(upbeat music) - I'm Steve Kendall, welcome to "The Journal."

We're going to take a look at the latest government activities in Columbus, Washington DC and across the nation.

In just a moment, we'll hear from Karen Kasler, the state of Ohio host, also Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and David Jackson, professors in the Bowling Green State University Department of Political Science.

But first of all, let us say that obviously all of us know that political violence has no place in this country.

We feel incredible sympathy and hurt for the family of Charlie Kirk, and we want to know that we have best wishes for them.

So we understand, and we all should understand that the kind of incident that took place has no place in our political discourse and should never have in the future.

That being said, and hopefully things will improve in our political discourse as we move forward now in this country.

That being said, I want to first of all say thank you, of course to our guests that are here today.

Karen, this sort of came up in a discussion you had with Senator Jerry Cirino, who is the author of Senate Bill 1, which is now law in Ohio.

So kind of characterize that interview you had with him, which involved a discussion about how educators and other people should address, people in the public, should deal with the fact that this is a controversial topic.

Senate Bill 1 deals with that in the classroom.

So kind of context us on your discussion with Senator Cirino.

- Well, first I should mention that lawmakers are not in session right now, but there have been some actions related to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

For instance, there was a statement from all four of leaders of the House and Senate from both parties condemning political violence and mentioning not only Charlie Kirk, but also Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman from Minnesota who was killed along with her husband earlier this year.

So I think that was an interesting point when it comes to what lawmakers are looking at here.

But Senator Jerry Cirino was the main sponsor of Senate Bill 1, which is of course the higher education overhaul that his whole discussion about it talked about free speech that he says it would protect free speech on campus.

Now, of course, there are plenty of critics who say that it would potentially have the opposite effect, but talking to him about Senate Bill 1 in the context that we're in right now with political violence being what it is, and the fact that Charlie Kirk was assassinated at a open debate on a university campus in Utah, you know, I asked Cirino if there was anything in Senate Bill 1 that dealt with security.

He said, not really, but he said that he felt like Senate Bill 1 really protects these kinds of debates that Charlie Kirk would have.

And it encourages these sorts of things.

He really strongly feels that Senate Bill 1 really goes after cancel culture and protects people of all opinions.

But certainly you have the question with so many professors and others who are aligned with universities losing their jobs or being disciplined because of things that they've written or said or whatever.

I mean, I read him a laundry list of like Clemson and San Diego or, I can't remember all of them, but there was this whole laundry list of states outside or universities outside of Ohio where professors have been disciplined for things that they've said.

And he said, well, professional standards should indicate that people who are aligned with universities shouldn't maybe express these sorts of opinions.

And he maintained that wasn't cancel culture.

So it's an interesting moment to be talking about what actually is cancel culture and free speech.

Does that just protect the speech that you wanna hear or does that really protect the speech that you vehemently disagree with as well?

- Hmm.

And I know that you had an extensive interview with him and it was very clear that he believes this sets a better set of a context for these kind of discussions.

And yet, as you just mentioned, that doesn't seem to be playing out, at least in some places the way he interprets it as playing out.

He seemed to think that this was strengthening free speech in Ohio, as you said, and wasn't backing away from that.

- Yeah, I mean, like I said, there's a laundry list of of Clemson, UCLA, University of Mississippi, University of Arkansas, I mean a whole bunch of places where professors have faced consequences and discipline because of their alignment with those universities.

And they said things that were controversial and, you know, Ohio State is actually being sued by a student who was expelled for pro-Palestinian activities.

The ACLU is involved in that as well.

And so, you know, the real question of how things work now under Senate Bill 1, when there is the threat of political violence is a real one, I think.

And while he feels that Senate Bill 1 protects people of all different viewpoints, the question is how is this going to play out?

And do people really feel protected?

Because that's part of the whole basis of Senate Bill 1 was that conservative students, according to Cirino, said that they did not feel that they were able to offer their opinions freely.

Well, now have we swung the other direction?

He doesn't feel that we have, we're still in the early stages of Senate Bill 1 being implemented.

But there is that question I think that hangs out there.

- Yeah, and in a way, the fact that we're having a conversation about it in this manner feels like we've narrowed what's allowed.

We've put guardrails on what people can and can't say.

And as you mentioned, people have been disciplined or have lost their jobs and you know.

- [Karen] And he says that some the stuff is gonna play out in courts, which is really is that where we want to go?

I mean, not everybody has access to the courts and can wait that long for action.

I mean, it's tough to kind of turn some of these things over to the courts.

Like I said, Ohio State is being sued by the ACLU, so you know, it's already started.

- [Steve] Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a whole new array of things that, and well, and we knew that Senate Bill 1 was gonna create a lot of questions that for everything that it may or may not have solved, created more questions.

