"CITIZENS NOT POLITICIANS" IS ACTUALLY RUN BY DEMOCRATIC PARTY BOSSES FROM THE DC SWAMP
The name Citizens Not Politicians is a lie.
It is the exact opposite.
It is Politicians not Citizens.
It is not a grassroots movement.
It is a fake astroturf scheme run by Democrat Party bosses.
The puppet masters behind the campaign for the absurdly complex ballot measure to radically dismantle constitutional redistricting in Ohio are two of D.C.’s biggest swamp monsters – Eric Holder and Marc Elias.
Flipping red states to blue by changing redistricting laws has been Holder’s mission for the last decade.
His primary job as U.S. Attorney General was to shield President Obama from his many scandals, including spying on reporters, the targeting of conservatives by the IRS, running guns to Mexican drug lords, and the Benghazi debacle. Holder was very successful protecting his boss. But he resigned under a mushrooming cloud of scandals as the only attorney general ever convicted of contempt of Congress.
Elias is D.C.’s alpha attorney. The Democrat’s wartime consigliere. Their fixer. The guy they send to make election recounts turn the Democrats’ way. The lawfare warrior who uses legal loopholes to overturn the will of the people. The left’s dirty tricks specialist. Elias commissioned and paid for the fake dossier used to launch the Trump-Russia hoax, arguably the dirtiest trick in the history of U.S. politics.
Now these Democratic party bosses are targeting Ohio with an anti-constitutional scheme to turn our red state blue by nefarious means.
The convoluted and cockamamie redistricting amendment was not put on the ballot in a grassroots effort by concerned citizens in Ohio. It is actually part of a nationwide plan targeting red states and masterminded by Democratic honchos in Washington.
Buying a Ballot Initiative
Democrats will complain, how can you say it's not grassroots when we collected 731,000 signatures to get our proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot in Ohio?
The answer is they got those signatures the old-fashioned way. They paid for them.
Citizens paid $6,137,500 million to a professional group in Dallas that specializes in harvesting signatures for ballot measure qualification.
That group, Advance Micro Targeting, spells it out clearly on its website: “We sell ideas.”
What kind of ideas? “Big ideas like ending government corruption, giving voters the right to decide what’s best for them, and electing people who actually listen.” In other words, the usual progressive buzzwords. Vague enough to conceal what they’re really after: power.
How do they do it? “We go where the people are. Sometimes knocking on doors, approaching people in parking lots, libraries and other venues where people gather.”
You can imagine the pitch – shoving a clipboard in your face and asking, “Do you want to stop gerrymandering?”
”Well, yes. Yes, I do.”
Who wouldn’t sign?
It’s like asking, “Do you want to save the puppies?”
Not a tough sell. Especially to unsuspecting bystanders outside a grocery store who have no idea how ridiculously complex, devious, and harebrained the amendment is in reality. See for yourself – just try to make sense of this 26-page word salad.
Making matters even more surreal, this drive to overturn a key part of the Ohio Constitution is bankrolled by a foreign billionaire whose ambition is to turn the U.S. Constitution into a progressive manifesto.
How in the world did we get here? Let’s take a close look.
Fundamentally Transforming Ohio
Ohioans passed an overwhelmingly popular redistricting reform as a constitutional amendment in 2015 with 70 percent of the vote and strong bipartisan sponsorship. Democratic leadership actually campaigned ardently in favor of the amendment.
So, why are Democrats pushing to overturn the amendment now? Not because of any popular discontent or because of any grassroots movement. Powerful leftists are targeting Ohio because Democrats can’t win here after the state turned solidly red following the election of President Trump in 2016. As On The Record has documented, and Gov. Mike DeWine has clearly explained, the Citizens’ ploy is actually a fake anti-gerrymandering scheme designed to favor Democrats in future redistricting maps.
The key players are Holder, Elias, and woke Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss:
• Holder runs the National Democratic Redistricting Commission.
• Elias represents the NDRC, Citizens, and Wyss.
• Wyss funds the NDRC, Citizens, and Elias.
