Shownotes
We unpack what our Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is signing...
- Thanks again to our guest Bernie Moreno, Candidate, U.S. Senate Ohio who was on the podcast last week
- The Ohio biennial budget is $86 billion - 1200 pages long
- One major change is the transfer of education policy control from the state board of education to a cabinet-level Tsar of education.
- We question the sustainability and effectiveness of centralized power and argue for a more localized approach.
- We discuss the benefits and opposition to voucher programs in Ohio, comparing public education without alternatives to a monopoly.
- The importance of education in inner-city, poor neighborhoods is emphasized, along with the need for school choice.
- We criticize the current education system as a monopoly and discuss the dangers of government-controlled education.
- Tax changes in Ohio's budget bill are mentioned, including a simpler income tax system and exemptions for low-income families.
- The conversation shifts to the topic of fuel taxes and the potential impact of transitioning to electric vehicles.
- The extension of maternity leave for state employees is discussed, highlighting the financial burden on taxpayers.
- The conversation touches on government employees taking extended time off work and the lack of accountability.
- Governor DeWine's veto of a bill banning universities from mandating vaccines is criticized, citing concerns about COVID vaccines.
- The conversation also covers a plea agreement involving Hunter Biden in a gun case, which fell apart due to controversy.
Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.
Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.
Brett Johnson is an award-winning podcast consultant and small business owner for nearly 10 years, leaving a long career in radio. He is passionate about helping small businesses tell their story through podcasts, and he believes podcasting is a great opportunity for different voices to speak and be heard.
Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.
info@commonsenseohioshow.com
Copyright 2024 Common Sense Ohio
Transcripts
All right, here we are. It is time for Common sense Ohio, July 28, 2023. You get towards the end of July and the summer is already over. The kids are thinking, All right, if you're playing football, it's about time for that hot August 1 start date where you got the conditioning and the two days. It brings back memories, Norm.
[:I loved it.
[:Yeah. It was something you dreaded all summer, but if you were smart, you started right away running and getting in shape for it. I used to actually wear my helmet and run starting first day of summer. I'd run every morning and put my helmet on, and everybody thought I was crazy. But then come August, I didn't have to get used to it.
[:Yeah, I did the same thing. I wanted so bad to make Varsity Football, I was running 17 miles a day.
[:Wow. Well, that's a way to make sure you don't make Varsity Football because you get hurt.
[:Well, what they wanted What they ended up doing was saying I should run track or.
[:Cross country. That's what I thought you were going to say. If you're doing 17, why are you going to get beat up in football?
[:What are you, foolish?
[:Yeah.
[:All right, well, anyway, enough football talk, enough preseason conditioning talk. It is Common Sense Ohio 7-28-23. There's lots to talk about, lots to make sense of. And coming on the heels of our special guest last week. I got a couple of ideas for some more guests, guys. We'll have to see. I think maybe a debate amongst candidates would be interesting.
[:He was a great guest.
[:Really.
[:Really impressive guy. Yeah, he was. And took all of our questions to heart.
[:And just so everybody knows, we tell everybody at the beginning, Hey, look, we'll give you the same instructions we give everybody or the same comments we give everybody, which is, look, if you don't want us to cover something, let us know. Or if you get done with this and you think you guys are a bunch of a holes, then we can e don't have to publish it. He just said, ask me whatever you want. I got no filter. I got nothing I'm worried about. You can cover any topics. And that's what we did. I had no plan for that, Norm. You probably did. But I just thought, well, I'm going to ask him whatever comes to mind as we.
[:Go along. It certainly wasn't a love fest. Yeah, no. It wasn't. I mean, we asked what we wanted to ask, and he was there. So it was great. And then he headed down to some county fair.
[:He's in a Ross County Fair down in Chile. It's great.
[:He failed to take my election advice, which is, listen, if you're going to run for statewide office in Ohio, you got to spend at least one night at the state fair in one of those animal barns like Governor Rhodes always did. And you could tell Bernie, that was just a bridge too far for him.
[:Well, he hasn't done it yet.
[:He wasn't prepared mentally for that.
[:True.
[:Anyway, so that's in the past. If you happen to be a candidate and you happen to be listening to Common sense Ohio, like everybody else does, then certainly give us a shout. We'd love to hear your thoughts and what you can do for the country and the state and the city or whatever you're running for, we're happy to at least hear you out because that's what we do here. We don't squelch speech, we don't try to influence what people say. We take it on. And if we don't agree and it doesn't make common sense, we'll push back, but we'll do it in a friendly, academic way. We won't scream names at you. Anyway, look us up at common senseohioshow. Com if you want to do that. Other than that, without further ado, Norm, why don't we hit it? I know there's lots to talk about.
[:Yeah, there is. There's a bunch. Steve, I just want to bounce off something you just said. Recently, I heard that great inaugural speech by John F. Kennedy. The reason I was listening to it was RFK's Junior's testimony about censorship. I don't know why, but JFK's speech came to mind and he said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And we have come so far from that mindset now, that with our entitlement society that it rocked me back on my heels. I just thought, man, what was gigantic change has happened in the last 65, 70 years to Americans, in general, American citizens thinking now that over 50 % of Americans get some monthly check, whether it's social security or some other benefit that we really have changed our psychology. We're far more socialist in terms of our government than Democrats like JF A ever conceived.
[:They just blew me away. The problem, though, is they planted the seeds for this. This is the old LBJ Great Society.
[:Fdr.
[:Well, you're correct. Go back to FDR. But then LBJ, when he was... A lot of people don't know this, but LBJ was a henchman for FDR. He was one of the righthand guys. When he got elected, he thought, All right, this is my opportunity. Norm, you and I have read that book. They talked a lot about how this all occurred. The notion that we can engineer a society by government entitlements and government giving and fixing poverty forever is so philosophically illogical when it plays out. It just can't work. It cannot work. Those guys, even though Kennedy was preaching that song, wrong. And I get it was LBJ. It was after Kennedy that this really took root. But the seeds were planted back then. And now the problem is the roots have grown sideways to the point where it's really hard to undo. I mean, what do you do at this point? You almost have to have a complete utter collapse and a start over of those entitlement systems. And nobody wants to talk about it. Trump's not talking about it. Nobody's talking about getting rid of or doing anything to fix it because it's just politically taboo to do it.
[:But we're.
[:Going bankrupt.
[:Yeah. And now that's a good way to set up some analysis of this month's Ohio budget bill, the biannual budget bill, had just a ton of massive changes for the citizens of Ohio bundled into that. It was 1200 pages. It is a biannual budget of 86 billion. So that's $43 billion the state will spend per year for the next two years. And what is in there is truly revolutionary in terms of restructuring a lot of state government. There's a lot of pork in there. There are some great tax cuts in there, so it's a mixed bag. But we should bang through that a little bit coming off that discussion we just had. If you guys don't mind, I'll just go through them and then I'll go through one topic and then we can discuss it and then we can keep going. I've got about eight bullet points on the budget, and all of them are really gigantic, including some vetoed items that DeWine... That came to him in the budget bill, and he has line item veto power and he vetoed some stuff. So the first one I think that we should talk about is he took away the budget bill and this is something DeWine wanted.
