The Ohio Republican Party Has Built a Laboratory of Autocracy
In Ohio, the state legislature’s GOP super-majority has been busy, populating the legislative slate with ruinous bills that test the outside bounds of common sense and basic constitutional rights. There is a bill that would require medical personnel to file a “certificate of life” for every fetus in Ohio, after detection of a heartbeat. There’s Ohio’s version of the SAVE Act; a separate bill would ban drag shows. There are bills prohibiting some immigrants from owning Ohio land, a proposed ban on fluoride in drinking water, and a bill to make it more difficult to access prescriptions for the abortion pill mifepristone.
For all but the most extreme Ohioans, it’s an omnibus shitshow. For the Democratic super-minority, it’s “more of the same,” with the addition of some “red meat” for primary season, says Democratic State Rep. Karen Brownlee.
Gerrymandering, the manipulation of electoral boundaries to give one party an unfair advantage, often leads to “safe” districts where elected officials’ greatest political rivals come from the extremes of their own party, pushing officials’ positions farther and farther from the center. Ohio, which was once a swing-state, has become a cautionary tale for what happens when gerrymandering touches off a lawmaking race to the extremes.
Ohioans, collectively, are rather centrist—or by some measures, a little progressive. In 2023, voters legalized marijuana for people 21 and older. The same year, Ohio voters enshrined reproductive freedoms—from contraception to fertility treatments and abortion—in the state’s constitution. Since then, Ohio’s Republican legislators have attempted to undermine voter-mandated reproductive rights.
Ohio House Bill (HB) 754 would create onerous new official paperwork: Within 10 days of finding evidence of a fetal heartbeat, the professional who performed the exam would have to file a “certificate of life” with the local registrar of vital statistics and provide the pregnant patient with a printed copy. It’s a fairly obvious attempt to shift the legal definition of “life”—and more closely monitor fetal death.
In Ohio, there is currently no requirement of a death certificate after an abortion. Under current law, fetal death in other circumstances must be registered with the coroner’s office if a fetal death occurs after 20-weeks’ gestation. Ohio House Bill (HB) 754, if made law, would require all fetal deaths to be registered, by the last physician who attended the fetus or the pregnant woman, and list the cause of death: abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth.
“It’s incredibly cruel to women who have miscarriages and still births, and people who are struggling to get pregnant and maybe have lots of miscarriages and stillbirths, to force them to have paperwork,” documenting all their losses, notes Rachel Coyle, co-founder of How Things Work at the Ohio Statehouse.
It is a savvy time for HB 754’s sponsor, Jean Schmidt, to prove her conservative bona fides to her base. Schmidt, who can be bipartisan and sometimes cosponsors bills with Democrats, is in a tough primary this spring against fellow Republican Dillon Blevins. Blevins has been on something of a political journey: His first campaign against Schmidt his slogan was “God, guns and Trump., did protest over George Floyd’s killing in 2020, and then argued the January 6th insurrection was led by FBI agents. Schmidt only narrowly beat Blevins in her 2024 primary.
Of course, there are other bills targeting reproductive rights. The so-called “SHE WINS” bill, which has already passed the Ohio House, adds a minimum 24-hour waiting period between a patient’s (written) informed consent before elective abortion. The bill would create a way to sue physicians (for up to $100,000 per claim) for failing to comply with the waiting period or failure to provide state-mandated information about abortion’s risks or options for prenatal care benefits or child support.
Ohio’s House also passed a bill requiring in-person visits with medical providers before someone can be prescribed a class of drugs with risk factors that match the abortion pill mifepristone—de facto including many SSRI’s which fit the same risk profile. Opponents note that this effectively bans telehealth delivery of such meds, which will disproportionately affect low-income and rural Ohioans.
In states where representatives are no longer under natural pressure to remain electable by the general population, it becomes easier for bills to become law that undermine the common good.
For the MAHA-minded, Ohio’s Republican legislators are looking to legalize the sale of raw milk for human consumption and normalize skipping kids’ vaccines. HB 561, the CHOICE Act, would require that when schools and daycares notify parents about required vaccines, they also include details of how parents can refuse those vaccines via exemptions. A coalition of medical groups, including the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, wrote that the bill would “weaken long-standing public health protections that help prevent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.”
If the bill passes, during chicken pox outbreaks, schools and day cares will not be able to refuse admission to kids not vaccinated for the disease (as they can now). Schools and daycares could turn away kids who have already contracted chicken pox, measles, mumps, or rubella, but could not turn away kids who are not yet infected with but are unvaccinated against these highly contagious illnesses. Schools that do not comply could lose their charter and daycares could lose their license.
