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Supporters of reproductive rights and legalized recreational marijuana bring in hundreds of thousands of signatures for the fall ballot.

The state budget is signed after the deadline, along with dozens of vetoes, and the congressional map that was ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court will go back to those justices again.

But it's a different court this time.

All this week in the state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

It was a big week, especially with a holiday in the middle of it.

Let's start with the fall ballot.

Groups that support reproductive rights submitted more than 700,000 signatures to put an amendment guaranteeing access to abortion in Ohio before voters in November.

That's not a record, but at 70% more than they will need to make the ballot.

State House correspondent Joe Ingles reports.

Two trucks carrying petitions with signatures from all eight counties pulled into the loading dock at the secretary of State's office in Columbus just hours before the deadline.

The coalition Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, made up of activists from abortion rights organization physicians, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, Democratic groups and labor unions.

Has been working since March to gather the 414,000 valid signatures needed to make the November ballot.

But three local party of preterm in Cleveland announced after months of circulating petitions, they've gathered 442 boxes, holding a lot more than they need.

Today, we're filing over 700,000 signatures.

Yes, Yes, over 700,000 signatures with the state of Ohio to put abortion rights on the ballot in November.

At this time last year, just after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the landmark decision legalizing abortion, Ohio's ban on abortion passed in 2019, went into effect, prohibiting the procedure at the point fetal electronic cardiac activity can be detected about six weeks into a pregnancy.

That law was put on hold in September by a Hamilton County court when abortion providers sued.

But the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to reinstate the six week ban and it could be put in place again any time.

And that's why Kelly Copeland of Pro-Choice Ohio said it's important to take action.

She said these petitions are the remedy for politicians who have ignored the will of Ohioans for 82 days.

Last year, Ohio and suffered under the tyranny of the state legislature and their gerrymandered majorities.

There are false majorities and their extremist and corrupt agenda.

Today we say never again.

Not under our watch.

Not for us.

Not for our children.

Not for our families.

Not for our patients.

Lauren Blauvelt with Planned Parenthood.

Advocates of Ohio said the group has confidence that they have the needed number of valid signatures because they were checked by volunteers ahead of time.

We have internal backstops.

We're really confident in.

The signatures that we're putting forward.

It is hard.

To collect signatures, but so many Ohioans wanted to sign this petition and so many.

Volunteers worked incredibly hard.

We're really confident in our process that we'll be over the threshold.

But Mike Garner Dacus, president of Ohio Right to Life, isn't so sure about that.

The rule of thumb is you should turn in at least double in order for the Secretary of State to find enough valid.

So it was a very underwhelming day for them because all the experts indicated that they were going to turn in a million or more signatures and they couldn't even hit 750,000.

So after spending millions of dollars, you think there would be more garnered?

Dacus said he thinks most Ohioans will reject the amendment if and when it comes up for a vote in November.

And he doesn't think some who signed petitions actually support the amendment.

I don't think they would have signed it because, as we have said from day one, allowing for late term abortion and getting rid of parental consent, which the language does do, I don't even think pro-choice Ohioans would sign that.

I think it's a bridge too far for them.

Backers of the amendment rejected Garnett Dacus characterization of it.

As a general pediatrician, I deal with parental consent every day that I'm at work, and the Reproductive Freedom Amendment will not impact any laws relating to parental consent.

Dan Dacus said his side is mobilized and ready to fight the amendment if the Ohio secretary of state's office certifies the petitions.

That decision is expected to come by July 20th.

If it does make the ballot, it could go down as the most expensive issue in Ohio's history.

Dr. Marcella Azevedo is one of the physicians in the coalition to take.

While we know what has happened in other states and we know that we're in an on air.

So we do expect it to.

Take millions of dollars.

We expected the range of $35 million.

Azevedo says that doesn't include spending to defeat issue one on the August 8th special election ballot.

Put there to head off the abortion issue in November.

Issue one ends majority rule in Ohio.

The ad war on that has already begun, and that's expected to be expensive because it's a critical issue put onto the ballot by Republican state lawmakers opposed to the abortion rights amendment.

If Ohioans approve issue one going forward would take 60% voter approval instead of the current simple majority to pass not just the abortion rights amendment in November, but all future amendments.

