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A new president is sworn in and the day comes and goes without major incidents in Ohio or elsewhere.

And lawmakers have the common challenge of drawing new maps for Ohio's congressional and state House districts.

And a new blueprint to work from all this weekend, the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio, I'm Karen Kasler Ohio didn't vote for President Joe Biden, as in 2016, the state went to Donald Trump by eight points, but there were no major protests.

And many of Ohio's members of Congress attended Biden's inauguration, including all four Democrats Tim Ryan, Joyce Beatty, Marcy Kaptur, who had been in quarantine after being exposed to covid during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.

And Marcia Fudge, who is Biden's choice to head Housing and Urban Development Republicans Bill Johnson and Warren Davidson did attend, though they had supported the challenge to Biden's Electoral College win the day of the Capitol riot.

Republicans Dave Joyce, Steve Stivers and Brad one strip did not.

They were also at the inauguration.

Republican Senator Rob Portman was there, too, but not Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who stayed away because of covid concerns.

An armed march that was expected at all 50 states and brought up heavy security never fully materialized, bringing just a few dozen protesters in Columbus over the days leading up to the inauguration.

Security was stepped up significantly leading up to the weekend, and Governor Mike DeWine ordered the state house and other downtown Columbus State offices close to Inauguration Day on Sunday.

As the wind blew and some flurries fell, a diverse group gathered at the state house, which was fully surrounded by bike rack style fencing and a big contingent of state troopers and Ohio National Guard members.

DeWine had authorized five hundred and eighty Guard personnel to help with security needs.

In Ohio, another 1000 soldiers and airmen with the guard went to Washington, D.C., joining a force of more than twenty thousand for the inauguration.

Though two Ohioans were sent home after being flagged by the FBI, a lot of people showed up armed, but the event stayed nonviolent, though it got heated at times.

But it was quite a contrast from the protest on January 6th.

That event sparked several brawls, but no arrests.

All that preparation didn't come cheap.

The Ohio National Guard says the running estimated cost so far is around eight hundred forty seven thousand dollars.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol says most of its costs are personnel driven.

And because of the way the state payroll system works, Ohio won't know how many hours of work and overtime was logged by troopers until February.

There was no damage to the state house, which did rack up one hundred and fifty nine thousand dollars in repair costs after protests that turned destructive this summer for Ohioans have been charged in that riot at the US Capitol, including a man and a woman from Champaign County who claim to be members of the Ohio State regular militia, a group tied to the far right antigovernment Oath Keepers.

Mark Milkovich studies hate groups for the Anti Defamation League.

The Ohio State regular militia is a tiny militia group.

So it's basically, from everything I've been able to determine, basically has a handful of members.

It's only been around for a short period of time.

These arrests may end up putting an end to it.

We'll have to wait and see.

The Oath Keepers, on the other hand, or one of the largest groups in the militia movement.

Probably more than a thousand members nationwide, and they specialize in, although they'll accept anybody as members, they they particularly try to recruit current or former military personnel, police or first responders.

So that's their little bailiwick.

It's unusual, as I can tell, that a woman is one of the people who is charged, who was a leader in a militia movement, isn't it?

Yes, although there are women in the militia movement, there aren't very many of them in positions of leadership.

And in terms of actually commanding a group, this person may be the first one that I've ever come across.

I tried to rack my brains across, you know, twenty, twenty, twenty six years and on hundreds of militia groups that have flown under the bridge during that time span.

And I really couldn't think of any back in the early mid 1990s.

Linda Thompson was a pioneer in promoting the militia movement.

She was an attorney from Indiana, but she didn't actually really head a group of her own.

So this is a very rare instance.

One of the other groups that was visible at the Sunday demonstration was the Ohio boogaloo.

What do we know?

What do you know about the Ohio boogaloo, the big boys in general?

Well, the Boogaloo movement is a relatively new anti-government extremist movement that is a very anti authority, very anti police, very pro pro gun there.

There are a lot like the militia movement used to be, except they don't have some of the traditional militia movement conspiracy theories.

And they also don't share what happened to the militia movement in recent years where the militia movement came out really strongly in favor of Donald Trump, which actually muted their hostility to the federal government quite a bit.

Because of that, the BUGLER'S are not necessarily fans of Trump.

And and so they're sort of more purely anti-government at the moment than the militia movement is at the moment.

When they were speaking on Sunday, they were talking about how they wanted to be nonviolent, they talked about unity, is that what this group really is about?

It's not it's not a group.

It's a movement.

