Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Equal Districts Coalition, a group of over 30 Ohio advocacy organizations and labor unions engaged in the redistricting process, released a statement on Wednesday after a panel of federal judges chose to leave decisions regarding Ohio's State House and Senate redistricting process to the Ohio Supreme Court for the time being.

"Today, Ohio voters won yet another round of the redistricting fight as a panel of federal judges rightfully chose to leave decisions involving Ohio's constitution and Ohio's legislative districts up to Ohio's highest court for the time being," said Katy Shanahan, a representative from the Equal Districts Coalition who earned both her law degree and graduate degrees from The Ohio State University, where she wrote a thesis on redistricting and which entity draws the fairest maps.

The Ohio Supreme Court on last Thursday struck down state House and Senate redistricting maps approved by the seven-member Republican-dominated Ohio Redistricting Commission for the fourth time in under three months, ruling 4-3 that the maps are unconstitutional and that they violate anti-gerrymandering rules approved seven-years-ago by Ohio voters.  The discrepancy has caused a delay in the election of Ohio lawmakers, which will not be on the May 3 primary ballot in Ohio, an almost unprecedented measure in the history of voting in Ohio.

The court said that the maps are not much different than the previously three submitted sets of maps and that, again, they fail to pass constitutional muster. Simply put, the court said that the maps are drawn to make it easier for Republican candidates in Ohio state House and Senate district races to win office over Democrats, both the House and Senate currently controlled by Republicans.

The court ordered the commission, which includes Gov Mike DeWine, House Speaker Robert Cupp, auditor Keith Faber, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, to approve yet another set of maps by a May 6 deadline. And it denied requests by the League of Women Voters of Ohio and other plaintiffs who filed suit against the commission for failing to abide by the court’s orders to demonstrate why it should not be held in contempt of court.

The Equal District Coalition said that the decision by the federal judicial panel not to intervene gives Republicans another chance to come up with fair and legal maps.

The Equal Districts Coalition is the largest redistricting coalition in Ohio, with over 30 member organizations. It includes the Ohio State Conference of the NAACP, Ohio Organizing Collaborative, OAPSE/AFSCME, Ohio Farmers Union, AFSCME Ohio Council 8, the Ohio Environmental Council, Innovation Ohio, the Ohio Student Association, OFUPAC, ProgressOhio, All On the Line-Ohio, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, Ohio Council of Churches, NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, URGE – Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, LEAD Ohio, the Ohio Women's Alliance, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, Ohio Education Association, CAIR-Ohio, Campus Vote Project, For Our Future Ohio, Ohio Unity Coalition, Equality Ohio, The Freedom Bloc, and more.

Pictured are former Ohio congresswoman Mary Rise Oakar and 11th congressional district candidate Nina Turner, a Cleveland Democrat

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

CLEVELAND, OHIO – Former Congresswoman, Mary Rose Oakar (OH-20) has announced her endorsement of Nina Turner in Ohio's 11th Congressional District primary. Her enthusiastic support comes on the heels of the Cleveland Plain Dealer's endorsement and following a flood of corporate and dark money interests into the Democratic primary.

The PD editorial board said via its endorsement, which was published in Sunday's print edition and at Cleveland.com, the online affiliate of the PD, that Turner, 54, and whom the Plain Dealer also endorsed for last year's special primary election to replace Fudge, is the better candidate and that "we endorsed Nina Turner last year, and do so again this year."

A former Ohio senator and former Cleveland councilwoman, Turner faces current Congresswoman Shontel Brown as the May 3 Democratic primary nears.

Oakar was unwavering in her support of Turner

"Nina is a leader and that's what we need in greater Cleveland, a fighter for the people who is committed to lifting working families," said Oakar. "Nina will be tough and she will care, not just go along to get along. Nina Turner is the most qualified and capable person we can send to Congress. I would love to have her as my Congresswoman. I will be proud to have her represent me and my family."

Turner expressed her gratitude for Oakar's support, stating "Rep. Oakar's longstanding work and dedication to our district's working families is truly remarkable. I am humbled to have her continued support."

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com

By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief

CLEVELAND, Ohio –The editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, has endorsed former Ohio senator and Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner in the Democratic primary for the race between Turner and current Congresswoman Shontel Brown in Ohio's largely Black 11th congressional district, which includes Cleveland and several of its eastern suburbs of Cuyahoga County. The primary election is Tues., May 3.