And it would require more signatures from more counties and less time to ensure they're valid.

Joanne Mills, Statehouse News Bureau.

The record for signatures for a ballot issue was set in 2011 as opponents of a law that made major changes in collective bargaining for police officers, teachers and other public employees filed 1.3 million signatures to repeal it.

That law, known as Senate Bill five, was overwhelmingly overturned by voters.

Also on Wednesday, a different group filed their petitions for a law that would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana for Ohioans over 21.

On that same ballot, the coalition to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol submitted 222,198 signatures.

They would need 124,046 valid signatures for their proposed law to be considered by voters in November.

The group's Tom Herron says the abortion rights amendment also on the same ballot, was not part of his organization's calculations in putting it up this year.

I don't know that an issue like regulation of marijuana is turnout driven in the same way that it may have been ten years ago.

We expect that our measure will pass with a wide margin of victory, irrespective of whether any of the reproductive rights amendments are on the ballot.

This is not a constitutional amendment, but an initiated statute.

And because it would be a law, it could be repealed by state lawmakers, many of whom oppose legalizing marijuana.

It's going to be regulated by the state, highly regulated, much in the same way that our existing medical marijuana program is regulated.

We have a 10% tax at the point of sale, which will generate hundreds of millions of dollars of new revenue to the state every single year.

And that tax is also low enough that Ohio operators will be able to effectively compete with the illicit market.

We're making huge investments in social equity.

We're authorizing home cultivation with safeguards to prevent home growers from having their homegrown product accessible to children.

So on the merits, we think this is really good policy, which will make it difficult to repeal in the legislature.

The Center for Christian Virtue, the conservative Christian group, has been influential in Ohio politics.

Issued a statement after the petitions were filed.

It claims legalizing recreational marijuana has been devastating and other states saying, quote, out of control black markets, traffic fatalities, workplace safety issues and increased incidence of psychosis and suicides among children.

Could all be expected unless responsible Ohioans hold the line in opposing the commercialization of marijuana in our state.

Herron says those are old talking points and not backed up by data.

As with the abortion amendment, the secretary of State's office has until July 20th to validate the signatures.

If they don't have enough, they have ten days to gather more.

That so-called cure period would be eliminated if issue one passes in August.

A two year, $86 billion state budget was signed this week.

A few days after the June 30th deadline, in the very early hours of Independence Day.

Governor Mike DeWine vetoed dozens of items when he signed it, and the next day he clarified some of those vetoes.

He praised the budget for money for nursing homes with incentives to improve care, funding for the Science of reading program that's in place in 31 other states, more money for behavioral health and low income state tax credits toward more affordable housing.

He noted the budget also creates the Ohio Department of Children and Youth and puts $300 million toward career tech facilities and establishes a merit scholarship for the top 5% of every Ohio high school graduating class.

Among his 44 vetoes were a rejection of the attempt by lawmakers to ban cities from outlawing flavored tobacco and their ban on universities requiring certain vaccines.

DeWine also struck the extension of the sales tax holiday in August to two weeks, saying the $750 million that lawmakers said it could cost is uncertain.

So he wants to study that more carefully.

We looked at this and frankly, can't project what that means.

We don't know how much money that would be.

We don't know how what what the sales would be.

We don't know how many Ohioans would take advantage of that.

We don't know how many Ohioans would not spend money for a while and then decide they want to go put all in that in that period of time.

We don't want to get in a situation where the numbers just don't come out at all.

And what is supposed to cost $750 million ends up costing who knows what?

DeWine also issued vetoes on the income tax cut, which will happen as Ohio's four tax brackets are reduced to two.

And on some specific lines about an exemption in the commercial activity tax.

But DeWine said those were technical and targeted vetoes, not full vetoes of those provisions.

And that means the income tax cut is still in the budget, as is the exemption that results in 90% of Ohio businesses not paying the state's main business tax.

Two years from now, Senate Minority Leader Nikki Antonio issued a statement that reads in part, While Democrats worked and delivered positive elements in this budget, such as fair school funding and continued funding for mental health and social services, the governor's vetoes failed to include necessary transparency and accountability.

Instead, the governor upheld the private school choice subsidies, cut taxes for the wealthy, ignored the voice of the voters in their choice of elected state school board representation, and forced centers for conservative indoctrination on our public universities.

