Self-serving Blackwell steams ahead with plan to preside over Ohio's ruin

[Algorem]

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/thomas_suddes/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1115804226139061.xml&coll=2

Thomas Suddes
Plain Dealer Columnist

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell wants to do for Ohio's state and local budgets what he's done for Ohio's elections, and - leaving aside his rivals for the governorship - the state's GOP "leaders" seem unwilling or unable to take Blackwell on.

Cincinnati Republican Blackwell, a darling of Ohio's flat-Earth rightists, doesn't take a breath without calculating the political value of respiration. So, with one eye on the Governor's Mansion and the other on headlines in Ohio's papers, he peddles a lunatic plan he claims would cap state and local government spending.

In fact, Blackwell's doubletalk "plan" could actually guarantee a constant rise in state spending from now until the Rapture. But of course, the constitutional amendment Blackwell seeks has nothing to do with budgeting and everything to do with political "gotcha," assuming his Frankenstein does lurch on to Ohio's ballot.

And political "gotcha" - voting "score cards" and the like - is what has landed Ohio in the soup by guaranteeing a play-it-safe legislature. Moreover, Blackwell's automata would stoke a round-the-calendar fund-raising orgy to finance, pro and con, the statewide referendum campaign that any cap-lifting legislative act would require...