Suddes: Representation should be based on population, not cornfields and cows. But is it?

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

Even if the Ohio General Assembly’s districts are ever drawn fairly — an impossible dream at this point — there’s another key component that a responsible legislature must demonstrate. And that component is transparency —who’s doing what, to whom, at the Statehouse, and why.

And that’s where the two-chamber shell game comes into play.

Accountability’s not easy when the Ohio House of Representatives and the Ohio Senate pass the buck back and forth to hide which lobby (or state agency) is benefiting from the amendments jammed into bills through procedural hocus-pocus.

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Take for example, the pending state operating budget for the two years that’ll begin July 1. It’s called House Bill 33 and is now in an Ohio House committee.

As introduced, the budget was 4,311 pages long. Then, last week a rewritten (or “substitute”) bill surfaced, and —hey, presto — the bill now has 5,364 pages. That is, the measure is 24% longer, and you can be sure not every one of those extra words is about good government.

True, eventually, and no thanks to a state law that closes certain legislative files to taxpayers, reporters will uncover some of the budget’s dicier sections.

Budget comes with inter-chamber shell-game

But after the House substitute comes the House-passed budget. Then come the Senate “substitute” and Senate-passed versions. And icing the cake is a conference committee budget — the one Gov. Mike DeWine will sign —written by three state senators and three House members, but in reality, by the General Assembly’s two GOP leaders, House Speaker Jason Stephens, of Lawrence County’s Kitts Hill, and Senate President Matt Huffman, of Lima.

The effect of these inter-chamber handoffs is to stage a shell-game when someone tries to find out how something got into the budget — and how something was taken or kept out.

And one root of that problem is having two legislative chambers.

That is, the Ohio General Assembly, like the legislatures of 48 other states, is composed of an upper house (a Senate) and a lower house, called a House of Representatives or a House of Delegates or an Assembly.

Why we have two chambers in Ohio.

Legislatures were originally patterned after Congress: State senates, like the U.S. Senate, were apportioned by geography, typically rural geography, regardless of population, while states’ lower houses were apportioned (officially speaking) by population. But as recently noted here, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that both chambers of states’ legislatures should be determined by population, not cornfields and cows.

So, officially, that means there’s one Ohio House member for every 119,000 Ohioans, and one Ohio Senate member for every 356,000 Ohioans — although rare indeed is the Ohioan who can name either (let alone both) of her or his state legislators. But you can be sure Statehouse lobbyists can tell you who theirs are, and probably who your legislators are, too.

In theory, having two legislative chambers, both based on population, slows legislation so it can get a thorough look-see — two pairs of eyes looking out for a given swathe of Ohio are better than one pair of eyes, again, supposedly. In fact, what a bicameral legislature can do is hide who did what to whom, and why. And in the worst cases, two-chamber legislatures can amount to tollgates for legislation: Someone donates to somebody, or traffic doesn’t move.

Only one state, Nebraska, has opted for a one-chamber (unicameral) legislature, but Ohio civic groups and reformers in the 1930s and 1940s gave serious thought to, and sometimes called for, a unicameral Ohio General Assembly. The idea didn’t go anywhere, because new ideas generally don’t in Ohio unless the occasional millionaire has a brainstorm — and Statehouse pals.

True, maybe it’s better for every Ohioan to have one Ohio House member and a state senator look out for her or him at the Statehouse.  But is that what’s actually happening?

After all, 51 (of 99) Ohio House members and 19 (of 33) state senators voted to bail out FirstEnergy Corp. Would those legislators also have voted to bail you out?

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Thomas Suddes: Budget comes with inter-chamber shell-game in Ohio