Author Archives: Sheila

The Arrogance Of Power

As Indiana’s election looms, the enduring truth of one of Jennifer McCormick’s talking points is hard to miss: it’s time for a change.

Indiana has been ruled by Republicans for over twenty years. We’ve had Republican Governors and a Republican legislature–and for the past several years, a Republican super-majority in that legislature. For any political party, a persistent lack of balance–and thanks to gerrymandering, a perceived lack of any real competition–leads to corruption. (“Power corrupts” is as old and hoary an adage as “it’s time for a change.)

The problem with extended one-party rule isn’t simply that extremists can pass rules and push through legislation without considering contending viewpoints or public opinion–it’s that those exercising power come to believe that they can do anything they want, legal or not, without worrying about the consequences. Two recent stories–one from the Indiana Citizen and one from The Capitol Chronicle–are directly on point.

The Indiana Citizen reports on the continuing corruption of the Attorney General’s office headed by Todd Rokita. A Marion County Superior Court has sanctioned two state agencies and the lawyers from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office who represented them, detailing ongoing misconduct and ordering them to pay nearly $375,000. While the agencies involved are certainly not blameless, the responsibility for complying with court orders and responding truthfully to questions from the court and other litigants rests squarely on the shoulders of the lawyers representing them. 

According to the court, 

Respondents and their counsel committed multiple types of unacceptable misconduct on numerous occasions. They acted in an unreasonable manner with disregard for Petitioners, the Court and the orderly process of justice,” Joven wrote in the order granting petition for attorney fees and costs. “Further, Respondents failed to explain why the repeated acts of misconduct occurred and went uncured, failed to accept responsibility for the misconduct, failed to express remorse, and failed to identify steps that have been taken to prevent such unacceptable misconduct from occurring in the future.”

Worse, this evidently wasn’t the first time these lawyers had been sanctioned. Only a year before this case was filed, “the Indiana Department of Correction, its counsel from the attorney general’s office and the attorney general’s office itself were sanctioned in another case for making false representations to the federal judge, making false discovery responses and submitting a brief that contained false information.” In other words, despite that previous ruling, lawyers from the AG’s office persisted in conduct that violated their ethical and legal obligations.

Courts have also smacked down Todd Rokita personally. He hasn’t listened either.

Then there’s the case against Jamie Noel, the southern Indiana political heavyweight who who pleaded guilty earlier this month to 27 felonies. Noel’s corruption, and his cozy ties to numerous state Republicans, have been the subject of considerable reporting, but The Capital Chronicle has focused on the effects of that corruption.

When a life is on the line in the back of an ambulance, first responders are supposed to have the best tools available to give every patient a fighting chance, said former paramedic Crystal Blevins. But for many who worked at New Chapel EMS — the southern Indiana emergency service provider previously ran by now-convicted former Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel — “the equipment and the medicine, a lot of the time, wasn’t there.”

“There was this lie being presented to the public about what New Chapel was giving — they weren’t fulfilling that promise. Jamey ran the service out of greed … telling us there weren’t funds for what we needed, and then we came to find out the money was there all along,” Blevins told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. …

Court documents indicate that Noel stole more than half of the taxpayer dollars provided to New Chapel by Clark and Floyd counties. In his last four years as leader, he pocketed at least half a million dollars in wages and spent $2 million more on vacations, clothing, Rolex watches, child support payments, his daughter’s college tuition and more, according to state auditors.

Noel served as the Clark County sheriff from 2015 until the end of 2022. He was also the Republican Party chair for both Clark County and Indiana’s 9th Congressional District. That made him the gatekeeper for southern Indiana’s Republican political hopefuls for the last decade.

Noel and Rokita are examples of the hubris that enables corruption. When a political party uses its legislative power to gerrymander the electorate and ensure its continuation of political control, that cronyism invites abuse by greedy and self-interested individuals who are confident that they are beyond the reach of angry constituents.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is definitely time for a change. 

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Puncturing The “Pro-Life” Myth

I assume there are sincere people (mostly, but not exclusively, male) who bought into the myth that prohibiting abortions was all about “saving babies.” In the wake of actual bans, the incredible dishonesty of that assertion has become harder to ignore. 