[:He took away education policy for the state of Ohio from the half elected, half appointed state board of education. They are now, by virtue of this budget bill, only going to retain power over teacher licensing and district borders, educational school district borders, and disputes over those borders. Other than that, all books, syllabus, training, everything to do with education will now reside with a cabinet level Tsar of education in a restructured Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. And they gave a billion dollar increase for public schools, public school funding as part of this. So there was a if you will, a carrot and a stick. But it's remarkable that now the governor will control educational policy rather than a partially elected state board. So that's a big one.
[:Has a Tsar ever worked in our history? That concept of a drug Tsar, agricultural Tsar. I don't recall that ever being a successful formula.
[:For so many reasons, it's just ill fated. Look at it this way. When I argue as a socialist, I always make this argument, and I'm sure there's somebody's got better arguments, and maybe somebody could even refute it. But I always go, it's like, all right, I get it. Your candidate I'll just give you this. Your candidate is going to be awesome. Your candidate is going to be the best equipped. This person is a superhero. Guy or gal, I don't care. This person's a superhero, can implement all of this, can engineer the economy, can make all decisions on what the best education is, can do all of this. But what about when that person is gone? Who's going to take that place next? Obviously, I'm not giving them that their candidate is able to do those things. But even if you could assume the best case scenario about the person, the horse, their backing, the fact is the next person is not going to be able to do it. That's a superhuman job. And I think that's where you're getting at, Brad. When has one person ever been able to do all this? And it's like the old Howdy Mandel show.
[:You want to make it the.
[:Millionaire show? Yeah, I know what you mean, though.
[:But you got three lifelines.
[:And.
[:The one that seemed to be almost always right was when you asked the audience, when you took a poll of the collective, what does everybody know? I'm not arguing for a majority rule or something like that, but when you tap into human potential of the individual, it is amazing what happens. And then if you scale that to the local level, wouldn't they know how to educate their own kids? Wouldn't they know what's best for their local economy? I mean, it's not some jackass sitting in Columbus, Ohio, that's dictating what should happen down in Portsmouth or even smaller town. And it's certainly not some jackass in DC dictating what's going to happen across the country. I mean, it's lunacy. In history, think of like the... Norm, it would be like the greatest Roman Emperor, say a Caesar.
[:Well, he's a good example.
[:And it lasted for him.
[:Julius.
[:Yeah. Great. And he got killed, but everybody after or before, it's like, did the power just corrupted him. Yeah. That's the problem.
[:I would observe a couple of things as a former lobbyist, although, hey, anybody out there wants to hire me, I'm available. But you could go to the state board and there was monthly opportunities for the public to step up to the mic and talk to the, I think it was something like 26 members, something like that. It's a very large state board of education. And as I mentioned, partially elected on the ballot statewide and partially appointed by whoever is the sitting governor. But the public had an opportunity to come before the state board, complain or praise or urge some particular policy. That will be gone now because the state board is just going to do licensure and talk about their powers are diminished to basically some rudimentary things. So there's not going to be a way to address and redress education policy in Ohio unless you make an appointment with the new director of the Department of Education. Good luck getting face time with him or her. Number two, obviously, the winds of political change in what policy will be in effect will come and go every time a governor is elected. Like, M ich McConnel said to Chuck Schumer when they were doing an end run on appointments.
[:One day we'll be in power and you'll regret that you changed the rules. That was Harry Reid, excuse me, not Schumer. And sure enough, right now Governor De Wines is going to have this vast power over education policy. But then when he's no longer in office, if the other party becomes governor, they're just going to completely flip. And what we're going to have is policy being whipsawed back and forth in huge, gigantic ways, depending on the winds of politics, rather than a widely elected, partially appointed state board that would tamp down the excesses if you want to look at it that way. Policy will become like it is currently in DC with the Department of Labor or Transportation or the EPA or any other thing, depending on whether the President is liberal or conservative. So put on your seatbelts, Ohio, and you're in for a ride, I think.
[:Yeah, the kids are going to be the ones that get hurt the most.
[:That's the thing. Well, you won't know what policies are going to be in effect in five or six years. Principles and local school boards will be like, Well, depending on who gets elected, we may or may not be able.
[:To handle them. Well, the Union's... Think of all the fertile ground for corruption here with all of it. And then who's going to dictate policy on how's it going to happen and where's the money going to change hands? It's not going to be directly to be indirectly. And it's going to be everybody... Like you said, Brett, the kids are going to suffer and the parents who are trying to raise their kids in a public education system are going to suffer. My kids are grown just about out of school. I would not put them in public school these days. I just wouldn't do it. I would avoid it. And I've watched it change even in the last decade or decade and a half. I've watched it decline.
[:It's top down. Teachers, I think, are still trying to do the best that they can. Their boots on the ground, w here it's the administration. You've got school systems that the administration is larger than the teacher body.
[:That.
[:Doesn't.
[:Make sense. Well, it's like everything. The power is going to just go to where it's naturally can. The more Tsars you put in place that can grab the power up top, they're going to take it. Why wouldn't they?
[:Why wouldn't they? It's given to them.
[:They're going to plodder. And you're talking about entitlements, Norm. I mean, look, now we've created yet a whole another structure, a whole another set of employees, a whole another government department, or expanded the one that we had, to the point where now it's got to sustain itself. So where do those dollars come from? And when people talk about shutting down the government... There are more people working for the... I think Bernie was talking about this, too. The number of people working for the government now, it's almost staggering. It's almost staggering.
[:Yeah.
[:It is. I'll shut up about it.
[:Well, I think you're right in terms of the single greatest employer in the country, and the one that is adding jobs to the greatest extent is the federal government. So I think you're right. Voucher program. This is another epic thing in the education policy area. So Ohio used to have some experimental voucher programs, such as in Cleveland, for example. I'm going back 30, 40 years. And it was limited to indigent families, and it was limited to just a few school districts as a pilot project. Under the budget bill, it is expanded now to virtually every single family in Ohio. And of course, the three of us missed out on all this. Here we go. It's almost like debt forgiveness. My wife and I, we sent our sons to private school at great expense. We're talking $8,000 to $12,000 per child per year to put them into parochial school. And we didn't get, obviously, any discount on our Ohio and local taxes. We had to pay that just as if they were going to public school. And I support public schools, but we made the choice. At any rate, this voucher program now would allow parents the household income of under $135,000, which is 450 % of the federal poverty level is $135,000 a year times 4.5. You will get $8,000 and $400 per student in high school, and you'll get $6.262 for each child you have going to an elementary school.
[:And you can spend that voucher on private schools and charter schools. And this is, I believe, going to kick in in 2024 is when it's going to take off. Perhaps. I don't know. I don't know all the ins and outs. Maybe this coming school year, but I'll bet it's 2024 because they got to set up this infrastructure. But, I mean, wow. So you got two kids in Catholic high school, for example, or a Jewish high school or whatever high school or Columbus Academy, that's $17,000 you'll get to spend. Instead of coming out of your checking account, you'll get a voucher from the state of Ohio for that amount, which is if it's two kids $8400 per kid, that's huge.
[:Yeah, that's a bit of a game changer.
