Former Chief Justice Foreshadowed Redistricting Campaign in 2022 Opinion and Now Serves as Spokesperson

The former Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court who is the face of the secretly funded $25 million Issue 1 campaign fronted a new ad this week.

“Seven Times,” she says the Supreme Court ruled the maps unconstitutional. “I know because I was Chief Justice on that court.”

Correct. She was the Chief Justice who was embarrassed by two federal court rulings, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Huffman v. Neiman, where the Court vacated the majority's activist decision for the Congressional map.

Ouch. SCOTUS basically said, O'Connor you got it wrong, and we're throwing out your opinion and recommend you apply the Ohio Constitution next time.

Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman released this statement when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the ruling.

“I’m pleased the U.S. Supreme Court granted our appeal which clearly recognized serious constitutional concerns with the narrow majority opinions rendered under the former Chief Justice. We are reviewing the U.S. Supreme Court’s message to determine the path forward."

It was surprising the activist majority would double down on prescribing new standards after another federal court overturned an opinion by the same four member majority just a year earlier for the state legislative maps.

Here is what a federal three judge panel said about the O'Connor majority not following the law as outlined in Article XI, as it instead attempted to conjure up new criteria to draw the maps that would meet O'Connor's own personal opinion of fairness.

Page 51 of the Panel's Ruling:

“And that is especially true when, as here, the Commission’s maps were rejected under a strict proportionality test that cannot easily be found in the text of Ohio’s Constitution.”

O'Connor's majority even tried to order the concept of symmetry into the map making criteria. That theory was promoted by lawyers representing the National Democratic Redistricting Commission during the Ohio Supreme Court hearings. Symmetry is not found anywhere in the Constitutional Amendment approved by more than 70% of the voters in 2015. 

And as Chief Justice, she opined in her January 2022 opinion that Ohioans should consider revising the redistricting process. This shows the bias she had against the process passed by more than 70% of the voters. 

"…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.”

The media was aglow about that.

Ironically, last week, multiple outlets applied a different standard, and criticized Justice Deters for correctly pointing out that Democrats want the Issue 1 gerrymander because they can't win. 

Imagine that. Yet, no outrage when two years later, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who recommended Ohioans change the law in a legal opinion, becomes the spokesperson for a foreign funded, out-of-state dark money campaign that would repeal the constitutional anti-gerrymandering protections passed by the voters in 2015 and 2018.

Coincidence? I think not.

O’Connor goes onto say in her ad:

“Then those same politicians lied about Issue 1, so let me set the record straight. Issue 1 bans politicians from drawing voting maps. It will restore power to where it belongs, with citizens not politicians.”

Laughable and a lie.

Issue 1 takes power away from the citizens. These leftists want voters to give their power away to an unelected, unaccountable panel that would draw the maps.

Guess who selects that panel? Retired politicians like her. Retired judges, also known as retired politicians, who will select their friends and political allies for the panel. Read more about the discriminatory nature of who even qualifies for the panel.

Issue 1 subtracts all the anti-gerrymandering protections passed by the voters, and instead adds gerrymandering into the Ohio Constitution. Don't take our word for it. Read the certified ballot language describing the acutal effects of Issue 1 if passed, which the Ohio Supreme Court held as a truthful and accurate description in September.

The entire plan is based on proportionality, which simply removes the need for campaigns and candidate races and instead breaks the state into sprawling political districts to achieve a proportional fixed outcome-otherwise known as gerrymandering.

Candidates, campaigns, and the issues matter. Senate Republicans strongly believe that. That’s why in the 15 Senate Districts that have a Democrat advantage, Republicans have won 8 of those districts.

The people behind this campaign don’t want competition. They want fixed reliable outcomes that are insulated from any variable, including political climate, landslide elections and even scandal.

When the process approved by you was allowed to work, it produced a unanimous, bipartisan vote from the Ohio Redistricting Commission that approved General Assembly maps for the remainder of the decade. It produced districts representing compact communities of interest, rather than the unlimited splits of neighborhoods that Issue 1 would require to achieve gerrymandered power for the progressive left.

The Black Equity and Redistricting Fund, comprised of Black elected officials, pointed out the danger of this plan.

Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a former state representative from Michigan pointed out how a similar redistricting panel there, split Detroit into 22 pieces. That is gerrymandering for a political outcome.  So much so, that a federal court ruled that the panel’s first map was a racial gerrymander.

“For 70 years prior to the adoption of the “Michigan Plan” in 2018, the City of Detroit was served in Congress by a Black representative. The 600,000 Black residents of Detroit no longer have Black Congressional representation,” said Gay-Dagnogo following a news conference this week in Cincinnati.

Under the current congressional map drawn under Article XIX, all of Ohio’s major cities, except for Columbus, are contained within a single congressional district. Columbus’ population exceeds the population requirement for a single district.

Under Issue 1, every big city in Ohio faces the risk of multiple splits and uneven political districts that dilute the principal of one person one vote.

If you hated the “Snake on the Lake” and “The Duck,” you’ll hate what Issue 1 brings to the state. Those districts will pale in comparison to the pieced together districts that will be created by "Frankenstein's Monster," that is Issue 1. 

Former Ohio Representative John Barnes, D-Cleveland, said, “Issue 1 will undercut Ohio’s civil rights progress of the last half century, diluting Black representation in Columbus and Cleveland where Blacks now serve in Congress. And hope of a Black Congressional representative from Cincinnati and Dayton will be lost.”

That’s because the districts will be stretched far into outside counties diluting the minority vote, in favor of progressive left political candidates and fixed political wins founded in the suburbs.

Issue 1 is a gerrymander of the worst possible kind. It is a lie. And it is funded by the Washington, D.C. swamp and California leftists who will say and do anything to fool voters into repealing what was passed by an overwhelming majority of the them in 2015 and 2018.

President Trump took the time to call Issue 1 a $26 million scam by left-wing special interest groups to rig Ohio's elections.

Republicans are united against the multi-million dollar effort by out-of-state special interest groups to gerrymander Ohio.

Watch Senate President Matt Huffman's most recent President's Podcast as he succinctly describes the danger of the left's secretly funded gerrymander, fronted by former Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor.