We’ve all heard the analogy about the frog who’s unaware the water it’s in is boiling, because the pot was cool when he climbed in and the temperature was raised slowly without the frog noticing tiny incremental temperature bumps. The point is that we get into ridiculously untenable situations not in giant leaps but in series of barely noticeable steps. My fellow Ohioans, we are frogs. And our lawmaking is the boiling cauldron. Now watch as I wend this column from boiling frogs to Art Modell. Once upon a time in this state, we had good faith legislators who proposed and passed laws the way we all grew up learning about the process. You know, the way they described in Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill,” with committee hearings and plenty of discussion. Anyone with an interest had a chance to weigh in, to help refine the laws. I should note here that in journalism, we are transparency advocates. We prize the process they sang about on Schoolhouse Rock. One benefit of passing laws transparently is that bad ideas get shredded by the public and subject matter experts. Controversy builds over bad ideas, and lawmakers pushing them realize they’ll be held accountable and drop them. In a perfect world, only good legislation makes it through that rigorous gauntlet to become law. Somewhere along the way, though, a lawmaker or two realized they had a loophole for getting their controversial ideas passed without public pushback. By inserting an idea or two into the state budget, they could enact laws without hearings, experts or public discussion. We all should have stopped that effort in its tracks when it began. The Ohio constitution has a single-subject rule, requiring separate legislation for separate ideas. But lawmakers lied to us, saying that the terrible ideas they slipped into the budget had financial ramifications and were, in fact, budgetary. Any thinking Ohio Supreme Court justice should have seen through such nonsense and forced lawmakers to follow the constitution they swore oaths to uphold. Instead, they got away with it. So, they did it some more. And more. And more. Because the budget comes along only once every two years, lawmakers learned they could do the same thing in their transportation budget, appropriations bills and in lame duck sessions, piling multiple topics into omnibus bills that clearly broke the law of the land. Again, the Supreme Court should have stopped it, but the justices became as complicit as the governor in signing off on such reprehensible violations of the constitution. I don’t know what the first piece of crooked legislation was, but I do know that today, because the citizens of this state never rose up to stop this unconstitutional behavior, we are awash in terrible laws that have been passed without transparency. No citizen had a chance to speak on them. That’s why I say the water is boiling. Year after year, our lawmakers turned up the heat a little at a time, passing more and more illegal laws, and we, the citizens barely noticed. I won’t provide the long list of laws that have been passed this way. We are publishing a story on cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer to list a bunch of them. But I do want to discuss the sleaziest of them, which is saying something, because there is much competition. Gov. Mike DeWine, the Ohio House and the Senate separately spent much of this year secretly plotting and maneuvering to lend $600 million to the Cleveland Browns for their $2.4 billion Brook Park stadium plan. The team is spending $1.2 billion. The rest is coming from local loans or, possibly, the team itself. As you might have heard. Cleveland has opposed the move and gone to court to stop it, using the Art Modell law. (I told you I’d wend my way to Modell.) That law requires owners of pro sports teams to offer the teams for sale before leaving their cities. Cleveland has been trying to force Browns owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam to sell. In the middle of the night Tuesday into Wednesday, at the 11th hour of writing the state’s next two-year budget, our sleazy lawmakers rewrote the Art Modell law to say it only applies if a team leaves the state. No discussion. No hearings. No chance for Cleveland to object. No shame. Without regard to what Cleveland wants or how much it has spent to protect its interests, the lawmakers acted like rodents, scurrying about at 1:30 a.m. to do their damage. Single subject? How can you possibly argue that the Art Modell law is budgetary? But lawmakers have been violating the constitution for so long and so boldly that they no longer even consider the legality. Making this even more ridiculous? The Modell law – sponsored by then Democrat Dennis Kucinich -- was not passed as a single piece of legislation, either. It was included in a huge appropriations bill, in 1996. That’s how long our Legislature has been violating the state constitution. That’s how long we have put up with it. So, yes, we are clearly the frogs in the time-worn analogy. Will we ever wake up to the fact that we live in a state that is boiling with crooked lawmakers who repeatedly violate their oaths to uphold our constitution? Or will we keep telling ourselves that the water is just fine? I’m at [email protected] Thanks for reading. | 