Technically, Wyss supports the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF). That’s the NDRC’s lawfare group that wages election litigation benefitting Democrats in battleground states.
Essentially:
• Holder is the mastermind.
• Elias is the hired gun.
• Wyss is the bankroller.
Wyss is on a mission is to "(re)interpret the American Constitution in the light of progressive politics,” according to the biography written by his sister.
He has donated $475 million to left-wing political groups to do that.
His Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $12 million dollars supporting leftist causes in ballot campaigns in Ohio in 2023.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund is also the largest backer of Citizens. The fund bankrolled by Wyss has already contributed $6,669,800 to the effort to overturn the Ohio Constitution’s redistricting amendment overwhelmingly approved by voters.
The D.C. Puppet Masters
Some smoking gun proof that Democrat Party bosses in Washington have been calling the shots in Ohio from behind the scenes was actually provided by a Democrat, apparently by mistake.
On May 5, 2022, House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, sent a letter to her fellow Ohio Redistricting Commission members asking them to review revised maps submitted by what she called a third party.
“We should be working from this map,” she stated, and included a link.
But the link didn’t go to a map. It went to another letter with a link to the map.
That second letter was from an attorney in the Elias Law Group.
That showed who was really calling the shots.
Russo was doing the bidding of Elias.
The letter also showed Russo was trying to portray the work of a map maker hired by Elias as an independent third party, while urging the commission to adopt that map.
The Michigan Template
Michigan is the template for the NDRC’s effort to flip red states to blue with redistricting ploys.
While Citizens Not Politicians is the front group for that drive in Ohio, in Michigan it was called Voters Not Politicians. Some coincidence, huh?
Voters Not Politicians is a Michigan-based lobbying and political advocacy group formed in 2016 to change how the state drew redistricting maps. Voters ran the successful petition drive to put Prop 2 on the ballot.
Proposal 2 created a supposedly “independent” commission of 13 “citizens” – four Democrats, four Republicans, and five independents to approve redistricting maps. Commission candidates would self-identify their political affiliation, meaning there was no other verification, leading critics to fear the commission could be stacked by stealth partisans.
Voters tried to portray itself as a bipartisan coalition but the Detroit News discovered most of their leadership supported Democrats: “Seven of 10 board members of the Voters Not Politicians petition committee have given at least a combined $5,649 to Democratic candidates and causes since 2005.” Not one of them had ever contributed to a Republican.
Voters committee President Katie Fahey described herself as an independent despite the fact she flew from “Grand Rapids to New York for what she thought was going to be an Election Night victory party for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.” Fahey wore a red pants suit for the occasion.
Apparently, a Democrat’s idea of an independent is a Democrat.
Fahey’s self-identification as an independent caused great concern for the makeup of a redistricting commission that would be comprised of four Democrats, four Republicans, and five “independents”...all self-identified.
Voters was backed by a ton of dark money (with sources hidden from the public) with histories of supporting Democratic causes – including the same groups sponsoring the current amendment drive in Ohio. Voters raised more than $16 million, outspending opponents by five-to-one.
Six million dollars came from the Sixteen Thirty Fund (funded by Wyss), $5.1 million from the Action Now Initiative (a leftist advocacy group), and $250,000 directly from the NDRC (whose largest donor is George Soros.)
Another Michigan paper discovered, “VNP spent nearly $11 million, most of it on consultants, strategists and media specialists who serve Democratic causes and candidates” including Senators Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren. Michigan’s lieutenant governor at the time said, “This should dispel the myth that Proposal 2 is some kind of nonpartisan grassroots initiative.”
With all that financial firepower behind the ballot initiative, Prop 2 won in 2018 with more than 61% of the vote. It caused a titanic shift in Michigan politics. Democrats got the results they paid for. They won control of the state House and state Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years.
A majority of Michigan voters had bought the line that the redistricting was fair, but black voters had serious remorse.
Even Voters was forced to recognize that when “Black Democrats from around Detroit sued the commission, casting the new maps which shrunk the number of Black seats as ‘racial gerrymandering’ that reduced the voting power of minority racial groups.”
