The morning newsletter of the Ohio Capital Journal
Reporting for the People
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By David DeWitt | Editor in Chief
Good morning Ohio!
Educators and advocates are worried that reduced public school funding and a lack of resources has taken its toll, causing teacher shortages both in Ohio and nationwide. But there is hope that opportunities exist, if the state can get behind them.
Getty Images.
By Susan Tebben
Anyone and everyone in the education field is looking for solutions to staff shortages in public schools. While advocates blame the problem on a lack of financial support from the state government, officials are pushing for more creative recruitment strategies.
By Megan Henry
More than 70 Ohio school districts and 15 Christian schools have staff members who are authorized to carry weapons on school grounds, according to state data. A mix of 116 school districts and independent schools total have armed staff members.
By Morgan Trau, WEWS
Ohio Republicans are evaluating whether they have the votes to override Gov. Mike DeWine's veto of legislation requiring a photo ID to vote by mail.
By Megan Henry
Hundreds of Ohioans rallied in Springfield Thursday to support Haitians hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that President Donald Trump can end legal status for Haitians who’ve left the violence in their home country.
COMMENTARY
A view of the death chamber from the witness room at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility shows an electric chair and gurney. (Photo by Mike Simons/Getty Images.)
By Marilou Johanek
When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine held a press conference to say the death penalty should be abolished in the state, the news bulletin landed with a thud. With six months left in office, the impact of his belated call to action is negligible. He knows it.
STATELINE
The big challenges and policy issues that cross state lines.
By Tim Henderson
By 2034 the United States may have more older adults than children; Social Security’s retirement fund could be exhausted by 2032, and the nation will depend on an ever-shrinking workforce of young people.
By Amanda Watford
As law enforcement agencies increasingly use AI, civil liberties advocates, legal scholars, and policing experts warn the technology could amplify surveillance, introduce hidden biases, and make it harder to challenge evidence in court.
By Robbie Sequeira
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision allowing governments to enforce public camping bans without violating the Eighth Amendment — more than 350 cities and 14 states have adopted laws or measures to crack down on street homelessness.
By Amanda Watford
It costs significantly more to incarcerate women than men, adding to the financial burden on state and local correctional systems, according to a new report from the nonpartisan think tank Council on Criminal Justice.
By Tim Henderson
Economic output in the first quarter was highest in Western and Southeastern states and dropped in the agricultural Midwest, according to new figures on Gross Domestic Product released Thursday by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.
By Alex Brown
A new lawsuit challenging a logging project in Oregon threatens to unravel the management plans governing hundreds of millions of acres of federal public land.
THE RUNDOWN
News from other states
By Juan Salinas II, Nebraska Examiner
The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that a lawsuit that sought to stop the state from handing over potentially sensitive voter data to the U.S. Department of Justice is moot and dismissed the appeal.
NATIONAL NEWS
By Jennifer Shutt
Republicans have one more opportunity to use the complex process they did for their “big, beautiful” law and provide billions more in funding for immigration enforcement, but that becomes less likely the more divisions over an elections bill splinter the party.
By Amelia Twyman
U.S. lawmakers from Maryland vowed to continue focusing on affordable housing initiatives for state residents and beyond at a Capitol press conference Thursday, taking stabs at President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign a landmark bipartisan bill.
By Shauneen Miranda
A federal judge last week temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Education’s new definition of “professional” fields of study, which set stricter borrowing caps for graduate students pursuing certain degrees.
By Ashley Murray
Visitors from across the United States traveled to the National Mall Thursday for the opening day of the Great American State Fair, a days-long event that is part of President Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
CATCHING OUR EYE
Churches. Ideastream’s Gabriel Kramer reports, “Greater Cleveland church network demands Citizens Bank end funding for private prisons, ICE jails.”
A network of Cleveland area churches rallied in front of a Citizens Bank branch in University Heights Thursday to demand the corporation cut ties with immigration and customs enforcement jails.
Greater Cleveland Congregations wants Citizens Financial Group to end what the church network says is $2.5 billion in credit agreements with CoreCivic and the GEO Group — two companies that operate private prisons and ICE jails.
GCC said it will withdraw more than $1.7 million from Citizens Bank between 26 church and personal accounts in Cuyahoga County.Going nuclear. The Cleveland.com Editorial Board writes, “The troubling rush to build small Ohio nuke plants without talking about health and safety: editorial.”
As cleveland.com’s Anna Staver recently reported, Southern Ohio is about to become a test bed for a revival of America’s nuclear power industry via “a fleet of small reactors” there starting in 2030.
The reason: to meet skyrocketing electricity demand from the mammoth corporate data centers that flooded into Ohio thanks to the state’s disastrous and poorly considered data-center tax breaks.
Yet where is the parallel effort to ensure adequate health and safety protections for citizens?Injustice Department. The Toledo Blade Editorial Board writes, “Editorial: DOJ leadership alarmingly illegal.”
New leadership that is untethered from the retaliatory obsessions of the President is needed in the U.S. Department of Justice.
A U.S. District Court judge who was appointed by a Republican president has condemned the subpoenas issued against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as “blatantly unlawful.”
We have already opined that President Trump’s current nominee, Todd Blanche, is unqualified for the post of attorney general. It’s not because Mr. Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer. It’s because Mr. Blanche’s actions in office reveal a man motivated entirely by pleasing his boss, not by upholding the principles of U.S. justice.
The best example of Mr. Blanche’s inability to act in the best interests of the United States was his plan to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off Trump’s election-denying goons and position them to carry out another attack on democracy like their attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a date that will certainly live in infamy.
THE POD
THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, FOLKS.
Mahalo!
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