Senate President Matt Huffman, left, and House Speaker Bob Cupp appear at a 2021 budget signing ceremony at the Veterans Memorial Civic Center in Lima.
Richard Parrish | The Lima News
LIMA — Two Lima natives at the seat of power. Two years of debating pandemic powers, abortion, education reform and legislative maps.
Here’s a look back at key moments from the 134th General Assembly, led by House Speaker Bob Cupp and Senate President Matt Huffman, both of Lima.
Pandemic powers trigger battle with DeWine
The session started with a power struggle between the GOP-dominated legislature and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, whose pandemic health orders had become so unpopular with members of his own party that the legislature voted to restrict the governor’s emergency powers.
“If you have one person who can declare an emergency, have emergency powers and decide when the emergency was over, that’s not a very good recipe for democracy,” Huffman said.
The resolution was swift: The House and Senate, which had argued over whether and how it should limit the governor’s emergency powers since the pandemic started, adopted Senate Bill 22 within three months of the start of Huffman’s tenure as Senate president in 2021.
Huffman secured enough votes to override a veto from DeWine. Come June, all pandemic-related health orders were rescinded.
“We both looked at the governor and said: ‘If you veto this, we’re going to override your veto,’” Huffman said. “Governors don’t like that, especially from your own party. And that was, I think, a monumental thing to get done.”
A fair school funding plan
Perhaps the most monumental achievement of the 134th General Assembly was the adoption Fair School Funding Plan, known as the Cupp-Patterson plan, included in the state’s budget in the summer of 2021.
The phased-in formula was a key legislative priority for Cupp, who was a state senator when the Ohio Supreme Court first ruled that the state’s previous school funding formula was unconstitutional and who spent years working to devise a new methodology to make the formula more equitable.
“I went back to the legislature just to work on public policy,” Cupp told The Lima News last month. “One of my main goals was to create a better school funding system.”
He was finally able to enact a plan one year after becoming House speaker.
Lima schools joins voucher lawsuit
The new formula increased state funding for school vouchers, or scholarships for students from low-performing schools to attend private schools — a key priority for Huffman, one of the most prominent voucher supporters in the General Assembly.
“I think it was pretty groundbreaking,” Huffman said, pointing to new programs for homeschooling families and increased funding for EdChoice and autism scholarships.
Lima schools joined a lawsuit challenging the voucher program as unconstitutional months later, arguing that the vouchers have increased segregation and siphoned money away from public schools.
“What we’ve seen happen over the years has been that parents haven’t really had a choice,” Superintendent Jill Ackerman told The Lima News before the lawsuit was filed. Private schools can screen out applicants based on disciplinary or academic records, she said, “so it was never really about choice for those kids.”
A Franklin County judge ruled in December that the lawsuit can proceed. But to Huffman, the lawsuit appears to be little more than a scare tactic to deter lawmakers from expanding vouchers, he said.
“When those folks try to come into offices of legislators, they say, ‘Well, you know, this lawsuit may wipe it all out together. Maybe you don’t want to expand it as much,’” Huffman said.
He added, “I don’t think it has any merit. It’s really a legislative negotiating tactic, which is meaningless to me.”
A new abortion ban sparks debate
The legislature became preoccupied with abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade decision last summer, sparking a debate about how far Ohio should go to restrict access to the procedure after a 2019 law banning abortion when fetal cardiac can be detected took effect.
The law, which is being challenged in court, quickly gained national attention when a 10-year-old rape victim traveled to Indiana for an abortion.
Huffman promised to revisit the law amid the uproar to clarify what the law’s exception for the life of the mother meant. But lawmakers did not reach an agreement during the lame-duck session, the period between Election Day and January.
“There just wasn’t consensus about exactly how to proceed with all of that,” Huffman said.
Instead, the legislature set aside money for crisis pregnancy centers and created a new grant program for adoptive families, doing away with a tax credit that Huffman said few families could take advantage of in the past.
“What we’re trying to eliminate as much as possible is people having an abortion because of the financial cost,” he said.
Redistricting battle draws ire from court
The two men from Lima drew the ire of the Ohio Supreme Court last year for their role on the state’s redistricting committee, whose legislative maps were repeatedly rejected by the court for reportedly violating the state’s new anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment, which Huffman himself helped pass.
The widely publicized battle dragged on for months, resulting in a second primary and a federal court order requiring the state to use the committee’s original maps for the 2022 election.
“The constitutional amendment was good in theory,” Cupp said. “In practice, as in many cases, it didn’t work out as it thought it would.”
At issue was whether the amendment required proportional representation, which would divide the districts between Republicans and Democrats based on the percentage of votes each party received in the prior election, about a 54-46 split favoring Republicans, and how that would apply for tossup districts and those that slightly favored one party.
“There is no requirement that they comply with some proportionality, because that doesn’t get taken into effect unless you violate the other rules,” like dividing political subdivisions, said Huffman, who helped push for the constitutional amendment. Once the third map was rejected, he said, it “became clear that the Supreme Court was drawing the map.”
The commission will reconvene this year to draw maps for the 2024 election, this time with some new members on the Ohio Supreme Court.
