials in Cincinnati recalled interacting with the men, believing they were from Nashville and either North Carolina or Georgia, but said they haven’t heard from them since last summer. Federal officials declined to comment on any ongoing investigation.
But again, every Republican who voted for Householder's corrupt kickback bill, and every Republican who made Householder Speaker before he was forced to step down, was reelected by Ohio voters.
But that's also proof of how moribund and useless the Ohio Democrats are, they couldn't beat a single Republican, with several indicted. Outside Sherrod Brown, the state's Democrats are 100% worthless, useless, and pointless.
You know, kind of like the KY Democrats.
Corruption means nothing in this state. I guess we'll have to wait until the Biden Justice Department gets around to actually trying the cases in court.
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