No Gloating
I promise
I don't think it’s right to in the middle of a global pandemic make fun of the Ohio Speaker of the House, Larry Householder, and his cronies getting arrested.
Hahahaha sike, FUCK YOU LARRY. ENJOY PRISON, BITCH.
Fun times in Cap Square
For those of you who don’t know I spent 3 years working for the Ohio House of Representatives. I don’t like to talk about it much, given the absolute horrific policy that the House is responsible for, but sometimes it’s good to have an insider perspective.
The insider perspective is holy shit it finally happened. Larry Householder has gotten away with being a rotten-to-the-core piece of shit his entire career and he is finally getting his due.
For those that haven’t heard, Little Ole’ Larry took 60 million dollars from First Energy in exchange for passing House Bill 6. I wrote about that right here back in the day, with some astute insight about how messed up it was.
Being rich is literally allowing First Energy to bribe their way out of democracy. It’s incredible to see a group this corrupt do this so out in the open.
First Energy and their stooges in the legislature, led by a noted friend of the newsletter Larry Householder, don’t feel the need to hide because with full Republican control of the state they’re invincible.
You can’t be investigated if you control all the investigators.
As it turns out, you can be investigated by the FBI, which Larry apparently didn’t realize. It’s notable that he didn’t realize this, given he was forced out of the Speakership in 2004 under a cloud of, wait for it, FBI investigation.
For all of you asking if I’m clairvoyant, just read this quote from yet another one of my past musings here. This is in reference to Larry trying to fly back legislators on the state plane to vote for HB6.
The legislators unfortunately made it back in regular ways and still voted in one of the most despicable and corrupt laws of this decade. At least the taxpayers weren't burdened with another additional ridiculous charge from it.
This is Ohio under Larry.
That’s the thing, I’m not clairvoyant the corruption was just so? blatantly obvious. Let’s run this back.
Back in the old days, after House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger stepped down (under FBI investigation) in 2018 there emerged two distinct camps in the statehouse. There was “Team Householder,” led by the resurgent Larry, and “Team Smith,” led by Ryan Smith who was elected speaker after Rosenberger.
This kicked off a immense power struggle for House leadership, with Larry working on electing his own guys to vote for him. This is where First Energy comes in. Their bribe money supplied the resources for his candidates campaigns, who all seemed to have boatloads of cash for non-establishment backed challengers.
That’s because well they did have boatloads, in fact tens of millions worth. This money ended up electing 23 representatives for Larry, which out of 99 is a ton. Every single one of these reps should resign and/or go to jail. They were elected with bribery money and 22 of them voted for Larry for Speaker and HB6.
Check out the breakdown here, to see if your rep took dirty money and voted for Larry.
Here’s where some of my experience comes in. While I was in the House my boss was on “Team Smith” and it was absolutely brutal there. The Larry stooges wouldn’t speak to non-Larry stooges, they operated a website (3rdrailpolitics.com), funded by First Energy money, whose sole goal was to write lies about his opponents.
The open harassment, hostility, and back stabbing isn’t new to politics but it derailed the House and caused effectively an open civil war.
Larry’s people would stop at nothing to smear their opponents and take power. Maybe that’s why it’s no surprise to anyone to see they were rotten to the core. How about these? If you’re wondering, both Larry guys.
This isn’t to say the Team Smith was fundamentally better, all were Republicans, but many of them were moderates and none of them came near the 60 million dollar bribery operation that Larry ran. There aren’t any good guys there, but Larry’s friends are the worst of the worst.
To be bipartisan for a second, Larry also never would have been promoted to speaker without the votes of 10 statehouse democrats. Each of those needs to be investigated, and if they took bribery money they too should resign/go to jail.
It’s worth thinking about how the deal on the face of it was they vote for Larry for Speaker in exchange for an HR officer for the House. While the HR officer was sorely needed, there’s no way they took the drastic step of supporting Larry for just that. I would be shocked if there wasn’t bribery money moving under the table, such is politics.
I have story after story of Larry trying to ratfuck the House from up high, so pardon my gloating it just feels so good. He deserves prison, his goons deserve prison, if you take 60 million dollars in bribes it is the place for you.
Hopefully we can learn from this in November and actually vote out Larry’s goons and the corruption in the House. That won’t fully happen, but the taking down of Larry’s campaign funding cabal could realistically net the Democrats 2 or 3 seats. If just one of those is Mark Fogel (running against Niraj Antani for State Senate) near Dayton I’ll be immensely grateful to Larry Householder for being dumb enough to get caught.
That’s the best part of this story, how preventable it was and how literally everyone knew. People knew Larry and crew were dirty, evidently people ratted on Larry, and the rooster has come home to roost.
I couldn’t have been happier if I tried, on Tuesday when Larry was arrested people I hadn’t talked to in years came out of the woodwork. Most asking, “who else is going down?” Good question.
Will it be Jay Edwards the serial-harasser and Householder goon from Athens? Niraj Antani the Householder goon and world-renowned shithead? Great questions and I don’t know, but I do hope the FBI thoroughly dismantles the corruption in downtown Columbus and go where they need to.
All I know for sure is that Tuesday night I enjoyed a beautiful “RIP Larry,” inscribed cake and that night popped some champagne to celebrate the possibility of seeing Larry in the pen.
If there’s one thing that can unify both sides of the spectrum (yeah I hate that term lmao why should we unify but whatever) it’s this guy being taken all the way down. His friends, who I haven’t mentioned here because quite frankly I don’t care, going down too doesn’t hurt.
Neil Clark, the lobbyist for ECOT (the massive scam of a private online school), got taken down which is fantastic. Matt Borges, fraudster, taken down. All of it is just a glorious combination for those who don’t love corruption.
Good politicians don’t take bribes, bad politicians should go to jail. Sorry this had to happen to you Lar. Anyways, watch this shit and sit happily on your couch knowing that you aren’t about to be federally indicted and that Larry can’t legally even have his guns anymore.
Here’s me dunking on Larry once more just for posterity.
I hope you all have a great week, free of prison. I know I am.