News reporters often eschew describing the nitty gritty details of “how the sausage gets made” in the Ohio General Assembly. This is the deal-making, wheeling, dealing, midnight squealing – that awful noise Clarice Starling’s lambs make during the slaughter – in the Buckeye State Statehouse.

Of course, lawmakers have an interest in not publicizing the gory deets: these less-than-savory mechanisms are embraced on both sides of the aisle every now and again to suit their purposes when necessary.

Perhaps the messiest of these tools are deployed during the “lame duck session,” which Ohio lawmakers went through this week, where the […]