Local Government – Page 25

They Don’t Even Want To Hear It…

In the U.S. Senate, Republicans are repeating a line made infamous by Indiana’s own Earl Landgrebe during the Nixon Impeachment: My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.

Landgrebe’s line also describes the current Indiana GOP, which has declined to hear any debate about a good government measure offered by Rep. Ed Delaney as an amendment to House Bill 1414. (Regular readers will recall my post on this effort to tell Indiana’s utilities that they won’t be permitted to go ahead with their plans to close down their inefficient, costly and carbon-producing coal plants unless the EPA has mandated the closure.)

After noting that what he termed HB 1414’s “coal bailout” would raise the cost of electricity for Hoosiers and worsen the air quality in the state, Delaney proposed an amendment that would make it a Level 6 felony for a coal interest or person who has a vested interest in coal to make a contribution to a political candidate or committee.

“I’ve grown concerned about the growing distrust Hoosiers have in our political system,” DeLaney added.

“If the state is going to subsidize an industry at the expense of taxpayers, lawmakers should not be allowed to take political contributions from that industry. Special interests shouldn’t be influencing such impactful legislation. The amendment I offered today would’ve held the coal industry to the same standards as casinos who can’t contribute to political campaigns. I am concerned to restore a greater sense of trust between Hoosiers and their legislators.”

The amendment was blocked from debate on the House floor by House Republicans.

At all levels of government, when Republicans have the power to do so, they block efforts to conduct the sorts of full and fair explorations that would be likely to inform the public but would be politically detrimental to the GOP.

If the facts make them look bad, they simply refuse to allow discussion of those facts.

In the case of HB 1414, as I noted previously, the utilities oppose it, environmentalists oppose it, and consumers get screwed by it. Coal companies must therefore depend upon their friends in the legislature to ignore the facts and protect them–and no one is friendlier than a lawmaker who benefits from an industry’s generous campaign contributions.

Representative Delaney’s amendment would remove the impression that coal interests had “purchased” the “friendship” of state legislators. Surely, if the impression is incorrect or unfair, lawmakers would be delighted to publicly debate it and pass it.

In Washington, they’re following in Earl Landgrebe’s footsteps. Despite taking an oath to act as impartial jurors, they are prepared to exercise raw power to prevent testimony that would confirm the accuracy of what they already know, because that testimony would be further evidence that they value party and power more than country or integrity.

The Republican super-majority in Indiana has declined even to debate the propriety of a rule against legislative bribery, presumably because citizens who followed such a debate (few as they are likely to be in the absence of local journalism) would see them protecting their ability to raise money from industries they subsidize.

Talk about a quid pro quo…

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Thank God It’s A Short Session…..

Yesterday, I posted about one of the more odious bills being considered by Indiana’s legislature.

It’s just one example of why I always get an uneasy feeling when Indiana’s General Assembly is in session. Indiana’s legislators are an unpredictable mix; there are some thoughtful people who can genuinely be characterized as public servants, and then there are the others–religious zealots, wheeler-dealers, and a collection of rabid partisans for whom politics is a sport and their only loyalty is to their team.

This year, the legislature meets for its 60-day short session. (In Indiana, regular and short sessions alternate.) The fact that time to consider bills is limited, however, doesn’t prevent our culture warriors from introducing divisive and/or ridiculous proposals, which is one reason why Harrison Ullmann, the now-deceased editor of NUVO, our local alternative paper, always referred to Indiana’s General Assembly as “the World’s Worst Legislature.”

It isn’t just Rep. Soliday’s proposed gift to coal companies. A week or so ago, I posted about a bill authored by one Representative Curt Nisly–in addition to prohibiting all abortions, the bill presumed to forbid the courts to declare the measure unconstitutional or the executive branch to enforce any such court decisions if made. While I grant that the degree of constitutional ignorance displayed by that measure puts Nisly in a class of his own, plenty of other bills demonstrate the often bizarre, corrupt and/or inhumane priorities of too many Indiana lawmakers.

In the “bizarre” category, the Northwest Indiana Times reports, tongue firmly in cheek:

The Indiana House is poised to vote Tuesday on what may be the most significant piece of pro-worker legislation since Republicans took majority control of the chamber in 2011.

It’s not an increase in the state’s $7.25 per hour minimum wage, unchanged since 2009. It’s not a requirement that businesses provide employees with their work schedules a week in advance. And it certainly won’t make it easier for workers to organize into unions and collectively bargain for wages and benefits.

Instead, House Bill 1143 would expressly prohibit an employer from requiring an employee, or a job candidate, to have an identification or tracking device implanted in their body as a condition of employment.

According to the Legislative Services Agency, there are currently no employers in the U.S. requiring such implantation. But hey–it might happen. You never know…

The ACLU of Indiana has a list of pending bills that threaten civil liberties, including one that Doug Masson analyzes at Masson’s Blog prohibiting persons born biologically male from competing in school sports contests against females. As he concludes:

As far as I can tell, this legislation isn’t so much an effort to address a real problem as it is simply a vehicle for expressing unhappiness that society is increasingly recognizing that gender identity is not perfectly correlated with biological sex.

