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The new two year session of the Ohio General Assembly begins, and a conversation with a lawmaker ousted in November after 18 years in office.

Former U.S.

Senator Sherrod Brown.

That's this week in the state of Ohio.

Just.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

We begin with a sudden development.

Late this week, Vice President elect J.D.

Vance resigned from the U.S. Senate at midnight Thursday, opening the door to governor Mike DeWine to announce who he's chosen to appoint to Vance a seat.

DeWine was among the Republican governors at Mar-A-Lago, with president elect Trump on Thursday night, and said he wasn't ready to make his choice public yet.

We certainly have been working on this for some time, and I'll.

I'll have an announcement probably next week.

You know, I'm looking for someone, first of all, who will be a worker in the U.S. Senate.

I spent 12 years there.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to be successful.

I want someone who understands Ohio, who has a deep knowledge of of our state.

We need that strong advocate there.

Ohio also has to be someone who's willing to run and and in two years and turn right around and run two years after that.

So that's, Ohio's a big state.

That's a tough that's a tough, thing to do.

Also, someone who can win a primary and who can win a general election in Ohio.

So those are those are the kind of the kind of main criteria The 136th Ohio General Assembly got a snowy and stressful start this week.

Lawmakers are required by the Constitution to convene on the first Monday of an odd numbered year, and some legislators had to travel through as much as ten inches of snow to get to the statehouse.

But there were no complications with the election of the House Speaker and Senate president, as Matt Hoffman and Rob McCauley were selected, as they had been by the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate in November.

there's some things that I think will be addressed in then.

And one is the resolution of marijuana and, Delta issues, the THC and another four issues, which has kind of pending for about a year I do think, that there's going to be some pretty synergies the way we create with you and in the state of Ohio, my estimation is an out of date of what?

And I think that will be a lot of discussion about that.

There's a lot of discussion about, developments throughout the state and how we can change those regulations, whatever it is, so that developers can have in Well, I think there's a lot of things we need to take a look at.

Property tax reform, I think, is going to be one of the things we take a look at.

There's going to be a lot of conversations about energy, as there has been for the past several months.

Of course we're going to jump into the budget.

And, I would imagine there's going to be a desire to continue the tax reform that we've done over the course of time.

And There are six freshmen members in the Senate and 27 among the 99 members of the House.

Most lawmakers made it to Columbus unscathed, but longtime representative Gene Schmidt had to be sworn in.

John Glenn International Airport following a string of flight delays.

Governor Mike DeWine signed 29 bills this week, finishing up last year's lame duck session.

They include House Bill eight, also known as the parents Bill of rights, which requires parental notification about sexual content in schools and has a provision allowing kids to leave school for religious instruction.

He approved an expansion of school superintendents powers to expel students.

Also a crackdown on sextortion.

He signed a ban on requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance and a bill boosting fines and penalties for drunk driving.

DeWine approved bipartisan measures to require employers to provide pay stubs to employees, and a bill that seeks to lower Ohio's high infant mortality rate, but doesn't include any funding.

The mine signed a bill that some talked about since 2018, shut down frivolous lawsuits from people who want to stifle others free speech rights.

And the attorney general will have the power to reject a potential ballot issue based only on its title, as part of an election related bill.

And the first woman to head the Ohio Department of Health has become the first person to formally announce a run for governor next year.

Doctor Amy Acton, who got national attention as DeWine's health director at the start of the Covid pandemic, will run as a Democratic candidate for governor.

Acton said in a statement, quote, unlike most of our leaders, I know the answer to moving our state forward isn't giving politicians more power.

It's giving people more freedom.

Today, I filed papers to run for governor because I refuse to look away from Ohioans who are struggling, while self-serving politicians and special interests take our state in the wrong direction.

It's time to give power back to the people and our communities.

It's time for a change.

Acton, who's headed up some nonprofit efforts since resigning from the state in June 2020, has been speaking at county Democratic events and hinted at the Democratic National Convention in July that she was considering a campaign for governor.

Attorney General Dave Yost has said he will announce his campaign for the GOP nomination for governor soon, and fellow Republican Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted has been raising money, but is said to top the list of possible appointees to Vice President elect J.D.

Vance's U.S. Senate seat.

Ohio will have two freshmen in the U.S. Senate, with whoever is chosen to replace Vance and the departure of a veteran lawmaker.

So to my colleagues, this is my.

This is my last speech on the Senate floor.

But it's not.

I promise you the last time you'll hear from me.

Sherrod Brown is back home in Cleveland after losing to Republican Bernie Marino in November, in a race that he'd always said would be his toughest one ever.