When we look beyond that part of what's going on in Columbus, I know there's other things going on.

And David, I know there is a discussion, again, higher education is in the discussion right now.

And there've been some changes in that as well.

So talk a little about what's going on with higher education funding, which again, is sort of one of those evergreen topics we have in Ohio.

It's back now based on the last budget.

So is there anything that people should be aware of in that last state budget dealing with higher education beyond the discussion we've had about Senate Bill 1?

- Well, higher education is in the view of, you know, many, if not most people, one of the central pillars of American democracy and the American economy.

And I think most people would agree that there is something approaching the level of a crisis in higher education, declining numbers of people who have confidence in our institutions of higher education, increasing doubts about the value of higher education, increasing attacks on higher education from legislators, issues related to funding of higher education.

And, you know, the list could go on, but an interesting thing that's happening in Ohio is in the last budget, some language was put in that said, a portion of the state share of instruction, which is the money that the state provides to our public university budgets, which, you know, as a percentage of our budgets has been declining over years.

We are very, very tuition dependent right now, but we still need that state share of instruction as well.

A portion of that state share of instruction is now based on the starting salaries of the graduates of the university.

And that may seem like a very sensible thing to do to encourage universities to, you know, create majors that lead to jobs that are in demand.

But I always, you know, teach my students that there's a couple of laws of politics and government that need to be understood and that are just iron clad and true.

And one of those is the law of unintended consequences.

And in this case, it may be actually an intended consequence, who knows.

But one of the unintended consequences, or a consequence, let's just say of this law is that universities who have a heavy percentage of their majors graduate with degrees in what we would call the helping professions.

Things like teaching, nursing, social work, jobs that are obviously, you know, essential for the smooth functioning of our economy and society are being hurt by this.

Whereas universities who have people who graduate with higher paying jobs are being benefited by it.

And you know, so here at Bowling Green State University, for example, we produce a large percentage of the teachers in the state of Ohio.

We started off as a normal school, you know, and retain, you know, a high focus on, you know, the value of creating K through 12 teachers.

Well, K through 12 teachers generally don't get paid a heck of a lot, especially when they start out in the profession.

And so the universities who focus in those areas like we do and who are doing everything right, I would argue, and I'm speaking here, both as you know, a faculty member somewhat objectively about what's going on, but also as somebody who is, you know, concerned that BGSU thrive, you know, we're doing great with enrollment, we're doing great with retention, we're graduating people, but ending up still seeing a state share of instruction issues.

It can create some challenges that, you know, like lead to some people maybe saying, we're doing everything right.

Why are you doing this to us?

And that was part of the feeling also of the increased regulations that have recently been passed by the state of Ohio and the unfunded mandates that came along with that particular bill for the universities in Ohio.

We're doing great work we believe, the evidence shows that we're doing great work, and if the reward structure isn't there, people are gonna sort of throw up their hands and say, what more do people want from us?

- Yeah, we come back, we can talk more about, about the environment in Columbus moving forward, because obviously there are several other topics involved that are going to come back again for further discussion.

We'll be back in just a moment with Karen Kasler from the State of Ohio, and Dr.

Nicole Kaylaf-Hughes and Dr.

David Jackson from Bowling Green State University here on "The Journal."

Thanks for staying with us on "The Journal."

Our guests are Karen Kasler, Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and David Jackson and Nicole, one of the other things that is constantly being kicked around in Columbus is redistricting, and it's gonna come up again, kind of set the context for why we're gonna still talk about redistricting again in the next couple of months and hear about a lot over the next probably year or so.

- Okay, so there's a lot going on with redistricting in Ohio and nationwide.

And I think kind of the first thing to reiterate is that we were going to be doing this in Ohio, regardless of the national political climate.

We were going to be redrawing our congressional district lines based on the Ohio State Constitution.

And there are a lot of other states who are doing redistricting right now, which is really outside of the norm, primarily based on a request or a directive from the Trump administration.

That's not us, no matter who won the presidential election.

We were gonna be here and we're gonna be here because of initiatives that were passed by Ohio citizens in 2018 and 2015 about how we draw the lines and the amount of bipartisan support that is needed to redraw the lines in Ohio.

And so when we did the census in 2020, the lines were drawn and what the law essentially says in Ohio is that you need, in order to get these to actually pass these districts, and I'm only talking about congressional districts right now, you need 60% of the members in each chamber to vote in favor of the maps and 50% of both major parties, which for us is Democrats and Republicans.

So we would actually need Democrats and Republicans to have some pretty big level of agreement on what these districts look like.

That's what Ohio voters wanted when they passed Issue 1 in 2018.

If we can't achieve that, and we know that's pretty difficult in Ohio, if we can't achieve it, it goes to our Ohio seven member redistricting commission.

And the redistricting commission has currently five Republicans and two Democrats.

