Opinion: Ohio Shouldn't Let a Lame-Duck Legislature Overrule the Governor It Just Elected

Ohio voters elected Amy Acton governor on Tuesday, choosing the physician who ran the state's health department during the first terrifying weeks of COVID-19 over Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former presidential candidate who tried to make the race a referendum on her instead of on his own platform. With returns nearly complete, Acton was running comfortably ahead, and the Associated Press called the race for her Tuesday night. She becomes the first woman ever elected governor of Ohio and the first Democrat to hold the office in 16 years, since Ted Strickland won in 2006.

The margin mattered less than what Acton had to survive to get there. Six years ago, as Gov. Mike DeWine's health director, Acton became the face of Ohio's early pandemic lockdowns, holding daily briefings that made her a minor national celebrity and, for a vocal minority, a target. Armed protesters showed up outside her home in 2020, and she resigned that June. This year, Ramaswamy and allied groups spent more than $200 million attacking her, a sum AdImpact called a state record, including a $4 million ad built around an estrangement in Acton's own family. She won anyway.

"This is a win for all of us."

That was Acton's own summary of the result on election night. Ramaswamy, for his part, called it "a tough night for us here in Ohio." Both were right about the facts; the harder question is what happens between now and Acton's inauguration on January 11.

A Lame-Duck Legislature With an Idea

Ohio's current General Assembly does not go out of existence when voters replace some of its members. Under the state constitution, the 136th General Assembly sits until December 31, and its newly elected successor is not seated until January, after Acton has already taken the oath. That gap is normally a formality. This year, a conservative Columbus think tank, the Buckeye Institute, is using it to urge lawmakers to shift authority away from the governor's office before the new administration takes over. Two bills already introduced would do much of that work: House Bill 1024 would move the Common Sense Initiative, the regulatory-review office that has sat inside the governor's office since 2011, over to the legislature, and House Bill 11 would require lawmakers to sign off on administrative rules that impose compliance costs above $100,000, along with new limits on permanent emergency rulemaking.

Buckeye Institute senior fellow Greg Lawson described the goal in strikingly literal terms: "We're wanting to look around and we're saying, what can we do, to make sure that we put some guardrails up." Hannah Halbert of Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal-leaning research group, called the timing and substance "extreme." The two cannot both be describing a routine governance tweak.

There is a second reason for urgency. Early returns suggest Democrats may have broken the Republican supermajority in the Ohio House, which would mean the incoming legislature, unlike the outgoing one, could not override an Acton veto without Democratic votes. A report on the legislative results notes Republicans needed to hold their 65-seat House supermajority and appear to have lost at least five incumbent seats, with several more too close to call. If the current, larger majority wants to lock in new rules insulating legislative power from a Democratic governor, this lame-duck session is its last chance to do so without having to negotiate.

Ohio Would Not Be the First

This is a familiar sequence, not a new one. In December 2016, after Democrat Roy Cooper narrowly unseated North Carolina's Republican governor, the outgoing legislature called a special session and passed Senate Bill 4, which dissolved the state elections board the governor had long controlled and replaced it with an eight-member board split evenly between the parties, with the legislature naming half its members through a process that the enacted law itself spells out in granular detail, down to which party chairs may submit nominee lists. Gov. Pat McCrory, who had just lost his own re-election bid, signed it before leaving office. Two years later, Wisconsin Republicans ran a nearly identical play against Gov.-elect Tony Evers, rewriting rules on agency authority and gubernatorial appointments in an overnight lame-duck session that outgoing Gov. Scott Walker signed weeks before handing over the office.

In both states, the legislature doing the stripping stayed Republican; only the governorship had changed hands. The lesson those episodes taught, and that Ohio's current push risks repeating, is that some legislators treat the governor's office as a prize that outlasts any single election, to be defended by rule changes once the ballot itself goes the wrong way.

A Reform, or a Preemptive Strike?

Buckeye Institute's defenders have a fair point buried in their argument: House Bill 1024 was introduced in October, before Election Day, and the group frames its proposals as a check on "unelected bureaucrats" rather than on Acton personally. Ohio's legislature has floated versions of these ideas before, under DeWine. None of that is invented.

But North Carolina's and Wisconsin's power shifts were framed the same way, as neutral structural reform, an evenly split elections board here, a rulemaking check there, and the framing did not change what they were understood to do once a court or a newsroom looked past the text to the timing. A bill that has languished for months suddenly becomes urgent in the three weeks between an election a party lost and an inauguration it cannot stop is not a coincidence that deserves the benefit of the doubt. If these changes to rulemaking and regulatory review are genuinely about good government rather than about Amy Acton, nothing is lost by letting the legislature elected alongside her, the one voters just passed judgment on, take them up in the ordinary session that begins in January.

Gov. DeWine, who spent much of 2020 standing next to Acton at the podium insisting he was following the science she gave him, still holds the pen on anything the current General Assembly sends him before he leaves office. He should decline to sign legislation whose primary effect is to narrow the job he is about to hand to his elected successor. Legislative leaders who will expect their own mandate to be respected the next time Republicans win back the governor's mansion have no coherent argument for denying that same legitimacy to Acton now. Ohioans hired a public-health physician, by name, to run their state government. They did not vote for a diminished version of the office stripped down by the people she beat.