Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman subs out from Ohio Redistricting Commission days before state court deadline

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman, a Republican who’s played a central role in directing the GOP’s redistricting strategy, is opting out of attending this week’s Ohio Redistricting Commission meeting and sending a top lieutenant instead.

Sen. Rob McColley, a Napoleon Republican will replace Huffman on the panel when he meets at 2 pm on Wednesday, two days before a Friday deadline by which the Ohio Supreme Court has ordered the commission to approve a new state legislative map plan.

The plan, if the commission ends up approving one, would be the fifth passed by Republicans during the ongoing, seemingly never-ending cycle of redistricting, the regular process of redrawing state political maps to reflect population changes. The Ohio Supreme Court by a 4-3 vote, with Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor joining the court’s three Democratic justices, has rejected four previous sets of maps, most recently on April 14, citing new anti-gerrymandering rules state voters added to the Ohio constitution in 2015.

In a statement Tuesday, Huffman said he needs to focus on other legislative priorities, including the pending state capital budget bill.

“After four sets of General Assembly maps were invalidated by a repeated narrow majority of the Supreme Court, I believe Senator McColley offers a fresh approach and a new opportunity to produce a result that clearly the majority of the court was not willing to consider with the speaker and myself serving as members,” Huffman said.

McColley is an attorney and the number-four ranking Senate Republican, serving on Huffman’s leadership team. His previous relevant experience of his includes co-chairing the panel that oversees the state’s redistricting budget, and sponsoring the bill that eventually became Ohio Republicans’ new congressional map plan.

Huffman, meanwhile, has played an outsize role in the redistricting process, including employing Ohio Republicans’ primary mapmaking expert and at times freezing out even his fellow Republicans from being more involved. The Ohio Supreme Court majority has criticized him by name at times in his written opinions striking down the various maps, and cited his supervision of the Republican mapmaker as evidence that Republicans intended to illegally slant the maps in their favor.

It’s unclear exactly what majority Republicans on the Ohio Redistricting Commission plan to do on Wednesday. They haven’t indicated publicly that they’re even working on a new map, despite the looming Ohio Supreme Court deadline.

An agenda, released Tuesday afternoon, says it will consider allocating more money for redistricting-related purposes, setting its “plan of work and meeting schedule,” and consider re-hiring a bipartisan duo of independent mapmakers, whose nearly-finished map the commission abandoned last month at Huffman’s suggestion just before the last court-imposed deadline.

Republicans have a strong incentive to stall thanks to a federal court ruling issued last week that some Republicans have hailed as a final victory in the months-long legal standoff over redistricting. In a final order, two federal judges said they would force Ohio to use a state legislative map plan the Ohio Supreme Court rejected in February as an illegal Republican gerrymander — the third map plan Republicans approved and the court rejected — unless the state approves a new plan before May 28.

The third map plan would be used for an Aug. 2 primary election, unless Ohio sets another date, the ruling said.

Ohio’s House and Senate races were supposed to appear on the May 3 primary ballot. But they were pulled due to the redistricting delays.