Ohio's House Republicans last month passed a bill that would punish universities if they help students vote. Included in the regular budget, the proposal would force universities to charge out-of-state students the lower in-state tuition rate if the universities give the students a letter or utility bill proving they live at school. Ohio universities say that would cost them as much as $370 million each year.

To which Ohio's House Speaker responded, verbatim, "That's a rather gigantic amount of money, and I just couldn't respond to it. I don’t know what to say." 

Meanwhile Republicans in the Ohio Senate have desperately been trying to slam the brakes on their colleagues' plan. For one thing, $370 million is truly a gigantic amount of money. For another, the House Republicans would create an incentive for more students to register to vote, and students tend to vote Democratic. It seems that Ohio's House Republicans had not thought about that part, either. From a Cincinnati Enquirer editorial:

Backers of the bill say they are rethinking the proposal because they hadn't considered the unintended consequences.

So it never occurred to them that making it easier for out-of-state students to get the lower in-state tuition rate -- indeed, requiring it if they want to vote here -- would not turn them away from voting but might in fact encourage them to vote, precisely to obtain the lower rate?

In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to vote in person at college. The court said it is students' constitutional right, under the 26th Amendment. Three decades later, Ohio Republicans are not satisfied with that. Republican State Senator Randy Gardner says the question of student voting belongs "in a separate election-reform bill," reports the Columbus Dispatch.

Some senators share concerns that students who have no intention of living in Ohio after college are voting not only in presidential elections in a vital swing state, but also on local tax levies.

"To dismiss this as a nonissue would not be fair," Gardner said.

Ohio's Senate is expected to decide on changes to the budget, including the student measure, by June 5.

The ancient response to tornadoes in school remains -- and, in many places -- the current one.

A bunch of you who grew up sitting in hallways during tornado warnings wrote in yesterday about Moore, Oklahoma. Neither of the two schools hit by a tornado this week had special "safe rooms" for protection from storms. The students and teachers took shelter the same way they have taken shelter for generations -- in hallways and bathrooms, wherever they could, with horrifying and tragic results.

Oklahoma state Representative Joe Dorman grew up sitting in hallways, too, and hoping for the best. Now he is proposing that Oklahoma spend $500 million building safe rooms for schools and other public facilities. As part of the Democratic minority, Dorman will need bipartisan support if he's to get anywhere with a bill. He tells us:

"There is that Big Brother mentality that says, 'You can't tell me what to do. We will never get a mandate that says you have to have a safe room in your home. . . . [I]f we are going to mandate that our kids must be in school, then we need to mandate that they have somewhere safe to go when there's a tornado."

As it happens, the mayor of devastated Moore now says he'll push for an ordinance requiring safe rooms in new homes. Even as Oklahoma has offered funding for schools to build safe rooms, the state has also resisted having the government regulation needed to require them and the expense of building them.

Oklahoma's 2013 legislative session is down to its last few days, so Representative Dorman's proposal might not get considered until next year. For now, the House budget chief tells the local press that they're considering the $500 million bond issue, along with other responses to the storm. Dorman says that if he can't get a vote in this session, he'll ask for a study committee over the summer and hearings to follow. He's term-limited out of office after next year. "Knowing this is my last stand in the legislature, I'm going to be tenacious about this," he says. 

After the jump, our segment last night on safe rooms and the Oklahoma town they saved.

In 2011, the tiny town of Tushka, Oklahoma, rode out a tornado in a pair of community safe rooms. The twister destroyed the town's school. Now they're rebuilding, they're including three safe rooms. The superintendent, as you'll see in the clip, says that was the first question they had about the new facility: Where are the safe rooms going to go? You can read more about Tushka's safe rooms on our previous post.

Tushka, Oklahoma, April 14, 2011. Courtesy of Gabe Garfield and Marc Austin/NOAA

The tiny town of Tushka, Oklahoma, sits a couple hours drive southeast of Moore. And like Moore, Tushka is vulnerable to tornadoes. A twister rated EF-3 struck Tushka in 2011, leveling much of the town. But as the Tulsa World noted at the time, Tushka was not defenseless:

Nearly 100 men, women and children crowded shoulder-to-shoulder into a six-year-old, above-ground, concrete-reinforced safe room adjacent to the Tushka pre-school. A block away, about 100 other residents, their kids and their dogs in tow, rushed into the 90-year-old, below-ground, public shelter -- 45-feet long and shaped like a tube, with dirt floors and steel doors at either end. 

Tushka lost two people that day who were not in the shelters. The safe rooms saved the others. The superintendent of Tushka schools, Bill Pingleton, says the newer shelter cost about $150,000 to build. Most of that cost got picked up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Divided over time, Pingleton says, safe rooms are not all that expensive.

The 2011 tornado destroyed Tushka's school; the new one they're building now will include three safe rooms, one each for the high schoolers, the middle schoolers and the grade schoolers. "That was absolutely our first thought, 'Where are we going to put the safe rooms?' " he tells us. "Then we sited the school around that." The design allows for all 460 kids to reach shelter within moments. 

