Ohio’s restaurant owners can use their city’s law directors to end DeWine’s unlawful closings and occupancy restrictions

CLEVELAND, OH – Ohio’s restaurant owners should consider reviewing each of the “unsuspended” federal, state and local laws and ordinances they were required to comply with and “pay for” in order to open and receive a Certificate of Business Occupancy signed by the mayor; and one from the Fire Marshall with an authorized number of customers and employees for seating and working. There’s also the board of health certificate for meeting food preparation and safe handling standards. 

Since many restaurant owners know a member of council in the city their business exists in, especially those where fundraisers are held, cut and paste the question below and ask them seek an opinion from the director of law about it.  If they say they can’t then shove this law in their face.   R.C. 733.54.  The heading is, “City director of law shall give opinions.”  Council members are “officers” of a municipal corporation.

When an officer of a city entertains doubts concerning the law in any matter before him in his official capacity, and desires the opinion of the city director of law, he shall clearly state to the director of law, in writing, the question upon which the opinion is desired, and thereupon the director of law shall, within a reasonable time, reply orally or in writing to such inquiry. The right conferred upon such officers by this section extends to the legislative authority of the city, and to each board provided for in Title VII [7] of the Revised Code.  Effective Date: 11-01-1977 .

I once owned a restaurant in downtown Warren and I’m a former mayor, mayor’s chief of staff and mayor’s special assistant.   I’ll share with you the laws I would have used to cause the mayor and city director of law to show me the exact “opinioned” legal authority any official had to close my business or restrict my occupany once I legally obtained and paid for permits.    The question you want to cut and paste for your councilmember to ask the director of law is set-up below. 

QUESTION:  Governor Richard Michael DeWine and Ohio Health Director Dr. Amy Stearns-Acton ordered officials throughout Ohio to close all public buildings, including the courts.  Businesses we’d given permits to open were ordered to be closed in violation of our local ordinances.  The mandated duties of the public offices we held, and our ordinances, appear to have been “suspended” even though there was no act of the General Assembly to suspend them pursuant to Article 1 and Section 18 of Ohio’s Constitution. So they were not suspended and the state’s laws and our local ordinances; as well as both our Constitutions remain intact.  The duties of the public offices all of hold were not changed by any legislative act or vote of the people.

  1.  Please provide me and all the officers of the municipal corporation with an opinion on Title 37 of Ohio’s Revised Code  and identify for each of us the specific statutory duties of the Ohio Director of Public Health, the county health board, the city’s health board and the governor during a pandemic.
  2. Please identify and cite with an opinion the federal, state and local laws that give the governor of Ohio and the Ohio Director of Public Health the legal authority to enact what amounts to new laws imposed upon the city’s businesses and property owners that have not been submitted pursuant to R.C. 119 or codified as law by the General Assembly of Ohio.  The imposition of their new and uncodified “rules” include terms like “social distancing” and “masks,” and appear to set lower occupancy thresholds than those we authorized by laws that have not been suspended.

After receiving the director of law’s opinion, Section 733.56 of Ohio’s Revised Code gives restaurant owners in a municipal corporation the ability to force that legal official to protect them with an injunction against Dewine and Stearns-Acton’s misconduct.  This will right now let restaurant owners save their own money for the fight after receiving the law director’s opinion.  It’s how taxpayers can make city officials work for them. 

Section 733.56 of Ohio’s Revised Code can be used to compel the director of law to enforce the findings in their own legal opinion about the governor and health director’s authority to vacate federal, state and local laws and ordinances that let the businesses open with an injunction against DeWine and Stearns-Acton.  

“The village solicitor or city director of law shall apply, in the name of the municipal corporation, to a court of competent jurisdiction for an order of injunction to restrain the misapplication of funds of the municipal corporation, the abuse of its corporate powers, or the execution or performance of any contract made in behalf of the municipal corporation in contravention of the laws or ordinance[s] governing it, or which was procured by fraud or corruption.”

For some crazed reason DeWine seems to think he can let Stearns-Acton create an order that he directs municipal police officers to enforce.  Because their 640 hours of training is less than the 1500 barbers and cosmetologists get, poorly-trained cops think they can enforce the governor and health director’s “orders” when R.C. 737.11 imposes the duty upon them to obey and enforce “all” federal, state and local laws and ordinances and orders of the court. 

