OK, WHAT'S more important to the American people, a vote in the U.S. Senate on whether to advance a landmark health-care reform bill, or a celebration of George Voinovich's election as mayor of Cleveland 30 years ago?
If you're the senior senator from Ohio, the answer is easy, which is why Mr. Voinovich bailed on Saturday night's momentous vote in Washington to spend the evening in Cleveland reminiscing with his 1979 mayoral minions.
Never mind that all 99 other senators from Maine to Hawaii deemed the vote significant enough to show up, even if it had become obvious a day or two earlier that Mr. Voinovich and his fellow Republicans couldn't muster more than 40 votes to prevent the bill from moving to floor debate.
The final tally: 60 Democrats to advance the bill and 39 Republicans against, with only Mr. Voinovich ignominiously absent and not voting.
He said it didn't matter. We believe it did.
When he announced in January that he would retire rather than run for a second term, we were optimistic that Mr. Voinovich would use his new freedom as a lame duck to cast off partisanship and truly act as the independent political force he has claimed to be during a 45-year career in public life.Little did we know that the former governor would use this freedom to evade his duty to show up and vote in the Senate. What if some senator's mind had changed and the vote hadn't gone as expected? The course of history has been altered by lesser miscalculation.
While we're discussing politicians who shirk their duty, we would be avoiding ours if we didn't add to the list Ohio Senate Republicans, who last week left Columbus for a long holiday without acting on a budget-balancing bill already passed by the House.
Action is urgently needed to erase the state's projected $850 million deficit. The House had approved a sensible solution: putting off until 2011 the last phase of an income tax cut, which, it turns out, wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime.
In place of a vote on the bill, the GOP majority indulged in a few hours of what one observer accurately labeled "cheap theatrics," then left for home, hoping that Gov. Ted Strickland will get blamed by the public if the inaction means that state payments to schools must be cut.
It's a shame that this kind of partisan foolishness is what passes for leadership in today's General Assembly. Perhaps Ohio voters will recognize that over the next couple of years and turn the Senate GOP majority into the minority.
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