Ohio Supreme Court Ends Case Over $900 Million in Pandemic Jobless Pay

The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected, for the final time, a lawsuit claiming more than 300,000 Ohioans are owed $900 million in pandemic-era unemployment payments, the Statehouse News Bureau reported Wednesday. The court declined to reconsider the case.

The suit concerns a federal program that paid $300 a week to people out of work because of the pandemic. Gov. Mike DeWine ended Ohio’s participation in May 2021, four months before the federal program expired nationwide. The justices had dismissed the case as moot in 2022 and again in August, agreeing with the state that the program had ended.

All six Republican justices voted to deny reconsideration, the Statehouse News Bureau reported; Justice Jennifer Brunner, the court’s lone Democrat, dissented. Marc Dann, a former Democratic attorney general who brought the case, said the issue is not moot because “the money’s appropriated. It’s sitting there.” The Ohio Chamber of Commerce and other business groups opposed the suit, which Dann has framed as a dispute between working-class claimants and business interests.

The state argued the case was moot because the federal program ended in September 2021.