Brown, of Warrensville Hts, the former county councilwoman and chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, defeated Turner, her closet opponent in the crowded 2021 special primary, by 4,269 votes and is now the incumbent in the seat formerly held by Marcia L. Fudge, who is now  President Joe Biden's secretary of housing and urban development. (Elizabeth Sullivan is the director of the newspaper's editorial board, the audio of the endorsement interview of  which is available in full at the end of the PD story).

The editorial board said via its endorsement, which was published in Sunday's print edition and at Cleveland.com, the online affiliate of the PD, that Turner, 54 and a Cleveland resident, and whom the Plain Dealer also endorsed for last year's special primary election to replace Fudge, is the better candidate and that "we endorsed Nina Turner last year, and do so again this year."

Turner, says the editorial, "has the passion, experience, toughness and out-of-the-box thinking to give Cleveland a powerful, socially committed and independent congressional voice, much in the spirit of the late U.S. Rep. Lou Stokes, who successfully fought for this majority minority congressional district."

Also a Civil Rights attorney, Stokes was Ohio's first Black congress person. He retired from Congress in 1998  after serving 15 terms in the House of Representatives, and died in 2015. His younger brother and only sibling, the late car B. Stokes, was the first black mayor of Cleveland, and of a major American city.

The Turner campaign quickly embraced the endorsement and said in a press release on Monday that if she wins the congressional seat and is sent to Washington she will fight for poor people and the middle class.

"I am grateful to have the endorsement of my hometown paper yet again," said Turner. "As the editorial board noted, greater Cleveland must have a representative with the vision and tenacity to tackle the systemic issues that have long plagued our communities. The reasons I ran last time are the same that motivate me today – Congress needs an agenda that centers the poor, the working poor and the barely middle class. My run for Congress isn't about any one person. It is part of bringing Cleveland into the bigger fight against the powerful interests that are stopping progress."

In large part the politically divisive congressional race in the heavily Democratic 11th congressional district is seen as a contest between Brown and the progressive Turner, who is also a former Cleveland Ward 1 councilwoman, and between the moderate and progressive factions of the Democratic Party.

Both of them had a long list of endorsements for last year's special primary election that Brown, 46, won, including labor unions, mayors, congress people, and city, county and state lawmakers. Among others, Turner was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has endorsed her again this year, U.S. Rep Alexandra Ocasio-Cortex of New York, and Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, who has since retired as mayor. Six of Ohio state lawmakers out of the greater Cleveland area also supported her. Brown's endorsements included Columbus Congressman Joyce Beatty, Hillary Clinton and U.S. House Minority Whip Rep James Clyburn of South Carolina.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper in Ohio and in the Midwest, and the most read independent digital news in Ohio. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview. CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Pictured is Ohio state Senator Dr. Vernon Sykes, an Akron Democrat and co-chair of the Ohio Redistricting Commission

clevelandurbannews.com and www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief. Coleman is a former public school biology teacher and a seasoned Black political, legal and investigative reporter who trained as a reporter at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio for 17 years.

COLUMBUS, Ohio-For the fourth time in less than three months, the Ohio Supreme Court has struck down state House and Senate redistricting maps approved by the seven-member Republican-dominated Ohio Redistricting Commission, ruling 4-3 on Thursday that the maps are unconstitutional and that they violate anti-gerrymandering rules approved seven-years-ago by Ohio voters.

The court said that the maps are not much different than the previously three submitted sets of maps and that, again, they fail to pass constitutional muster. Simply put, the court said that the maps are drawn to make it easier for Republican candidates in Ohio state House and Senate district races to win office over Democrats, both the House and Senate currently controlled by Republicans.

The court ordered the commission, which includes Gov Mike DeWine, House Speaker Robert Cupp, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose, to approve yet another set of maps by a May 6 deadline. And it denied requests by the League of Women Voters of Ohio and other plaintiffs who filed suit against the commission for failing to abide by the court’s orders to demonstrate why it should not be held in contempt of court.

"It was clear that these maps would be invalidated from the moment the majority hijacked our historically transparent process," said state Sen. Dr. Vernon Sykes of Akron, co-chair of the redistricting commission and one of only two Democrats on the commission along with House Minority Leader Allison  Russo. "The Supreme Court has given us another chance and plenty of opportunities to fulfill our duty to end gerrymandering, as voters have demanded. I sincerely hope that Republicans will finally commit to bipartisanship and work with Democrats to draw maps in an open, transparent manner."

Sykes is the only Black on the commission.

The controversy has caused a delay in what would have been a May 3 primary in Ohio that included state House and Senate district races, those races now on hold, though congressional and statewide and other races will go forward as planned, including a hotly contested gubernatorial race and a high profile U.S. Senate race.