In sum, Democrats ended up gerrymandering African-Americans out of power in order to elect more progressive Democrats.
Protecting Ohio’s Constitution
To protect our constitution, legislators passed a law this year banning foreigners from contributing to ballot initiatives in our state.
A lawsuit filed in June seeks to overturn the ban. It was filed by Elias.
The DC swamp lawyer is desperately trying to:
• Dismantle legal protections to Ohio’s elections.
• Keep the overseas legal fees flowing into his own pockets.
• Keep the overseas money flowing into Citizen’s effort to rewrite our laws.
The real power behind this effort – the one group that ties all these groups together – is Holder’s NDRC.
The NDRC is the Democrat’s machine designed to fundamentally transform America.
Here’s a closer look into Holder and Elias – who these Democratic Party bosses really are – and why no one should mistake the NDRC and Citizens for a bipartisan effort.
Holder’s Scandalous History
The mainstream media treat Holder as a respected statesman, but they have memory-holed the truly alarming details of his sordid record.
That includes lying to Congress repeatedly about the numerous scandals that plagued his tenure as U.S. Attorney General from 2009 to 2015.
• Holder lied about prosecuting the New Black Panthers
Holder testified to Congress on March 1, 2011 that “career attorneys” in the Justice Department made the decision to drop the prosecution of members of the New Black Panthers, videotaped intimidating voters outside a Philadelphia polling place.
An actual career attorney in the DOJ testified that his colleagues unanimously recommended prosecution but were overruled by an Obama political appointee, Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli.
• Holder lied about his DOJ spying on reporters
Holder personally signed off on the warrant to surveil FOX News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen in 2010.
But he testified before the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, 2013, "This is not something I've been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy."
The DOJ also secretly subpoenaed phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors.
• Holder lied about “Fast and Furious” gun running
Holder testified on May 3, 2011, that he first heard about the Obama administration's secret and illegal Fast and Furious gun-running operation "over the last weeks.”
In fact, he was told about it in a memo in July 2010 by Michael Walther, head of the National Drug Intelligence Center. Other documents showed “Holder’s top aides had sent him briefings about the case many times the year before.”
Walther told Holder that straw buyers in Fast and Furious "are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to the Mexican drug trafficking cartels."
The idea was to track the guns back to cartel leaders but the feds lost track of the guns, some of which were found at the scene where a Border Patrol officer was shot and killed in 2010.
• Holder held in Contempt of Congress
House Democrats joined Republicans in voting to find Holder in both civil and criminal Contempt of Congress in 2012 for refusing to turn over documents related to Fast and Furious, making him the first U.S. Attorney General to be so disgraced.
Despite refusing to comply with the investigation, no criminal charges were filed against Holder for his cover-up because he headed the department that would make such charges – and because then-President Obama asserted executive privilege in order to shield Holder.
• Holder whitewashed investigation into IRS targeting conservatives
Holder initially called the IRS targeting and harassing tea party-related groups “outrageous and unacceptable,” and announced his DOJ had launched an investigation in 2013.
The IRS refused to comply with subpoenas to turn over key evidence, and Holder’s DOJ did not compel them to comply.
Holder’s investigation conveniently only found evidence of “mismanagement and poor judgment” at the IRS, and the DOJ announced in 2015 that no criminal charges would be filed.
Elias’ Scandalous History
Could anyone be less qualified than Holder to determine how Ohio runs its elections?
Meet his partner in lawfare.
• Elias is the Redistricting Attack Dog
Marc Elias is Senior Advisor and General Counsel for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee run by Holder. He has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to subvert the constitutional redistricting process in Ohio.
“He is the party’s leading election lawyer. He’s the party’s leading redistricting lawyer. He’s the chief counselor on election-facing legal issues for Democrats,” said President Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain in 2018, when Elias represented the DNC.
• Elias leads Democrats’ Lawfare Army
Elias was head of the Political Law practice at the firm of Perkins Coie LLP, which represents the Democratic National Committee (DNC), from 2009 to 2023. He was kicked out under a mushrooming cloud of scandals that unnerved even the Biden administration. He then began his own firm which still represents key Democrat power players.