The avowed “pro life” activists have been conspicuously silent about the fact that– In the wake of the Dobbs decision–in states like Indiana that have stringent bans, women have died or suffered extreme medical consequences in greater numbers than before. While most women already knew that the purported “pro life” concerns about “life” didn’t extend to the lives of women, those activists have been equally silent about the sharp rise in infant mortality. As the linked report shows, in the year and a half following the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, hundreds more infants died than usual in the United States. The vast majority of those infants had congenital anomalies, or birth defects, and it is likely that a number of those babies experienced painful deaths.

The refusal of ideologues to understand that abortion availability is an essential part of healthcare has meant that women suffering miscarriages have been denied adequate and timely treatment, and that pregnant women who very much want to carry their babies to term are having difficulty finding an ob/gyn to provide prenatal care and deliver those infants. The state’s abortion ban has led to a decline in OBGYN residency applications–a decline likely to worsen the already alarming shortage of maternal care providers. A patient in Northern Indiana died last year from an ectopic pregnancy because there was no ob-gyn to treat her.

None of which seems to bother the “pro life” Micah Beckwiths of the world.

Now, it turns out that the medical consequences of these bans–their very negative effect on actual lives–extends far beyond reproductive medicine. According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, the bans are also interfering with the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. In the wake of Dobbs and state bans, finding a local provider for breast screenings has become far more difficult. Planned Parenthood clinics that used to provide those screenings have closed and staff shortages at other sites have increased as medical personnel leave states with bans.  The remaining health care providers are overwhelmed.

One in 3 oncology fellows surveyed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology says abortion restrictions hurt cancer care, and more than half of fellows said they are likely to consider the impact of abortion restrictions on care when deciding where to practice. Although many states like Indiana allow exceptions when the termination of a pregnancy is necessary to protect the life of the pregnant patient, the rules on how to apply these exceptions are unclear. In Ohio, two cancer patients were denied treatment until terminating their pregnancies under the state’s 6-week ban, forcing them to seek care out of state. As these bans persist, more Hoosiers will face similar situations—many of which may go unseen.

Early detection through routine screenings plays a critical role in improving survival rates, as 1 in 8 women in the U.S. will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. But when health centers are forced to close, those lifesaving screenings disappear too.

How “pro life” are the pious ideologues who talk endlessly about the “pre-born” but refuse to acknowledge the profoundly negative outcomes of these bans for the lives of already-born women? 

Excuse my cynicism, but I remain convinced that the real motive for these bans is the patriarchal belief that women should be returned to a submissive social status. Increasing efforts by GOP politicians to restrict access to birth control give the game away.

With the advent of the pill, women were–for the first time– able to manage their fertility and plan their families. Women were able to enter the workforce, able to participate with men in the broader civic and political society. As Morton Marcus and I documented in From Property to Partner, reproductive choice has been far and away the most important element of women’s liberation. 

Initially, perhaps some people were convinced that the “pro life” movement really was about keeping wicked and “ungodly” women from “killing babies.” Now that we have irrefutable evidence that, thanks to these bans, more babies and more women are dying, it will be interesting to see how many of those people revise their opinions. 

I’m not holding my breath, because for the great majority of those “pro life” warriors, it was never about life. It was about male dominance and faux religion.

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State-Level Choices

Most of us are obsessively focused on the national election, but the stakes of our state-level choices are equally dire–at least, in Indiana.

The Indiana GOP is running a staewide ticket composed of lunatic White Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, two Beckwith clones, and MAGA Mike Braun. I’ve posted numerous times about Todd Rokita, our embarrassing, unethical Attorney General. Today, I want to remind readers that the only difference between Beckwith and Jim Banks, who is running for the U.S. Senate, is that Banks is too politically-savvy to publicly claim the White Christian Nationalist title to which he is amply entitled.

Let me just reiterate why Banks is–as I’ve previously noted–wrong about everything. In Congress, he joined clowns like Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, pursuing a pro-Trump, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-liberty performative politics.

He makes no bones about his desire for a national ban on abortion with no exceptions, not even for rape, incest or life of the mother. He has an A+ rating from Pro-Life America, and a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee. His voting record on abortion/reproductive health can be accessed here.

He opposes even the most modest efforts to control the proliferation of firearms. He opposes both a renewal of the ban on assault weapons and a federal “Red Flag” law. He supports concealed carry and has voted against background checks for private sales. His voting record on gun issues can be accessed here.

Banks calls climate change a “liberal hoax,” and the Biden Administration’s environmental efforts “a war on energy.” The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 1% lifetime rating. His votes on the environment can be accessed here. 