And there are individual bugler's, you know, in a lot of different places across the country.

And a couple groups are starting to form.

It's a very new movement.

So there hasn't been a lot of group formation so far.

I mean, Bugler's have got a lot of bad publicity this past year because a number of them were arrested for violent incidents, including terrorist plots and two murders, shootings of a federal protective officer, a security guard in California.

And then during the attempt to arrest someone for that shooting, one of those boogaloo was shot and killed a police officer.

So so they're trying to you know, they've got a public, you know, sort of an image problem right now, and so they're trying to portray themselves as not violent and some of them may not be violent.

Others, however, plan for a plan for the possibility of violence.

Think about violence.

Some of them may even want to engage in violence proactively.

A lot of them imagine violence in response to some sort of perceived government tyranny, like the government is going to come and take our guns away.

And that's when we're going to shoot those ATF agents or whomever the FBI, they call them, the alphabet boys like ATF, FBI and so forth.

You know, in other cases, some of them may have visions of some sort of civil war between an authoritarian government and the boogaloo or between left wing extremists and the boogaloo or whatever scenario they have, sort of one of our fantasy scenario they've created in their own mind.

So, you know, I mean, it's certainly true.

Not all boogaloo are violent, but in the short history of this movement, it has already generated a track record of violence.

So it's something that people have to be concerned about.

With what we saw at the insurrection at the capital and all the chatter that was happening online leading up to Inauguration Day, were you surprised that these armed marches didn't really materialize, that nothing really happened on Inauguration Day?

I wasn't I wasn't too surprised.

I don't want to claim any sort of omniscience for myself, but it was well known that both in Washington, D.C. and at state capitals around the country, there was going to be a high degree of security because of what happened on January 6th and after January 6th, there was a huge amount of denunciation of of the storming of the Capitol by Republicans and Democrats alike.

And that condemnation can affect not necessarily the most hardcore people, but the people more on the periphery who might be outside.

Well, maybe I shouldn't get involved with something like that.

And in fact, you know, in the days leading, you know, the days leading up to the days before the inauguration, that's the sort of awkward phrasing.

There were some extremists who are actually saying don't show up at the state capitols, don't show up in D.C. because it's actually a trap that they actually want you to go there.

That way they can round you up.

That way, you know, they can claim that you're trying to start a riot or something and arrest you.

So don't even show up.

Don't play into their hands.

So that was actually good if extremists were actually warning other extremists to stay away, too.

With that in mind, though, are we out of the woods here or is there potentially more action to come from some of these groups that had been talking all this time?

Well, people who are angry about the election of Joe Biden did not stop being angry at the inauguration.

And, you know, a lot of what happens going forward, it will depend on a lot of factors.

To what degree might Trump or his lieutenants or other people try to incite this group of angry people to keep them angry, to keep them agitated?

Or maybe they won't.

But it's also true that people who are angry right now.

Could in weeks or months or even years, decide to do something about it, sometimes it actually takes quite a while between a particular sort of event that may trigger someone and the point at which they actually decide to become violent.

Just to give a big example, Timothy McVeigh became extremely angry over the tragic ending of the standoff in Waco, Texas, in 1993 between the FBI and the Branch Davidian as an end in which fires were fires were started and many people died.

But it took him two years till he got to the point where he had decided he wanted to attack the US government and had actually done everything in order in order to attack the US government.

And that was not until April 1995, two years later, that they actually launched an attack.

So theoretically and again, I'm not trying to raise any, you know, do any handwaving or anything like this, but theoretically, you know, there could be a risk of violence, lone wolves coming out of the woodwork or small cells or something, you know, for some time to come as a result of what's happened in the past couple of months.

And we're just going to have to wait that period out.

If there is a change in tone in Washington, and it certainly seems like from President Joe Biden's inaugural address and some of the things we've seen that he wants to change that tone, how much of that could influence some of these movements?

I mean, how much of the rise of white supremacists and hate groups is directly attributed to the tone that was coming from Washington just in the last couple of years versus any other time?

Well.

And I guess when I say Washington, I'm specifically thinking of President Donald Trump, right?

Well, I would say the surge, the surge of.

This is this gets a little complicated, I will say, basically.

That inciting language can can can help agitate extremists or even maybe cause some people to come closer to being an extremist, but.

Not inciting language from someone they already don't like is not going to have the opposite effect on them.

And so I think there's very little that Joe Biden could say that could pacify right wing extremists, all of whom, you know, already basically hate him and are extremely suspicious of him.

You know.

You know, there are.