Elias was general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Other top Democrats Elias has represented include: Sherrod Brown, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Al Franken, and Harry Reid. By 2019, he represented all but three of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate.
• Elias is the Democrats’ Election Fixer
The Hill reported the DNC had a plane on standby on election nights to send Elias to wherever help was needed to get a Democrat victory in a contested vote or recount.
His legal maneuvers and media blitz in 2008 turned Al Franken’s 215 vote deficit into a 312 vote win in the Minnesota senate race. “Not all of those votes would have been counted without Marc’s strategy,” said Obama senior advisor Eric Schultz. President Trump called Elias the Democrats’ “best election stealing lawyer.”
George Soros paid Elias five million dollars to challenge photo ID (and other) requirements for voting before the 2016 election.
• Elias paid for the Russia Hoax
As lawyer for the Clinton campaign in 2016, Elias hired Fusion GPS to collect the phony opposition research on Trump that became known as the Russia dossier. Full of salacious and wild allegations, the dossier was eventually debunked by the Mueller special counsel investigation, including the primary accusation that Trump was colluding with Russia. However, the report was used by the FBI to launch the investigation that resulted in the Mueller investigation.
Special Counsel John Durham said Elias lied about his connection to GPS and the nature of its work, but never brought charges against the lawyer. However, the Federal Election Commission fined the DNC and the Clinton campaign $113,000 for secretly paying more than $1 million to fund the dossier by falsely labeling the project as legal expenses instead of opposition research. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
• Elias Laughed out of Court
Elias was laughed out of court by a Democratic judge for suing to reinstate congressional and state senate maps gerrymandered to favor Democrats that had been rejected by the New York Court of Appeals in 2022.
“This is a Hail Mary pass, the object of which is to take a long shot try at having the New York primaries conducted on district lines that the state says are unconstitutional,” said Southern District of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee.
• Elias Sanctioned by Federal Court
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued sanctions on Elias and other Perkins Coie attorneys in 2021 for "redundant and misleading" motions and “lack of candor” (meaning, he lied to the court) in a suit he brought against Texas voting laws. The court ordered Elias to cover Texas’s legal fees and, most damningly, recommended Elias review rules of professional conduct and complete Continuing Legal Education classes.
• Elias Fought Voter Identification
Elias lost a lawsuit this year seeking to block a Wisconsin law requiring a witness to sign absentee ballots. The judge, an Obama appointee, said the most obvious problem with the Elias' interpretation of the law "is that it simply does not make any sense."
• Elias Fought to Count Disqualified Ballots
Then-senate candidate John Fetterman hired Elias to file a federal lawsuit in 2022 to force Pennsylvania’s election boards to count thousands of undated mail-in ballots after the State Supreme Court disqualified those ballots. He succeeded when a federal court overruled the state court.
• Elias Flip-Flopped on Voting Machines
Elias filed suit to audit a congressional election in New York in 2021, claiming that Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanners malfunctioned, skewing the vote. Ironically, and perhaps hypocritically, Elias was the attorney who successfully fought 2020 election challenges by President Trump – who said there were problems with those same voting machines.
Elias lost when a state judge ordered New York election officials to certify the Republican candidate's victory after over three months of vote-counting and litigation.
• Elias Represented Dirty Tricks PAC
A Democrat political action committee masquerading as a conservative group paid $5,254 to the Elias Law Group in 2021. The PAC ran ads questioning Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin's commitment to Second Amendment rights.
Elias may have elusive ethics but Democrats know what works.
Vice President Kamala Harris just hired Elias to focus on potential election recounts. Elias joins a massive legal army of hundreds of attorneys and thousands of volunteers preparing to challenge and litigate any results they don't like in the November election.
How did these D.C. swamp monsters end up targeting Ohio’s Constitution? President Obama actually set the wheels in motion a dozen years ago.
National Democratic Redistricting Committee
Stunned by midterm losses in 2012, Obama, Holder, and Nancy Pelosi hatched a scheme to help Democrats win more congressional seats by using lawfare and deceit.
