The departure of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner might mean a slight change to the way federal policy affects Ohio.
Boehner has been speaker of the House for nearly five years.
But David Niven, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati says that, in that time, Ohio has not seen a clear, tangible benefit to having one of its own members at the helm.
Niven says, however, that Boehner was a first line of defense for the state.
“You don’t see something that comes out of nowhere and a policy that somehow would’ve hurt Ohio in a traumatic, specific way, that he was in a position to stop anything that he didn’t want to see happen to Ohio,” Niven said.
But Democratic critics say Boehner influenced the drawing of the state’s Congressional districts map, which has been called one of the most gerrymandered in the nation. Boehner will leave office at the end of October.