[:That's a game changer.
[:Isn't it? Yeah.
[:And that's what Thomas Soel and several marketplace economists, the Milton Friedmann School, they've been proposing this stuff for half a century.
[:If you look over at the Scandinavian countries, too, and see what their success is, I think they have a system like this, too. But I guess I've never understood nobody on the left, because the left abhorse this. They hate it. And I've never really gotten a good argument against it. I don't know why. And maybe I'm just missing something obvious. I'd love to hear somebody's position on it, but it seems to me.
[:That the... You're not. As Sool says, public education without alternatives is a monopoly. It would be as if Ohio citizens were being told there's only one grocery store you can go to, and that's it. You can't go to Giant Eagle or Kroger or Windy Dixie or A&P. No, you've got to go to the state grocery store, and that's the only alternative you have.
[:And the only thing I can think is that they want top down control over the curriculum. They being whoever's opposed to it. It's like they want to... There's no child left behind or whatever it is. They want to mandate the curriculum from afar. You can only do that if you have a single system. That's the only way to do it. Then obviously, if you're going to pay the teachers and you got teachers, you're just influencing it. But as far as pure logic, I've never heard somebody dismantle the system that Thomas Soll has advocated for in a way that was compelling to me.
[:I'm going to play devil's advocate on that, though. Isn't that a form of social welfare? They're giving you money. The state is giving you money. You can make up $135,000 a year as a family, but they're going to give you money to go to another school.
[:Well, they're giving you back your tax money because you're not using... Isn't that the theory, Norm? Is it?
[:Yeah. So you're not being taxed.
[:No, you are being taxed, but then I guess they're calling it a tax refund because you're using it somewhere else.
[:Okay.
[:So it's not giving you money to go spend on private schools.
[:It's giving you... Refunding your tax money.
[:Because you're not using the public schools, so you're refunding your tax money. I think that's the argument, right?
[:Yeah, absolutely.
[:Okay. Because I didn't know the money flow.
[:On that one. Now, I think you could eliminate... I have to think that through. There's probably a better way to do all of it.
[:Maybe. It just hit me like that. It just seems funny because we're going to set up an education Tsar, but then they're.
[:Not going to really have much. It's almost too.
[:Congruent, isn't it? It is to a certain degree. But again, not knowing all the mechanisms of it.
[:The education Tsar will be establishing, just like the state board used to, will be establishing specifications and certifications for charter schools private schools, and public schools. So nothing comes with strings.
[:Nothing with curriculum, though. Is the Tsar on top of curriculum?
[:Oh.
[:Absolutely. I'm sure. Yeah.
[:There it seems to be in congruent.
[:There we have like, but I said, the Tsar is in.
[:Charge of curriculum. I don't see any incongruity at all. So there's going to be standardized testing or not standardized testing. There'll be mathematics or not mathematics. In other words, the curriculum, other than religious curriculum established by the Tsar or previously by the state board, affects students at whatever.
[:School they go to. Well, does it affect students at the parochial schools or the private schools? It would. Absolutely. Can they cram down the curriculum? How can they cram down? Well, anyway, it is what it is. I need to know.
[:More about it. Because the standardized test, test mathematics, you've got to teach it at the private schools or they won't pass the.
[:Fair enough.
[:So indirectly it does. And you would know more about it because you sent your kid to private school. We didn't. I didn't. So I didn't know. No, I didn't know. Yeah.
[:Okay. Yeah. The teachers unions fought this voucher program tooth and nail. Famously in Washington, DC, Obama, when he was President, killed the voucher program for inner city, largely black parents in Washington, DC. But yet the Quaker Friends School that Malia and the other daughter attended, of course, they had the money privately to spend on their education. But the welfare mother and father in DC, they lost their voucher program to send their kids to similar schools. There's the incongruity.
[:If you read anybody who's interested in this, and I was blown away and I don't even want to begin to go into all the nuance of it. But Thomas Soul, go read what he's got to say about this stuff. It's remarkable. It just makes perfect common sense. It just does. If you want to fix education in inner city, poor neighborhoods, this is the A number one way to do it.
[:Give them the tools. Don't condemn people living in poor neighborhoods that they have to go to poor schools. What Thomas Soul, as a child, was lucky enough to know, a family friend. So none of the people who raised him, his mother and father died when he was young, and he was raised by an aunt and her two oldest daughters. And when they moved to Harlem, they had a friend who knew the ins and outs of the New York public school system, and he was going to go to a terrible, just awful inner city school. And this friend knew that he would be allowed to go to any contiguous school district instead of the one that he lived in. And he said in his autobiography, if it wasn't for that, the rest of his life would have been completely different. So you got to give people school choice. And schools have to rise and fall based on whether or not they can survive in the open marketplace.
[:And that was the thing. So if you've got a crappy inner city school and it's sucks, it's either going to change or die. That's right. But right now, kids are forced to go there and it survives crappy.
[:Because it's a monopoly.
[:Yeah, it's a monopoly. I've never understood stood the argument against it other than money power.
[:Right. And that's usually the root of it anyway. You got to figure it out where it's coming from.
[:What's best for the kids? Is it that? And again, it's like some Tsar. And maybe this Tsar isn't a Tsar as much as it's like they're trying to limit the power. But the idea that some Tsar can fix the crappy inner school, crappy inner city school on his or her own, it's a farce. They're not going to fix it. And if you give them that much power to fix it, then where's that power going to be wielded elsewhere? So the only way to do it is to let the.
[:Market fix it. Well, and the argument, I look at it as if you're going to fix a school, it's got to be coming from the parent level. Yes. Right. And no politician ever touches that. They just don't. They want to fix it from top down. It's never that community needs to build up a school. You know, the best schools have great parent organizations. Parents get involved with it. It's community. And we never touched that.
[:Politicians never touched that. Bernie touched on something Bernie said last week when we were talking to him blew me away. And that was when he was talking, I think it was at Accra... What was the school that he was giving money and scholarships to?
[:Oh, Cleveland State, right?
[:No. Cleveland State or...
[:It wasn't Cleveland State and also the vocational. Two years college.
[:And I'm not sneezing at 100 grand a year for five years. That's a lot of money. But when you hear the billions and millions of people pour into these things, he made differences with a little bit of money, and it came from the private sector. It came from him. And he didn't create a huge structural department of administrative crap in order to do it. He did it at a grassroots level. The problem is when the government creates these huge institutions that are, quote, in control of it, then guys like Bernie become rarer and rarer because they can't control anything. They can't influence anything. Why would they give their dollars there?
[:Because the government's doing it. They may not even be allowed to do.
[:What he did. And they wouldn't, right? Because somebody.
[:Else is in control. When it becomes successful, it's like, you got to stop that. Right.
[:Sometimes. Well, because you're pissing in the power structure.
[:Right. Yeah, exactly.
[:I think we beat that horse.
[:Yeah. Tellingly, Walter Williams, who's another economist and a...
[:He died recently. He died last year, I think.