To execute this scheme, these top party bosses created the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Holder is the chairman. It is a long range plan and still going strong. Politico reported in 2016 that Obama was “fully briefed on this and he is 100 percent committed, both in the short term and after he leaves office.” Indeed. On a podcast just a few months ago, Holder said "President Obama has said this is going to be his chief political involvement in the coming decade.”
Launched in 2017, Holder revealed the NDRC’s first mission was to target 12 states where Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature as well as the governorship. They would blame Democrats’ inability to win in those states on gerrymandering.
They disguise the NDRC’s partisan plan as a bipartisan effort to “end gerrymandering and restore free and fair elections.” The NDRC is actually a Democratic Party PAC (political action committee.)
The NDRC pushes state ballot initiatives organized by liberal proxy groups to change how states draw congressional and legislative districts, taking the power away from the voters and putting it in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats – what they disingenuously call independent panels or citizens’ commissions.
One of the NDRC’s “anti-gerrymandering” proxies in Ohio is called Fair Districts, which is run by the leftist League of Women Voters and Common Cause Ohio. They strongly support Citizens Not Politicians, the leftist movement to overthrow the Ohio Constitution’s provisions on redistricting.
To convince voters to relinquish their own power in targeted states, the NDRC and its acolytes use deceptive ads claiming these plans are grassroots and common sense. They flood the airwaves by spending millions on these ads, using money from foreigners with progressive agendas.
States the NDRC have targeted recently include Michigan, where they succeeded in turning a red state blue with a redistricting measure, and Missouri, where they failed.
Now they are targeting Ohio.
Pushing the ballot amendment is their Plan B.
First, they tried to block the Ohio legislature from implementing perfectly constitutional redistricting maps before the last election cycle, but were ultimately smacked down in federal courts.
NDRC’s War on the Ohio Constitution
The NDRC (and ACLU) began waging lawfare against the Ohio Constitution by filing the first in a series of lawsuits just days after the Ohio Redistricting Commission adopted new legislative district maps for Ohio House and Senate in September 2021.
Democrats immediately cried “gerrymandering” and insisted they were shortchanged by the 37 (out of 99) seats in the House and the 10 (out of 33) in the Senate they would be favored to win under the maps.
That’s because voting preferences have averaged 54% for Republican candidates and 46% for Democratic candidates over the past decade.
That's called proportionality – the proportion of past voting percentages. And that's why Democrats argued they should have something closer to half of the seats in the General Assembly rather than a third.
But there's a reason proportionality isn't mandated by Ohio Constitution. The statewide average margin of victory doesn't accurately reflect voter preferences in individual districts. If it did, the GOP would deserve a 54% to 46% advantage in every district.
And if that were the case, Republicans would win every single election in the races for the House and Senate. That demonstrates how relying heavily on proportionality is, in fact, gerrymandering.
That logic was ignored by power-hungry Democrats who re-branded proportionality as “representational fairness.” That deceptive misinterpretation would be weaponized by, of all people, the Chief Justice of the Ohio State Supreme Court, Maureen O’Connor.
The O’Connor Court’s argument was based on a clear misreading of the Ohio Constitution’s rules for proportionality in creating districts.
Article XI, Section 6(B) states the commission “shall attempt” to achieve proportionality, but only if doing so does not violate non-partisan, neutral, mapmaking criteria such as making districts contiguous, generally equal in population, and limiting the splitting of communities or county and municipal boundaries.
Under current law, proportionality based on past election results, an inherently political exercise, is secondary and subordinate to the traditional drawing criteria.
There was a good reason that proportionality was aspirational and not mandatory in the Constitution. Commission map makers would discover, time and again, that conforming to Democrats’ notion of “representational fairness” was impossible without violating other, mandatory, politically neutral, rules in the Constitution.
In other words, it would be the textbook definition of gerrymandering. Which is what Democrats were demanding: more seats in defiance of the text of the Constitution. And they would find an ally on the bench.
Holder’s first suit challenging the legislative district maps was filed by Elias on behalf of the NRAF on September 24, 2021.