When it comes to labor issues, Banks gets a zero rating from the AFL-CIO. In the Indiana legislature, he supported “Right to work” legislation (dubbed by labor as “Right to work for less.”) On vote after vote in Congress, he has voted against labor; a list of those votes can be seen here. 

He continues to oppose any expansion of healthcare coverage, and rejects medical science. He voted against the most recent expansion of Medicaid and supports legislation that would ban vaccine mandates. He has voted to repeal the ACA, and against legislation that would prevent insurers from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions.  A review of all of his healthcare votes is here.

Banks has voted repeatedly against efforts to fund research into the effects of marijuana. (Those anti-research votes track well with his “know nothing” approach to all issues.) Banks’ votes on issues related to pot are here.

He is an extremist on immigration. He supports finishing Trump’s wall, eliminating federal funding for sanctuary cities, and deporting “criminal illegal aliens.” He opposes legislation granting amnesty for any undocumented persons (presumably including children currently protected by DACA) and opposes any expansion of guest-worker programs.

Banks created the “anti-Woke” caucus in the House of Representatives and introduced legislation to outlaw any remaining affirmative action in college admissions. He has been dubbed “Focus on the Family’s Man in Washington.” He opposes all DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs. He has been especially vocal in his opposition to gay rights generally, and to trans children especially– in addition to his “Anti-Woke Caucus,” he has supported efforts to ban trans people from the military, prevent trans women from participating in women’s sports, and prevent medical personnel from treating children for gender dysphoria. He recently sponsored a particularly odious bill that would prevent agencies charged with placing children in foster homes from taking measures to see that gay and trans children not be placed with foster parents who have religious objections to homosexuality, saying that refusal to place those children in such homes was discrimination against religion.

Banks consistently attacks educational institutions of all kinds. He has vowed to investigate the National Association of Independent Schools, focusing on the group’s role in political advocacy and its tax-exempt status. He has threatened to “expose” what he calls “widespread political indoctrination” in America’s public schools, and has claimed that lawmakers have a “moral duty” to investigate the use of academic accreditation associations as “political tools by leftist ideologues.”

When Banks was in the Indiana legislature, he voted to allow instruction in creationism and enthusiastically supported the educational vouchers that send tax dollars to private, overwhelmingly religious schools.

And of course, he’s described Trump’s felony convictions as “rigged,” posting on social media that “New York is a liberal sh*t hole.”

As I’ve previously written, having a Neanderthal like Banks in Congress is bad enough. Electing him Senator would be worse.

Republicans should be embarrassed by the whole statewide ticket. As this Republican says, Hoosiers should vote BLUE this year.

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SO SORRY

My site suddenlly began sending out old posts–a LOT of them. I have no idea why. My son is looking into it. Meanwhile, my apologies for inundating your inboxes.

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About Project 2025

This morning, I will speak at the Unitarian church in Danville. I was asked to address Project 2025, Here’s what I will be telling the congregants.

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I’ve done a lot of research recently into the emergence of the White Christian Nationalism that forms the basis of the MAGA movement. Project 2025 does a great service for anyone who wants to know what life would be like if the 40% of Americans who identify fully or partially with those beliefs manage to win control of Congress and the Presidency—especially at a time when the Supreme Court has been captured by ideologues who are sympathetic to their aims and apparently unwilling to follow longstanding constitutional precedents.

PROJECT 2025 was produced mainly by the Heritage Foundation, but it had the assistance of over 100 other conservative think tanks. (If you go online, you can find lists of them. They represent a longstanding, well-organized and well-funded effort to claim the country for their particular tribe of White Christian males.) Project 2025 is the product of over 400 contributors and writers, including the 240 former Trump administration authors who wrote 31 of the 38 chapters of the 920 page document.

Despite Trump’s effort to separate himself from Project 2025, it mentions him over 320 times, and in 2023 he referred to it as “great work. Our roadmap.”

Those who produced that “roadmap” claim that it would “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children,” “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people,” and “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” What that lovely language really means, of course, is spelled out in the details—and whoever coined the phrase “the devil is in the details” might have been referring to Project 2025.

I don’t have time—and neither do you—to go through a comprehensive list of the regressive, and frankly, insane, proposals in this document, but I will hit some of the highlights (or low lights).

