Background
Ohio enacted an accident-victim solicitation restriction and a public-records exemption for certain victims’ telephone numbers in its 2019 operating-budget bill. Allied Health & Chiropractic and related plaintiffs sued, alleging that the provisions exceeded the budget bill’s subject in violation of the Ohio Constitution’s one-subject rule, and also raised equal-protection and free-speech claims.
While the case was pending, later bills amended the solicitation law once and the telephone-number privacy law twice. The trial court nevertheless held both laws unenforceable because their original enactment allegedly violated the one-subject rule. The Eighth District affirmed, reasoning that later amendments could not validate provisions originally enacted unconstitutionally.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Ohio reversed. It held that the later amendments repealed the challenged versions of the statutes and enacted new operative provisions. Thus, any alleged one-subject-rule defect in the 2019 budget bill did not make the subsequently amended statutes void ab initio.
The court did not decide whether the budget bill itself violated the one-subject rule. Nor did it resolve the statutes’ other constitutional validity. Because Allied Health did not challenge the later enactments under the one-subject rule, the State was entitled to judgment on the claim that the laws remained void because of their original enactment. The court remanded for the Eighth District to address the State’s challenges to class certification and the preliminary injunction.
Key Takeaways
- An amendment that repeals and reenacts a statutory section can cure an alleged defect in the original enactment process.
- Courts must assess the amended statutory language as enacted in the later bill, not treat an alleged flaw in an earlier version as permanently disabling the statute.
- The decision did not decide whether the 2019 budget bill violated Ohio’s one-subject rule or resolve the plaintiffs’ free-speech challenge.
Why It Matters
The decision rejects the theory that an alleged one-subject-rule violation permanently invalidates every later amendment to the affected statute. It preserves the General Assembly’s ability to replace challenged statutory language through subsequent legislation, while leaving open direct constitutional challenges to those later enactments.