[:Yeah. He wrote, It was very he was very widely written. His columns appeared in syndication. He famously said, You can up the per pupil spending. Government can spend... I think Washington DC, for example, has some of the worst outcomes but spends the most per pupil. And what Walter Williams said is money is not the solution because you can look at rural districts in Iowa and those students score in the top five % of the country and they spend the least amount per pupil. So his point was, yeah, fine, spend the money, but somebody has to get that child out of bed, feed them breakfast, compel them to do their studying, has to stress the importance of them behaving at school and not becoming a disciplinary problem. And unless you have that, you could spend all the money in the world and it's not going to result in a better educated child.
[:Well, this is the Marxist are going to push back on this because the idea of Marxism is that you don't have your kids. They're the big brother's kids. They're the government's kids. Yeah, there are children. Right. And Biden famously, or maybe infamously, gave us this nonsense a couple of months ago where he said, These are all our children. Now you're America's children. And it's a complete utter destruction of what you're talking about, Norm. So the idea that the government is going to educate your kids and fix your kids, just send them off to some public school is nonsense, unless you send jackboots on the ground to escort all the kids to school. It's like, how can the government support or take over as a parent in a home? It can't do it. Instead, it wants to create like, this is the Hitler Youth. This is what it is. This is a Marxist path to hell because we have to do it at the home level at the schools. Even the Kennedys used to say they were educated at the dinner table, not in the schools. The schools are an extension of what happens at the home, or at least that's the idea.
[:Well, in the budget bill, there are some really exciting tax things that they did. You recall that the Senate wanted to reduce the four brackets for the Ohio income tax down to two. That made it into the budget bill. So we have a much simpler income tax system. They also raised to $26,000 the amount where you don't have to pay any state income tax. So for low income families or individuals who make 26,000 or under, that's exempt, the first 26,000. And I like this. They also have barred city or municipal income tax for minors. So I like that because if minors get a job washing dishes or working at Amazon or whatever they're doing, mowing grass or whatever, okay, if they make over $26,000, they got to start paying state income tax. But until they become adults, they don't pay any city of Columbus or Cleveland or any other municipal income tax. We're going to let kids keep more of that minimum wage dollar or whatever they're earning. And I think that's a smart thing.
[:Yeah. And look, if anything, they can make the tax system simpler. That's a dumb. That's not the right way to say it because that presumes that it's already simple. That can push it in and make it simpler is good for me. And every now and then you get these... I see these envelopes that come and they say, Rita. And I always call my accountant and I say, Boy, Rita is a real bitch, isn't she? What is this this?
[:Exactly. I've been fighting Rita for two years because I wasn't supposed to be billed from Rita. My previous accountant got a hold of her. And apparently, Rita wants her money. It's like, I don't owe you, Rita. And it's really hard to get out from Rita's thumb.
[:Yeah, no, they just keep... Rita keeps sending.
[:You letters. She keeps sending me love letters.
[:And she's not the Beatles meter made.
[:No, she is not.
[:Not.
[:Lovely at all. She's much more vicious. The budget bill also pretty much eliminated the commercial activities tax for businesses. And I'm sure that's to lure more business to Ohio, which is now suddenly a hot spot for expansion of businesses. They also eliminated sales tax on anything to do... Well, I shouldn't say anything because we'll find out what it really means. But baby products, so car seats, blankets, nursing, nursery, feeding things, and anything to do with babies. And that fits in with Governor DeWine. I got a lot of issues with him, but his general philosophy is pro life, pro parenting. And this reflects his personal philosophy. I think it's a good thing to exempt things involving child care from sales tax. So that will help indigent families, again, a little bit more because a sales tax is the most regressive tax. Those are the people that can least afford to pay that sales tax.
[:Yeah. So these people that complain about tax the rich and they advocate for a sales tax, it just is... None of it makes any logical sense. It's just like one-off. We're going to do it right in front of us because it sounds good. And that's it.
[:Well, maybe we'll eventually get into the state will take a look at reducing the gas tax since it makes sense to take that off too, maybe.
[:A lot of states did that, Brett.
[:I mean, we could do it on baby products. Maybe we can look at somebody that's earning. I don't know how you track that, or you just do a blanket going, you know what? The first 10 gallons are on us.
[:I don't know.
[:Just let the market control it.
[:Yeah. Right. Especially if they're really going to implement these tattletail GPS locating things and they're going to be in every vehicle like they're in trucks right now to allocate fuel taxes, it doesn't make any sense to collect it at the pump anymore if they're going to start tracking us because the electric guys, they're not paying anything. They pay a little bit more when they register for a license plate than the gas cars. But other than that, they pay no use tax.
[:What's the weight? Take an average Sedan, Norm, do you know the answer to this? What's the weight of an average Sedan electric versus gasoline engine?
[:Well, it's gigantic. The difference in weight is unbelievable. Like a Prius, a gasoline powered vehicle solely like a Ford Focus or Fiesta when they were still making them versus an EV, it's at least another 50 % in weight. The new GMC and the new Hummer, those pickup trucks are going to weigh, or SUVs, they're going to weigh over.
[:Five tons. As electric? Which is heavier.
[:As electric.
[:As electric. So isn't it true? I was always of the understanding that the wear and tear on the roads is largely reportion or related to the weight of the vehicles on the road. So if you have a heavier car, you're doing like the big rigs carrying more weight are going to cause more damage to the roads. No question. And the bridges. And the bridges. So it seems so insane to me that we're going to take the heaviest vehicles on the road and not make them pay any tax.
[:Yeah, it's crazy.
[:On Gasoline. Right.
[:So it supports what Brett is saying. The state and even the federal fuel tax, if you combine them, it's approaching like 20 cents on every gallon.
[:It's crazy. What do they do then if they had it their way and they waived their governmental magic wand and got rid of every single internal combustion and gasoline engine? And now we only have EVs. Who's paying to.
[:Fix the roads? And you don't hear that discussion. That's a really good point. Well, here it is.
[:Here it is. So for commercial vehicles, guys, what they do is they install a device, a satellite NAV device, and there is a 50 state tax distribution agency in the federal government. And depending on where you run that truck, it tells that agency, oh, that truck last year did 1,500 miles in Idaho. It did 20,000 in Oregon, and it did 30,000 in Washington State. And then it allocates the fuel taxes to those three states and bills that company for those fuel taxes. So they're paying at the pump and it's collected federally. And then it disperses that money based on how many miles you rolled in which state and what that state's fuel tax is. So it distributes the money after the it's collected federally. So here's the thing, though. That's a telltale device. And what they want, Magic 1, Steve, since you asked, they want to do that same technology in your Dodge pickup truck. They want to install a nanny device that will tell them, oh, Steve went to Kentucky for this amount of miles, Indiana for that, Ohio for that, and then disperse the tax money, whatever that rate is going to be to those states.
[:And you'll have to pay for it as an electric vehicle owner.
[:We have those nanny devices in our cars already. Our cell phones.
[:Yes, if you enable that, yes, for sure. And if you don't enable it and they want to get to, they can still get some location input. They got it. They got it. Yeah, that's coming. And it makes some logical sense. I just think the government having total control over where I or total knowledge of where I am. I don't like.
[:Big brother. I think we need to move into that very slowly.
[:Yeah, we need to move.
[:Into that very slowly. I agree because it's going to be used in divorce cases. It's going to be used in.
