Former Ohio Supreme Court Justices Lead Redistricting Reform Effort Against Gerrymandering
Former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Yvette McGee Brown remembers when the Ohio General Assembly was run by Vern Riffe and Stan Aronoff, bipartisan leaders in the days before term limits and the Republican supermajority.
Brown remembers stories of the former Senate president and House speaker meeting for a drink at the end of the day to discuss the happenings of the legislature. “They talked about what they could get done, and they both understood that there was going to be compromise,” McGee Brown told the Capital Journal.
For McGee Brown, unless changes are made, those days are over. She is a Columbus native who has spent her career in the law. She was the first Black woman elected to the Franklin County Common Pleas Court in 1992 and the first to sit on the state supreme court when she took the bench in 2011. “That’s what breaks my heart, I grew up in this state and I don’t even recognize it anymore,” McGee Brown said.
But in the last year, she’s taken on a new way to enact change in the state, in a bipartisan way much like the old days she remembers fondly. She and former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor — the longest-serving woman elected statewide and the first woman to lead the state’s highest court, who also happens to be a registered Republican — are two leaders in the fight to reform redistricting in the state of Ohio with a new proposed ballot initiative.
“This whole focus on party over people and power over people, it’s not the way a democracy works,” O’Connor said.