A former lieutenant governor and the first woman elected chief justice of the court, Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor , a Republican, joined with the three Democratic justices for a fourth time to reject the controversial state House and state Senate district maps breaking ranks with fellow Republicans on the bench. The remaining three Republican justices dissented, including Justices Sharon Kennedy and Patrick DeWine, the governor's son who refuses to recuse himself from redistricting rulings while doling so from any contempt hearings that might involve his father.

Kennedy is running Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, for the chief justice seat that is open since O'Connor, notwithstanding the primary election. Per state law, O'Connor, the court's first female chief justice, could not run for reelection because she is at least 70 years of age.

Gov DeWine is also running for reelection, as is LaRose, who seeks to hold on to his secretary of state seat. Other than three seats on the state supreme court, the Republicans hold all of the statewide offices in Ohio, and have done so since 2010 when John Kasich, who went on to win a second term and was succeeded by DeWine, ousted then Democratic governor Ted Strickland from office.

The commission, which approved the maps 5-2 and along party lines, has repeatedly been accused of approving racist and unconstitutional four-year state legislative district maps by plaintiffs in lawsuits pending before the court. The maps were to take effect for four years because Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature could not agree on 10-year maps.

The court,  on Jan 12.,  struck down the first set of GOP drawn maps, and did the same thing for the second, third and fourth maps respectively, Thursday's Supreme Court  decision the latest in what has become a redistricting maps stand-off between the commission and the Ohio Supreme Court, and more specifically Justice O'Connor.

The plaintiffs in the three lawsuits who convinced the court to reject the maps the first time around, including the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, say basically the same thing. They argue that the maps are unconstitutional because they are drawn to carve state legislative districts where voters collectively favor Republicans over Democratic candidates for elections to the Ohio House and Senate. This, says the plaintiffs, is blatantly racist and against the 2015 voter approved referendum that changed redistricting rules.

The court's majority opinion in which the first set of maps were deemed illegal was written by Justice Melody Stewart, a Democrat and the first Black elected to the court. A former 8th District Court of Appeals judge out of Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, Stewart's opinion on behalf of the majority says the maps the first time around disproportionately favor Republicans.

Those preferences, Stewart wrote, were 54% for Republican candidates and 46% for Democratic candidates over the past 10 years and since the last census report.

“The commission is required to attempt to draw a plan in which the statewide proportion of Republican-leaning districts to Democratic-leaning districts closely corresponds to those percentages,” wrote Justice Stewart. “Section 6 speaks not of desire but of direction: the commission shall attempt to achieve the standards of that section."

The court heard oral arguments in December relative to three lawsuits that challenge the first set of Republican-approved state legislative district maps that the court rejected, controversial maps approved in commission, which  is accused of  approving illegally drawn maps that are racist and that favor Republican candidates for office.

Such maps determine state district boundaries for elections of state representatives and state senators in Ohio, and in a discriminatory fashion, the lawsuits say. Currently, Republicans control the Ohio House of Representatives and the Ohio Senate, which is partly why the ORC is largely Republican.

An amendment to the state constitution approved by voters in 2015 changed the way the process for drawing congressional and state legislative maps occurs and created the ORC, though districts are still drawn initially in conjunction with population dynamics in response to the U.S. Census every 10 years. The year 2020 marked 10-years since the last applicable census and, accordingly, this year is the first time that the new process that employs authority to the ORC to step in for the state legislature when a partisan conflict ensues over the maps has been put to a test.

The first lawsuit for which the state Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December was filed by the ACLU primarily on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the second by the National Democratic Redistricting Committee on behalf of a group of Ohio voters. A third suit was brought by plaintiffs who say the maps dilute Black Muslim votes. It was filed by the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, the Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Ohio Environmental Council.

All three of the lawsuits were filed in the Ohio Supreme Court and allege in large part that the ORC purposely gerrymandered the maps to help Republicans win elections over Democrats for state House and Senate races with the plaintiffs in the third lawsuit claiming also that the maps have racial implications that raise constitutional questions since a majority of Black and Muslim voters and voters of color in general are Democrats.

"OOC believes that the maps currently under scrutiny by the state's highest court are unconstitutional because of the ways they dilute the power of voters in Black, brown, immigrant, and Muslim communities through "cracking and packing,"  a spokesperson for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative said in a statement to clevelandurbannews.com and www.kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's Black digital news leader.

Ohio lawmakers are term-limited. State law restricts state legislators in Ohio from holding office for more than eight years, and only after a four year period out of office.