[:Criminal cases.
[:The IRS, when a businessman writes off his miles, the IRS will want that information also to verify that this guy really did use that vehicle for this amount of miles when he gets his per mile deduction.
[:Yeah. No, it's scary stuff. And you can say it's all for a good purpose, but until it's not. And they start using it for purposes that aren't so altruistic, and do you really want the government spying on where you are? I get into this all the time. Well, there's other European countries that would assume that this is the right way to go, but we're just a little bit different here. We like our privacy and we don't like Big Brother in our business.
[:The electric cars have to be charged up somewhere. So why isn't that charger right there being taxed? I don't care if it's in their home or if it's at Koles, wherever you can go to different places and.
[:Charge up. I don't know that it is or is it not. Does it cost to charge your car if I pull over a car and I got an EV and I'm going to charge it? I can just see a bunch of dudes sitting around smoking cigarettes, drinking and saying, all right, I'm waiting on my car.
[:To charge. But isn't that the terminal is the place to do it? Yeah. Well, it's just like getting gas. So if you charge at home, it's a different charger at home.
[:That doesn't create the impression that it's it's good. If the owner of the EV had to actually pay more, there's no EV owner.
[:But it does simplify the GPS tracking.
[:Yeah, it would be a replacement for that. Yeah. But I mean, look, hey, I hate all of it. Yeah.
[:But then, Brett, you're going to have the... So we'd be pumping 300 gallons into a commercial truck in Ohio. But then he goes across the border from Cincinnati right into Kentucky and he does most of his miles in Kentucky. Kentucky would be saying, Well, hey, you're wearing down our roads and bridges. If you're going to run 95 % of your miles but fill up in Ohio, we want 95 % of that fuel tax.
[:That makes sense. If you charge up in Ohio and you're driving Kentucky with your electric car. Okay, that's true. I didn't think about that.
[:That's the argument.
[:Yeah, look, it's a classic. I mean, on the one hand, you can easily put together a logical argument in favor of this, right? So you're going to tax those who use it the most. Now, on the other hand, it might be oversimplified. If I'm trying to think of counter arguments, it's like, all right, well, what about the person who is buying goods and services that are then transported on those roads? So they're using the roads, but they're not the ones behind the wheel, and you're taxing the ones behind the wheel. I guess that'll drive up prices for everybody because it's not like... It's not like the commercial people are just going to pay the tax and say, Oh, I guess I make less money this year. They're going to pay the tax and charge you more. So if you think at home that, Oh, I'm safe from this, and you're getting 10 Amazon deliveries a week, it's like, you're going to pay more. This is another Thomas Soul revelation. It's never in a vacuum. There's always a consequence to this stuff. So if you're going to increase the cost of truck drivers using the roads and make them pay more because they're using the roads more, well, guess what?
[:They're using the roads to transport the things that you want and need. So you're going to pay more. It doesn't just happen.
[:Well, your man Thomas Soul also said there are no perfect solutions, only trade offs.
[:Yes. He's an economist. He's an economist.
[:Four more things, and these are smaller things, but they're interesting. 10 million were allocated in the budget to encourage kids of elementary age in high school to walk and bike to school. I don't know why we need to spend money to do that, but there's 10 million bucks I guess in a $86 billion budget, 10 million bucks doesn't look.
[:Like real money. Repeat that again. It is 10 million for what purpose?
[:It is to promote. So this is a marketing campaign, a public campaign public service announcement effort to encourage children to walk and to bike to school, which, of course, these days you'd probably get arrested if you let your kid walk to school because that's probably endangering your child.
[:Well, I got a way they would just save it. Just don't send busses out. You would spend less and get the same result.
[:That's where my mind was going. You stop the bus routes from a 1 mile square area or something like that, from.
[:Around the school. It costs nothing. It's a net gain instead of a net loss. And we just.
[:Fixed it. Let's get the 10 million into the.
[:Studio here. So if you want some suggestions on how to spend $10 million, please give us a call here at Common sense Ohio. We can help you. And I'll start with refunding my tax dollars.
[:Well, how about supporting impoverished podcast?
[:There you go. Yes. Well, look, I know I got a better idea. We are going to be champions. I believe that it is awesome. Kids ought to walk to school. Kids need to ride their bicycles to school, to the ice cream shop after school, to go run errands for their parents, and they should walk everywhere. So that announcement is now worth how much, Norm? Because if they're allocating marketing dollars, we can at least get our.
[:Piece of it. That grand right there.
[:Exactly. Right. So that's our public service announcement.
[:Another little bullet here, and I just don't know what to think of this. So the three of us are self employed, and this is real common sense stuff. And I don't understand all of the gratuities going to state employees, but this one is shocking to me. And maybe I'm just out of touch, but you and I won't get any benefit like this because we would have to self fund this. But under the budget bill, state employees now will go from one month of eligible maternity leave, whether it's the man or the woman or some undefined non binary. But if you're a parent now, I don't know if a sperm donor counts as a parent, but if you're a parent and you're a state employee and you have a child, it's currently one month of leave you can take, four weeks at 70 % of your salary. This bill expands it to three months. So if you have a baby, the husband and the wife, if they both work for the state, can take one quarter of the year off.
[:Well, see what's insane about that is we're freaking paying for that. Yeah. It's not the government paying for it. That's me. That's me not taking any time off. You know how many days I've had off in the last year?
[:Unbelievable.
[:Maybe none.
[:I thought there was federal law for leave, isn't it?
[:Well, this is state...
[:State workers really are not under the federal scope for the state.
[:State workers are getting three months of leave. Three months. That's like a quarter.
[:Who the hell advocated that?
[:Well, I'm sure this is a sop to the state.
[:And they're getting paid? I hate to interrupt you, but they're getting paid for that?
[:Yeah, 70 %. Unbelievable. Wow.
[:So, Brett, okay.
[:I'm just trying to figure it out. That's all.
[:When you and your wife had your children or me, Circle270 or Team Blitz, our two companies, if we wanted to give ourselves four weeks off, that came out of our checking account. So we didn't do it. Just like Steve said, he doesn't take days off because the only guy who... The poor guy is going to have to pay for that is himself. So self employed people, when they pass these parental leave laws, like in DC, it's not as if you and I can take four weeks off.
[:None. Right. Right. Yeah, right. Exactly.
[:No. And then I'd say, I want to go work for the state. It's like, Then who's going to do what I do? It's like, this is what we're talking about. This is, well, we're back to the... This is socialism. It's almost upside down to the point where you can't fix it.
[:Because that position that person leaves for three months, still at 70 % of his income or her income, they bring somebody in to sit in for that position for three months and pay, maybe at least double. Yeah. It's going to be as equal as that person because of longevity of that thing in the job.
[:Somebody's got to do that job. Or that job isn't necessary. Either way, it's.
[:A farce. Good point. Nobody comes in because it's not necessary. They can sit on it for three months.
[:Famously, Pete Boudica much, right?
[:That's such a good point you just made. Sorry. Go ahead, Norm.
[:Yeah, he took a month off. He's Secretary of Transportation, took a month off. Meanwhile, things go on like East Liverpool or.
