Tag: represenatives

A Coup in the Ohio House: Lessons to remember about Democrats, treat them like raccoons always digging through your garbage

There is an important lesson that everyone needs to take notice of regarding the Democrat coup in voting for Jason Stephens as Speaker of the House in Ohio. Republicans who hold a substantial majority in the Ohio House thought they had the Speaker role all mapped out, and it was going to be Derek Merrin. Being outnumbered the way they were in the newly elected body, RINOs and Democrats decided under the chaos of the Holidays to join together to “stop far-right policies.” The communist left sees them precisely as education issues centering around the “Backpack Bill” which allocates funding per child, not per district, which is a terrifying concept for education people. So while Republicans were busy with Christmas, the New Year, and family emergencies, 32 Democrats were convinced to vote for the moderate Republicans Stephens for the Speaker position, while 22 Republicans joined them to give them the majority. The drama over the incident was lost behind the national Kevin McCarthy debates, and it was too late when everyone found out what was going on. Republican Representatives in the Ohio House had been suckered and found themselves caught looking, just as a baseball player batting against a good pitcher stands at the plate expecting a slider or a curve ball and were planning their approach exclusively for those pitches. Then came a 90-mile-an-hour fastball right over the plate, the last thing that was expected. And the Democrats suddenly found themselves in power to protect their education policies and other big government union goodies extorted through years of bad government. For more details on this, you can hear from my good friend Jennifer Gross, a current Representative in Ohio, talk about it on the Brian Thomas show on 55 KRC. It’s a really good interview.

I’m sure Jason Stephens can be worked with, but it will make it much harder to do what many of the Republicans in the Ohio House had intended to do. The issue that remains, it will take several more sessions of Representative leadership to remove the premise of the 22 Republicans who are prone to be RINOs and work with Democrats who are essentially the same thing. They call themselves Republicans because they come from districts where people wouldn’t vote for Democrats strictly because of the name. So they pretend to be Republicans when, in fact, they are Democrats philosophically aligned. And the big union position has crossed many lines over the years; most people have friends or family who has benefited from union extortion, so it’s difficult for them to make a logical statement about them now. President Trump is a union supporter, which further complicates things for many RINOs. Suddenly the Republican Party in Ohio had in President Trump a person union members could vote for, so in the wake of his presidency, the old union problems are still problems, and they are doing everything they can to push reality off as far as possible. And by scheming to get Stephens in the Speaker role, the union types, especially the public sector unions, like those in the teaching profession, feel they can protect the money basket, that funding will continue to go to the wreck of the schools that we currently have, which don’t work and are filled with liberal propaganda. These people are going to fight to keep what they have extorted over the years, and when they saw how things were lined up with Merrin, it terrified them. 

Many from that side of things are calling anything to the political right of Karl Marx “far right,” when in truth, the facts are that everything else has been put in place through deception. Most of what Democrats have done over the years, including their relationship with public unions, has involved deception. And my distinction about union representatives is that all union concepts are socialist and communist in their positions, politically. I have known a lot of people, including family members, who were big union supporters. BIG union supporters, specifically because they worked at the Norwood car plant and Fisher Body in Fairfield, Ohio. Those manufacturing plants couldn’t deal with the unionized labor, and they never should. The Department of Labor’s position of being friendly and advocating for unionized labor penalizing companies who make big investments in communities only to have those investments controlled by union slugs talking about Karl Marx phrases as “workers of the world, unite” to always bring extortion to labor production unless the workers got what they wanted. That was always the radical left position, and they sold it to the public wrapped in the American flag as patriotism. But it was always a communist scam, and anybody who spoke against it was considered radical right winged. I’m okay with that, even with family members and their children who grew up thinking unions were “all-American enterprises.” I have always told them to read a book, then they would know better. Unions are not American and are hostile to capitalism. That makes them an enemy of the American economy and is detrimental to any concept of small government. 

And they have one play in the playbook, radicalism, deception, and cheating to keep any power they have acquired over the years. Once companies realize they won’t be able to run their own investments, that unions will, they shut down and leave, which is precisely what happened in Norwood, Ohio, Fairfield, Ohio, and many other Ohio facilities that watched the industry leave the state because of union activity. But that can’t happen in public education because it’s all attached to government jobs, and government never leaves. You can only make it smaller. And the issue in the Ohio House involving the Backpack Bill was a bridge too far for the radical union types. Once education funding starts going straight to the kids, and performance for that money is measured in the success of the end-use product, it’s over for the big union types who own and operate government schools. So they had to do something to protect themselves from reality.   And they did; under cover of chaos, they elected the RINO Republican Jason Stephens to snatch up the Ohio House Speaker position in a surprise upset while people watched the last Ohio State game and made New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think it’s the end of the world, but it was certainly a lost opportunity. Eventually, that opportunity will come around again because that is the trajectory of politics. Many of those 22 RINOs are only in those positions through some form of deception, and people are getting tired of it. They will be replaced with more conservative members in upcoming elections; that is the trend. Critics might call it “far-right,” but I would call it the America we have always loved and are working to get back to. Any other thought on the matter comes from people lost in the definitions created by the radical left anyway and has no merit in reality. Name-calling and deceit is no way to run a political movement, yet that’s all Democrats have. So they played their hand this time and won because nobody took them seriously. Well, take them seriously; they will do anything for power, and understand that while dealing with them. Don’t play nice with Democrats; treat them like the raccoons digging through your garbage late at night and assume they all have rabies. They are not your friends; they are diabolical representatives of Karl Marx and nothing else. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Jennifer Gross Endorses Jim Renacci: The Overton Window in Ohio Politics