My Statehouse News Bureau colleague, Joe Ingles, talked to the former senator about what's next following the closing of his Senate career.

it ended.

It was some drama and certainly effectively my last vote of probably 13,000 votes in the House and Senate.

My penultimate.

I've always wanted to use that word in a real interview.

My next to the last vote after midnight on the last day of session, we passed a bill I've been working on for ten years with Susan Collins.

Remain.

It was bipartisan.

It, passed with, in the end, 76 votes.

It didn't look like it was going to pass until the last few months.

It it will provide for Social Security benefits to 250,000 Ohioans, 3 million people across the country.

That we're not going to get those that have been shortchanged on their earned benefits from Social Security.

So it was a huge victory.

It really is.

I mean, I, I worked right up until the end.

I was hired for six years to do that.

And I was proud of what we've done.

But it's really what I've tried to do my whole career and the dignity work, looking out for people, you know, whether you were a school secretary or a bus driver, a cafeteria worker or a stadium employee that's at a desk all day or was out in the field, whether you're a teacher or a firefighter, or police officer, we restored those full benefits to those to those, those earned benefits for Social Security beneficiaries.

Also, the president I was at the bill signing, sports, actually three days after I left office with the president, bill signing the Social Security Fairness Act.

But the other thing that happened, literally my last day in office, the president, at our request of the request of a of a small number of others, black weather steelworkers and notably blocked the sale of half of U.S. Steel to Nippon to a Japanese company.

That'll mean American jobs.

But it's foremost it's a national security issue that Japan Nippon had too many ties to the Chinese steel industry, and of any private sector industry.

The most important, probably for national security, is production of steel.

So it was a victory for workers, for sure.

It was a victory for trade enforcement.

It was a victory for our national security.

So, my mission from now on, my post Senate career will be about how do we how does the Democratic Party again become the party of workers, the Republicans or certainly not the party of workers?

You and the media like to make it sound more and more that the Republicans are gravitating that way.

And, but it sounds to me that Democrats really need to, to kind of push away this reputation we have as a party of being a bi coastal party were to were to bicoastal, were to corporate.

Again, Republicans are worse in terms of their, their slavish ness, if you will, to corporate interests.

But the Democrats should be about workers.

It's what I built my career on.

It's what I want to continue to fight for.

You've accomplished a lot during your tenure.

What do you think is the most important thing you've accomplished?

I remember on the, when March 6th, 2021, I said to Senator Casey, who sat next to me on the Senate floor, I said, this is the best.

This is the best day of my career.

Because that day we were passing the bill to restore pensions, to 100,000 Ohio workers, who had who had at the bargaining table.

He had negotiated giving up dollars in the president to get a pension.

And Wall Street shenanigans essentially took these, these benefits away.

We restored those at the same time in that bill passed by one vote in that case, every Democrat voted yes, every Republican.

No.

The vice president broke the tie.

We passed the biggest tax cut, called the child tax credit, for literally hundreds and hundreds, thousands of families, and that the families of 2 million Ohio children, got a major tax cut or refund, 60 mil families of 60 million children around the country.

Unfortunately, that lasted only one year.

If you would ask me the next question, what unfinished business did you leave behind?

I would say making the child tax credit that that huge tax cut for working families, regardless of income, 90% of families of kids were eligible.

Us all.

But the 10% wealthiest families.

We're getting these benefits, and it's the way we should should have gone.

We passed it for one year.

It's what this Congress should do.

Well, I kind of am going there with the next question.

I wanted to know what your biggest concern or your biggest worry is with the Trump administration coming in now.

My biggest worry is that he has surrounded himself with billionaires, billionaires who have a reputation of using government to get even richer.

And they, they seem unaware of probably the most persistent problem as a nation.

We face next, perhaps, to climate change, is that the wealthy are getting wealthier and wealthier and the middle class is shrinking.

The, the last 40 years, wealth is, is is migrated to the richest people from the middle class.

The middle class is shrinking.

I grew up in Mansfield, and I went to school with the sons and daughters of, steelworkers and rubber workers and auto workers and, and, and machinists and and carpenters and electricians and and millwrights and pipefitters who service those manufacturing plants a real path to the middle class for for millions of Americans, that path, because of bad trade agreements, were presidents of both parties sold us out and continue to all the way to the present day and into the future with the new president.

And we're seeing, there's no real addressing that I can see in this administration or in the upcoming Congress that that wealth gap where the middle class continues to shrink and the rich get richer and richer and richer and richer.

And it's it's most it's most, represented, by, by the number of billionaires in the president's cabinet and the people whom he is listening to.

