Catching Our Eye News Roundup, July 8, 2026

Every morning in the Ohio Capital Journal’s free newsletter, The Eye-Opener, we round up the news and commentary from across Ohio and around the country and world that is catching our attention. We call this feature Catching Our Eye, republished here.

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Catching Our Eye

• Ohio lawmakers disinvesting from public education. In a Columbus Dispatch opinion column, Ryan Cook and Antoinette Miranda write, “Ohio’s ongoing disinvestment in all schools hurting kids.”

Ohio has known its school funding system is unconstitutional since the Ohio Supreme Court’s landmark DeRolph decision in 1997. Yet nearly three decades later, the state’s commitment to public education has continued to erode. The state’s share of public-school funding has fallen from approximately 47% following DeRolph to a projected 32% in 2027.

As state support has declined, local taxpayers have been forced to make up the difference.

The consequences are clear. Since 2005, state tax reductions have created an estimated $18.6 billion revenue gap, limiting the resources available to invest in public education and other essential services. School districts across Ohio are increasingly left with only two choices: reduce educational opportunities for students or ask local communities to approve additional property tax levies.

That isn’t sustainable. And it certainly isn’t fair.

• Unprecedented self-enrichment off the presidency. The New York Times reports, “Trump’s Huge Windfall Has Few Known Global Precedents.”

President Trump’s earnings in office are at a level once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president….

This week, new financial disclosures suggested that Mr. Trump has broken that mold by making at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses.

Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office.

The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.

• Shadow docket. ProPublica reports, “A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes With Little Justification.”

In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court.

These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent.

The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked — and has done so with little to no explanation.

• Campaign finance free-for-all. Reuters reports, “Supreme Court ruling may wipe out Democrats’ cash advantage in Senate battlegrounds.”

U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a fundraising juggernaut, raising more than $81 million so far this cycle and holding nearly $33 million in campaign cash, or $30 million more than his opponent in the November election, Republican Representative Mike Collins.

It might not matter anymore.

Ossoff’s financial edge in a state that ‌President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election may have effectively been erased by the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week struck down limits on how much individual candidates ‌could coordinate their spending with national political parties.

The Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee, among others, will now be able to spend unlimited funds from their big donors in coordination with political campaigns.

• National Weather Service troubles. CBS News reports, “National Weather Service faces hurricane season with less experienced staff, missing data.”

Last year’s federal downsize shrunk the weather service by about 600 employees, most of them experienced workers who accepted early retirement packages, said Tom Fahy, the legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a labor union representing weather service and other NOAA staff. About 100 probationary employees, in their first year of federal service, were fired.

Federal employment data reviewed by CBS News showed staffing gaps have persisted since then. NOAA had nearly 300 fewer meteorologists and hydrologists in its workforce at the end of May, compared with January 2025. While the data doesn’t specify which NOAA employees are part of the weather service, meteorologists and hydrologists working in other subagencies contribute heavily to the research that informs forecasting operations.

• Defending the indefensible. In a Guardian opinion column, Margaret Sullivan writes, “Why does JD Vance keep saying loony things?”

In recent weeks alone, the Catholic convert has suggested that Pope Leo – the head of the Catholic church, after all – should be careful when discussing theology.

Vance also has declared that the Watergate scandal and its cover-up were no big deal, and that it’s absurd that these (clearly corrupt) acts should have brought down President Nixon.

He even described as “troubling” the Vatican’s welcoming views on immigration. Vance went so far as to say such tolerance – echoed in lawn signs that say, for example, “no person is illegal” – run against core Catholic beliefs. The well-known Jesuit priest Father James Martin SJ pushed back hard, noting Jesus’s clear message of caring for strangers and saying Vance had it all wrong.

Add this to Vance’s scorn, during the 2024 presidential campaign, for single women as “childless cat ladies”. (He has since disavowed those comments.)

Or recall his spreading the ugly lie that Haitian-Americans were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

What exactly is all this craziness intended to accomplish? Why would a guy who wants to be president make a practice of unnecessarily insulting huge swaths of the electorate and going up against a hugely popular American-born pope?

Strange as it seems, his outrageous comments – presented as if they are the product of a thoughtful, serious person – are no accident.

Vance is sending a clear message to Trump’s dedicated base that he’s just as good at stirring up hate and grievance as the man they elected twice as president.