Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, took office as a Tea Party hero, unafraid of the union bosses and welfare lobbyists who would fight his efforts to shrink Ohio’s bloated government. He leaves as an honorary union member who was inducted to a hospital lobbying group’s Hall of Fame.
Kasich beat incumbent Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in 2010 by promising to deliver job growth with smaller government, labor reform, and opposition to Obamacare. Kasich “was in the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party,” he said during the campaign, leveraging a reputation for fiscal conservatism built when he was House Budget Committee chairman in the 1990s.
But after eight years with Kasich in the governor’s office and Republican supermajorities in both houses of the Ohio General Assembly, Ohio’s government spending is higher than it’s ever been. Medicaid enrollment has exploded, and private sector job growth trailed the national average every month from 2013 through 2017. Ohio’s union laws, municipal tax system, and unfunded public pension liabilities remain among the nation’s worst.
What happened? In 2010, Kasich saw a path to the White House for a governor with a record of taking on the left-wing special interests that make reform so difficult; by the end of 2011, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., was on that path in front of him.
Walker’s public employee union reforms shifted power from union bosses back to taxpayers, but the similar Ohio Senate Bill 5 was overturned at the ballot box. As unions spent $40 million on their campaign to kill Senate Bill 5, Kasich and his allies focused on minimizing the harm he’d suffer for signing it.
Instead of plotting an incremental approach to labor reform, Kasich made it clear that any legislative push for a right-to-work law protecting Ohioans from forced union fees was a dead end and chased donors away from a grassroots right-to-work initiative.
While four of Ohio’s five neighboring states adopted right-to-work, Kasich grumbled that the policy was divisive and unnecessary. As a reward, Kasich was named an honorary member of the union whose anti-right-to-work billboards can be seen along highways across Ohio.
“Let me just say, it’s a long way from Senate Bill 5,” Kasich said as he modeled his new International Union of Operating Engineers Local 18 jacket during an August 2018 press conference. “I wasn’t going to say that, but what the hell.”
Kasich has moved a long way to the Left on other issues, too. The governor has signed numerous anti-abortion and pro-Second Amendment bills, but he has vetoed two anti-abortion heartbeat bills since 2016, called for an AR-15 ban last spring, and recently vetoed a gun owner self-defense bill.
Kasich bought himself a place in the Ohio Hospital Association Hall of Fame by unilaterally implementing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (a decision that has cost taxpayers $20 billion in five years) and then lobbying against Obamacare repeal. Kasich also vetoed a modest Medicaid Health Savings Account program and refused to implement a healthcare price transparency bill he signed into law.
When the legislature wouldn’t back his proposed agricultural run-off regulations, Kasich imposed them via executive order. He vetoed a freeze of state “green energy” mandates and spent years pressuring the general assembly to dramatically increase taxes on oil and gas drilling.
John Weaver, who ran Kasich’s 2016 campaign and bragged about voting for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke in last year’s Senate race, is trying to sell Kasich as the conservative alternative to President Trump. If he can convince any donors to the right of the average MSNBC host, Weaver will have earned the $200,000-plus he’s siphoned from Kasich’s super PAC since 2017.
After the Monday morning swearing-in of Republican Gov.-elect Mike DeWine, Kasich will be free to follow his presidential dreams wherever they lead him. DeWine is unlikely to fight for the reforms Kasich turned against, but Ohioans can at least hope he’ll spend less time attacking the legislature from the Left.
Jason Hart, a lifelong Ohioan, is a freelance health and labor policy analyst in central Ohio.
