It's been a newsworthy and controversial week for the Ohio Supreme Court.
And that was with a 4-3 Republican advantage on the court. Wait until next month, when there is a 6-1 GOP advantage.
That's when even more controversial issues — like abortion rights and redistricting, among other hot topics — could land in justices' laps.
On Monday, the four Republican justices on the court re-affirmed a decision that has been derided and mocked relentlessly by legal scholars and media pundits all over the nation.
In July, Republicans on the court said chicken wings advertised by a restaurant as “boneless” can indeed have bones.
This, after a man named Michael Berkheimer sued a Butler County restaurant after a 1-and-3/8-inch bone lodged in his throat, tearing open his esophagus and sending him to the hospital.
The four Republicans decided he had no right to seek damages.
It was Berkheimer’s fault, they said, that he did not inspect the wings advertised as "boneless" for bones.
The three Democrats on the court wanted to re-consider the court’s 4-3 July decision before the end of the year.
The Republican majority said no.
And, because of the results of November’s election, that's likely case closed.
ANALYSIS: Did Ohio Supreme Court choke with 'boneless' wing decision?
The new Ohio Supreme Court that takes office in January will have six Republicans and one Democrat — Jennifer Brunner — after two of the Democrats, Michael Donnelly and Melody Stewart, lost re-election in November.
This means the six Republicans on the high court can most likely do whatever they want.
A decision on Tuesday may have served as a preview.
On Tuesday, the court, in a 5-2 decision, ruled that pharmacy chains cannot be held liable for allegations they violated Ohio's public nuisance law by flooding communities with addictive pain pills.
"We recognize that the opioid crisis has touched the lives of people in every corner of Ohio," reads the ruling, written for the majority by Justice Joe Deters, who also wrote the opinion on the "boneless" wings case. "The devastation experienced by these private citizens, individually and collectively, undoubtedly has far-reaching consequences for their communities and for the State as a whole. Creating a solution to this crisis out of whole cloth is, however, beyond this court’s authority."
Deters was joined in the opinion by Republican Justices Sharon Kennedy and Patrick DeWine, as well as Brunner, the soon-to-be lone Democrat.
The decision puts the $650 million previously awarded to two Ohio counties to help fight the opioid epidemic at risk. It could also affect similar cases pending in other states.
RELATED: Your questions about Ohio's opioid settlement money, answered
On the "boneless" wings decision, State Sen. Bill DeMora, a Columbus Democrat and frequent critic of the Republican court, called the decision not to reconsider the case “an abuse of the people of Ohio for the benefit of corporate interests.”
“I am ashamed but not surprised that Republicans on the state Supreme Court have doubled down on the biggest legal joke in the country,” DeMora said.
“It is ridiculous that the Republican Party thinks so little of the people of Ohio that they are comfortable keeping the ridiculous legal fiction that boneless wings should be expected to have bones in them in order to protect their corporate owners rather than stand up for the people of Ohio,” DeMora said.
In the Monday decision, Republican Justice Patrick Fischer of Cincinnati was blunt in his defense of the court not taking up the chicken wings case again.
Fischer’s argument was that the Ohio Supreme Court follows the law, not public opinion.
Such decisions should not be decided by public opinion, news reports or “writings by nonlawyers who have not reviewed the entire judicial case file and applicable case law,” he wrote.
“No court should ever be influenced in any way by media commentary, and such commentary, which is not part of the record, should never be relied on as a basis for granting a motion for reconsideration,” he concluded.
Fair enough.
But Donnelly, writing in favor of reconsidering the case, hinted at what might be the most troubling issue of all — what such decisions might do to erode public confidence in the institution.
“The majority’s opinion has been rightly subjected to ridicule,” Donnelly wrote. “If there was an Olympics for sophistry, the majority’s opinion would certainly have taken the gold. The majority blatantly orchestrated the desired result by usurping the jury’s traditional role as the determiner of fact. This is exactly the type of activism self-described conservative justices purport to disdain.
“In short, if the public cannot trust the judiciary to be faithful in small things — like whether ‘boneless’ can reasonably be understood as not including bones — how can the judiciary be trusted with greater things?”
