The ball now is in the Ohio Senate’s court when it comes to the state budget bill.
Ohio House Republicans voted Wednesday to approve a two-year, $61 billion bill that funds all state operations. The bill passed in a 60-39 vote, with five Republicans joining all the chamber’s Democrats in voting “no.”
It contains most of the highlights in the draft plan released last week, but House Republicans made some last-minute tweaks that include:
- Restoring some funding to the state’s public libraries, converting what probably would have been a small cut into a small increase. The budget bill gives an average of $495 million a year to libraries, which is around what state officials say they’re estimated to get in 2025. The move comes after an intense lobbying campaign from libraries, which called on the legislature to accept Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to give libraries an average of $540 million a year.
- Banning public buildings from placing menstrual products in men’s restrooms. This seems related to a 2025 complaint from Dayton-area Republican state Rep. Rodney Creech involving libraries in his district. It accompanies other anti-transgender budget language that sets state law to only recognize two sexes: male and female.
- Increasing how much in unused money schools would be allowed to carry over in their budgets before being forced to issue a tax refund to property owners. The earlier House budget plan set the “carryover” threshold at 25% of the school district’s budget. The final version sets it at 30%. Republicans said the move could lead districts to refund $4.2 billion.
- Spending another $50 million a year on a state program that helps qualifying families pay for childcare.
- Requiring pornographic websites to verify the ages of users. Similar legislation has led some large pornographic websites to stop operating in at least 19 other states.
- Abolishing the Ohio Elections Commission, a state panel that adjudicates and investigates complaints about campaign-finance law violations. The bill would distribute the commission’s responsibilities to county boards of elections and the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office.
- Giving pay raises ranging from 1.75% to 5% annually for judges, justices and county/township officials.
- Requiring the DeWine administration to seek federal approval to ban the use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, to buy “sugar sweetened beverages.”
The bill does not restore a $1,000 child tax credit or $50 million in funding for schools to launch driver’s education programs, two DeWine priorities that the House GOP nixed last week.
It does include $600 million in state-backed bonds to help build a new domed stadium for the Cleveland Browns in Brook park, although there was some fourth-quarter drama before that part of the budget made it into the final version.
The state Senate already has begun hearings on its version of a budget bill. The two chambers are required to negotiate a final version for DeWine to sign by the end of June.
Filmmaker focuses on Ohio political scandal
Alec Gibney previously won acclaim for casting a light on political corruption in Washington, D.C.
A new film from the Oscar-winning documentarian does the same in Columbus.
“Ohio Confidential” will be released next Tuesday on Max (formerly known as HBO Max.) It’s a documentary about the federal corruption investigation into House Bill 6, a since largely repealed 2019 Ohio energy law.
A second movie that takes a broader look at the influence of money in U.S. politics, “Wealth of the Wicked,” will be released the following day.
As a reminder, HB6 led to corruption convictions of four people, including former House Speaker Larry Householder. Prosecutors say Householder received $60 million in bribes, largely via hidden campaign contributions, from FirstEnergy. The money was in exchange for help passing HB6, which subsidized two financially troubled Ohio nuclear power plants the company used to own.
The case is still active, with two former top company executives facing state and federal charges. Prosecutors said the scandal was enabled by campaign-finance laws that rely on “dark money” – or political contributions that are structured to conceal their source.
For close watchers of the scandal, the film doesn’t bring any new information to light. But it does provide a comprehensive narrative thread, which brings some clarity to the complex, years-long scandal. Audio and video recordings, captured from FBI wiretaps and undercover informants, help tell the story.
It also makes the argument that the 2019 “Heartbeat” bill, the since-overturned law that banned abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, was related to Householder’s FirstEnergy-funded rise as speaker.
But it’s tough to say whether the law wouldn’t have passed if a different Republican had been speaker. The guy Householder deposed, Ryan Smith, oversaw a vote approving the Heartbeat bill in late 2018 only to see the measure vetoed by then-Gov. John Kasich.
Neil Clark’s posthumous starring role
The movie starts with what amounts to a cold open, featuring video and photos of the police investigation into the March 2021 death of Neil Clark.
Clark, a longtime powerful Columbus lobbyist, killed himself in Florida about six months after he was arrested and charged in connection to the scandal.
