Case Dismissed

The Ohio Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit…challenging Gov., DeWine’s authority to end Ohio’s participation in a federal pandemic unemployment aid program…ahead of the federal government’s 2021 deadline for stopping the payments. The court’s unanimous decision on Tuesday called the case moot, without any additional explanation. At issue before the court was a weekly $300 federal payment for Ohioans to offset the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The federal government ended that in September of last year, but DeWine stopped the payments two months earlier, saying the need was over. The governor then followed the position of business groups that said the payments were making it difficult to recruit employees. More than two dozen other states, all led by Republican governors and legislatures, began blocking payments around the same time.