President Abraham Lincoln warned us: “If our American society and United States Government are overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire for office, this wriggle to live without toil, work and labor from which I am not free myself.”
Are state legislators in Ohio now working to prove honest Abe right? Or are politicians innocently attempting to improve state government operations? Or, perhaps it’s not legislators at all; maybe it’s a ghost at work here.
What am I talking about? A bill winding its way through the Ohio Legislature in this time of budget crunches was amended to spend $1.8 million dollars adding new seats to various state commissions. The skinny is that legislators were looking to provide themselves with a few cushy places to land before being term-limited out of office. What better than serving on a state commission at top-dollar!
The chief of staff for House Republicans says “simply not true.” Of course, I would much rather talk with the legislator that wrote the provision. But the sponsor of the idea may well have been a ghost: no legislator will own up to it.
The effort that was being attempted by legislators, or perhaps by some evil spirit, is scuttled for now, pulled from the bill much less mysteriously than it was tucked into it. Speaker Larry Householder says it was “just causing too much hell.”
Yeah, we know what you mean. Abe Lincoln talked about it. Thank goodness for term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.