“The Republicans’ view of partisan fairness is absurd,” Elias complained to the press.
Senate Republican spokesman John Fortney responded, "Two of the most partisan, far-left, polarizing figures in politics want to lecture Ohio voters about fairness."
Holder's NRAF filed another suit two days after Gov. DeWine signed the commission’s new congressional maps into law on November 20, 2021.
Holder called the map “an insult to Ohioans.”
The suit claimed "the map-drawers subordinated traditional redistricting criteria," which ignores the Constitution’s mandate that non-partisan means take precedence over the political ends sought by the NDRC.
Ohio Supreme Court invalidates first set of maps
Ruling in favor of the NDRC, former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor cast the deciding vote, bizarrely ignoring the text of the law and siding with the Democrat’s argument that the maps didn’t meet the proportionality aspiration in Section 6.
Justice (now Chief Justice) Sharon Kennedy countered that the law shows maps cannot be invalidated for Section 6 violations unless there was also a violation of Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7.
Ignoring the law, O’Connor’s apparent motive suddenly became clear. She began encouraging voters to overturn the redistricting amendment in the Ohio Constitution they had overwhelmingly approved just a few years earlier.
"Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics,” she wrote in her opinion – blatantly lobbying from the bench for a new constitutional amendment.
The stage was set for the current ballot initiative push that would follow the legal drama.
Ohio Supreme Court invalidates second set of maps
The commission approved a new set of state legislative maps on January 22, 2022, that would favor Democrats to win in 10 more districts in the house and three more in the senate.
House Minority Caucus Leader-elect Allison Russo complained that wasn't good enough and O’Connor agreed. She cast the deciding vote invalidating the maps again, and called for even more Democrat seats based on proportionality.
The dissenting justices wrote, “[F]our members of this court have now commandeered the redistricting process and that they will continue to reject any General Assembly-district plan until they get the plan they want. It would simplify matters if the commission would just provide the majority with the map-drawing software."
Republican voters file suit in federal court
Fed up with the state Supreme Court and Republican-In-Name-Only O’Connor, a group of Republican voters filed a motion in federal court on February 18, 2022, asking it to force implementation of the second set of state legislative maps.
Ohio Supreme Court invalidates third set of maps
Republicans on the redistricting commission called Russo’s bluff and adopted legislative maps giving her exactly what she called for – 45 Democratic seats in the House and 18 Republican and 15 Democratic seats in the Senate.
That wasn’t good enough. Proportionality wasn’t good enough, anymore. Democrats now complained they weren’t favored to win by a big enough margin in the new districts.
Republicans strongly suspected national Democrats were pushing state Democrats to oppose any maps so they could make even bigger gains in court.
O’Connor now provided Republicans ample evidence to suspect she was taking her cues from national Democrats, too, by suddenly moving the goal posts.
On March 16, 2022, she again cast the deciding vote against the maps but did not cite proportionality this time. O’Connor joined the majority opinion in ruling it was not enough for the commission to adopt maps – it must actually draft them. That is, draw the maps themselves.
Dissenting justices were flabbergasted. They called it “patently ridiculous” to expect “seven hands on a mouse” to draw a map. They noted the constitution requires the commissioners to “adopt” a plan, but does not empower the court to “micromanage” how they do it.
A federal court appoints a three-judge panel
That was the last straw for federal judges. U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley lifted his stay on the lawsuit against the state of Ohio on March 18, 2022. That allowed a three-judge panel to review the case.
NDRC files third and fourth lawsuits
Holder filed a lawsuit against the latest congressional map plan on March 21, 2022, only to have it rejected by the Ohio Supreme Court on technical grounds. The decision included wording stating nothing prevented the NDRC from re-filing the suit. Holder took the blatant hint and refiled.
Ohio Supreme Court invalidates fourth set of maps
Attempting to comply with the order to draw legislative maps, the Redistricting Commission hired two outside consultants to assist mapmakers on March 23, 2022.
But, without a new map just hours before the deadline on March 28, the commission resubmitted it's third set of maps with some modifications intended to meet the court's demands.