It's made up of statewide elected officials and representatives chosen by the major parties in the legislature.

And it requires for it to get through that after it's already failed out of the legislature to get through that.

You also need bipartisan support.

So you need both of those Democrats and the Republicans to agree.

If you can't get that, which we couldn't after our 2020 census, then it goes back to the legislature and then you can get lower thresholds to get these through.

You would just then need 1/3 of the members of both parties, a simple majority, and 1/3 of the members.

We couldn't get that either because again, our parties are struggling to get along a little bit in the legislature.

And then if it doesn't get that, then you can just go with this simple majority and you don't need Democratic support because Democrats are in a minority in the legislature.

However, if you hit that point, so if it's failed out of those other three previous efforts at bipartisanship, if you can't get that, then the districts that come out of our Ohio legislature only last for four years and that's what happened.

And now we are back here.

And when these initiatives were originally passed in 2018, there was legitimate concern that we were now going to be redrawing our districts every four years with no information and with no new information I mean, so right, we typically draw them every 10 years after the census, once we know where people are through the apportionment process.

We don't have any different information than we did after the 2020 census.

We just only have districts that lasted four years because they were passed without bipartisanship.

And Ohio voters wanted a bipartisan process.

They wanted both parties, both Democrats and Republicans to weigh in.

And we didn't have that.

And so because we didn't have that when we tried to draw the lines after the 2020 census, we're here and it's going to continue to bounce around.

There's a couple other things that make this a little bit different than it was four years ago.

And that's the fact that we now have a very Republican Ohio Supreme Court.

So when these districts end up in court, which barring a political miracle, I'm guessing they will, but we can be optimistic, when whatever districts come out of the legislature when they end up in court, as our last ones did.

And our last ones were repeatedly thrown out as being an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

We now have a very Republican State Supreme Court because in 2022, I think we started attaching the Republicans in the legislature passed a law that attaches party labels to our Supreme Court.

And instead of now having a previously, what we had a bipartisan State Supreme Court, we now have a Republican super majority on the State Supreme Court because Republicans swept the judicial elections with the party labels.

So we're redrawing the districts, we have a little bit of a different judicial climate in the state than we did previously, but the requirement for bipartisanship still remains.

It's likely not achievable barring a political miracle.

But the requirement and what the voters wanted still remains.

And so that's what the legislature is about to start trying to do is draw congressional districts that they can agree on and that will last more than four years.

- Yeah, and Karen, you're in Columbus.

Where is the legislature on this situation?

Gonna give us a couple of minute overview of have they started this and where are they if they have in the process of addressing redistricting in Ohio again?

- Well, the first deadline that Dr.

Kalaf-Hughes just mentioned is coming up on September 30th.

And so yeah, they're starting, they're starting as we are recording this show, they're meeting at 11 o'clock today.

But nothing is expected to happen.

We're not expected to see any sort of map from Republican leaders.

We're not expecting a vote on anything yet.

There have been, there was a map that was proposed in the House and the Senate from Democrats.

It would in most years result in an 8-7 split, eight Republican, seven Democrats.

House Speaker Matt Hoffman called that gerrymandered and said that because it was drawn in secret, he didn't have any details on it, that he felt that it violated the spirit of the 2018 Constitutional amendment, which I should mention, he was heavily involved in drafting and passing.

And one thing about that amendment that's really interesting is the whole idea of redrawing the maps every four years was held out as being something that nobody wanted to see.

The idea was that redistricting was gonna be something that we did every 10 years, and we had to get bipartisan support so that we didn't have to go to this repeat cycle of redistricting.

That doesn't seem to have been a disincentive at this point because we are here, we're doing this again.

And so we've got these three deadlines of September 30th, October 31st, and November 30th.

It was Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who is a Republican on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, has set a map, really needs to be in place by Thanksgiving to keep next year's election cycle going.

Candidates have to file by February 4th, so they're expecting, I'm sure, litigation over all this.

So we're just starting here, but it feels like this is all happening pretty quickly and we've all known that this is coming.

So here we are just getting started.

- And you'll be on top of that and covering it as it goes along, as we continue to follow the never ending story of redistricting in Ohio and across the country for that matter.

We'll be back in just a moment with more of our guest, Karen Kasler, Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and David Jackson here on "The Journal" back in just a moment.

You're with us on "The Journal."

Our guests are Dr.

Nicole Kalaf-Hughes and Dr.

David Jackson from Bowling Green State University and the host of the State of Ohio, Karen Kasler.

David, to continue with our discussion about redistricting, there are obviously from the Republican side, districts that are held by Democrats that are the focus of their efforts in this next congressional election, which takes place in November of 26, not November of 25, but it's front page right now.

It's at the top of the agenda.

Talk a little bit about what's going on with those districts.

The Republicans have kind of have their eye on right now.