Governor DeWine chose to support extremist policies and a partizan power grab over prioritizing the needs of everyday Ohioans.

The US Supreme Court has ordered Ohio's highest court to review its ruling that the current map or Ohio's 15 congressional districts is unconstitutional.

This comes after the case in which the justices rejected the independent state legislature theory, which claimed state lawmakers have ultimate power in regulating federal elections, not state courts.

This could mean the current map under which ten Republicans and five Democrats won is ruled constitutional.

Or a new one could be drawn later this year.

I talked with Steven Hoffner at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law about this complicated decision and what it means.

In recent years.

Some people have been arguing that by giving to the legislature of each state the responsibility to set election procedures, the U.S. Constitution essentially deprives state courts from any role.

Now, that's the extreme version of this independent state legislature theory.

And so it's called the independent state legislature theory, on the basis that the provision in the U.S. Constitution I just quoted gives it solely to a state legislature, This independent or unreviewable power to establish how congressional elections will be held.

And in North Carolina, what happened was the legislature created new congressional districts after the 2020 census, and the North Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the way the North Carolina legislature had done that violated a provision in the North Carolina constitution that required North Carolina elections to be free and fair.

And the North Carolina legislators, as you said, then went to court saying the independent state legislature theory means the North Carolina Supreme Court can't micromanage how we as the state legislature have drawn the districts.

The U.S. Constitution gave the legislature alone this independent authority.

Courts have no business getting involved, and the North Carolina legislators bringing that claim before the U.S. Supreme Court lost in the case of Moore versus ARP.

Now, how did that case affect the case involving Ohio's congressional map?

Why is it coming back to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled last July that it was unconstitutional?

So in Ohio, we have a new process being used for the first time after the 2020 census that provided that the congressional districts were to be drawn using a procedure established in our state constitution that in the first instance gave the Ohio General Assembly the authority to draw the congressional districts for the state.

But if they weren't able to do that in the way in which the Constitution describes how they should do so, that it would then go to a redistricting commission of the state of Ohio to do that.

And that's how things played out after the 2020 census.

But the same part of the newly amended Ohio Constitution that described the role of the state legislature and this redistricting commission also provided some substantive constraints on what these districts needed to look like, how they needed to be put together, and that the Ohio Supreme Court then was asked to interpret it.

And so challengers of the map that emerged from the new process went to the Ohio Supreme Court and said this new map does not comply with the new provisions in the Ohio Constitution.

And the Ohio Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 3 on two occasions, agreed with the challengers that, in fact, the new map did not comply with the Ohio Constitution.

Once the Ohio Supreme Court had said that there were Ohio legislators who, like the North Carolina legislators, went before the U.S. Supreme Court and said the independent state legislature theory if the U.S. Supreme Court were to embrace that theory or approve that theory would also mean that the Ohio Supreme Court does not have the ability to tell the Ohio legislature how to draw the congressional districts, and that even though the Ohio Constitution might have given the Ohio Supreme Court reason to think it had that authority, the U.S. Constitution is a higher law, supreme law, and it would deprive the Ohio Supreme Court of the ability to have overrule what the legislature and the redistricting commission had had done.

So by wanting the U.S. Supreme Court to make or to consider that argument, the Ohio legislature had done what we call filed a petition for a writ of s'assurer, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying that these Ohio participants had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to also review the Ohio Supreme Court, but ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Ohio Supreme Court's decision.

Now, you know, U.S. Supreme Court didn't do anything at all with the Ohio petition until after they had decided what to do with the North Carolina case.

Right.

So in the North Carolina case, the U.S. Supreme Court says to North Carolina, state courts continue to have a role of reviewing what their state legislatures have done, even with respect to drawing congressional districts, even under the language of the U.S. Constitution, that says it's given to the state legislature to establish the rules of an election for members of Congress.

In saying that, the U.S. Supreme Court also said that although state courts continue to have the responsibility to engage in what was called ordinary judicial review, which is a fundamental dimension of the way in which we've established our three branches of government, is that the judicial branch has authority to review the legislative branches work.