[:Whatever, or.
[:East East Palestine, excuse me. Things happen. Airport shut down, planes crash, trains derail. Our secretary of transportation says, Hey, me and my partner had a baby. I took a month off.
[:Are you kidding? And you shouldn't criticize. If your job is such that whatever you do, it doesn't matter if you don't do it for three months.
[:It's lunacy. The month I can live with, obviously, we have been living with the month. I get that, but.
[:Three months? I don't even get the month. I don't even get the month. And the reason I don't get.
[:The month is.
[:Because it's already there so I'll accept it. Right, we're stuck with it. But on a private level, I can't take a month off. I didn't take a month off when I had my kids. When my kids were born, there was not a month off. Nothing. It was like, I took time away, but it was like, all right, I can't come in now, but I'll be in later today, or I'll be in this. You juggle and get your work done.
[:A quarter of the year, plus all the federal holidays they get already. Right.
[:A quarter of the year. If you have a kid, you take a quarter of the year off. Unless there's a reason in the private sector that doesn't happen, and it's because it doesn't work financially. And it would work financially if the supply and demand of the economy dictated it. But it doesn't. It's like, I don't have it. If somebody came to me and said, Look, I'll work for you, Steve, but I need a month off every time I have a kid and I plan on having three kids, or I need a whole quarter off, I'd be like, No, then no, thanks.
[:The only way to make this fair for self... The only way to make this fair for self employed people or for people who work for a business under the threshold where they don't get the federal mandated leave would be if we could claw back the cost of taking a month off from our taxes.
[:Or something with childcare.
[:Yeah, give me a credit.
[:Yeah, I.
[:Won't do that. A bigger than what it already is. No, we're not going to do that. Yeah. Versus going through HSA or another account you have to dump money into and it's tax free, quote unquote, which.
[:Is crap. I'll tell this story and I'm not going to mention names, but I ran into somebody I knew who worked for the government in a legal capacity. And this individual was encouraging me to apply for such a job. And anybody who knows me knows I'm not ever going to do that. But it's like h. And this person was saying, Man, it's awesome. I work at home and I got this device. And he named the device. I don't remember. I don't know what it was called. But the device was a mouse pad designed to jiggle the mouse every 10 minutes so your laptop wouldn't fall asleep. And this person was watching Netflix, doing laundry, or screwing off, or whatever, and bragging about it. And that's what government employment has become. And I'm thinking to myself, Well, if we could use 10 or even 20 % fewer of those people, think how much more efficient would be. And that was a $150,000 job, plus all these benefits, and not working anyway.
[:So, Steve, one of the things in the budget bill is right on that target. The legislature sent to Governor DeWine, and he vetoed this, was a requirement that state workers, post COVID, now need to come back and be in person. He Vita'd that. And what the particular language was is that at least four days a week, the state employee had to come back into the office. They could still work one day out of the week from home. But the wine vetoed that. So we're going to have full-time state employees working out of.
[:Their house. Doing nothing.
[:Well, yeah. I mean, if you can get a mouse to jiggle itself, and And all they know is you're reviewing unemployment compensation cases. And maybe you're not doing that.
[:You're gambling. I would have less concern over this if the salaries were low, but they're not. They're not. They're getting paid a crap ton of money to do nothing. And it almost makes me... At what point do we just... We got three self employed people here. At what point do you say, if you can't beat them, join them? I said I would never do it. But look, I'm starting to think, if I could work at home, half time with a mouse jiggler.
[:And get three months off every year.
[:Get three months off every year. I could almost keep my current job and do that.
[:I.
[:Could do that. And people would say, Well, that's fraud. You can't do that. It's like, Yeah, but that's what they're freaking doing, people.
[:Not.
[:Everybody.
[:Not everybody.
[:But to the extent, nobody is auditing this. It is happening. I've represented others. I've represented an attorney who was, unfortunately, had alcohol addiction, other problems, and went through life as a government worker, not working for years. And nobody knew. Just nobody really knew. And it just is making well over six figures. It is gross. And the more I talk about it, the more we got to move on. It's going to.
[:Piss me off. Yeah.
[:I'm getting uncomfortable. Couple last quick vetoes. Deline Vita, the measure in the budget bill that was going to outlaw or ban local government regulation of tobacco and vapes, having to do with the products themselves, whether they're flavored or menthol or unflavored and all that stuff like Columbus did. The budget bill was going to get rid of local governments being able to regulate tobacco and vaping. And the line who wanted a statewide ban on flavored products, he vetoed that measure. So he allowed Columbus and the other cities that want to do that to micromanage vaping and tobacco use. That hits a lot of small business people terribly. And it's also, of course, it's like that blue burd thing in New York with salt and big gulps and all that other stuff. We're micromanaging people's lifestyles, and it doesn't seem like a very Republican thing to do for.
[:Governor DeWine. I guess I would rather be regulated on a local level than a.
[:State level, though. I think. Given two alternatives, I'm with you. Because look, I don't know why DeWine vetoed this. I'd have to give this some thought because that doesn't happen in a vacuum. So he vetoed what a law...
[:The state's authority.
[:To rule. That would have basically preempted the field for the state of Ohio. And by preempt the field, that means Ohio has sole exclusive jurisdiction and authority to regulate tobacco and flavor tobacco. And we're now not going to... And he vetoed that. That seems like power that he would want to have. And so I don't know what was at play, why that was. Maybe it was a really good model.
[:Well, he could not get his way. So, Steve, I think the explanation is he could not get legislation passed that would allow... He wanted a ban on mental and flavors.
[:And he couldn't get it at the state level.
[:He could not get that law through. Now, the speaker of the house said that they're going to try to override his veto on this, so they're not done yet. I think the Republicans in the house are going to attempt to reverse this veto by three quarters of a vote, they'll be able to override De.
[:Wynne's.
[:Veto.
[:Well, I wonder... I've got a problem with this, like you said, when New York was trying to regulate the Big Gulf and you can have so much sugar and so much fat and so much fat and so much calories. You wonder, what do the Republicans want to do with it? And where's their bread getting buttered? Because on the one end, I can see what you're saying, Norm, is like, DeWine vetoed this because his goal, you're saying, was to ban such things at the state level, but he didn't have the votes to ban it. So he just let the cities do it.
[:Exactly.
[:I like that outcome, I suppose, but I still question the flow of money and power and where it all came from and how it's happening because big tobacco has a hand in this and an interest in it.
[:Somewhere.
[:Yeah, somewhere. Well, they definitely do. I guess I just come down on the liberty side that if it's legal to have assisted suicide in Ohio, and it's legal to have abortions. So we have actively sanctioned killing in this state. We still have a death penalty. If you can have ultimate control over somebody's life and death, then why don't you allow people to decide whether they're going to smoke or not smoke and what.
[:Flavor it is? Well, get rid of wine coolers, right? Because when teenagers start drinking, they used to come, they're wine coolers when I was a kid. Now it's like the malt drinks or the very red claws or white claws or whatever. Get rid of the ones that don't taste like crap.
[:And.
[:That way, kids won't use them. And there's some truth to that, right? You could probably make a logical argument.
[:It's the.