He says he's a billionaire himself in, in several other building, I think a dozen or so billionaires literally surround him.

Give me you advice.

Sitting in his cabinet.

We've never seen anything like that in American history.

Well, speaking of billionaires, would you support state funding or state backed bonds for a domed stadium for the Cleveland Browns?

If they moved to Brook Park as planned?

That was easy.

No, I, I, I find it reprehensible that a billionaire owner who had no ties to Ohio comes and buys a team and then asks taxpayers in Cleveland for hundreds of millions of dollars.

And when essentially they've said no, he says he wants to move it to the suburbs, the Browns team.

And he's asking for, I believe, as much as $1 billion from Ohio taxpayers.

So why should Ohio taxpayers, why should taxpayers generally, fund millionaire multi-millionaire players and billionaire owners?

It's it's emblematic of the power that billionaires have in this government.

And I'm hopeful the state legislature will say no to him, although I'm I'm not optimistic.

There were things that you were working on, and you had to leave them undone.

Tell me about some of those.

Well, certainly the child tax credit was one, the Recoup act, which we passed out of the committee, chaired the banking Housing Committee, which would have clawed money back from those bank executives that defrauded the system and put in and caused a collapse of part of the banking system.

They should be penalized by giving the money they essentially stole back, and they should be penalized by never being allowed to be bank executives again.

I, a number of other issues.

The child tax credit, it's probably foremost in that what we to to to, make permanent what we did for one year, the, the East Palestine railroad issue, the power of the railroad lobby.

We had enough Democrats to pass the jump pass a bipartisan bill.

Senator Vance and I worked on it.

But we couldn't get enough Republican votes.

We had a few.

We couldn't get enough Republican votes to Republicans to stand up to the railroads.

And, you know, whether it's the railroads, whether it's, the the, the billionaires generally, whether it's the banks and wall Street have far too much power.

They've had far too much power under, frankly, with too many of my Democratic colleagues.

And they they seem to own lock, stock and barrel.

The Republican leaders in this country.

You talked at the top about the Social Security Fairness Act.

That had been a long time coming, and you had fought for that even when you were in the house.

Tell me what it felt like to get that across the finish line.

And what are you hearing from public retirees now that they're going to get the money they put in the Social Security?

I'm hearing from people all the time now by my government email is no longer exists.

So I'm not hearing it that way.

But I'm hearing all kinds of thank you.

So I was at the bill signing when the president called out Senator Collins, Republican, and me on passing this bill and sticking to it for ten years.

She and I worked together on it.

We had only 20 sponsors when I began with her, and it grew and grew and grew.

We got, every Democrat voted for it, and we got 25 Republicans for it.

And one day, I think a couple of Democrats weren't there.

But every Democrat who voted supported it, not all of them were for it initially.

And it took some real persuasion and pushing.

But it means that I, I'll give you a story that this story of somebody that we had to this really took off when we had a field hearing.

And I believe you covered in Columbus months ago.

One of the people who testified is a bus driver, named Barb from, Gallup from, I believe, megs County on the river.

She drove 200 miles a day.

Barb Ward is her name.

She drove a school bus with disabled kids to, 200 miles a day.

She, done it for, I believe, 30 years.

She's in her 70s.

She finally retired when she retired, she she gets a small pension.

She didn't make a lot of money as the school bus driver.

Didn't work a lot of hours compared to a full time 12 month job.

So she didn't get paid a lot anyway.

So.

But when she got her pension, she her Social Security was was cut by more than 50% her husband's social security that she had in a sense in essence here inherited.

So we restored those benefits.

It will make such a difference in her life.

And I've heard from her and heard from a school secretary in Dublin and talked to a police officer in Cleveland, talked to a firefighter in Cincinnati.

I mean, people all over this state and the 250,000 people in Ohio are going to get there for Social Security.

This is not a giveaway.

They worked to, to to, to qualify for Social Security, you need 40, 40, quarters.

That means ten years of private sector work where you're receiving social, where you're paying into Social security doesn't make you rich, but you should get what you earned.

And this was a ten year effort, to make sure people got what they earned.

And that's really been my career is the child tax credit took, 8 or 9 years.

The pension bill took ten years.

This Social Security bill took ten years.

The PAC act, which is named after an Ohioan, is the pension bill is named after Columbus, a young married, a young serviceman from Columbus, Heath Robinson.

And I know his wife is his widow and his daughter and his mother in law.

It named after Ohio and it took years to get that passed.

So I think the key here is, is, I mean, I said during my campaign that, you know, you could count on me the things I've worked on, I'm going to see them through.