“Orders” aren’t in R.C. 737.11 as anything a municipal police officer has a duty to enforce and to assign them to do, so enforcing any unlawful “order” would be “the misapplication of funds of the municipal corporation.”  The evidence is the “ticket” the cop issued as a criminal tool in contrast to the duties of municipal police officers in R.C. 737.11 he or she disobeyed in “conspiracy” with the city’s prosecuting attorney who can find no statute they can enforce to support the cop’s misconduct.  The fact they’re twisting laws to enforce an order Title 37 didn’t authorize either DeWine or Stearns-Acton to make places the cop, prosecuting attorney and municipal court judge in a federal conspiracy to violate your constitutional rights pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code.  Sections 241 and 242. 

It’s the tool U.S. Attorney General William Barr is going to use to prosecute some of the constitutional -rights offending governors thanks to the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Control Act U.S. Senator Joe Biden voted to support and President Bill Clinton signed.  It took crimes cops, prosecutors and judges commit from misdemeanors to felonies; and gave them prison sentences of up to 10 years.

Here’s what I know as a former mayor who’s been administered an oath of office to obey Ohio’s Constitution.  Article 1, Section 18.  It’s one sentence.

“No power of suspending laws SHALL EVER BE EXERCISED except by the General Assembly.”

None of the permits cities, fire marshalls and health departments issued restaurant owners were revoked during the “pandemic that wasn’t” and the law works both ways.  Out of the state’s 26 pandemic laws the only the authority Ohio lawmakers granted the governor was to stop adulterated products like the fentanyl that was made in China he helped kill nearly 40,000 Ohioans during his time as attorney general.

There were 84 narcotic overdose deaths the year “before” then Ohio Attorney General DeWine led a viciously slanderous attack on 62 pain management physicians that drove them out of the state and their patients to the streets to die.  If you lost a loved one to a narcotic overdose between 2011 and even recently point the fingers at this life-robbing asshole.

Stearns-Acton’s “authority” was over “Co-Vid 19 infected Ohioans” and not “coronavirus-infected Ohioans” because it’s nothing more than the seasonal common cold. Co-Vid 19 is influenza that turns into deadly pneumonia.   The final cause of death for all the deaths they classified as Co-Vid 19 once all DeWine and Stearns-Acton’s lies are sorted through will be “pneumonia.”  Especially the 94-year-old man. 

R.C. 3707.08 required Stearns-Acton by law to ensure that those she knew were infected with Co-Vid 19 were quarantined to their homes.  A placard was “required” by that law to be placed on their home to alert first responders and others interacting with the occupants that they were “Influenza infected” and in a healing status.  No big deal.  They’re not lepers. Dewine had no legal authority to share health information “to protect first responding cops, firefighters and EMS workers” in violation of federal Health Information & Patient Portability Act that made health records and the information in it private.  Those people have claims against him, individually, for the decision he made outside the law.

Stearns-Acton through her statewide supervision of the directors of local health boards was granted the authority in Title 37 to instruct them to post a guard at the infected Ohioan’s home to ensure they remained in it if they refused.  None of Title 37 includes words like “social distancing”, “shelter in place,” or “mask.”   The words “self-quarantine” don’t exist in the Revised Code.

Children raised homeless by mentally ill parents are known to “socially distance” from others to keep their parents from being arrested and them from being placed in custody.  Stearns-Acton has told reporters she was raised by a mentally ill mother who once pitched a tent in a Mahoning County park during the winter for her and a brother to live in.  Stearns-Acton, if she ever ate from trash or begged for food, couldn’t share that reality with the Youngstown-area teachers and classmates she had to socially distance from and deceive.  Once the habit of lying is ingrained it’s hard to stop.

What makes this argument more compelling is how both DeWine and Stearns-Acton did actually lie and inflate their lie about the number of infected Ohioans in order engage the duty-exceeding misconduct that executed their economy-killing debacle.  This is now the time for Ohioans to put politics and party affiliations aside to ensure these two dangerously reckless officials are fully held accountable for their misconduct that sends them both to prison.