[:Sugar then. So Yeah. How many times do you hear the kids say, And you can't even taste the alcohol. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah, that's the point. That's the point. So it's like, You can't even taste the tobacco.
[:So let's go down the DeWine mentality a little bit further and look at some more of his anti libertarian vetoes. So he also vetoed a measure that was going to ban universities and colleges from mandating vaccines. If you can believe this, after all that's come out about the COVID vaccines and the harmful effects because they weren't thoroughly studied, they didn't go through the normal approval process, and now we're finding cardiac issues and all manner of things to do with these vaccines. Fauci and the guys have to admit that it was a rush job. So the wine vetoed. So Ohio State state, or any public university can still mandate that a student be vaxxed or they cannot attend class. And DeWine vetoed a ban on universities.
[:Dewine is never going to give up such power to make that decision. And look, the problem is, on the one end, I don't have a problem with that veto because there should be a constitutional issue with a state university mandating vaccines. And I think that I like to think the courts want to figure that out. On the other hand, to the extent the courts are not, this reflects DeWine's thought process that he knows best. He was a big brother type guy that he's... That's right. We've got the tool. I remember that freaking speech. I almost smack mashed my car radio. I was sitting outside my son's music lesson and hearing him saying, We've got the tools to do this, citizens of Ohio. We did it before. And he was talking about shutting us down and not letting us go to work. I'm like, You know what? Go F yourself, you son of a bitch, because you didn't do this. You didn't do shit. You went to work and you got paid.
[:Well, it's very paternalistic. He's not our father. He's the governor.
[:And he's no freaking genius. What does he know? It's like, what does he know that we don't? I t's so abhorrent to me to think that he believes that he knows best for everybody. And I think he truly does believe that.
[:Oh, yeah. A lot of other states have withdrawing on all these COVID powers that were handed over to governors through the courts or through legislation. A lot of states are moving against that. And here, Governor De Wynne is going to allow the universities to continue to dictate what your child has to be inoculated against.
[:It is so important to me that he won't give up that power.
[:That's.
[:Unbelievable.
[:Amazing. Steve, I think you ought cover, if you will, I can hit the facts if you haven't heard about this case. But back on July fourth, there was a truck driver that was running away from the Circleville, Ohio Police Department. The state patrol got involved. He is a black young man, 23 years old, Jaderious Rose. And he led them on a chase for a little while. Then he got on 911 and he called 911 and said, Hey, I'm confused why they're even pulling me over and I fear for my life. I'm going to get out of the cab now and put my hands up, but I'm in fear of my life because all these police are following me and I sure as hell hope that they don't shoot me. So he told that to the 911 operator. He gets out of his truck, puts his hands up. The Ohio State Highway Patrol people on the scene told the Circleville K9 unit guy, Do not release your dog. They coached him up and said, Don't release the dog. And the guy, Ryan Spikman, is the ex police officer since fired from Circleville PD. He, in fact, did release the dog.
[:The dog damn near tore the driver's arm off. And now, Benjamin Crump, who represents black plaintiffs against white police officers, he's made a specialty of that, is representing Jaderious Rose. And it's become, of course, racially tinged. I don't know that this wouldn't have also happened with an Appalachian white truck driver. So I don't know what the intentions were, but could you go into that a.
[:Little bit? Yeah. I mean, I don't know all the facts, and not just that you didn't tell me all the facts, but I would want to know a couple of things. Is the officer, the canine officer in charge or the local Circleville guy, is he saying that he misunderstood the command out of the Ohio State Patrol? Is he saying, I thought they meant release that dog and not to not release the dog? I would want to know that. And I'm sure that's a public fact now. I just don't know. So if he misunderstood an order and released the dog, that is different to me than him just making a mistake and releasing the dog. The second thing I want to know is, is it racially motivated? It's like You'd want to know that. I asked the same thing of Shalvan. We should probably talk about that quickly, too. That'll spin off this. The first thing I texted my employee at the time was, he texted me, he said, Did you see this? I was like, Yeah, it's awful. I wonder if it was because of race. My employee said, I don't need to know that.
[:It obviously is. I was like, Wow. Just because it's a white person or a white cop and a black suspect doesn't mean that it's racially motivated. And it could be racially motivated intentionally, like, I don't like black people, so I'm going to release my dog and make sure they get their arms ripped off. It could be that I am being cultured in a way that I know black people are dangerous, and it could be racism showing up that way. Or it could just be what it probably is, is a dumb decision and bad police work, which I think is more likely than all the other things. Either way, it needs to be redressed in some way. And I'm sure whether this guy is black, white, Asian, or Russian. There's a lot of Russian, or at least there used to be a lot of Russian truck drivers. Whatever it is, there's a civil rights problem here because if they didn't need to release the hounds, so to speak, then they shouldn't have. So I think this will get redressed in some way, shape, or form. There'll be compensation to this guy. I'm guessing the case, the criminal case will go away.
[:And then the other thing I'd want to know is why was he running? And did he know that he was being chased and followed for traffic violation? Why didn't he stop? Because it's never so easy. This is another Thomas Sool thing where it's like, rarely is one outcome the result of a single cause. There's almost always multi dynamic stuff going on. And if the guy would have stopped right away when the police first encountered him, would any of this have happened in the first place? And you're going to say, well, you can't blame him for getting attacked by a dog. No, I mean, maybe you can. Maybe you can't. But you can't just ignore that fact either. So there's always more to it. Maybe he's going to say, Well, I'm black and I was afraid I was going to get shot if I stopped. It's like, Wow, all right, but come on. At some point, something has to give. If you're in a traffic violation and you take off running and you don't expect the police to chase you, you're not living in a reasonable world here. And it's not that police always do it right.
[:And here, clearly, they didn't do it right. So I don't know, Norm, I think there's a lot of stuff going on that we would want to know. The problem is I think that we're going to jump to the conclusion that this circleville cop is a racist, and he might be. We're going to jump to the conclusion it wouldn't have happened to a white guy, and it might have. We're going to jump to the conclusion that this was an intentional act and not just stupidity or negligence, and it might have been. The problem is the racial undertones of this will likely impede a legitimate investigation in an outcome to really dig into these things. And I think if you really dig into these things, you might actually learn something beyond the case itself. You might actually learn, All right, well, how are we employing canines in police stop situations? So across the board, this stuff doesn't happen. And then you wonder, Norm, would it even be on the news if this would have happened and the guy were white? I'd want to know, has this ever happened to a white guy who stopped with this same canine guy?
[:What's his history? I think all of those things we want to know, and hopefully all of those things we will know. And hopefully, if the guy is a racist, he's punished accordingly. If he's just not good at his job, he's not a cop anymore, or he's trained up, and whatever.
[:Well, and also the training program that Circleville has.
[:That's right.
[:If it's poor, then it needs to.
[:Reevaluate itself. Or do we have a dog who is just not well equipped for the job? I don't know if the dog just got loose somehow by mistake because the dog wasn't obeying the commands. There's just so much to know that it's hard to reach any conclusions definitively.
[:I know this is a cosmic shift to a national thing, but you being an attorney and practicing in the federal system, I've got to ask you about this sneaky clause inserted at the last minute for Hunter Biden.
