Court Opinion

ID: 9801942
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 08:56:44.830138+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:57:27.060798
License: Public Domain

Pfeifer, Acting C.J.,
concurring.
{¶ 23} On February 21, 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt addressed the delegates at the Ohio Constitutional Convention regarding initiative and referendum:
{¶ 24} “If in any state the people are themselves satisfied with their present representative system, then it is of course their right to keep that system unchanged; and it is nobody’s business but theirs. But in actual practice it has been found in very many states that legislative bodies have not been responsive to the popular will. Therefore I believe that the state should provide for the possibility of direct popular action in order to make good such legislative failure.” 1 Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Ohio (1913) 383, available at http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/LegalResources/Law Library/resources/day24.pdf.
{¶ 25} Wouldn’t Teddy be dismayed to learn that the “direct popular action” of the people of Ohio is far, far from direct, involving straw men, front organizations, red herrings, and smoke and mirrors, and winding its way from Ohio to the New Models’ “headquarters” in a nondescript house in suburban McLean, Virginia, and back again, with possibly a couple of stops in the boardroom of a gaming company or in the luxury suite of a basketball arena? Shouldn’t we all be dismayed that the exercise of pure democracy that is the right of referendum, added to our Constitution after a vote of the people in 1912, has been made impure through surreptitious funding? Shouldn’t we expect our secretary of state, as Ohio’s chief elections officer, to aggressively investigate instances where our election laws appear to be exploited? Or in the alternative, should we not expect her to investigate in order to identify a gaping hole in our election law that could not have been intended by the General Assembly?
(¶ 26} I concur.
*427Langdon Law, L.L.C., David R. Langdon, Thomas W. Kidd Jr., and Bradley M. Peppo, for relators LetOhioYote.org, Thomas E. Brinkman Jr., Gene Pierce, and Carlo LoParo.
Baker & Hostetler, L.L.P., John H. Burtch, Rodger L. Eckelberry, and Robert J. Tucker, for relators New Models and Timothy Crawford.
Axelrod, L.L.C., Brian J. Laliberte, and David F. Axelrod, for relator Norman B. Cummings.
Richard Cordray, Attorney General, and Richard N. Coglianese, Erick D. Gale, and Pearl M. Chin, Assistant Attorneys General, for respondent.