The information they’d used public offices to acquire privacy-protected health information about those known to be contagious in the state produced hard data that only 13 Ohioans were identified as Co-Vid 19 infected.  Nine were Russian American Jews from Cuyahoga County.  Three had just returned from a trip to Soviet Israel.  Six were Hawken Upper School students who had attended an American Israeli Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington, D.C. 

This writer didn’t know Stearns-Acton’s Hebrew faith until she recently shared it.  Jews were accused of the Black Plague and recently those who follow the Orthodox side of the religion were accused of spreading measles because of their refusal to be innoculated. 

It would be understood why she would “personally” not make the decision to quarantine them and placard their homes, but she didn’t have the authority to allow Cuyahoga County’s health director, Terry Allan, to let them “self-quarantine.”  The words “self-quarantine” were created by disobedient anarchists holding public office.  Public officials have no authority to close a state or a business to keep members of their faith from being stygmatized.

The World Health Organization had confirmed as recently as December 2019 that the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or “MERS” was being transmitted camels to humans in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Irag, India and Pakistan by American and foreign travelers; and the Middle Eastern medical students working in our hospitals. The 13 was the only figure either DeWine or Acton in their “official capacities” were authorized by law to report to the public and not a person more.

When Stearns-Acton “guessed’ that the infected Ohioans were one percent of 11.7 million Ohioans, and they both acted on an estimate of 100,000 Co-Vid 19 infected Ohioans instead of  the 13 they’d used the authority of public offices to confirm, each recklessly exceeded the authority of the public offices they held by disseminating false information to the public and causing a panic.

DeWine tweeted Stearns-Acton’s lie the next day and inflated the figure even more by claiming that the 100,000 infected Ohioans would double every six days.  This was on March 13th.  On March 16th he closed the state with Stearns-Acton.  My March 19th there should have been 200,000 infected Ohioans.  Then 400,000 by March 25th.  Then 800,000 by March 31st.  By April 6th there should have been 1.6 million infected Ohioans and 3.2 million infected by April 12th.  By April 18th we should have had 6.4 million Co-Vid 19 infected Ohioans  who would have infected the entire state’s 11.7 million population by April 24th if we follow the math these recklessly lyin’ lunactics offered.

When each public official acted on knowingly false information instead of the information an authorized investigation revealed, every deed they committed afterwards abused the office and exceeded its authority. 

This is how Title 37 authorized the health director to protect first responders from being infected. No law authorized Governor Richard Michael DeWine to give first responders the names of infected Ohioans.

Both and DeWine and Stearns-Acton were administered oaths of office like I was as a mayor to obey and enforce the U.S. Constitution, Ohio Constitution, federal laws, the state’s general laws and to discharge only the duties spelled out  for them to perform as written; and without alteration. Our grandparents here in 1918 for the Spanish Flu and every pandemic afterwards codified instructions in federal and state laws for future generations to follow; and based on lessons they’d already learned. I asked the Cuyahoga County health department for guidance as mayor in 2009 for the H1N1 or “swine flu” virus. 

I’d spent 7 years working in administration between civilian and U.S. Air Force hospitals during the end of the Vietnam War, and in Thailand when South Vietnam surrendered to China-controlled North Vietnam in April 1975.  My tour of duty at the CIA’s lead Air America base ended in August of that year.  My last year was working in epidemiology and as an aide to the Commander of the School of Aerospace Medicine.

With my own medical knowledge, as mayor I had already ordered custodians to sanitize city hall and posted signs on all public properties instructing residents with flu-like symptoms not to enter when I reached out to the county.  Employees with the symptoms were told to stay home whether they had sick time or not.  Employees want to “bank” sick time and tet checks for that which is unused.  Fuck that shit. 

Then the Plain Dealer’s Michael McIntyre accused me of insighting a panic.  Stupid fuck.  The county’s health officials confirmed that all I’d done was all I could do within the law.

There were no new laws for either DeWine or Stearns-Acton to invent between 2009 and now that would allow them to order every restaurant in the state to close and to come up with new “rules” no one legislative authority in any city had seen or approved in public meetings.  To seek new rules required Acton to submit them through a public process required in Chapter 119 of the Ohio Revised Code.  She doesn’t get to now say, “Oh I thought I was doing the right thing.”