Tulsa World

A safe room on the way in Tulsa, 2011.

Already people drive in from surrounding towns to use the existing Tushka safe rooms during bad weather, including yesterday. That is something of a tradition in Oklahoma, where they have at least 77 community safe rooms scattered around the state, most of them funded by FEMA. The federal government is still helping local governments build them. FEMA announced a $2.3 million grant for a community safe room in Victoria County, Texas, this month. 

After a tornado struck the town of Moore, Oklahoma, in 1999, people used FEMA grants for safe rooms at home. They would need them just four years later. A FEMA release tells the story of a Moore resident named Charles Atchley, in tornado number two:

During the tornado of May 8, 2003, Atchley and his three grandchildren took shelter in his safe room. His wife was at work at the time of the storm. He quickly took shelter after hearing the warning siren. When the storm passed, his family left the shelter safe and sound. Once again, this family was lucky and had no damage to their home, but Atchley said the storm shelter gives him "peace of mind" he wouldn't trade.

The shelter unit is neatly recessed into the ground and only the door can be detected nestled within the manicured landscape of the backyard. Atchley has stocked his safe room with the necessary supplies for survival and even included a black-and-white TV that runs on batteries. "I even get reception in the storm shelter," he boasted.

The town of Moore has continued its safe room program, urging people in town to get one. The city's website notes that only about 10 percent of homes there have a dedicated storm cellar and not many have basements. With two big tornadoes in the last several years, it does seem like people in Moore have been eager to take advantage of FEMA grants for safe rooms at home. In theory, FEMA will cover $2,000 of the $2,500-or-so cost for a shelter at home. But Moore officials have run into delays. From a February 2013 posting:

The City's safe room rebate program is still "on hold", with not a lot changed from our update of last May.

Our county-wide Hazard Mitigation Plan still has not been approved by the State and FEMA.  There were changes to the Federal requirements for this plan that occurred while our contractor was writing the document; he has had to rewrite it.  We've found that the FEMA requirements and their interpretations seem to be a constantly moving target, more so with the new wrinkles.  We're still working out various wording changes with the State reviewers and hope to submit the final document in March.

However, the Plan is not our main obstacle.  The Federal grant program which funds local initiatives such as ours is funded by monies set aside during Presidential major disaster declarations.  Oklahoma has had few of these declarations in the past couple of years, so there is not a lot of grant money available. 

Once our Plan is approved and grant funds become available, we will certainly proceed with our rebate program application.

Moore's public information officer, Jayme Shelton, says the process has been frustrating. "No one has gotten the money yet," he tells us.

There's no way to know for certain, of course, whether having more safe rooms would have made a difference in Moore yesterday, in homes or in the schools. Down the road in Tushka, superintendent Pingleton says he could not help thinking of Moore's teachers and students clustered in corridors, closets and bathrooms. "It was on my mind last night," he says. "When they were huddled in those hallways, it's a tough situation."

ADDING: Andrew Revkin at the New York Times' Dot Earth blog looks at the question of building shelters for more schools.

Ohio Republicans' push to make it harder for college students to vote is back in the headlines, with the news that Ohio Republicans appear to be sticking with it. As first reported by Plunderbund last month, the idea is to attach a price tag when colleges vouch for students registering to vote from school. If you're currently paying out-of-state tuition, and you register to vote at your university with a letter or utility bill from your dorm, then the school would have to charge you the much lower in-state tuition.

Estimates for how much that would cost Ohio universities are as high as $370 million a year. The measure punishes schools for helping students vote.

Tucked inside the budget, it passed the House earlier this month. This week the Cincinnati Enquirer reports that, for now, the language appears likely to stay alive in the Senate.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that under the 26th Amendment, students can register and vote where they go to school. In punishing schools that help make that possible, Ohio Republicans say they're just trying to lower tuition. But as you can hear in the interview below with Ohio House Speaker William Batchelder on May 2, they also want to stop college students voting in local elections.

From the transcript:

House Speaker William Batchelder: [W]hen I first came here people who were coming in from New York or some other place could not vote in Ohio. Then there were federal court decisions and other peculiar things, so that was permitted. The real issue is, for local areas in particular, what happens after somebody from New York City registers to vote. How do they vote on the school levy, how do they vote on the sheriff’s race, and so forth?

Obviously it would be possible for people to become knowledgeable in those areas, but there's to me a significant question, about what the particularly levies, what the result of having people who don't have to pay for them would do in terms of adopting those things.

Reporter: So is this to discourage them from participating or is to level the playing field with other students?

Speaker Batchelder: Well, it's to level the playing field in terms of who gets to vote on local issues in particular. I know, I can remember when this first started, it would have been '70. And very frankly I don't think most of our folks thought that you could do that up until it was done. It began down in Athens County, to the best of my recollection, but it's a long time ago.

Reporter: Do you have any reason to believe that a university's going to be less likely to give a letter or a utility bill based on this amendment?

---

Speaker Batchelder: Not on the basis of the studies I've seen on how faculty vote.

Reporter: On how faculty vote?

