“We’re just doing the basic things (in Ohio) that the country ought to be focused on,” Kasich said. “I’m going to do everything I can to lead an effort in our state and across the country to call for an amendment to the Constitution to provide for a federally balanced budget.
“Right now (members of Congress) just run around and don’t have to meet a bottom line. They go home, they blame someone else, and at the end of the day, nothing gets done except we go deeper in debt.”
The governor said “somebody like (Speaker of the House) John Boehner would love” the constitutional amendment because it would force both parties to “develop a plan, to act like a small business, a family or the state and be responsible and live up to their responsibility in office.”
Kasich has been pushing this initiative since last year, and the Ohio General Assembly in November passed a joint resolution urging Congress to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Kasich spent Tuesday on the campaign trail. After the Hamilton event, Kasich met with small business owners and clients at Poelking Lanes in Dayton. He ended the day in Tipp City where he led a small business panel discussion with Roger Geiger, Ohio chapter of the NFIB vice president, and local small business owners at Repacorp Inc.
Yellow Springs attorney Sharen Neuhardt, the running mate of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald, said a constitutional amendment is “just a lot of talk” by Kasich, who served nine terms (from January 1995 until January 2001) as the representative of Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, including time on the House Budget Committee.
“This is the latest thing (from Kasich) because everybody wants to see our federal government reduce its debt and to balance its budget,” Neuhardt said during an interview Tuesday with the Journal-News. “But John Kasich … didn’t even get it done (in Congress), so I don’t even take it seriously about his efforts in this regard.”
Kasich’s team says Neuhardt and Democrats are “clueless” when it comes to Kasich’s history in Congress.
“The Democrats are so clueless when it comes to balanced budgets that they don’t even know it was John Kasich who led the effort to balance the federal budget in the late 90s,” said Connie Wehrkamp, Kasich’s communications director. “It’s a real relief that the Democrats are no longer in charge of our budget here in Ohio and can’t run us into another $8 billion hole that Gov. Kasich inherited and cleaned up a few years ago.”
Tuesday’s event in Hamilton was mainly about touting the NFIB’s endorsement of Kasich over FitzGerald in the gubernatorial race. Neuhardt said she can’t remember the last time the business federation endorsed a Democrat, and they were not expecting the endorsement.
But Geiger insisted to the crowd in Hamilton that party affiliation is irrelevant.
“We have a process, we were fair, deliberative and we gave both candidates an opportunity to be vetted before a group of small business owners, respond to a candidate questionnaire and, most importantly, we asked 25,000 members who we should issue our endorsement to,” Geiger said. “And without resolve, without question, overwhelmingly because of his track record as governor, John Kasich is earning NFIB’s endorsement for a second time.”
Kasich said the endorsement is a mandate of job-creators.
“Today, the job creators have spoken,” the governor said.
“What’s good for small business is good for Ohio,” Kasich said. “Helping small businesses do what they do — create jobs — has been our focus for the past four years, and they’ve responded by helping our state to add over a quarter million new private sector jobs.”
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