I’ve never been a “no government anarchist.” My thoughts on government management have always been a small but active legislature that is contentious, honorable, yet tenacious. Those who have read my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business know I view most group-oriented behavior as a competitive match, not an opportunity for back-slapping and friendship. Our republic form of government has been unique globally, and now that we understand the nature of the attack against our country, we can better understand the threat that has always been there. I have thought about this kind of thing a lot over the last year, especially while visiting Mt. Rushmore. I found that place to be a temple of intellect, and the bookstore they have there is better than a gold mine of infinite wealth. My thoughts on the matter have matured up to the present with this visit to the Statehouse of Ohio. The challenge has been to create as open a market as possible for business and individual rights while still defending the sovereignty of our states and nation from foreign aggression. Which, of course, is hard to do in an open market global economy. The hostile forces to the United States have attacked not the concept of any nation-states but the essence of our very economy. This corporate board room government within a government type of thinking is challenging the very nature of our Republic form of government. Understanding the nature of that attack is precisely why I have been pointing out Ohio politicians I know who are doing the job correctly, in their own unique way, so that we can see examples of how our republic government should look. And a fine example of how government should look can be found in my State Representative Jennifer Gross, whom I recently had a chance to visit at the Statehouse. 

It’s taken me a while to warm up to Jennifer Gross. During a rough election, she ran against my pick for that seat that Mike DeWine had screwed up with emergency power Covid rules. But in the short time Jennifer has been in the seat of the 52nd District; she has brought more of the Tea Party to Columbus than I would have thought possible. When I recently found her after Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, she was very bubbly and enthusiastic, working the floor and talking to many different people. I know that many members of the House and Senate and many other politicians view Jennifer as a disruptive force and find her unsettling. I’ve heard lots of negative talk about her by several in the political class, but I have some other ideas about her that I wanted to confirm. So we spent some time together talking about the Overton Window and its role, which she more than understood. And we also talked about the challenger Jim Renacci whom she is one of the only official members of the Statehouse to endorse openly. I know there are a lot more, but I could see the pressure up close. At this event, where Jennifer and I talked, Governor DeWine walked around talking to people. People in the House and Senate know they need DeWine to sign bills they are working on. And DeWine needs them to, to look like he’s in charge. DeWine wants to take credit for the big Intel chip manufacturing plant coming to Ohio, announced just ahead of the primary for 2022. And he recently signed a controversial Constitutional Carry bill he would never have signed otherwise, except for Republican pressure to act more “conservative.” But the trade-off has been to show public support for DeWine in a very tight race against Renacci and other challengers. So there is a lot of double talk going on around the Governor. But Jennifer is not one of those double-talkers. She is right out in the open about it, and the Governor is well aware. 

And that is the value I see in Jennifer; she openly embraces that role of a disrupter, someone who will challenge the Overton Window on the political spectrum and yank it hard right away from the communism that has seeped into the process over the years. Back to the constitutional republic, we have needed and expected. Politics is not about friendships, it’s about doing the job correctly, and there is a real hunger from Jennifer to do a great job. She intends to represent all the people honestly in her district, including the people who didn’t vote for her, and that was the general vibe I picked up on as she showed me around where her desk was and other features of the House chamber. Things got pretty heated in Columbus as Jeniffer was on the front of legislation to prevent mandated vaccine requirements imposed by the Biden administration. We all learned a lot from that experience. It was a balancing act between a Chamber of Commerce view of the world, allowing corporate environments to impose rules on their workforce for their own needs and the individual’s rights. The workers have their own sovereignty. Jennifer represented the raw Tea Party small-government perspective against forces that didn’t want to be bothered with contentious debate during a government-imposed pandemic. But in hindsight now, after watching Klaus Schwab at the World Government Forum in Dubai recently, we see those vicious bandits plotting the demise of America out in the open. Their mode of attack has been through the corporate boardroom, our Chambers of Commerce, and our mom-and-pop businesses, dancing to ridiculous rules and regulations imposed by unconstitutional commerce clauses. If we ever needed a functioning republic to sort all these things out, it was now. And I have been increasingly happy that there is someone like Jennifer Gross who will ask the hard questions and force people to think out of the box without making it unnecessarily contentious. Jennifer walks that line quite well, I think. 

So how to put businesses first in Ohio and give corporations the autonomy to locate in our state and do great things is the problem of those lofty halls in Columbus. It’s why I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and started passing out copies of it to people I talk to in the political world. We have to defend business and commerce, uphold law and order, and stand by our government and boardroom politics. We have to stand for executive-level leadership in business and politics. But we must also stand for individual freedom and to force the scum and villainy out of our lives without killing the host. Not an easy thing to do, and that is what that book is about, a guide on how to tell good from bad, right from wrong, and unprofitable activity from the driver of all things, profit and value. And to perform that task well, especially in organized government, I find great value in disruptive forces like Jennifer Gross. She will uncomfortably keep everyone honest without turning the dispute into a personal fight. Playing along to get along is not what makes any republic form of government great. But asking the right questions, most often the ones you don’t even know you need to ask, is the key to keeping a government working correctly. And in the world we have today, where the bad guys have been hidden behind the rules and regulations of corporate America and international partnerships, there is a significant need for more disruptive Overton Window types like Jennifer Gross in our grand Statehouse. I am glad to have her there, and I feel proud to have such an engaged representative with plenty of fire to fight the forces at work in our state for duplicity and malice. The need for good government is genuine, more so now than ever. And Jennifer Gross keeps honesty at the front of all conversations for the betterment of everyone. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business