Monday morning on Always Right with Bob Frantz, weekday mornings on AM 1420 The Answer, host Frantz welcomed Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to the show to discuss the strategy of Democrats to “sue until they’re blue” and violate the Ohio constitution.
Frantz: As promised, I want to bring to the airwaves the Ohio Secretary of State, as we’ve got a lot of issues to talk about between now and May 3rd, and maybe now in August as well in this election season. He is Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Mr. Secretary, good morning. Good to have you back on our program. How are you?
LaRose: I’m doing well, Bob. Great to be back.
Frantz: Good to talk to you. So let’s first dive into this: You and the redistricting commission continue to submit what looked like they would be constitutional district maps that do favor Republicans as the party in power is able to do it has been approved on a party-line vote by the commission, and sent for approval to the court.
Now, this is four times, and each time the Republican chief justice sides with the Democrats and says nope. Can you tell me what problem she has with this?
And can you tell me what the ultimate solution is going to be if she won’t allow you guys, meaning the redistricting Commission in general, to do their jobs?
LaRose: The chief justice, and really the other three members of what now constitutes the liberal majority – let’s be clear, there is a liberal majority on the Ohio Supreme Court. So what if Chief Justice O’Connor calls herself a Republican.
She’s certainly not acting like one. They keep moving the goalpost, and that’s really the problem. They told us in January, you got to draw more Democratic districts.
Doesn’t say that in the Constitution. But we did what they told us because we believe in rule of law. And then they came back again and said no, still not enough Democratic districts. And then a third time they rejected the maps that we drew that had the exact number that they asked for.
The court said you got to have no more than 54 Republican districts. Okay. We drew a set of maps that had that. And then they came back with a completely novel idea that, again, nowhere in the Constitution, completely made up, and it’s what they call symmetry.
They said that there is no symmetry between Republicans and Democrats, effectively saying that we didn’t draw a safe enough Democrat district.
Evidently, they believe that the Constitution says we have to draw safe Democratic districts where you’re going to automatically win just because you’ve got a D after your name. It’s nonsense what the court is doing. And they’re way outside of the bounds of what the law says.
Frantz: I know that the Ohio Constitution has no bearing whatsoever on other states and other states don’t have any bearing on the Ohio Constitution or their Supreme Court or their redistricting commissions, but does it seem like this is the only state that is suffering through what we are right now?
Because there are extraordinary liberal blue majorities in states all over this country, including the largest ones like California and New York, where they draw their lines and they clearly favor far more gerrymandering than anybody could accuse the Republicans of in this particular state, as you guys draw these maps, Why are we the only ones who aren’t allowed to draw the maps the way the Constitution says that we can?
LaRose: You’re right about the liberal democracies on this. And of course, their allies in the media are more than happy to tell that story as well. If you want to see probably the most egregious examples of gerrymandering in our nation’s history, look at places like Illinois, New York, California, and some of these Democratic-controlled states.
And you’re right that nobody has a thing to say about it when Democrats hold the pen. It’s not correct, though, to say that Ohio is the only state that’s dealing with this. But you will find that in states where Republicans are in control, Eric Holder and Stacey Abrams and Mark Elias are filing lawsuits. They have a strategy, Bob.
They literally call it sue until they’re blue. And that’s exactly what they’re trying to do in Ohio. If you want to know why we have such a problem with redistricting right now in Ohio, it’s because of Eric Holder and Mark Elias and all these other folks on the Left that are filing all of these lawsuits because they want to accomplish something at the courthouse they can’t accomplish at the ballot box. And that is to try to increase the number of Democrats in the state legislature.
Frantz: Yes. And that’s the bizarre part, of course, is Maureen O’Connor is a Republican. At least I think Jack Windsor said best in his article about this. She’s a Republican on paper.
If people are tired of the phrase RINO Republican, only she’s a Republican on paper. But the way she governs or she makes decisions, it’s certainly with a liberal bias.
So the last question on this part of the conversation, Secretary LaRose, is where do we go from here? What’s going to change between this drawing and the next drawing? And why are the dates and what are the limitations put on it by O’Connor and her crew?
LaRose: Yes, and let’s talk about dates for a minute. You would think that one of the core competencies of being a justice in the Ohio Supreme Court is to understand the state law of Ohio.
In their most recent decision, they said that August 2nd doesn’t need to be the date for the second primary. That’s absolute foolishness. And anybody that can read and look at what Title 35 of the Ohio Revised Code says would know that any date after August 2nd is just not tenable.
But what they want is they want more time for them to be in control of the process. They want to keep going around and around and try to get more Democratic districts out of us on the redistricting commission.
And obviously, that’s not something that we’re going to stand for. August 2nd is when there needs to be the second primary in Ohio in order to have the election in November it’s got to be done on August 2nd.
Frantz: They argue that some states have primaries as late as September. I didn’t know that. Is that accurate?
LaRose: That is accurate but they’re not justices of a Supreme Court of other states, they’re justices of the Ohio Supreme court, and Ohio’s law has a whole lot of things laid out in it that all trigger off of election day.
So, for example, 30 days before election day is when voter registration ends. In Ohio, we always do a post-election audit that’s set out in law, so we need time to do all of the post-election activities. The work of the board of elections doesn’t end on election day.
In fact, far from it. Some of the most important things that the board of elections does happen in the weeks after election day and one of the reasons why Ohio is such a gold standard for election integrity is because of all of the work we do after election day to reconcile and make sure that the numbers were accurate and done correctly.
Those are things that just wouldn’t be able to happen if somehow a primary happened later than August 2nd. It’s foolish to think that just because other states run their elections a certain way that all of a sudden Ohio needs to.
A basic understanding of federalism and the fact that the state layout, the way that elections are run, would tell you that we can’t have our election for the second primary later than August 2nd.
Listen to the interview here:
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Photo “Frank LaRose” by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Noclip.
