He works hard for the kickback

It’s not every week that you see a state’s house speaker arrested by the feds.

The bare facts of the bribery case out of Ohio are pretty striking: The FBI arrested Republican House Speaker Larry Householder, as well as two lobbyists and one of Householder’s advisers, former Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges. The allegation is that, over a series of years, Householder was established as speaker with the help of $60 million in donations to his PAC, in return for passing a nuclear bailout law in July 2019. You can already imagine the wheels turning in Hollywood on this one.

The New Republic has previously covered the unbelievable mess that is state energy politics. Last September (just weeks, incidentally, before Ohio’s nuclear bailout law took effect), Meaghan Winter wrote about the huge amount of energy policy that gets written at the state level and how utilities and energy companies corrupt state politics.

Back when the electricity grid was first built, the federal government decided to allow utility companies to operate as monopolies within their regions under the condition that they would adhere to guidelines put in place by local government commissions. Today, those commissions are “a very dark corner of state government, which most Americans don’t know about,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group for the energy industry.… In recent years, with the emergence of alternative forms of energy, utility companies have had more incentive to buy favor on the state level—and some of them have made brazen attempts to squash perceived threats to their monopoly from third-party solar companies and other forms of clean energy.

Winter was focusing particularly on the state of Virginia, and not all of her piece is applicable to the Ohio case. And it’s worth remembering that most models for how to meet energy needs while rapidly decarbonizing the economy involve some amount of nuclear power. But the reason it’s important to revisit that piece (and other vital reporting on state energy policy) now is to consider the Ohio case in the context of a long history of insufficient transparency in state politics and what that means for energy policy at a pivotal moment. Is this on the extreme end of state corruption? Sure. An unthinkable aberration? Not exactly.

As Election Day approaches, many eyes are on the presidential contest. But some of the most significant races are actually fought on the state level. This has been one of TNR’s big themes in the past year—from Nick Martin’s retrospective on the implications of GOP control of the states over the past decade, to Kate Aronoff’s piece on the remarkable fossil fuel–regulating power of Texas’s Railroad Commission. We’ll have more on this topic in the coming days and weeks.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor