Ohio Legislature Refuses to Bail Out Biden’s Incompetence. Good for It.

As of today, Joe Biden will not be on the presidential general election ballot in Ohio.

Not because of some sort of lawfare or GOP dirty tricks. This isn’t a situation like what happened in Colorado or Maine earlier this year, in which partisan Democrats attempted to block Donald Trump from being on the ballot using a bizarre interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause” that was written to keep Confederate officials out of Congress following the Civil War.

Actually, Joe Biden is currently off the ballot in Ohio because Republicans in that state have done nothing at all.

It’s really simple: The Democrat Party has set its nominating convention to end on Aug. 22, and the deadline for a party to have its candidate on the ballot in Ohio is Aug. 7.

The Ohio deadline preexisted the Democrats’ scheduling decision. It was knowable that scheduling the convention would put the Democrat Party at odds with Ohio’s election laws because it wouldn’t be able to declare a nominee before the deadline if it held the convention that late.

Team Biden did this to itself. But it’s going to throw a fit because Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature is refusing to change state law to accommodate the Democrats’ mistake.

The nominating convention was also set too late for Biden to be on the ballot in Alabama. Like Ohio, Alabama law specified a lengthy lead time before Election Day — 82 days — for a party to nominate a candidate for that state’s presidential ballot. Unlike Ohio, Alabama’s legislature changed the specified lead time to 74 days.

Ohio’s Senate had prepared a bill that would have made the same change in addition to banning contributions from foreign nationals to political campaigns in that state. But when that bill passed over to the Ohio House of Representatives, the foreign nationals ban was stripped out, and the bill didn’t move to the floor before this year’s regular session ended.

When asked about the Biden ballot bailout, Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens gave it a big, fat “meh.”

“There’s just not the will to do that from the legislature,” he said.

The Democrat minority leader in the Ohio House, an AWFL named Allison Russo, threw a fit.

“We’ve seen the dysfunction here in this place,” she said. “And I think we’ve seen that folks have not been able to put aside partisanship and hyper-partisanship and infighting.… I think at this point, you’re probably going to see either, you know, some sort of inner party effects or perhaps court action.”

Awww.

Or maybe you people should have considered the laws on the books in the various states before you set your convention more than two weeks past the deadline that several had well established in law.

There is no obligation on the part of the Ohio legislature to bail out Team Biden for its incompetence here. Certainly, there’s no moral obligation for Ohio to do Biden a solid. Not after East Palestine.

And given the efforts of partisan Democrats in Colorado, Maine, and, less successfully, in other states to pervert the 14th Amendment to deny Trump a place on the ballot there, there certainly isn’t a moral obligation for Republican legislators in a red state to change their laws to accommodate Democrats.

And there’s no legal obligation. The Democrat Party is a private entity that does not make election laws, as much as it might clearly believe otherwise.

What is Russo offering Stephens in return for a special session and a bill putting Biden’s incompetent campaign, together with a full boat of shady electoral practices and machine politics, on the right side of a brand-new ballot deadline? Anything?

It would seem that the GOP, which controls Ohio, ought to be in a position to make a few demands in return for such a consideration. And, yet, if you cycle through the news stories covering this unfolding fiasco, you’ll struggle to find any mention of a deal.

It’s just gimme, gimme, gimme.

Because they know that if Biden isn’t atop the ballot in Ohio, Democrats won’t turn out to vote. That will kill the campaign in several House races in swing districts in Ohio, and it will also doom Sherrod Brown’s efforts to be reelected to the Senate. Brown currently leads by about 5 points in the average of the most recent polls, but that lead — which is likely more Mitch McConnell’s fault than anyone else’s — will likely shrink. If Biden isn’t on the ballot, the Democrats will have some real problems with voter turnout.

The failure to consider Brown’s situation when scheduling the convention after Ohio’s ballot deadline is a level of political malfeasance and incompetence that really ought to be punished. It’s one thing for Democrats to run every city they control into the ground. It’s another to turn elections into ballot-harvesting contests and engage in lawfare rather than political campaigning. But this? This is an own goal.

Mike DeWine is Ohio’s Republican governor. DeWine should be actively castigating Biden and the Democrats for their utter and complete disrespect of his state’s laws and scolding them for disregarding Ohio. He should be telling them: “This is what you get for ignoring our deadlines.”

Is that what he’s saying? Nope. Instead, DeWine is offering the classic Stupid Party response.

“I have every confidence that it’s going to get done,” DeWine said. “No one should worry, they’re going to be able to vote for the president or the former president, whoever they want to vote for. You know, this is not going to be a situation where the president’s name is not on the ballot. So it’s either going to be done by the court, or it’s going to be done by the legislature.”

DeWine threw the legislature under the bus. And he wrote a check that Ohio’s courts are apparently now going to have to cash.

Exactly what legal justification would there be for a state or federal court in Ohio to invalidate a ballot deadline of which the Democratic National Committee was aware — or certainly should have been — before scheduling its convention?

If I were the Trump campaign, I would have lawyers lined up ready for go to war in Ohio should Team Biden sue to get on the ballot. This is a fight worth taking on just to outline how utterly lawless Biden and the Democrats are and to press the case that, at some point, the law — and the obligation to abide by it — has to mean something.

No, it would seem this is something Ohio’s legislature has to fix. And if Stephens and his colleagues in the Ohio House don’t feel like fixing it, well…

Again, what are the Democrats offering?

We all know how this will end. Pressure will mount on Stephens and the House Republicans in Ohio until they knuckle under and write a new ballot deadline of 74 days as Alabama did.

But it’ll be entertaining to watch Team Biden sweat in the meantime, with the knowledge that it made this mess with no help from anyone else, due to its own terrible planning and stupid choices. And it’ll also be entertaining to see the Allison Russos of the world lose their minds over the “mean-spiritedness” and “dysfunction” of the Ohio GOP for its reticence to bail them out of the consequences of their own idiocy.

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