DeWine grabbed his medical quack from the Columbus Foundation where she was working on a grant.  She’d also taught at Ohio State University and spent time as a pediatrician.   His second in command is a psychiatrist.  While each met the “qualification” of being a “medical doctor” there are different levels of “doctor” experience; and doctor experiences that are right for every doctor’s job.  The commander I served as an aide disciplined doctors and I typed his reports.  

The coronavirus, according to the 1996 Medical Microbiology handbook of the University of Texas’ School of Medicine, is the “seasonal common cold” that turned into the flu for some; and pneumonia for others neither sought an answer from Title 37 on how to handle.  A doctor with limited emergency room and intensive care experience who spent time teaching and managing grants would not know that putting a person with pneumonia on a respirator worsens the pneumonia and causes death in 85 percent of the patients whose lives were sacrificed to serve their “death count boosting” law breaking. 

What’s heartbreaking and both fearsome is that neither DeWine nor Stearns-Acton could wait for 3000 to 8000 Ohioans to die a day.  Everyday these political ghouls showed up on television to keep us updated and waiting for the horror show they were predicting.  When the misery and deaths didn’t achieve their made up statistics DeWine eventually took his ghoulish political “reality show” off the air.  The ratings must have dropped as each day Ohioans were told new lies by the delusional Stearns-Acton.

Ohio’s mayors should have instructed their city law directors to review Title 37 of Ohio’s Revised Code before they blindly followed the recklessly lunatic path DeWine and his medical quack, Stearns-Acton, followed that had nothing to do with the state’s 26 pandemic mitigating laws.  Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has no authority to do anything in Title 37.  The proclamation he issued isn’t worth the paper it’s written on; and no citizen of the city or business and property owner is compelled to obey it.  Should he try his victim can use R.C. 2935.09 and 2935.10 to file criminal charges against him.

As a “home rule” state with 1400 different municipal corporations operating under laws enacted by their councils and enforced by the mayors, the only legally authorized permmit revocation or amendment processes in those “local” ordinances didn’t change or end up wiped out just because DeWine and Stearns-Acton exceeded the authority of the public offices they held to order businesses and municipal and county government buildings they had no control over to close on March 16, 2020. 

Ohio law requires health departments to quarantine the infected and notice those interacting with them with a placard on their home.

DeWine and Acton-Stearns should have obeyed Title 37, first, and then sought permission through a public process identified in Section 119 of the Revised Code to have sections of it amended or expanded based on evidence that the sections they applied didn’t work.  They failed to “acknowledge  no constitutional or statutory limitation” upon their conduct as Congress in 1954 described Communists in the Communist Control Act they enacted that year.  Compare a “portion” of the language of Title 50 of the United States Code, Section 841 to the conduct of DeWine, an Irish Catholic, whose ancestors are from a nation that sided with Adolph Hitler’s Nazis during World War II.  It is language that describes the Communist Party and conduct of its members 

“It constitutes an authoritarian dictatorship within a republic, demanding for itself the rights and privileges accorded to political parties, but denying to all others the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Unlike political parties, which evolve their policies and programs through public means, by the reconciliation of a wide variety of individual views, and submit those policies and programs to the electorate at large for approval or disapproval, the policies and programs of the Communist Party are secretly prescribed for it by the foreign leaders of the world Communist movement. Its members have no part in determining its goals, and are not permitted to voice dissent to party objectives. Unlike members of political parties, members of the Communist Party are recruited for indoctrination with respect to its objectives and methods, and are organized, instructed, and disciplined to carry into action slavishly the assignments given them by their hierarchical chieftains. Unlike political parties, the Communist Party acknowledges no constitutional or statutory limitations upon its conduct or upon that of its members. “

DeWine and Stearns-Acton acted far outside the scope of the legal authority of the governor and director of public health; and that’s where the state’s restaurant owners have their “cause of action” both civilly and criminally against them … individually.  R.C. 2921.44 is Ohio’s “dereliction of duty law” and sections (D) and (E) are where both DeWine and Stearns-Acton’s violations of law are found.

D) No public official of the state shall recklessly create a deficiency, incur a liability, or expend a greater sum than is appropriated by the general assembly for the use in any one year of the department, agency, or institution of the state with which the public official is connected.