The chapter on “DEFENSE OF AMERICA” proposes to “” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission.” It proposes to end what it calls “the Left’s social experimentation in the military” by halting the admission of transgender individuals. It would increase the Army by

50,000, bring overseas troops home, grow the Navy and Air Force, and triple the number of nuclear weapons—while withdrawing America from all arms reduction treaties.

Project 2025 would withdraw the U.S. from NATO, and expressly disavow NATO’s Article Five, which is NATO’s mutual defense pact. It also proposes to make our Allies pay for any weapons we might provide them.

With respect to Trade and Foreign Assistance, the Project wants USAID to defund women’s rights provisions in foreign aid initiatives, withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements, stop providing financial aid to Ukraine, and institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 10% on all other imports. (Every reputable economist—conservative and liberal—has pointed out that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that imposing them would cost American families thousands of dollars a year and throw the country into recession. If a future administration actually imposed those tariffs, the economy would tank.)

There’s a lot more in this section, but the effect would be to make the world far less safe, and Americans far less rich.

Moving on…

To the extent that the media has reported on Project 2025, it has focused mostly on the Project’s proposed changes to American governance– especially the plan to replace 50 thousand civil service employees with Trump loyalists. I recently read that the Heritage Foundation is currently “vetting” individuals in order to facilitate that replacement should Trump win.

The replacement of civil service workers, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Project also proposes to eliminate or re-write the First Amendment so that the government can operate on what the authors call “Christian Principles.” Those of you in this congregation, and other Christian clergy, might dispute their interpretation of Christian principles….

The media has also reported on the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, Head Start, Title 1, & school lunch programs. The less-reported portions of their “education” policies are equally regressive: they would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms (they don’t specify which version…probably the Cecil B. DeMille version). They would eliminate any books addressing race or gender from the nation’s classrooms, withdraw federal funding from any school requiring vaccinations, and require states to provide vouchers for religious schools.

They’d also arm teachers and defund NPR and PBS.

As I said, I can’t go through the entire list of Project 2025’s looney-tunes and profoundly unAmerican proposals, but let me just reference a few more: they’d privatize Medicare and TSA, and entirely eliminate the EPA, OSHA, the EEOC and the FDIC.

When it comes to elections, they’d eliminate mail-in ballots, and require federal elections to be done in one day, on paper, with stringent voter ID requirements.

When it comes to how their proposed government would deal with what the Project delicately calls “minorities,” the bigotries become very visible. They’d begin with the immediate mass deportation of undocumented persons that Trump and Vance have promised, ignoring both the inhumanity and the practical impossibility of conducting such a massive effort. Other measures they propose in connection with immigration include construction of internment camps and limiting lawful immigration to 20,000 annually—good luck to any of you who need to hire people to work in restaurants or pick crops or any other jobs disproportionately done by immigrants. They’d deport all the Dreamers (who came as children with their parents, and most of whom have never known another country). They want to end birthright citizenship—which I note would require amending the 14th Amendment– and ban Muslims and Haitians from entering the country. Lest you wonder where the homophobia and misogyny come in, they propose to roll back gay rights, invalidate same-sex marriages, and outlaw transgender rights and no-fault divorce.

Given our recent experience with hurricanes, I thought I’d just end with the Project’s ”Principles Guiding Climate Decisions.” Those “principles” begin with science denial. I guess their version of God will protect them…

Authors of the Project say—and I quote– the “climate is not changing and schools are not to teach that it is.” Since climate change is just a liberal myth, they would eliminate climate and environmental protections, eliminate the regulation of greenhouse gases, and defund FEMA. (I will note that both Mike Braun and Jim Banks—currently running for Governor and Senator—both recently voted against funding for FEMA.) Project 2025 would return management of emergencies to the states. (I imagine even Ron DeSantis might now disagree with that one…)

Project authors want to dismantle the National Hurricane Center and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. They would halt all climate research and revoke the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Of course they would once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accords. And they would halt research into electrical vehicles and revoke tax incentives for clean energy.

If even a small portion of this truly insane wish list became reality, the America we inhabit would disappear. Unfortunately, we’d take most of the world down with us.

In my blog, I keep warning readers about the threat posed by a well-organized, well-financed theocratic movement. The small dip into Project 2025’s 900 pages that I’ve just shared should illuminate that threat.

I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that these people hate the America we inhabit. They love an America that existed only in their fevered imaginations. This is a very scary time.

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