Late last week some, but not much, news was made in Ohio when GOP leaders made their push for waiting periods before voting on legislation.
State Representative Randy Gardner (R-Bowling Green), Minority Leader William G. Batchelder (R-Medina) and all House Republicans members will soon introduce legislation re-establishing a requirement that conference committee reports must undergo a two-day waiting period before consideration on the floor of the Ohio House of Representatives.
The proposed bill is in reaction to Monday’s House vote on the conference report for the $50.5 billion state budget only hours after the Conference Committee publicly released more than 2000 pages of changes. Almost no legislator on either side of the aisle was able to read the budget conference report before voting.
Not many paid attention. Maybe they just felt this was politics as usual. Maybe it was just more whining from the Minority Party.
Well, it turns out the Gov. Strickland/Speaker Budish strategy has angered a hungry lion.
The media.
How serious was it? Well, the Editor of the Columbus Dispatch felt it was serious enough to devote his column this past Sunday to the mess.
Our front page has been dominated by coverage of the state’s budget crisis for the past few weeks.
This past week alone, we published one story after another exposing something else our reporters found tucked into the state’s two-year spending plan.
We’re not trying to torture you with a series of what some of you will call “bad news” stories. Rather, we want you to be informed.
We were forced to dribble out story after story because we didn’t have access to the budget before it was approved.
The final 3,120-page, $50.5 billion budget wasn’t available for public inspection online until Thursday. The 1,879-page amendment that finalized the changes in the budget surfaced Monday — the same day lawmakers voted it out of committee and passed it in the Senate and House, sending it to the governor.
We all know how the MSM seems favorable to the left. But personal politics tends to be trumped when the media feels their craft has been insulted.
Expect continued vitriol from the Dispatch as we move on into campaign season. Reporters tend to have long memories.
