It's my party, and I'll defy if I want to

Two heads are better than one – and so are two political parties with real clout. A trio of recent developments in Ohio state government help bear that out. All three should have been addressed when Republicans enjoyed total control in Columbus – but weren’t.

-- The General Assembly finally has made it easy for citizens to check online to see how their state Senate and House members are voting. The legislation Web site now will list who voted for and against each measure.
Rep. Jennifer Garrison, a second-term Democratic lawmaker from Marietta, sponsored two bills in the previous session that would have made such changes. Neither saw the light of day, because GOP leaders had no need to consider input from Democrats. Now that Democrat Ted Strickland is governor and Republicans have lost their veto-proof majorities in the legislature, they’ll be paying more attention.
In this case, House Speaker Jon Husted, R-Kettering, gets credit for working with Garrison to make the changes. It’s still a clunky process: Click the “Go” button on the page’s “Find Bills or Resolutions by Number” box, open the bill or resolution’s text, click the “Votes” link in the left-hand column, then click on “Details.” But it’s better than nothing.

-- New state Treasurer Richard Cordray, a Democrat, is suggesting that Ohio “securitize” its tobacco-settlement payments with private investors to get billions in up-front cash and lessen its risks if the tobacco firms making the payments run into financial trouble in the future. Sound familiar? It is. Several years ago, then-Treasurer Joe Deters, a Republican, proposed the same thing, but his fellow GOP officeholders shot down the idea – even though several other states had taken this prudent course. Hello?

-- One of Strickland’s first major acts after becoming governor was to create a quasi-independent, five-member panel to nominate candidates for the governor’s appointments to fill judicial vacancies. Previously, governors had simply taken the advice of political party officials on such appointments. This could help open up the process, both to public scrutiny and to a wider field of qualified candidates.
But guess who had been advocating just such a reform for nearly a decade? Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyer. Despite the fact that he’s backed by the Republican Party (judicial elections are technically nonpartisan, however), Moyer was repeatedly rebuffed when he called on former Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican, to set up such a panel. The chief’s head must be spinning by now.