But the film still more or less makes Clark the main character. It also uses him as a narrator – via an actor who reads Clark’s self-published memoir – in a manner reminiscent of crime movies like “Goodfellas.” While I obviously can’t speak for him, I believe that Clark would have enjoyed the comparison, based on my interactions with him over the years.
Like others have for years, the movie subtly hints that the investigation may expand to implicate other elected officials. The film includes the not-so-subtle detail that Clark was wearing a campaign T-shirt for Gov. Mike DeWine when he shot himself. Gibney confirmed as much in an interview. (DeWine has not been accused of wrongdoing.)
The movie’s release comes a few weeks after state lawmakers voted to repeal most of the vestiges of HB6, via a nearly complete bill that would stick it to utilities like FirstEnergy.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that lawmakers still haven’t passed any ethics or campaign-finance reforms in response to the scandal.
Weaknesses in state law helped conceal elements of the scandal, such as a state ethics loophole that helped Householder conceal from the public a $500,000 loan from an aide that prosecutors said he eventually stole. A major ethics bill that a large group of Republicans introduced in 2023 never got a vote and hasn’t been reintroduced. The same goes for a bipartisan campaign-finance bill that would have required more disclosure about political ads.
Q&A with Alec Gibney
How did you come to do this movie?
I wanted to do a movie about dark money. I didn’t know when I started what stories I was going to pursue. Because it’s kind of a broad topic. So we had some themes, and we were in search of stories.
Jane Meyer tipped me off to the Ohio story that she thought we might find interesting. And we dug into that story, and we really did.
It was potent for us that many people had never heard of it, which was shocking to me given the scope of the corruption. And it seemed like it fit into a lot of themes for us.
Is it challenging to bring this topic (campaign finance, utility policy) to the average person?
Yeah, except we had these wiretaps and we had the character of Neil Clark. So it became a true crime noir. It’s a crime story.
You previously wrote and directed a documentary about Jack Abramoff (a notoriously corrupt Washington lobbyist). Do you see similarities between him and Clark?
I’m a bit more sympathetic to Neil Clark, but there’s an aspect of Jack Abramoff that I came to be engaged by. Both men, I think, believed they were just playing hardball, but they didn’t cross the line. And they knew how to skirt the rules for goals that they felt were honorable and just. But I think they both got lost.
There is an argument that the conduct in House Bill 6 was a version of politics as usual. Do you believe they committed crimes?
I think they did commit crimes. And we debated this a lot when we were making the film. They were so egregious in terms of what they were saying on the wiretaps and body wires in terms of what was obviously a quid pro quo and a criminal conspiracy that they couldn’t defend themselves.
I think, sadly, the Supreme Court has blurred the line between bribery and speech in such a way that makes this a common occurrence. I think people are better at hiding it than they were in Ohio, where no FBI agents stumbled onto the conversations that ultimately led to their convictions.
What is your impression of Ohio politics?
There’s campaign contributions, which is the one key area we looked at. The other we looked at was how money flooded into the state in the wake of Citizens United, which happened to be right after the census, which allowed the Republican Party to pursue an extreme gerrymander in the state.
The other issue we thought was interesting to explore was the religious dimension. Because we were interested in this unholy alliance between the religious right and Big Business. And this led to the passage of the Heartbeat bill, which was an extreme anti-abortion bill, even though that was overturned by Ohioans.
What do you want people to take away from this film?
If we want to be a better society, we have to get money out of politics, end of story.
2026 update
Recent Ohio political history says Donald Trump’s endorsement is the only thing that really matters in a Republican primary election.
If that continues to be true, then U.S. Sen. Jon Husted is on track to fend off any potential challengers from inside the GOP.
Trump announced on Wednesday that Husted has his “total and complete endorsement.” The development follows haggling between Trump and Gov. Mike DeWine, who appointed Husted to a vacant Senate seat in January. It’s not a surprise – Husted’s team has been quietly confident it would come. But it still brings some clarity to the 2026 field, assuming Trump doesn’t change his mind.
No Republicans have come forward to challenge Husted. No Democrats have either, although some who might do so include U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes, former senator Sherrod Brown and former congressman Tim Ryan.
Stay tuned
I spent a couple days this week traveling across Ohio with Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The former vice-presidential nominee held presidential campaign-style town hall rallies in Youngstown and Lorain on Monday and Tuesday.
Walz said he came here on a mission to figure out why Democrats lost last year’s election. I’ll have something summarizing my observations about the trip and the conversations I had with people soon.