[:I think it was paragraph 15 famously in this diversion agreement that the judge, I guess she was reviewing it for maybe a week or two. And at the last minute, they added an extra paragraph, and she zeroed in on that in a very ingenious toliquid between her and Mr. Hunter Biden. Back and forth, the judge quiz him about this get out of jail free clause that basically said in this diversion on the gun crime and the misdemeanor tax pleas, that he would be prevented from being pursued by the federal government for anything else during the dependency, during this five year period, anything named, anything mentioned in the statement of facts. It included his representation of Burisma and the Chinese company and all of his lobbying activities. And the prosecutors told the judge, Hey, we're still examining some of that. And we don't think that this agreement exculpates him from being prosecuted. And Hunter's team said, Oh, yes, it does. So there was no meeting of the minds, and the judge scuttle d this agreement.
[:Yeah, there's a lot to unpack with that.
[:Something's right happenened.
[:At the outset, we should just talk about how plea agreements happen. And we all do this all the time. We all have people in the criminal justice system, both at the federal, state, and local levels, or all three of those levels. In federal court, you typically have something called a plea agreement. The plea agreement spells out the terms and conditions. And there's a criminal rule called 11. And there's different parts of criminal rule 11, some that would give you immunity for things, some that just say the plea agreement is what it is. I'm not going to go into the depths of that. But the idea here is, if I have a plea agreement with a client, I spell out and the government will spell out the terms and conditions of our agreement. We're going to say, here's what the government is agreeing to do, here's what the defendant is agreeing to do. Sometimes it's an exchange for cooperation. Sometimes the defendant just agrees to plead guilty and there is no agreement for the government to recommend any sentence. Sometimes the government is recommending a lesser sentence, or they reserve the right to recommend a lesser sentence or departure from the sentencing guidelines.
[:And typically that's all spelled out in writing in the plea agreement. Here, they had a plea agreement and some stuff was spelled out in writing in the plea agreement. But as part of the plea agreement, Hunter was agreeing or getting... Maybe I'll say it this way, the government is agreeing to let Hunter Biden get some diversion in federal court, which, frankly, I've never heard of or done. Look, I'm not done at all. But on a gun case in federal court, I can just tell you this, if my had a client, a normal client who had a gun, and the gun was deposited in some trash can receptacle near a school, there would be a process. It wouldn't be diverted. It would not result in diversion. At least that's not my experience. But to the extent that happened here, in and of its own, that's a little bit odd. But then in the diversion agreement, they spelled out, so not the plea agreement under Rule 11 that is filed and becomes a public record, in the diversion agreement, which says a diversion agreement would be like probation in advance. And if you do all these things, we're going to dismiss the case.
[:Again, that doesn't happen. But it did here. So in that agreement, which is not a filed public record, they spell out some immunity that Hunter was relying upon not to get prosecuted for other things. And the judge tore into this. And you wonder, I think the judge tore into this because of all the amicus or the friends of the court filings and other things. I know that people were up in arms about this for a long time last couple of months. I think the judge took a careful look. But what this judge did, I think, to some extent, is at least maintain some integrity in the system because I've been in front of plenty of federal judges, and they have to have what's called a meaningful dialog in order to accept a client's guilty plea. T hat means they have to understand what the client understands. The client's pleading guilty, waiving his or her right to have a trial, to make their government prove their case. And they're acknowledging guilt and going through all this. And they're waiving constitutional rights. The judge has to have a dialog and talk to the client. And here, the judge talked to Biden and really probed into what Biden's expectations of the deal were because there was enough stink around this that it seemed like it ought to be discussed.
[:And it doesn't take a rocket science to discuss this because we were talking about it here, I think, even at the time. It's like, oh, I wonder if by pleading guilty and getting diversion on the gun case and put into a couple of misdemeanor tax cases, Biden's also got an immunity agreement for all the other crap that he's done. And clearly the lawyers were thinking, Yeah, we'll slide this through and he won't be prosecuted. But then the crap hit the fan. And then you've got like Jim Jordan and other people in DC saying, What the heck is going on here? And I think it blew up because of that. And had it have not, I think this would have slipped through and Biden would never been prosecuted. But for this other stuff now, I think that at least the light bulb is on and there's some sunshine on the problem. So kudos to the judge for tearing into it. The plea agreement blew up. But don't just assume that it's over and Hunter Biden's going to trial. They'll go back and reinvent the wheel and they'll figure it all out. And hopefully, if there's going to be some immunity grant on all the other foreign corruption or whatever foreign business activity potential crimes there are, it at least gets exposed.
[:Because to get immunity on something, just so everybody knows, you have to go tell them what you did. So I can't have a client get immunity on all sorts of crimes that my client doesn't discuss with the government through some proffer agreement where my client agrees to tell the truth about all his or her activities. Only then do you ever get a chance at having some immunity on using those statements against you or even transactional immunity on a prosecution, which is even rarer. Look, this whole thing, it sticks out like a sore thumb and it really, really stinks. This is not normal treatment. I am telling you that right now, and I've been practicing in federal courts for a long, long time, this is not normal treatment. It's just not. Now, I've had some sweetheart deals in federal court, but only because my client did something that warranted special treatment like cooperation, or the government did something that warranted special treatment like a fourth amendment violation. This doesn't just happen, folks. It doesn't just happen. There's special treatment here. I'm saying it. You heard it here, not first, but you heard it here. Great. Thank you.
[:Now, one last thing. I did hint about Chauvin. Just ew, I'm curious about this stuff because Chauvin is appealing now and asking the US Supreme Court to reverse his conviction based upon pre trial publicity and not moving and changing venue of the case. I've always said that venue is such a hard thing. I've never had a case that actually warranted a change of venue. And there's only been a few that have actually where that happens and you meet the standards. This might be one where the US Supreme Court might do something about it. When you got the trial happening in the backyard where all the riots occurred in Jersey, was actually scared, saying, I think in void here in advance of the riots and what might happen. I don't know all the facts and details, but this is one to watch. And I bring it up because one of the seminal cases on this is Old Doc Shepard from Cleveland or was it Lakewood, Ohio. Sam Shepard, who was prosecuted back in the day, represented by F. Lee Bailey. He was convicted. They actually made an entire TV series out of it called The Fugitive.
[:And the US Supreme Court ended end up reversing his conviction on issues like this. The Cleveland Plain Dealers press coverage of it was so insane that the US Supreme Court concluded for oversimplified reasons that he didn't get a fair trial. Look, a full circle back to Ohio. All right, Norm, with that, we probably have to wrap it up. We've pushed our limits of our normal timeframe. So anyway, it's www.commonsenseohioshow.com. For those of you who want to check out Norm's blog, Brett's blog, my blog that doesn't exist yet, but it might. If you want to ask us a question, you can do so right there. We're getting some questions coming in. If you want to be a guest, you can just www.commonsenseohioshow.Com. Shoot us a note and we'd love to have you in. If you want to be a sponsor for the show, we can do that too. We've got a couple lined up and we're going to start doing that very soon. If you like what you're listening to, and we think that you do, like it, subscribe to it and share it with your neighbor. Tell them the good news.
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