Business lobbies’ attempts to derail Ohio tort reform bill: Thomas Suddes

One of the glories of Ohio is its Bill of Rights, in some ways more protective than the federal Bill of Rights.

And one of the glories of Ohio’s Statehouse is the 1912 speech ex-President Theodore Roosevelt gave to the Constitutional Convention then refashioning – with voters’ subsequent OK – the Ohio Constitution.

Teddy Roosevelt was immensely popular in Ohio, and in 1912 was amid his second presidential bid – as a Progressive, not, as before, a Republican. TR didn’t carry Ohio in 1912 or win back the White House; he split the vote, delivering Ohio to the victor, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Pluralities in eight Ohio counties did back Roosevelt: Ashtabula, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Trumbull, Fulton (Wauseon) and Gallia (Gallipolis).

Roosevelt, at the Ohio Statehouse, catalogued the sordid list of big-business abuses against working Americans during the nation’s Gilded Age, notably fat cats’ opposition to workers’ compensation and, indirectly, to personal-injury lawsuits:

“I ask you not to think of … mere legal formalism,” TR thundered in the Ohio House chamber, “but … to ponder what it means to men dependent for their livelihood, and to the women and children dependent upon [them], when the courts … deny them the justice to which they are entitled.”

(Unions and commonsense business leaders won Ohio’s battle for workers’ compensation, and in 1981, almost 80% of the Ohioans voting on a statewide ballot issue refused to privatize Ohio’s state-monopoly compensation system.)

But, like cicadas, lobbyists periodically emerge on Capitol Square to undercut a parallel protection for everyday Ohioans suffering from personal injuries, despite Ohio’s Bill of Rights promising every Ohioan – rich, poor; of every hue and heritage – “for an injury done him in his land, goods, person, or reputation … remedy by due course of law, and … justice administered without denial or delay.”

One legendary episode in the Statehouse’s “tort reform” cycle came late in the 1980s, stewarded by the late Sen. H. Cooper Synder, a colorful Hillsboro Republican, a nonlawyer often remembered as a fan of cock fighting. Damages for injuries don’t sit well with industries that think they’re “more equal” than everyone else and that personal-injury protections are socialistic claptrap.

In 2004, the legislature passed a “reform” sponsored by then-state Sen. Steve Stivers, an Upper Arlington Republican later in Congress. Ohio’s Supreme Court used that 2004 bill to hammer down damages a jury awarded a 15-year-old parishioner for “forced oral and vaginal intercourse” inflicted on her by a then-senior pastor at Grace Brethren Church of Delaware.

The jury awarded her $3.65 million; of that, $3.5 million represented “pain and suffering … mental anguish, and any other intangible loss.” But thanks to Stivers’ 2004 law, Ohio’s Supreme Court cut — to $500,000 — the victim’s damages, despite what a jury of her fellow Ohioans had ordered.

(No, Stivers isn’t necessarily an extreme conservative “mossback”: In 2003-04, as a state senator, he courageously voted “no” on a bill banning same-sex marriages in Ohio that passed and then-Gov. Bob Taft shamefully signed.)

This session, pro-business lobbies, spearheaded by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce – whose president happens to be Stivers – want to block Ohio House Bill 447. At its core, legislative analysts said, the bill “increases the amount of … damages recoverable for noneconomic loss … in a tort action, or a civil action upon a (medical malpractice case), from a minimum of $250,000 to $415,000 and from a maximum of $350,000 to $580,000 for each plaintiff” … and requires adjusting those amounts (presumably, upward) in accord with the Consumer Price Index.

The bill’s sponsor is Rep. Brian Stewart, of Pickaway County’s Ashville, a nominally conservative lawyer who appears to be in the entourage of GOP House Speaker Matt Huffman, of Lima, also a lawyer — maybe boosting the Stewart bill’s prospects. (Lawyers’ fees in personal injury cases are typically a percentage of the damages a client wins.)

The chamber said that, for years, Ohio “policymakers have worked to build a predictable, pro-growth environment … HB 447 would undermine that progress by driving up costs for employers, increasing car and home insurance rates for Ohioans, and destabilizing our legal system.”

Oh, so that’s why the last time Ohioans’ per-capita personal incomes matched or bested the nation’s was … in 1969.

Thomas Suddes, a member of the editorial board, writes from Athens.

To reach Thomas Suddes: tsuddes@cleveland.com

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