Politics & Power Quote by Mike DeWine

DeWine’s line is engineered to feel like a history lesson while functioning as a permission slip for policy. “Since its inception” drapes the claim in inevitability: if compassion and justice were always the national foundation, then today’s leaders aren’t inventing values, they’re merely restoring them. It’s patriotic varnish with a practical aim - to frame whatever comes next as continuity rather than controversy.

The pairing is doing careful work. “Compassion” signals a soft, faith-adjacent moral register (care, mercy, decency) that plays well in Midwestern political rhetoric. “Justice” supplies the harder edge: law, order, fairness. Together they bridge two constituencies that often talk past each other - the people moved by suffering and the people motivated by rules. It’s a coalition-building sentence.

The subtext is also defensive. In an era when “America was founded on…” statements are instantly litigated (slavery, dispossession, exclusion), DeWine chooses the safest, least contestable nouns. Not freedom, which invites arguments about whose freedom. Not equality, which triggers contemporary culture-war alarms. Compassion and justice sound capacious enough to include almost everyone, yet vague enough to avoid binding commitments.

Contextually, this kind of language usually shows up in moments of institutional stress: after tragedy, during debates over immigration, criminal justice, health care, or social services. It’s meant to steady the room and elevate the speaker above the fray. The irony is that the sentence’s moral certainty is powered by historical selectivity; its strength as rhetoric is precisely its refusal to name the messy parts of the national story.