Ohio has experience instituting extreme mandates over educational bodies, with threat of penalties for noncompliance. Last year’s Ohio General Assembly passed a higher-education law that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion in scholarships, DEI-related jobs and offices. Public colleges and universities cannot endorse or oppose “controversial topics,” such as immigration, climate change, marriage, abortion, electoral politics or DEI. In the time since, Ohio universities have closed their LGBTQ centers, Women’s Centers, and multicultural centers; suspended academic programs; and seen double-digit declines in international student enrollment. There is a complaint reporting process for faculty and departments not in compliance and a new bill proposes withholding state funding for a fiscal year from schools not in compliance.
Ohio has also created the nation’s largest K-12 school voucher program, which shifted over $1 billion in public funding to private entities in 2025. A coalition of school districts sued the state. In turn, Ohio House Republican Rep. Jamie Callender sponsored a bill that would deny state funding to school districts involved in such legal action against the state. On top of this battle over purse strings, this year’s General Assembly is considering a bill in the Ohio House and Senate that would bring Ohio’s anti-DEI law to kids, grades K-12.
And then, what could public schools teach? A bill, passed by the Ohio Senate, would allow classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. One bill, already passed in the Ohio Senate and well on its way in the House, would mandate middle and high schools teach students the so-called “success sequence”—that they should graduate, get a job, get married, then have kids, in that order. The state’s version of the Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act (already passed by the Ohio House) would, unlike most other states honoring Kirk with bills about free speech, instead permit public school teachers and higher-ed instructors to “provide instruction on the positive impacts of religion in America,” specifically, accounts of the “influence of Judeo-Christian values on the freedom and liberties ingrained in our culture,” which the bill calls “imperative to reducing ignorance of American history, hate, and violence within our society.”
Ohioans have known for a long time that gerrymandering is a problem. Twice, Ohioans voted for state ballot measures to end gerrymandering. The subsequent Republican-majority Ohio Redistricting Commission manipulated maps, which the state Supreme Court rejected multiple times. In 2024, a statewide vote to switch to a citizen-run redistricting commission failed, in no small measure, because voters were confused by contradictory summary language on the ballot, penned by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who was part of the commission that created and supported the gerrymandered maps.
Despite how secure so many legislative seats are for Republicans, state officials are nevertheless attacking mounting vicious campaigns against voting rights. Late last, year, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill into law that tightened voter verification rules, and by February, 11,000 people in Cuyahoga County had their voter’s registration flagged as not matching state or federal databases. The federal SAVE Act threatens to disenfranchise millions of voters who do not have a passport or whose current legal names do not match their birth certificates—including transgender Americans and women who changed their names at marriage.
Opponents are calling SB 153 (HB 233) Ohio’s SAVE Act. Among a range of actions, including making citizen-led ballot initiatives more difficult and eliminating all ballot drop-boxes, the legislation would require people’s ID to match their voter information exactly—so a person could be forced to vote provisionally if, say, their middle initial was included on their voter registration but not their driver’s license; if they’d changed or hyphenated their last name (75 percent of married Ohio women have); if they’d moved in the past 8 years but did not update their license; or if they don’t have a driver’s license or state ID. Any Ohioan could be flagged at any time, requiring vigilant cross-checking of records. People whose ID doesn’t match could vote provisionally, but if they then failed to provide adequate documentation, their voter registration would be canceled. Ohioans who do not respond to mailed voter confirmation notices within 28 days of a second notice could face prosecution.
Power, held at the extremes, often works to dehumanize vulnerable populations. In Ohio, Republican lawmakers have sponsored bills targeting immigrants and gender-nonconforming people.
At the start of 2025, jails around Cincinnati held about 100 people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; by the end of 2025, ICE had detained 6,600 people in and around Cincinnati.
In such a landscape, Ohio’s SB 172, which the Ohio Senate already passed, would allow immigration arrests and detention by federal, state or local officers, with or without a warrant. A person would only need to be “suspected” of being in the U.S. illegally—a designation that could open Ohioans up to all manner of discrimination. SB 172 would also cut off help by prohibiting public officials and offices from obstructing or interfering with the detention or arrest of someone under such suspicions.