Indiana’s lawmakers tend to be fixated on issues around sex and sexuality. Case in point is a measure that definitely belongs in the “inhumane” category: Indiana Senate Bill 300. This effort to allow discrimination in the service of (certain people’s) religion would allow mental health professionals to turn away clients seeking emergency services for suicide prevention and emergency interventions, “on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, those who have received reproductive services, those who are divorced, etc.”

Ironically titled “Conscience protection for mental health providers” the measure would prohibit a hospital or other employer from discriminating against or disciplining such a professional because of the “sincerely held ethical, moral, or religious belief” that impelled that “professional” (note quotation marks) to withhold emergency assistance to desperate people of whom he or she “sincerely” disapproves.

Indiana’s public schools are underfunded. Our teachers are underpaid. Indiana’s infrastructure is crumbling. Hoosiers are embarrassingly unhealthy. The opiod epidemic has been brutal here. I could go on and on.

But thanks primarily to gerrymandering, those issues get short shrift. The bills referenced above are a very small sample of the damaging nonsense that our legislators prefer to address, and that we Hoosiers have come to expect.

At least it’s a short session….

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ALEC Again

The American Legislative Exchange Committee, familiarly known as ALEC, has come in for substantial criticism as its formerly-secretive operations have become more public. Most of those criticisms have focused upon its success in working with Republican legislators to create state-level policies that benefit businesses and corporations–often at the expense of working Americans and the poor.

Formed in 1973, ALEC was virtually invisible until 2011, when media reports on its activities and priorities–reducing regulation and individual and corporate taxation, combating illegal immigration, loosening environmental regulations, tightening voter identification rules, weakening labor unions, and opposing gun control–brought it unwanted attention, and prompted the departure of several corporate members.

The Guardian has recently reported another priority–an accusation that ALEC fosters White Supremacy.

AlEC, the rightwing network that brings conservative lawmakers together with corporate lobbyists to create model legislation that is cloned across the US, has been accused of spreading racist and white supremacist policies targeted at minority communities.

A report published on Tuesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and other advocacy groups charges Alec with propagating white supremacy.

In one of the sharpest criticisms yet levelled at the controversial “bill mill”, the authors warn that “conservative and corporate interests have captured our political process to harness profit, further entrench white supremacy in the law, and target the safety, human rights and self-governance of marginalised communities”

The report came as ALEC was preparing for its four-day Policy Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. The agenda for that meeting included sessions on several of ALEC’s “core principles” including “election integrity” (more properly called vote suppression), privatization of education and support for homeschooling, and protection for pharmaceutical companies (because Big Pharma needs so much protection….)

The event’s dinner was jointly hosted with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Guardian identified as “an anti-LGBT coalition devoted to re-criminalizing homosexuality in the US in the name of Christianity.”

ALEC was also responsible for the passage of 2010 Arizona law SB1070, which initiated what was then the most extreme crackdown on undocumented migrants in the entire country. The measure was patterned after a “model bill” drafted at the ALEC conference the previous year.

The CCR report characterized ALEC as a “shadow state apparatus” in which “private industry seizes control of the authority of the state, writing legislation and public policy for the general public behind the closed doors of a CEO suite,” and it identified four policy interventions that work to advance White Supremacy: “Stand Your Ground” laws (studies show that states having such laws are much more likely than states without them to rule homicides justifiable in cases of white-on-black killings); voter ID laws (overwhelmingly shown to disproportionately disenfranchise minority and poor voters); “critical infrastructure” bills (these bills criminalize efforts to protest contested infrastructure construction like the Dakota Access pipeline); and efforts to ban criticisms of Israel on college campuses.

These positions would be cause for concern coming from any organization, but they are truly dangerous coming from ALEC, because its partnership with state-level Republicans has been both secretive and wildly successful.

Bill Meierling, ALEC’s head of External Relations, boasts that

“Alec is routinely targeted because its member legislators are nearly 300% as effective as any other group of elected officials. In fact, this year, USA Today reported that of 10,000 bills analyzed in state legislatures from 2010-2018, 2,900 were based on Alec model policy and more than 600 became law.”

That’s a statistic that makes the hair on my neck stand up.

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It’s Not Just In Washington

It seems as if the rule of law is under assault everywhere.

A recent story by Reveal, a nonprofit news organization, alleges that during the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters, the state made four safety citations against the company “go away.” (I find it illuminating–and incredibly depressing– that the Indianapolis Star simply published Reveal’s investigative report. It’s just one more bit of evidence that the Star itself no longer has the capacity to engage in investigative journalism or fulfill its watchdog role.)

When an Amazon worker was killed by a forklift in a Plainfield warehouse in 2017, the state of Indiana’s investigator found the company was at fault. The state cited Amazon for four major safety violations and fined it $28,000.

But an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that, as Gov. Eric Holcomb sought to lure Amazon’s HQ2 to Indiana, state labor officials quietly absolved Amazon of responsibility. After Amazon appealed, they deleted every fine that had been levied and accepted the company’s argument — that the Amazon worker was to blame.

