Ohio Tea Party members say an elite political class of Republicans-In-Name-Only controls the state’s GOP.
Any conservatives not among the establishment class Republicans are kept at a distance. Once in office, these powerful RINOs use their power and influence to penalize people who speak up against them — and this includes even the relatives of the people who don’t conform, Tea Party members said.
John McAvoy, a Tea Party official in northwest Ohio, told The Ohio Star this week that this was especially true when former Republican Gov. John Kasich held office. Kasich, of course, does not hold U.S. President Donald Trump, a fellow Republican, in high esteem.
“If you were going to benefit from Kasich then you had to be a Never Trumper. I have had phone conversations with people when we were running state central committee candidates who told me ‘If you ever say I said this I will deny it, but I must support Kasich. The reason I must support him is because I have a brother-in-law who works for the Turnpike Commission and if I don’t support Kasich then my brother-in-law loses his job,” McAvoy said.
“There were things like that. That is how the party tends to rule here. ‘If I am elected governor,’ the thinking goes ‘then I reward the people who helped me get elected and I may or may not squelch those people who stood in my way.’”
Meanwhile, Ray Warrick, who chaired the Warren County Republican Party for two years, told The Star the Ohio GOP “is pitiful.”
“They are mostly Democrat-lite. It’s just a big networking organization for themselves, and they have no conservative principles at all,” Warrick said.
“They simply carry out big government initiatives or don’t stand up against them. There was a whole bunch of people in the state, including me, that said we would have been better off having a Democrat in the governor’s mansion during the Kasich years because if the stuff Kasich proposed had been proposed by a Democrat they (the Republicans) would have voted against it.”
McAvoy said there is no greater proof of this than current Republican Gov. Mike DeWine supporting Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.
As The Star reported, McAvoy and Warrick believe DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, both Republicans, made a secret and underhanded pact to assist one another’s political fortunes.
The two men allegedly did this during the 2018 elections. Initially, Husted ran for governor, but he later dropped out of that race to seek the lieutenant governor’s job, as DeWine’s running mate.
Spokesmen for both DeWine and Husted deny the accusation.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Ohio Republicans” by Ohio Republicans.
