The ongoing push by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and state Rep. Brian Stewart, R-Pickaway, to make Ohio’s constitution more difficult to amend has stirred up controversy, and understandably so. Most Americans like democracy, so asking them to give some of it away is not an easy sell. LaRose initially claimed he was trying to protect Ohio’s constitution from “special interests” and “out-of-state activists.” But as Stewart seemed to acknowledge weeks later, the real goal is to protect the Ohio constitution from certain kinds of Ohioans, including the majority of Ohioans who would likely support a state constitutional right to abortion.
The clock ran out on the 134th General Assembly before Stewart could round up enough votes in the Ohio House to pass his plan, but he is now trying again with what one expert says is his worst version yet. House Democrats have gone to great lengths to try to stop this proposal, even working with dissident Republicans to elevate Rep. Jason Stephens, R-Lawrence, to the House speaker’s chair over the Republican caucus’s official nominee. Whether such efforts will succeed remains to be seen.
In this tug of war over Ohio’s constitution, it is worth noting that Ohio went down this road once before. For much of the 19th century, a supermajority requirement made the Ohio constitution very difficult to change.
It didn’t go well. In fact, the supermajority requirement came to be so disliked that historian Charles B. Galbreath argued in his History of Ohio that the landmark 1912 Ohio constitutional convention might not have happened without it.