A legislative priority of Ohio House Republicans is HB 1, which would prohibit people associated with certain countries—deemed foreign adversaries by the Secretary of State (including Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela and Russia)—from owning a home or other property within ten miles of critical infrastructure. Such “critical infrastructure” is defined broadly enough to include anywhere with a water or sewage system, access to cell phone towers or phone poles or lines, railroads, electric or gas utilities.
“You’re never going to not be 10 miles from one of those things,” notes Coyle.
The bill has garnered resistance; 102 people and organizations like Asian American Coalition of Ohio and the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce gave opposition testimony. Only seven testified in support (five of which, Justice for Ohio noted, were from out-of-state special interest groups). The advocacy did have some limited results: now Green Card holders and military personnel (originally from these countries) would be allowed to own land in Ohio. Critics note the bill still conflicts with U.S. and Ohio laws governing property ownership, due process, and equal protection.
In some of these bills the only clear, unifying feature is doing harm to groups marked as problematic by Ohio Republicans. A different bill, HB 700, introduced by Rep. Josh Williams, (R-Sylvania Twp) would block Legal Aid or other pro bono justice services that receive state funds from offering any legal services to “any individual who is unlawfully present in the U.S.” HB 700 also (rather unrelatedly) would make it illegal for any entity that receives state funds (including Ohio Medicaid) to provide “gender transition” services to minors. This would prohibit any hospital or medical center with Medicaid patients from providing any puberty-blocking hormones, “cross-sex hormones” or gender reassignment surgery. (The American Medical Association already suggests surgery should generally be deferred until adulthood; puberty blockers and hormone therapy are well-established components of the standard of care for adolescents with gender dysphoria.) HB 798, also introduced by Williams, would allow people to sue institutions that permit people to enter restrooms and changing rooms different from their sex assigned at birth and block changes to sex designations on birth, marriage and death certificates.
Yet another bill, HB 249 (Williams is a co-sponsor), seeks to abolish drag shows, creating a new crime in the state: “unlawful adult cabaret performance.” It would ban “adult cabaret” wherever minors are present and would deem material or performances “harmful” when they are “offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for juveniles.” It also makes two changes to Ohio’s current public indecency laws. First, it would create a breastfeeding exemption (which some Democrats see as a ploy for support for the broader bill). The bill would also modify the term “private parts” in indecency statutes to “private area,” in such a way that, Equality Ohio executive director Dwayne Steward suggests, the bill would also ban sports bras worn while jogging or cheerleading uniforms.
Alas, drag brunch and sports bras are not the largest crises Ohio faces.
Ohio currently ranks 41st in the nation for higher education, 39th for its economy (and 43rd for employment), 34th for healthcare access, 43rd in maternal and infant mortality, and 38th for economic opportunity. In Gen Z parlance, Ohio has become synonymous with a sort of cringe dystopia. It hasn’t always been this way. However, for 28 years in the span since 1992, Republicans have simultaneously held a trifecta of the governor’s seat, the Ohio House and Ohio Senate—even back when Ohio was considered a “purple” state.
But this isn’t only about Ohio. What gets tested in Ohio’s legislative laboratory does not necessarily stay in Ohio.
Justice Louis Brandeis described the states as “laboratories of democracy”testing out novel policies, with successful experiments replicated in other states or at the federal level. Organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, exploit this practice, creating and promoting model bills, which are often tied to corporate interests and make headway first in conservative-majority states. Successful passage of such bills helps normalize and increase the odds of adoption in other states. But “laboratories” like Ohio’s can produce and pass extreme culture war legislation all on their own, modeling what could pass in other states and become the framework for extreme laws nationally.
If there is an upside to extreme policies and computer-aided gerrymandering, Brownlee notes, it might be that Ohio’s Republican super-majority has “been putting out policies that do not reflect their voter’s will for so long now that people are starting to notice.”
Coyle reports seeing some burnout, but also a “huge uptick in people paying attention and getting involved” and “a significant increase in people showing up to testify, calling their legislators.”
But for a long-term fix? Ohio politicians have to be made accountable to all Ohioans again.
“I think everyone in this space will tell you the solution is we’re going to have to go back to the ballot and ban gerrymandering in a different way,” Coyle says, eliminating politicians entirely from the redistricting process and adding “penalties for violating the law.”
To get another ballot measure passed, says Coyle, Ohio would need a Secretary of State, “who would not lie on the ballot” or otherwise sow public confusion about the nature of such a ballot measure, as LaRose so infamously did. The Ohio Secretary of State seat happens to be up for statewide election this year.