The investigator on the case, John Stallone, had arrived at the warehouse a day after 59-year-old Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death. He was so troubled by the pushback he was getting from higher-ups that he secretly recorded his boss, Indiana OSHA Director Julie Alexander, as she counseled the company on how to lessen the fine.

“It’s like being at a card table and having a dealer teach you how to count cards,” Stallone said.

Stallone is quoted as saying that pressure to back off came from “as high up as the governor’s mansion.”

The governor has reacted angrily, sending Reveal and the Star an intimidating “cease and desist” letter, and insisting that he was not involved in handling the dispute. The officials at the labor department have thus far declined to be interviewed.

According to Reveal,

Indiana OSHA issued four serious safety citations, for a total fine of $28,000. Stallone sought more, but he was getting pushback. On Nov. 20, 2017, Stallone joined his boss, Julie Alexander, the Indiana OSHA director, as she called Amazon officials. He secretly recorded the conversation, which is legal in Indiana, and shared the recording with Reveal.

During the call, Alexander told the Amazon officials what she’d need from them in order to shift the blame from the company to “employee misconduct,” according to the recording….

Some days after the conference call with Amazon officials, Stallone said Indiana Labor Commissioner Rick Ruble pulled him into his office. The governor was there, too, standing by the commissioner’s desk, according to Stallone.

He recalled that Holcomb told him how much it would mean to Indiana if the state won the Amazon headquarters deal. Then, Stallone said, the commissioner told him to back off on the Amazon case — or resign.

Stallone did resign, and reported the situation to OSHA.

The same day Stallone sent his whistleblower email, Amazon’s corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indiana’s governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasn’t donated to him before or since.

Perhaps–as the Governor and labor officials insist– Stallone is just making entirely innocuous actions seem nefarious, although it is difficult to imagine what his motive might be. Or perhaps, the prospect of winning Amazon’s headquarters–or at the very least, avoiding measures that might make the state less competitive–persuaded the Governor and other officials to make an exception to the rules.

These days, everywhere you look, exceptions are swallowing the rules.

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Indiana Doesn’t Do New

Residents of Indiana’s urban areas will tell you that one of the more annoying features of Hoosier life is a state government in thrall to rural interests.

Indiana has a significant urban/rural cultural divide. Our legislature–which for years has been gerrymandered in ways that significantly favor rural Republican areas–resents the fact that Indianapolis is the state’s economic driver, and routinely screws us over.

State agencies, for their part, vary in their approach to the needs of urban Hoosiers.

Nowhere is the disconnect between state and city more striking than the incomprehension of urban realities displayed by Indiana’s Department of Transportation. I’ve posted previously about the conflict between the city and the state over the latter’s planned repair of the aging interstates that cut through and deface residential and historic districts in the central city.

When I read this recent article from Forbes, I thought about the reluctance of Indiana’s DOT to actually engage with the group of planners, architects and residents who came together to try to explain why elevated highways, interchanges and walls designed for country interstates create huge problems in cities.

The interstate highway system is over 50 years old and many portions of the system need repairs or upgrades. As we debate the future of the interstate highway system in light of advances in smart infrastructure and autonomous and electric vehicles, it’s worth considering whether some portions of the system should be removed, especially urban portions that are underused or harmful to the vitality of cities.

The article recognizes and recounts the many benefits of the Interstate system. Interstates have played an important part in the nation’s economic growth. But as the article notes,

The highway system is great for facilitating travel between metro areas and states and faster travel times are what make the system so valuable. But the system doesn’t need to be in its current form to serve this purpose. Several stretches of highway within cities’ boundaries do little to facilitate inter-state travel and come with a host of negative impacts on the cities that contain them….

Economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow estimates that on average the construction of one interstate highway through a central city caused an 18% drop in that city’s population between 1950 and 1990. The economic explanation is that the highway decreased commuting times, which allowed people to live farther from the city. Furthermore, the decrease in the price of commuting freed up money that could be used on other things, including more space. And since people really value space—think about how the average home size changes with income—this increased the demand for space and led to more suburbanization and a decline in population density as people consumed more land and built bigger homes.

Population loss wasn’t the only result of highways running through the cores of cities. Entire neighborhoods were razed to make room for highways, destroying homes, businesses, and urban amenities….Highways also became barriers between neighborhoods, cutting people off from job opportunities and retail options. There’s also evidence that air pollution from highways negatively impacts student outcomes in nearby schools.

Highways that bisect cities create barriers that hinder interactions between people on either side. They also take up valuable real estate that could be used for more housing, businesses, or amenities, such as parks, that make cities more appealing places to live and work.

The article’s conclusion, ironically, echos the approach preferred by Indianapolis and rejected by the state’s DOT. (In fairness, DOT did retreat from its original plan to add lanes and huge buttressing walls…)

Several highways running through cities could be removed without adversely affecting the overall system, and removal would clear the way for a new period of urban revitalization. A system of smaller, lower-speed boulevards would still enable travel through city centers without the noise, pollution, and unsightliness of today’s high-speed highways. It’s time to try something new.

And I’m sure some states will actually work with their cities to do that. Indiana, not so much.

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