And so the Supreme Court said, yes, state courts still have this basic fundamental responsibility to conduct judicial review of the legislative branch, but it's not unlimited judicial power, essentially, and that if a state court in some circumstance were to do something that seemed to not be a fair interpretation of its state law, that there might then be a place for federal courts in the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and say to that state court that has done something that's not a fair interpretation of state law.

You have therefore usurped the legislature's responsibility in the first instance to establish how the elections in that state will be conducted.

So they left this little window open, if you will.

That's it's an open question at this point, how wide this window is and in how many circumstances the federal courts are now going to be second guessing whether a state court interpretation of its election law is not a fair interpretation, not a fair exempt example of judicial review.

So that then gets me to the question you asked about the Ohio case.

Right.

Once the U.S. Supreme Court had decided the North Carolina case, they really could have done two different things with the Ohio case.

One was they simply could have denied the request that the Ohio petitioners had brought before the Supreme Court in which case the Ohio Supreme Court's existing judgment would still be the law of Ohio.

And that judgment arguably had been staid or held in abeyance by the filing of this petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Until that petition was resolved, the district attorneys were saying, We don't have to do anything now to comply with the Ohio Supreme Court decision until the U.S. Supreme Court has decided this case.

So had the U.S. Supreme Court simply denied their request for review, then we'd be back to the circumstance in which the Ohio Supreme Court had said the map doesn't comply with the Ohio Constitution.

That was one option.

It's not the option that the U.S. Supreme Court took.

The other option, which is what they did, was to grant the Ohio petition for review and immediately to vacate or make of no facts.

The decision of the Ohio Supreme Court that had been put before the U.S. Supreme Court and to send it all back to the Ohio Supreme Court to say to the Ohio Supreme Court, please redo your decision, please revisit the questions before you in light of what we've just said and more versus Harper.

Now, the way to understand what that means is the U.S. Supreme Court has now said to Ohio in Moore versus Harper, we the U.S. Supreme Court, have said state courts may engage in the ordinary course of judicial review even with respect to congressional redistricting stuff.

You, the Ohio Supreme Court, now have the responsibility of reconsidering what you had said about the Ohio Constitution and its constraint on the redistricting process in light of what we've just said.

And so you need to make sure that whatever you say, Ohio Supreme Court is within the ordinary course of judicial review.

So that's where it stands now.

And so now really, the ball is in the Ohio Supreme Court's hands.

Whereas if the U.S. Supreme Court had taken the first option, the ball would have been in the redistricting.

Whose hands next?

Now we're turning the case to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Does that imply that the court's initial ruling that the congressional map is unconstitutional is wrong?

No.

Doesn't mean that really means nothing.

With respect to that, it's really just saying to the Ohio Supreme Court, we, the U.S. Supreme Court, have just issued this important decision about the relative role of state legislatures and state courts.

Make sure what you're doing is consistent with that.

Could the state make the argument to the Ohio Supreme Court that the Ohio Supreme Court does not have a role in reviewing the map?

Well, they can make that argument.

They can't say that.

More versus Harper deprives the state Supreme Court of a role.

They'd have to be saying, as they were essentially saying anyway, in the first two times it went before the U.S. Supreme Court that the proper interpretation of the Ohio Constitution is that the Ohio Supreme Court lacked the authority to decide whether a map unduly favored a particular political party, which is the language that the Supreme Court was relying upon.

Now, I'm confident that if the U.S. Supreme Court's remand of this case to the Ohio Supreme Court had gone back to the same Ohio Supreme Court that it issued the original decision that the four justices in the majority on those original decisions would be quite comfortable issuing a new decision that says, thank you, U.S. Supreme Court.

We have reconsidered and we are ourselves fully confident that what we have just done is an exercise of ordinary judicial review interpreting the language of the new amendment to the Ohio Constitution in what is the ordinary way in which we, as the state Supreme Court, interpret our state constitution and would produce an opinion that substantively was saying the same thing about the existing map, but dressed up in the language of more versus Harper.

But that's not what we have now.

We have a new Ohio Supreme Court, so it's like all bets are off, I suppose, about what will happen when that new set of Ohio Supreme Court justices now has to decide what to do.

Since the case was just sent back to the Ohio Supreme Court this week, there's no timeline on when it will consider the congressional map.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse news Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

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