Speaker Batchelder: Yes.  I mean I think there’ll be encouragement from the administration in that regard.

Reporter: Universities estimate now that this will cost them about $370 million a year in tuition payments because they expect that everybody who is out of state will demand one of these letters just so they can get the in-state tuition. They say there is no money added to the budget to cover that cost. What is your response to their economic concern on this?

Batchelder: I don't have a response. I'm obviously going to talk to the president of the Senate and well see. Obviously the bill is not in front of us. It’s in front of the Senate. That's a rather gigantic amount of money, and I just couldn't respond to it. I don’t know what to say.

How or whether Ohio Republicans would help universities recover from the hundreds of millions in lost tuition is still not clear. (Thanks to Marc Kovac of the Youngstown Vindicator for posting tape from that press gaggle.)

Since the 2012 election, Republicans in Indiana, North Carolina and Ohio have introduced bills to make it harder for students to vote -- by banning out-of-state students entirely, or by imposing a financial penalty for exercising their rights. It's easy to see why they would be so interested in curbing the college vote. The chart below shows how the student precincts of Ohio State voted -- check out the margins for Barack Obama.

Bonus from the May 6 show: The history of students winning the right to vote goes back to Prairie View A&M, an historically black university in Texas.

-- North Carolina Republican state legislator Bob Steinburg, who apparently has company.

Back in 2004, I had the opportunity to commission a series of articles for the Village Voice about student debt. We called it "Generation Debt." The first installment, "The Ambition Tax," was written by the brilliant Brendan Koerner. I remember that the draft came in at 4,000 words or so, and contained almost no quotes. One of them was from a Harvard Law professor who had just written a book about middle-income debt. At the time, no one was talking much about student debt, but she did:

"The next generation is starting their economic race 50 yards behind the starting line," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and author of The Two-Income Trap. "They've got to pay off the equivalent of one full mortgage before they make it to flat broke, in order to pay for their education. They can never get ahead of the game, because they're constantly trying to play catch-up.

"And once you've got accumulated debt, the debt takes on a life of its own. It demands to be fed, and it takes that first bite out of the paycheck. And it means the opportunity to accumulate a little, to get a little ahead, to maybe put together a down payment—it's just never there. It's just staggering to me that this is not a part of our national debate right now."

Nearly a decade later, as Senator Elizabeth Warren, that frustrated law professor has introduced a bill -- her first -- to cut the interest on school loans. As Steve blogged earlier, she's proposing that students would pay the same rate as big banks instead of seven times as much. It's kind of cool to think how history goes sometimes. 

Larry Taylor of Dallas, Texas, sends this grab from his local TV news. It shows WFAA asking viewers if they would vote for Senator Ted Cruz, now a Republican Senator, for president in 2016.

Not scientific, just interesting.

You can see that the results in progress do not favor a President Cruz. Taylor, a blue dot himself, points out that Dallas County went for Barack Obama twice. If it's true that Texas is going from red to purple, his part of the state is already blue. 

(We love getting pics, stories, etc., from you. Send them here or through our Facebook page.)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that students have a constitutional right to vote where they go to school, even if they're considered an out-of-state student. But since the 2012 election, Republicans in Indiana and North Carolina have floated legislation to discourage college students from voting. 

In North Carolina, a Republican bill would raise taxes for the parents of any student who registers to vote at their college. The student votes, and the family gets punished.

Now Republicans in Ohio have come up with a new approach. In Ohio, eight of the 14 public universities routinely provide students with documents that make it possible for them to register to vote at school. But in the state House, Republicans are pushing a budget amendment (pdf) requiring schools that issue those documents to charge the student only in-state tuition, even if the student otherwise would pay the higher out-of-state rate. Under Ohio's scheme, the student votes and the school gets punished.

State Senator Nina Turner says the measure would give universities an incentive to make it harder for students to vote:

"[T]o force Ohio’s universities to do the dirty work of voter suppression is unconscionable."

Ohio universities say that lowering the tuition for everyone who wants to use their right to vote at school would cost the system $370 million a year. See also, from 2012: Tea Party challenges hundreds of student registrations in Ohio.

(Thanks to Ohio Capital Blog for the video; he's got lots more on this.)

Along with the new gun reform percolating in New Jersey, several bills for gun safety are on the docket in Maine. The Bangor Daily News reports that most of the bills in Maine have stalled, including a bill to limit magazine size.

At a hearing yesterday, Republican State Senator Gary Plummer suggested that limiting magazine size might have led to more deaths in Sandy Hook Elementary School. From the BDN: 

“I don’t believe if this law were in effect in that elementary school it would have saved one life,” Plummer said. He also said there is some information suggesting the Sandy Hook shooter was using a high-capacity clip that jammed and that allowed some children to escape. He said the shooter may have killed more if he was armed with just 10-round clips.

Investigators say the Sandy Hook shooter fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes, using 30-round magazines.

Laura Rushfeldt writes from Cambridge:

I took this 20 minutes ago out my window. Massachusetts Ave. at Inman Street, one block north of Central Square, taken this morning at 10:30am. COMPLETELY deserted, very eerie.