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Please God, Let Ohio Reelect Sherrod Brown Next Year

Please God, Let Ohio Reelect Sherrod Brown Next Year

consumer financial protection bureau director rohit chopra testifies in senate banking hearing

Kent Nishimura//Getty Images

It’s a long pull up a dirt road, and the dirt road is in Ohio. Nevertheless, I am going to treat this as unalloyed good news for a while. From CNN:

The decision to run for Senate, which [Sherrod] Brown had quietly considered for months, adds another layer of intrigue to the Democratic Party’s uphill fight to win control of the Senate. Yet his candidacy is far from a winning bet, considering the rising GOP strength in Ohio, where Republican Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to the job earlier this year, faces reelection.

In their infinite dumbassery, in 2024, Ohio voters turned out Brown, one of the country’s most stalwart defenders of the country’s workers, in favor of a Trumpist sock puppet named Bernie Mareno.

Mareno’s most significant contribution in the Senate so far has been to file a bill that would call on the Senate to nominate the president for the Nobel Peace Prize. He also called for Los Angeles to lose the Olympics because of the protests against ICE in that city. And he livened up the campaign by some of the clumsiest dodging on reproductive freedom ever seen. From CBS News:

“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno says in the video. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50, I'm thinking to myself, ‘I don't think that's an issue for you.’”

Honest to god, Ohio. Have some pride, will you?

Brown will contest the seat of incumbent Republican senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to replace J. Divan Vance when the latter ascended to a better class of furniture in Washington.

When last we saw Brown, he was delivering a memorable farewell address on the floor of the Senate. After the requisite expressions of gratitude, and the requisite biographical details—Brown honest-to-God went to Johnny Appleseed Junior High—he got into the meat of his political career, and the fights he sought to win.

Corporations searched the globe for cheap labor. First, they moved south to anti-union states. Then, they lobbied for tax breaks and bad trade deals to move manufacturing overseas – always, always in search of lower wages. And compliant politicians were all too happy to oblige: They called it the North American Free Trade Agreement. They called it Most Favored Nation status with China — honest to God, that was its original name. They called it the Central American Free Trade Agreement. They called it the Trans-Pacific Partnership—until we put a stop to it.
And Wall Street rewarded those companies and those politicians, over and over and over. I saw what corporate greed and presidents of both parties did to my hometown—and to towns like it all over this country. Through all my years in Congress, I’ve tried to be their voice and their megaphone.

Brown actually fought for those issues that frauds like Senator Josh Hawley and the president only shadowbox for political advantage.

The old, 40-year Washington-Wall Street consensus on trade—that “compensate the losers” mindset—is dead. Of course this town is still full of people who think that way—whose arrogance won’t allow their worldview to be changed by all the evidence that corporate trade deals have failed our workers and our communities and poisoned our politics. But they no longer go unchallenged and unquestioned.

I will grant you that in these days of Tariff Guy, the idea that there ever was a “consensus on trade,” for good or ill, sounds like something outside of time and place. But Brown believed in a consensus that would benefit as many Americans as possible, and in a capitalism restrained against its worst instincts, and in economic policies that at least made some sort of freaking sense, instead of policies designed by throwing darts at a board in the president’s head.

It’s a long pull up a dirt road, and the dirt road is in Ohio, but it’s work worth doing.

esquire

esquire

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