Jason Williams: Chabot being Chabot by invoking Nancy Pelosi, 'defund the police' GOP talking points

Credit: Jason Williams Cincinnati Enquirer

Steve Chabot is aggressively trying to define Democrat challenger Greg Landsman as a supporter of the unpopular defund-the-police movement in one of Ohio’s most competitive congressional races.

Does Landsman actually support defunding the police?

Or is this Chabot being Chabot, picking a national campaign talking point and beating it into the ground? For the Westwood Republican, has "defund the police" replaced Green New Deal as the three-word campaign attack slogan?

Landsman’s voting record as a member of Cincinnati City Council has been consistent on the issue: He has regularly supported funding the police.

In fact, the Mount Washington resident has voted for budgets that have collectively increased funding for the police by nearly $20 million since he was first elected in 2017.

No one who has closely watched Landsman on council has viewed him as a supporter of the defund the police movement. In his council reelection bid last year, Landsman didn't include coded defund-the-police language in campaign materials unlike some of his Democratic colleagues.

So where is this coming from?

Asked specifically why Chabot is attacking Landsman on the defund-the-police issue, Chabot campaign manager John Gomez brought up that Landsman once worked for Nancy Pelosi before she was Speaker of the House.

Gomez said in a statement:

“On the campaign trail, Greg Landsman has bragged about working for Nancy Pelosi and flippantly questioned why his ties to Pelosi would matter to voters – the same voters who feel the impact of the Pelosi agenda every time they fill their gas tank or buy groceries for their family.

“Landsman’s record reflects out-of-touch priorities inspired by his former boss, including mandates that would devastate small businesses and proposals to defund the Cincinnati police. At a time when southwest Ohio families and small businesses face skyrocketing crime, Landsman says the ‘change’ he supports should ‘come from the police budget.’

"A vote for Greg Landmsan would be a vote for his former boss Nancy Pelosi and the same radical agenda that has led to rising crime in greater Cincinnati communities and higher prices on everything.”

Landsman worked briefly in Pelosi's congressional office in 1999. But Pelosi and the cost of gas and groceries are irrelevant to what I asked about. 

Previously, Chabot and Washington Republicans had homed in on a motion that Landsman introduced at the height of the nationwide defund-the-police protests in June 2020.

Landsman called for diverting $200,000 from the police budget to fund the Citizen Complaint Authority, a police accountability program that had been long underfunded. Chabot advisers have previously pointed to a WLWT-TV interview Landsman did two years ago to make their point.

“The question that I think that we’re all going to have to wrestle with is, what does public safety look like now, and what does it need to look like?” Landsman told WLWT. “I believe the changes that are absolutely public safety related, which these are, should come from the public safety budget, should come from the police budget.”

From the outside, calling for diverting money from a police budget may like defund-the-police. But that wasn’t the case here. I’ll explain momentarily. 

This is what Chabot does. He exploits past comments made by his opponents without nuance or context. In 2020, Chabot tried to portray Clifton's Kate Schroder as a radical leftist by repeatedly saying she was a big supporter of the Green New Deal – even though she wasn't.

If you got sick of hearing Green New Deal two years ago, then brace yourself for hearing "defund the police." Ohio's 1st Congressional District is now considered a tossup after all of blue-leaning Cincinnati was included in the new map.

Landsman's motion and TV interview are fair game in a campaign. That’s politics. But it’s not the full story voters should know.

Landsman wasn’t calling for a new program to be started at the expense of the police budget. He wasn't calling for officers to be cut in order to fund the the Citizen Complaint Authority, a program that was born out of City Hall’s Collaborative Agreement nearly two decades ago.

The Collaborative Agreement has been held up as a model for police-community relations and came out of the 2001 officer-involved shooting death of an unarmed Black man.

The Citizen Complaint Authority is supposed to be part of the city’s public safety programming. In 2020, then-Mayor John Cranley and City Council later found a way to fund the authority without taking money directly from the police budget. Landsman supported it.

As chair of council's budget committee, Landsman recently led the effort for the city to approve a second police recruit class this year to address personnel shortages. The money is coming from federal pandemic-relief funding. The city hasn't had two recruit classes in one year in more than a decade.

"I do think it says a lot about him," Landsman said of Chabot. "He’s so far removed about what’s happening. We are talking about adding to the public safety spend. I’m 4-for-4 and about to go 5-for-5 on supporting police budgets."