Ohio Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, was the keynote speaker at the Allen County Republican Party Luncheon on Friday at the Lima Eagles.
Craig Kelly | The Lima News
LIMA — The Allen County Republican Party welcomed a neighbor, of sorts, to its monthly luncheon Friday at the Lima Eagles with Ohio Sen. Rob McColley, R-Napoleon, making the trip south to encourage his fellow Republicans to stay vigilant going into what promises to be a pivotal election season.
The senator, whose district includes Putnam, Van Wert and Hardin counties, sought to motivate the GOP base in Allen County by pointing to Democrat-led policies regarding clean energy, and the impact those policies have had on Ohio’s natural gas industry, and what he described as outside influences in state politics, seen especially in the 2023 campaigns for Issue 1 and Issue 2.
When it comes to energy policies, efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption have been disastrous for the nation’s energy infrastructure, McColley said, as efforts to develop “green” energy initiatives are not adequately meeting increased demands for energy, especially in light of the promotion of electric vehicles. McColley asserted that as the government has disincentivized fossil fuel energy production, power plants are going out of service earlier, putting increased stress on the power grid.
“This is completely a government-created problem, and it’s going to leave us literally in the cold years from now when we have the early retirement of all these plants happening exclusively because of government regulations and the government’s invisible hand in the market,” he said. “They need to reverse those policies. Otherwise, Ohioans are going to be left in the cold and unable to turn their lights on during polar storms or extreme heat events.”
McColley also pointed to last year’s elections on Issue 1, guaranteeing abortion access in Ohio, and Issue 2, which allows recreational marijuana use in the state. While he said the government needs to respect the outcomes of these elections, he also said that those races saw a large influx of funding from organizations outside the state that are connected to foreign nationals. An example he cited is the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which he said is connected financially to Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.
“We saw the Sixteen Thirty Fund spend approximately $14 million in the state of Ohio in the August [2023] campaign and the November campaign,” he said. “[Wyss] has put $200 million into that fund since 2016, and those are numbers from last year. There could very well be much more money that’s going into it. They’re certainly becoming more active. This is something that we shouldn’t allow in this country and we should be more mindful to work against it.”
To that end, McColley, along with Ohio Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Bowling Green, introduced Senate Bill 215. The bill, currently being considered in committee, aims to curtail any political contributions with connections to foreign nationals, McColley said.
“The way it would work is that, number one, whenever you would file a campaign finance report, if you were a [political action committee] that is spending money in an election, you would have to certify that you didn’t take any money from a foreign national or a group that had received money from a foreign national,” he said. “The penalties for that are that not only would you have to return the money back to the entity if you were found to be in violation, but there would also be fines up to three times the donation amount. So what we hope it will do is, rather than [people] trying to find a loophole or dance around the edges and find some kind of plausible deniability, that the penalty will be severe enough that they won’t do it. It won’t be worth it to them and they’ll stick within the bounds of what we believe campaign finance laws should be.”