- Well, the expectation is that one of those districts is right here in northwest Ohio.

That's the 9th Congressional District, which is currently represented by Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, whom I believe has now become and has been for a while, the longest serving woman in the history of the US House of Representatives, as well as being a fiercely proud Polish American Democrat in the House.

A couple of big name Republicans have entered the race, a former state representative and a current state representative.

And if my numbers are right, I heard that the district right now is probably something like an R plus, maybe seven.

And an interesting thing happened in the last election in Ohio in 2024, you had two long serving progressive Democrats in Marcy Kaptur and Sherrod Brown, who both dramatically overperformed the expectation of their state in the case of the Senator and district in the case of Kaptur, it's just that the state of Ohio went 11 points for Trump.

And Sherrod Brown lost by about three points.

Some people actually said that was his most impressive electoral performance in the sense of the headwinds that he was fighting against.

And he had said that he could probably beat about an eight point Trump victory statewide.

And then you saw sort of a microcosm of that in the 9th District where if it's an R, you know, plus seven, that election came down to, you know, like a thousand votes or something.

And you know, both candidates were out scurrying in the period before the election was certified to get absentee ballots that were rejected, cured based on signatures because it was coming down to the wire and coming down so close.

And so that's an obvious district I think that Republicans would think if they could make it a few more points plus R. Representative Kaptur might be in trouble.

Now, a lot of people in northwest Ohio who support Representative Kaptur sort of acknowledge that once Representative Kaptur decides to move on, and at some point she will, even the way the district is currently drawn would become a much tougher sell.

I mean, the incumbent advantage is real, especially when you're, as you know, big entrenched a name in, you know, Northwest Ohio politics as Representative Kaptur is.

- And Nicole, are there, are there other areas that the Republican party is looking at in terms of trying to find Democratic seats they want to make Republican?

- [Nicole] Yes.

And so the kind of the two districts that are thought to be really vulnerable to kind of these, the redrawing of the lines are that 9th district and then the 13th District, which is out near kind of Akron-Canton area.

And that is held by Amelia Sykes right now.

And Kaptur won her most recent election by less than 1% of the vote.

She won it by I think it was like 51.1 to 48.9.

But these are both seen as districts that Republicans have said they're gonna focus on redrawing to be Republican pickup.

Trump won about 55% of Ohio votes.

Bernie Marino won about 50% of Ohio votes in the last election.

Republicans currently hold 66% of congressional seats in Ohio.

And their publicly stated goal, this is not like me editorializing, this is the publicly stated goal, has been 80% of congressional seats.

And so the goal is instead of 10 to five split Republicans, Democrats to move to 12 Republicans and three Democrats, and Bernie Mareno actually said that they can pick up two seats way to bump that Republican majority of Congressional seats to 80% in Ohio, which is significantly larger than any estimates of the Republican population of Ohio.

And so those are probably the two most vulnerable districts.

They're both districts held by women, and that's likely where we're going to see the new maps target.

But again, they're gonna start working on those pretty quickly here, but we don't know exactly what they're gonna look like yet.

- Yeah and Karen, besides the redistricting part, a pretty important name in Ohio, not necessarily a political name, but became a political name, has decided not to run for governor.

So talk about what's going on in the governor's race and what this one person saying I'm not interested anymore means on both the Republican and the Democratic side with regard to the governor's race coming up.

- Well, when Governor Mike DeWine picked former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel as his Lieutenant Governor, I think a lot of people thought that was a big surprise.

And there was a thought that maybe he would run for governor himself.

He's never run for public office.

And just in the last couple of days he announced that he is firmly shutting the door.

He'd gone back and forth kind of hinting that he might run, but when he said on Friday that he is not gonna run, he and his wife had done considerable thought and prayer and had decided not to run.

That really opens up the race for Vivek Ramaswamy, who already has a ton of endorsements, including an early endorsement from the Ohio Republican Party.

And he and US Senator John Houston are appearing as we're recording this today later.

So it really looks like the Republican ticket is kind of firming up and whoever of course wins the Republican nomination for governor would run against, at least at this point, Dr.

Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, she's the only announced Democrat in the race for governor.

- Yeah and you've got like about 30 seconds, Tim Ryan talked about it.

He's still debating, still thinking about whether to run as a democratic candidate for governor.

Is that correct?

- Yes and I think his time is running out at this point to try to raise enough money and to get out there and compete, it could be very difficult for him, but he says he still may be considering it, so we'll just have to wait and see.

I don't think we'll see him in the race though.

- Well, we'll leave it there for this time.

Appreciate all of your comments, thank you for being in.

And then the insight that you brought, you can check us out at wbgu.org.

You can watch us every Thursday night at 8:00 PM on WBGU-PBS.

We will see you again next time.

Good night and good luck.

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