SUDDES: DeWine and his appointees have been outstanding managers of Ohio’s checkbook

Underpinning the Triple-A rating, Fitch reported, is “[Ohio’s] high financial resilience and superior budget management, as evidenced by robust fiscal reserves and cash, and a proven ability to absorb economic cyclicality and repeated tax policy changes.”

Compare that to congressional budget anarchy and the budget woes of such states as Illinois and New Jersey, which U.S. News & World Report, citing data from Moody’s, another bond-rating service, ranks last among the 50 states in credit ratings. (Democrats control Illinois and New Jersey; DeWine and his fellow Republicans control Ohio.)

True, the future is unknown. That’s especially so for states’ budgets, big chunks of which are dependent on the federal budget, when and if Congress passes one. And President Trump’s ludicrously named One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1), which became law July 4, and which every Ohio Republican in Congress supported, except U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson, of Miami County’s Troy, has potentially enormous negative financial effects on every state’s budget.

As of September, one in every four Ohio residents was a Medicaid client. Any cutback in Medicaid eligibility, or in the federal share of federal-state Medicaid spending, could have crushing consequences for Ohio Medicaid patients and the physicians and hospitals who care for them.

Still, the budget framework DeWine will leave his successor is well-crafted. It built on earlier work of budget professionals appointed by Lakewood Democrat Richard F. Celeste, governor from 1983 through 1990, and equally professional budget directors appointed by Republican Govs. George V. Voinovich; Bob Taft; and John R. Kasich; and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.

Unfortunately, the musical chairs of legislative term-limits have slashed the Ohio General Assembly’s budgeting experience. But so far – fingers crossed –governors’ budget directors have been not only policy-crafters but also state-finance professors to legislators.

As indicated by the state’s sterling bond rating, Mike DeWine and his appointees have been outstanding managers of Ohio’s checkbook. Still, history demands saying – on the policy side – that DeWine’s budgets haven’t given Ohioans a fair system of public school funding, and sluice more and more public money to private, often religious, schools, though Ohio’s constitution forbids that

But the same is true of Ohio’s roll-over-and-play-dead Supreme Court, which in a 5-2 ruling in May 2003 in effect killed the DeRolph school-funding lawsuit that had ordered statewide fairness in state public school aid, regardless of a district’s poverty. (Justices who opposed ending the DeRolph case in 2003 were the Democrats then on the court: Toledo’s Alice Robie Resnick and the late Francis E. Sweeney Sr., of Lakewood, author of the high court’s original 1997 pro-school-funding majority opinion.)

DeWine isn’t alone in his failure to fashion fair school funding budgets that, agreed, our mulish legislature would ignore anyway. No governor since the DeRolph case was originally decided in 1997 – from Voinovich onward – has done so either.

That’s a blot on DeWine’s legacy. Still, overall, on the budget-management side, Mike DeWine and his aides have maintained Ohio’s sterling credit rating and kept Ohio budgets balanced. Amid today’s beside-the-point politics, that’s a genuine public benefit to all Ohio taxpayers.