One expects Ohio's Democratic Minority Leader Armond Budish to say: "He (Republican Governor John Kasich) asks us to put aside partisanship and yet he rams through the most extreme radical agenda in quite a long time."
One does not expect a Republican lawmaker to say: “... the proof will be in the pudding. The next 12 months will he be reaching out to try to bridge that gap? There were gaps the first year of the session. There was no question about that. ... we’ll just wait to see and give him the benefit of the doubt.” (Stark area legislators react to State of State address, Robert Wang, The Repository, February 7, 2012).
That is unless the lawmaker is not a consummate Republican politician.
Although state Senator Scott W. Oelslager (the 29th - Stark County) certainly qualifies as a loyal Republican, he has proved periodically over his more than 20 years in the Ohio legislature that he will take on "over-the-top" partisan political positions.
Oelslager did exactly that when he voted no on the Kasich administration overreach in presenting Senate Bill No. 5 (SB 5) as its marque piece of legislation designed to gut Ohio's police, fire, educator and other public worker unions in order to weaken the unions' ability to support Democratic candidates.
Kasich et al tried to convince the Ohio public that SB 5 was for the public good. But the Ohio electorate wasn't buying.
Ohioans saw that the real underlying motivation of Kasich was partisan politics and was having none of it.
Ditto for Scott Oelslager.
While his Stark County delegation Republican colleagues were voting for SB 5, Oelslager was voting no.
It is apparently dawning on Governor Kasich that there is no way he and the Republican dominated state government is going to be able to pull Ohio out of the economic dumping grounds of America without all out "across-the-political-isle" support.
But as Senator Oelslager's skepticism highlights:
"the proof will be in the pudding ... ."
No comments:
Post a Comment