The Ban a Governor Vetoed, His Own Party Passed Anyway

In the last week of 2023, a Republican governor had a Republican bill on his desk, and he said no.

Mike DeWine vetoed House Bill 68 on December 29, 2023. The bill banned puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for transgender minors. DeWine is no ally of the trans Ohioans that ban would touch, and he did not pretend to be. He rejected it anyway, and he said why. These are decisions, he explained, that belong to "the parents." A father sitting with a doctor and a child. Not the Statehouse.

Weeks later, the people who sent him the bill sent it back over his head.

Here is the part most people miss about a veto in Ohio. It is not the last word. A governor's signature is one gate, and the General Assembly holds the key to the other one. When a single party controls three-fifths of both chambers, it can walk right through. That three-fifths threshold has a plain name. It is a supermajority, and Ohio Republicans have one.

In January 2024, they used it. The House and Senate voted to override DeWine's veto, and House Bill 68 became law without him and against him. It took effect in August 2024. The governor who called the bill a mistake watched his own party enact it, and there was nothing his office could do to stop them.

So walk back through that sequence and ask the question it raises. Who actually held power here?

Not the governor. He used the strongest tool he had, the veto, and it was overturned inside a month. Not the families the bill claims to protect, the ones DeWine pointed to when he refused to sign. The people who held power were the legislators who counted their own votes, knew they had the numbers, and moved a policy their own Republican governor had told them, in public, was wrong.

Stay on that, because it cuts against the story most Ohioans carry about how a state government works. You elect a governor to be the check. You imagine the veto as a wall. In a state with a legislative supermajority, the veto is closer to a speed bump. The majority slows down, takes a second vote, and keeps going. The wall was never as tall as it looked.

And this majority moved to the right of a Republican governor to get here. DeWine is a lifelong conservative, an opponent of the very care HB 68 bans. He still landed to the left of his own caucus on the single question of who decides. That gap is the story. When the Statehouse majority is standing to the right of Mike DeWine and to the right of the parents he named, the distance between what that majority passes and what the public it governs actually wants is worth measuring out loud.

For the families inside the law, the sequence was not procedure. It was a clock. Care that a doctor had recommended and a parent had chosen became illegal for their child in Ohio. Some of these are kids who had been in treatment. Some are parents who did exactly what DeWine said parents should be free to do, and then watched the legislature take the choice away.

Two of those families went to court. The case is called Moe v. Yost, brought by the ACLU, the ACLU of Ohio, and the law firm Goodwin on behalf of two Ohio families. They argue the ban violates the Ohio Constitution's Health Care Freedom Amendment and the rights of parents to direct their own children's medical care. It is the same parental-rights language DeWine reached for. The families are making it a constitutional claim.

The courts have not settled it. A trial court upheld the ban in 2024. The Tenth District Court of Appeals struck it down on March 18, 2025, and for a moment the law was dead. Then the Ohio Supreme Court stayed that ruling on April 29, 2025, and the ban snapped back into force. The court heard oral argument in March 2026 and has not issued a final decision. For the families waiting on it, the law has been on, then off, then on again, each flip a change in what is legal for their own child.

Which brings the story to a bench that most people never think about until it decides their life. The Ohio Supreme Court now holds Moe v. Yost, and it is 6 to 1 Republican. Two of those seats are on the ballot in 2026. The same court that put the ban back in force is the court voters get a direct say over this year, and it is the court every future challenge to this law will run through.

That is the shape of it. A veto that did not hold. A supermajority that enacted a policy its own governor called a mistake. Families caught in the swing of a case that keeps reversing. A court, elected, that will decide whether any of it stands.

None of this was hidden. The votes are on the record. The dates are on the record. DeWine's reason for the veto is on the record, in his own words, pointing at the parents. Ohio has the whole sequence written down.

So the question is not really about trans kids, though they are the ones living inside the answer. The question is about power, and about how much of it a supermajority is meant to hold in a state where the governor, the legislature, and the court all answer to the same voters in the end.

DeWine drew his line at the parents and lost. The legislature drew its line at the votes it could count and won. When those two lines part inside a single party, and the tie-breaker lands on a court that two elections could reshape, which line do you think the public actually drew? And when you vote in 2026, which one will you be voting for?