You know, plenty of people on the mainstream, right, who would still be extremely hostile to Joe Biden, despite things like his inaugural address.

So you can imagine people way out there on the right being that much, far less receptive to such messages.

How much of a connection or an overlap is there between some of these movements and, say, the Kuhnen conspiracy theory, which seems to be falling apart after what happened in the inauguration and how it went forward without any any action?

The killing on the killing on movement is certainly experiencing an identity crisis at the moment.

I don't know whether it's falling apart or not.

It's going to be very we don't have a lot of precedent here.

It's going to be very curious to see if if it does crumble and kind of fade away, if it is successfully able to sort of reorient or reshape itself, or at least a part of it may.

And even if not, whether those people may gravitate towards other extremist movements or other conspiracy theories or just kind of go back to whatever they were doing before, we really don't know in terms of the connections between Kuhnen adherents and other types of right wing extremists.

In some areas, you could definitely see some overlap.

You could see some overlap with the militia movement.

You can see some overlap with some other types of right wing conspiracy theorists.

But there are also a lot of people on the far right who think that coming on is just crazy and don't really want to have anything to do with killing on people because they think they're kind of crazy.

So, so culotte, so large, you know that.

And it also contains a lot of people in it who have never been involved with anything extremist before.

So it kind of radicalized a whole bunch of people.

And so the question is, are they permanently radicalized?

And if so, what are they going to do going forward or whether now that the storm didn't happen?

And no, there were no massive arrests of a satanic pedophile ring by Donald Trump, as was promised four years, will they become disillusioned and, you know, go back to being that is that teachers and accountants and mechanics and, you know, just whatever they were before.

In the two weeks following the January 6th riot investigations have been opened into the Capitol Police and into other members of Congress, gave tours to people who later stormed the building.

Democratic Youngstown area Congressman Tim Ryan chairs the subcommittee that funds the Capitol Police.

He said it's been hard to work in the building that was stormed by rioters, including two Capitol Police officers who've been suspended.

I think we're going to find there's a lot of post-traumatic stress, both in the Capitol police force, the US marshals, the sergeant at arms and members of Congress and staff, because it was such a traumatic experience for them.

And then they have to go back and think, you know, how did these people know how to get to where they got.

Did anybody on the inside help them?

There's already 15 to 20 open investigations to members of the Capitol Police.

We know that there were active duty military in the crowd, active duty police in the crowd.

So it's it's scary from that vantage point that you just don't know who's who.

And and we need to make sure that we find that out so that we can all begin the healing process and move back into governing the country again.

That you want me to know about what it's been like doing what you've had to do over the last couple of days after this nightmarish thing happened on live television right outside your doors?

I think you had to say lastly, you know, I think it's a lot like 9/11.

You know, we always used to think after before 9/11 that no one struck us on our homeland.

No one attacked our homeland.

And then 9/11 busted that myth.

And I think a lot of us who worked on Capitol Hill or visited Capitol Hill or just an American citizen, you think no one's ever going to storm the Capitol and then all of a sudden they did.

And so there's a new reality that we're all living in and we're going to have to deal with that new security reality.

But again, I hope we can try to make some lemonade out of lemons here.

And hopefully we can all say this is not what we want in our country.

And and while there may be some huge disagreements, you know, a lot of people are there's a lot of frustration out in the country.

And we have an obligation as citizens to try to try to heal that.

And I hope this is a moment that we can somehow turn into a net positive over time.

Are you concerned?

What do you think, that there will ever be a day that when the White House, when the capital will go back to the access that we have always enjoy where, you know, school groups could come and tour those places and you could come in and see how government works.

Are you concerned that we're going to lose, that we're going to lose some of that?

I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

There's a new reality that we're living in.

We're going to have to reevaluate that.

We're going to have to move out the perimeter.

We're going to we'll look at all of that, the roads that are on each side of the House, in the Senate, how school groups access it, how people can even get on the lawn.

That's all going to be reviewed.

And unfortunately, there'll be some changes that will probably make access a little bit more difficult.

Ryan also said he's concerned that some of his fellow Ohioans were among those criticizing or tried to avoid new metal detectors installed at the Capitol, including Republican Steve Stivers, Jim Jordan, Bob Gibbs and Bob Latta.

Ryan says he likes a lot of those guys, but he feels it's a small sacrifice and using his words, it's time to be unselfish.

Speaking of members of Congress, this new year will bring new maps for their districts and for Ohio's state House and Senate and a new way that they will be drawn.

Voters approve reforms in the past five years to avoid gerrymandering, where districts are drawn to favor one party over another.