The majority rejected the maps yet again, this time saying the GOP districts were not competitive enough. The court set a May 6 deadline to adopt a new set of maps.
Dissenting justices blasted the majority’s reasoning. One said they eliminated all incentive for Democrats to compromise. Another said the “rogue majority is simply exercising raw political power.” A third said it was like being stuck in Groundhog Day.
Federal court sets deadline for intervention
The federal court moved the deadline back to May 28, ruling it would implement the third set of state legislative district maps if the commission produced no new maps.
The commission re-adopted the third set of legislative state maps rather than creating entirely new maps the Supreme Court had called for.
Ohio Supreme Court rejects maps for fifth time
The Ohio Supreme Court majority rejected the maps for the fifth time on May 25, 2022, while conceding the federal court would now decide the matter by validating the very maps O’Connor’s Court had rejected.
Realizing she’d been out maneuvered, a livid O’Connor used her opinion to attack Senate President Matt Huffman for “ignoring” her. Clearly she doesn’t understand the separation of powers among the three branches of government. The legislative branch doesn’t pass bills telling the Supreme Court how to rule on cases, and the judicial branch doesn’t create new criteria and order the legislature to use it.
O’Connor also insinuated once again that voters should amend the constitution in a way she would prefer.
Federal court okays legislative maps
Two days later, the three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court’s Southern District of Ohio ordered the state use to the third set of legislative district maps for the 2022 election.
Ohio Supreme Court rejects congressional maps again
O’Connor wasn’t quite done. Her majority rejected the congressional maps for a second time on July 19, 2022, once again citing proportionality.
U.S. Supreme Court overrules Ohio Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling that the congressional maps were unconstitutional on June 30, 2022.
In light of its ruling in a separate North Carolina redistricting case, the high court summarily overturned the O’Connor Court decision and remanded the matter to the state supreme court for further consideration within the bounds of ordinary judicial review, which the O’Connor Court had flagrantly overstepped.
NDRC and ACLU lawsuits dismissed
The Supreme Court ruling compelled Holder to drop his lawsuits.
Realizing their attempts were now futile, the NDRC and ACLU both dropped their lawsuits challenging the congressional district maps.
Holder wrote an op-ed blaming O’Connor for not holding the “state’s lawmakers in contempt for blatantly ignoring its orders.”
The severe irony and sheer hypocrisy is stunning, given that he was held in Contempt of Congress as U.S. Attorney General for refusing to comply with the law...and ignored it.
His lawfare stymied in the courts, Holder turned his attention to pushing the amendment initiative and called upon Ohio voters to hold “legislators to account at the ballot box.”
Another irony – O’Connor is now the public face of that NDRC puppet, Citizens Not Politicians.
Commission unanimously approves new maps
Following the loss of their RINO ally (Kennedy had replaced the term-limited O’Connor after winning the 2022 election for chief justice) and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling stopping Holder in his tracks, Democrats on the Ohio Redistricting Commission dropped the charade and approved the current maps on September 29, 2023, in a historic 7-0 unanimous vote.
Because both Democrat members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission joined all five of their Republican colleagues in voting for the legislative maps, those district boundaries will be in effect for the rest of the decade, as called for in the Ohio Constitution – a result that will be undone and washed away if the proposed redistricting scheme passes in November.
Bottom Line
Holder and Elias, via their proxies in Citizens, claim their redistricting plan is pro-democracy because it puts map making in the hands of an independent commission rather than politicians.
The facts indicate it would really take power away from elected officials who are accountable to voters and put it in the hands of shadowy bureaucrats who are accountable to no one...and who would vanish into the ether upon adopting legislative and congressional redistricting plans.
The bottom line – while Democrats say they are trying to protect democracy – in reality, the evidence shows they are doing just the opposite.
The facts indicate their redistricting plan is a threat to our democracy here in Ohio and for our entire nation.
And those threats are coming from the same source.
Democrat party bosses in Washington.
Garth Kant is Senior Press Secretary of the Ohio Senate Majority Caucus