OH Shit: Someone Mailed Poo to Every GOP State Senator in Ohio

Talk about direct mail.

All 25 Republican members of the Ohio State Senate were mailed envelopes filled with feces on Thursday morning, according to the Columbus Dispatch reported. The packages had been sent from a Cleveland post office, according to the Dispatch. 

All the envelopes were intercepted by post offices in Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus before the legislators actually received them, and the United States Postal Inspection Service told VICE News Friday it was investigating. 

“As the law enforcement and security branch of the Postal Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is committed to protecting Postal Service employees and customers and preserving the integrity of the mail,” a spokesperson said in an email. “The Postal Inspection Service is investigating these incidents. At this point in time, this is all the information we can provide.”

A spokesperson for the Senate Republican caucus said Thursday that “we’re assuming human,” when asked by a reporter about whether the poop came from a human or an animal. 

“I’m really angry about it,” the spokesperson, John Fortney, told ABC 9 in Cincinnati. “These are a bunch of little scared, little cowards that wouldn’t say shit or a thing to you face-to-face, right, they would rather send it in the mail.”

“It’s gross and stupid, immaturity at its highest level,” state Sen. Jay Hottinger, one of the intended recipients, told the Dispatch.

At least one lawmaker told reporters Thursday that she believes the poopy packages have something to do with the recent Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the federal right to have an abortion. 

As a result of the ruling, abortion effectively became illegal in Ohio in all instances except to save the life of the mother, following a law passed in 2019. A 10-year-old girl who’d been raped was recently forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion, the Indianpolis Star reported last week. 

GOP State Sen. Kristina Roegner called this a “highly charged and emotional issue.”

“There’s passion on both sides,” Roegner told ABC 9. "But we need to engage in civil discourse.”

Of the poop, Hottinger told the Dispatch: “Just another crappy day.”

A former swing state won by former President Barack Obama twice, Ohio has shifted drastically to the right in recent years. The GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, J.D. Vance, said there was “something comparable between abortion and slavery,” during an interview with a Catholic radio show last year. 

“I really think abortion has really done something very socially destructive to us as people in how we see the most vulnerable and the most dependent among us,” Vance said during the radio show. “I think that’s one of the underappreciated facts about abortion. It’s really distorted our entire society.”

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