And as Ohio stands to lose a congressional seat, voter advocates say the time has come to make sure the process works.

State House correspondent Andy Chow reports Ohio has been considered a battleground state for decades, having voted for Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

But Katherine Tercer with Common Cause Ohio, says the current districts for state legislative offices and congressional seats do not reflect a political balance.

For many years.

Our votes have been manipulated.

They created districts that leaned Republican or lean Democratic.

And what happened is year after year, those gerrymanders were really robust every single year since the maps were drawn in 2011.

There have been 12 Republicans elected to go to Congress and four Democrats year after year after year.

And that manipulation of our vote is actually ends up being the manipulation of public policy.

And so, you know, what we want is for all of us to participate in real elections in the state, House Republicans have maintained their two to one dominance in the Senate and picked up a seat in 2020.

And after losing a few seats in the House in 2018, Republicans added a total of three members in the last election.

Every 10 years, Ohio draws new district maps, and in 2015 and 2018, voters approved a new process to prevent gerrymandering.

The process includes rules the maps must follow, such as keeping 65 of Ohio's 88 counties whole and only letting five counties be split more than twice.

Turtur says these rules will stop mapmaker's from creating districts that weave in and out of political strongholds that favor one party over another.

The maps will be created in a more bipartisan fashion because the Ohio Redistricting Commission will have additional members of the minority party on it.

So I think that's important to be aware of.

The other thing to be aware of is if the district lines are drawn in ways that violate the rules, well then that map or maps, if it's the Ohio House and the Senate, for example, that can be taken to the Ohio Supreme Court and challenged.

And so the rules are embedded in the Ohio Constitution and can go to the Ohio Supreme Court, which at the moment is fairly well balanced.

The official map making process won't start until the summer.

But Jenn Miller with the League of Women Voters Ohio says they're mobilizing now to make sure the voices of voters are heard.

League in Common Cause and all of our volunteers who have been fighting gerrymandering for more than half a century are gearing up.

We're going to be calling our lawmakers.

We're going to be engaging the public so that they're ready to participate as well.

Miller says the new map making process includes better opportunities for citizens to provide their input and for the drawing to be more transparent.

New Republican Senate President Matt Huffman was at the forefront of creating the reforms, but he defends the maps that were made in 2011 and points out that there were state legislative races where a challenger was able to be an incumbent.

However, he says the new rules will help keep the map makers accountable.

Somebody and maybe a lot of people who knows somebody is going to be unhappy with what these districts look like.

They're going to be outraged.

It's going to be unfair.

It's going to be because, hey, you know, especially when it comes to things like this, you can't make everybody happy.

And when when that happens, everybody, including me, can say, well, this is the way the voters wanted it to be done.

The new maps will be based on the outcome of the 2020 census, which was taken last year.

The results of that will come out in February.

Officials will take that census and begin to compile data on how a map can accurately reflect different regions of the state.

The congressional maps will be created by state lawmakers with bipartisan approval required.

The state legislative districts will be drawn by the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which includes the governor, secretary of state auditor, two Republicans from the House and Senate and two Democrats from the House and Senate.

The state is expecting the census to show a lag in population growth, which could mean Ohio might lose one or two of its 16 congressional seats.

Andy Chow Statehouse News Bureau, as the Biden administration takes over the pandemic, is as bad as it's ever been.

Ohio is approaching nine thousand five hundred confirmed covid-19 deaths and three quarters of a million confirmed cases.

And as more groups become eligible for the coronavirus vaccine, there are problems getting it.

Biden's advisers are saying they're finding there was no White House vaccine distribution plan this week.

Governor Mike DeWine, who had praised the Trump administration's efforts in the pandemic, wrote to Biden asking for more vaccines and money and saying in a personal note to Biden, Your team has been great to work with.

We appreciate the outreach.

We look forward to working with you.

My best to you.

And that's it for this week.

Please check out the Ohio Public Radio and Television State House News Bureaus website at statenews.org.

And you can follow us and the show on Facebook and Twitter.

And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the statewide broadcast of the state of Ohio comes from medical mutual, providing more than one point four million Ohioans peace of mind with a selection of health insurance plans online at Medda Mutual dotcom slash Ohio by the law offices of PorterWright Morris and Arthur LLP.

Now with eight locations across the country, PorterWright is a legal partner with a new perspective to the business community, Morad PorterWright.com and from the Ohio Education Association, representing 100 24000 members who work to inspire their students to think creatively and experience the joy of learning online at O H E A dot org.