Ohio Senate Pushing for 4 A.M. Booze Sales in Cleveland During RNC

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It’s not like these things are anything other than giant coronations anyway.

From Cleveland.com:

Cuyahoga County bars and restaurants catering to Republican National Convention delegates next summer would be allowed to serve beer and alcohol until 4 a.m., under language added to the Ohio Senate’s budget plan.

The provision, still under debate, would allow local officials to issue waivers for businesses to continue booze sales past the usual 2:30 a.m. cutoff time during the convention, scheduled for July 18-21 of 2016…

…Sen. Tom Patton, a Strongsville Republican who inserted the provision in the Ohio Senate’s budget plan, said he wants to make sure that local establishments can remain open late to serve convention attendees who may not leave the Quicken Loans Arena until after midnight.

“We’re trying to show Cleveland in its best light, and we have a lot of great restaurants downtown,” Patton said.

Some prescient Ohio Republican senators probably figure that plenty of RNC attendees will either be drowning their sorrows or basking in the glow of a John Kasich nomination. There will either be dancing in the streets or weeping and gnashing of teeth well into the wee hours of the night. Why not let the bar owners make a few bucks off of the ecstasy/misery, they figure.

What this has to do with the state budget? Who knows.

Also, (and I don’t know if this is related to the anticipated alcohol consumption):

A pair of Democratic senators from Ohio and Pennsylvania — the states holding 2016’s major political conventions — have requested $100 million in security funding to be evenly split between the two events.

In a Tuesday letter to leaders of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Robert P. Casey asked that the security funding be tacked onto a federal program that provides money for local law enforcement agencies.

Brown’s and Casey’s letter says the funding is “critical to the host cities’ efforts to obtain extra law enforcement personnel necessary to ensure a safe and secure environment” for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Sen. Rob Portman sent his own convention funding-related letter on Tuesday to Sen. Richard Shelby, the chairman of the Senate banking committee and a member of the appropriations committee.