And I saw that through the last day.

We're in session on the Social Security Fairness Act and my promise on my promise to try.

I never I never promise I'll absolutely succeed.

But my promise to try on stopping US steel from being bought by Nippon.

Finally, as I said the day after day of the day, my last day in office was when the president said that you had advocated for other changes, to Social Security and Medicare.

And I'm specifically thinking about the provision that would have allowed people in their early 60s to buy into Medicare.

That really didn't materialize.

But you fought for it.

Do you still believe that that should happen?

And what do you think should be done to shore up that Social Security trust fund?

Now?

Well, so you just signed there's a there are a lot of ways to do it.

And I'm not going to debate them now because the Congress has to make that decision.

But it's not it's not complicated.

It's just they've got to have the political will to do it.

And it means Congress has to stand up to some of its rich contributors.

And Congress doesn't have a history of doing that.

Frankly, the most important benefit, the most important success we've had with Medicare is something I've worked on.

I used to, when I was in the house, I used to drive.

I used to rent a bus from Lorraine.

We go from Lorraine to through Sandusky to Toledo to Detroit to Windsor, across the river to Canada.

And, seniors and seniors could Medicare beneficiaries could buy prescription drugs, same drug, same packaging, same dosage, but cost twice cost half as much in Canada because their government has stood up to the drug industry.

Finally, we succeeded this year in doing that.

Insulin capping insulin at $35 a month, a cap on out-of-pocket expenses, $2,000 a month to, I'm sorry, $2,000 a year for Medicare beneficiaries and it's important, as any of those, this is the Congress now for a finite number of drugs, ten and then another ten.

And then the number will grow larger, will negotiate drug prices on behalf of, I believe, 35 million maybe it's 40 million.

Now Medicare beneficiaries will negotiate on their behalf with the drug companies.

And and if if what happened in Canada and what happens at the VA or any indications then those the drug prices price will be cut by 30 or 40 or 50 or 60%, because the government will use the buying power of all those Medicare customers, if you will, in extracting a better price from the drug companies.

Okay, what is your greatest regret either way?

One more.

You got that?

I'm sorry.

Go ahead, I said, what is your greatest regret?

That we haven't one of my, I'll say it both ways.

We changed the debate on trade policy in this country.

The the mainstream thought on trade today.

It's what I advocated 30 years ago when NAFTA passed and I saw the damage NAFTA.

Did I still hear about it?

The Mahoning Valley I still hear still hear about it.

The Miami Valley and Ohio and elsewhere.

My greatest regret.

What did you say?

Regret.

My greatest regret?

Yes.

Your greatest incident is that we haven't.

Seriously, close that gap.

And people are cynical about their government because government far too often stands for the rich.

And government has far too often cited with the most powerful against everybody else.

And, this president has no interest in that.

He talks about it.

No.

And this new president, but no interest in dealing with that.

And my regret is that that we've what we've not won those battles, which the public deserves, that we win.

Now, that kind of leads into the next question.

The Democrats, at least in Ohio, have a brand that is proven unacceptable to voting Ohioans in this past election.

And you've long been able to retain your seat by focusing on what you call the dignity of work.

But that didn't work in November with Ohioans anymore.

So what do you think needs to change, and how are you going to message to Ohioans so that they can embrace the Democratic brand again?

Well, my my percent goal is mission is to, make the Democrats the party of workers again.

I ran seven and a half points ahead of the national ticket.

You can't run much more than that.

I think my message worked with people in that way.

Understanding.

It's easy to say, well, didn't work.

You lost.

I understand that, of course.

But, my mission will continue to do that.

I also would point out that, you know, Republicans lied about redistricting.

They made it harder to vote.

They tried to change.

They changed ballot language.

They did all kinds of I know I lost fair and square.

I know that other Democrats lost.

But I also know that, the powerful interests in that state, have no interest in helping middle class voters, have no interest in helping working families.

They have an interest in continuing their power, and they're very good at it in the way they run elections and the way they know.

No bitterness on my side.

I am I am honored to have had the career I did, but I see what it does to ultimately to middle class families in my neighborhood.

And Cleveland, where I used to live in Lorain, where I grew up in Mansfield.

And I know people who are victimized by a government that doesn't care about them.

Frankly, We've also requested an interview with Republican Senator Bernie Marino, who I spoke with before the primary last year.

You can see that interview in our archives at State News org.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State news.org or find us online by searching the State of Ohio show.

You can also hear more from the Bureau on our podcast, The Ohio State House scoop.

Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for watching and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

Just.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.