(E) No public servant shall recklessly fail to perform a duty expressly imposed by law with respect to the public servant’s office, or recklessly do any act expressly forbidden by law with respect to the public servant’s office.

(F) Whoever violates this section is guilty of dereliction of duty, a misdemeanor of the second degree.

DeWine and Stearns-Acton’s state deficit-creating “general law suspending” attack on the state’s economy and small businesses was not authorized in Title 37 of the Ohio Revised Code or in Article 1.15 of the Ohio Constitution.  As such, no citizen or business owner is compelled by any law to obey a government official’s unlawful “orders” when the authority they’re exercising is not authorized by law. 

The Revised Code of Ohio is where the general laws of the state exist and whenever the word “shall” is placed in front of instructions the duty imposed upon the elected or appointed public official is mandatory.  It means they have no other choice but to obey and apply its instructions as they are written in plain English. They didn’t and deserve to be prosecuted as punishment for all the harm they caused.

 

Eric Jonathan Brewer

Cleveland's most influential journalist and East Cleveland's most successful mayor is an East Saint Louis, Illinois native whose father led the city's petition drive in 1969 to elect the first black mayor in 1971. Eric is an old-school investigative reporter whose 40-year body of editorial work has been demonstrably effective. No local journalist is feared or respected more.

Trained in newspaper publishing by the legendary Call & Post Publisher William Otis Walker in 1978 when it was the nation's 5th largest Black-owned publication, Eric has published and edited 13 local, regional and statewide publications across Ohio. Adding to his publishing and reporting resume is Eric's career in government. Eric served as the city's highest paid part-time Special Assistant to ex-Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White. He served as Chief of Staff to ex-East Cleveland Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor; and Chief of Communications to the late George James in his capacity as the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority's first Black executive director. Eric was appointed to serve as a member of the state's Financial Planning & Supervision Commission to guide the East Cleveland school district out of fiscal emergency and $20 million deficit. Former U.S. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson told Eric in his D.C. office he was the only mayor in the nation simultaneously-managing a municipal block grant program. Eric wrote the city's $2.2 million Neighborhood Stabilization Program grant application. A HUD Inspector General audit of his management of the block grant program resulted in "zero" audit findings.

As a newspaper publisher, Eric has used his insider's detailed knowledge of government and his publications to lead the FBI and state prosecutors to investigations that resulted in criminal prosecutions of well-known elected officials in Ohio; and have helped realign Cleveland's political landscape with the defeat of candidates and issues he's exposed. Eric's stories led to the indictments of the late Governor George Voinovich's brother, Paul Voinovich of the V Group, and four associates. He asked the FBI to investigate the mayor he'd served as chief of staff for public corruption; and testified in three federal trials for the prosecution. He forced former Cuyahoga County Coroner Dr. Elizabeth Balraj to admit her investigations of police killings were fraudulent; and to issue notices to local police that her investigators would control police killing investigations. Eric's current work has resulted in Cuyahoga County Judge John Russo accepting the criminal complaint he guided an activist to file against 24 civil rights-violating police officers in the city he once led for operating without valid peace officer credentials. USA Today reporters picked up on Eric's police credentials reporting from his social media page and made it national.

Eric is the author of of his first book, "Fight Police License Plate Spying," which examines the FBI and local police misuse of the National Crime Information Center criminal records history database. An accomplished trumpet player and singer whose friendship with Duke Fakir of the Four Tops resulted in his singing the show's closing song, "Can't Help Myself": Curtis Sliwa of New York's Guardian Angels counts Eric among his founding chapter leaders from the early 1980's role as an Ohio organizer of over 300 volunteer crime fighters in Cleveland, Columbus and Youngstown, Ohio. For his work as a young man Eric was recognized by Cleveland's Urban League as it's 1983 Young Man of the Year.

Known in Cleveland for his encyclopedic knowledge of government and history, and intimately-connected with the region's players, every local major media outlet in Cleveland has picked up on one of Eric's stories since 1979. There is no mainstream newspaper, television or radio outlet in Cleveland that does not include an interview with Eric Jonathan Brewer in its archives over the past 40 years.

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