Tag Archives: Braun

Hopelessly Undemocratic Indiana

We can’t “save” a democracy we’ve already lost. (See yesterday’s post.) The real question is: can we regain it?

Indiana is a case in point. Extreme gerrymandering ensures a Republican legislative supermajority–not simply because lawmakers have distributed voters to ensure GOP dominance, but because that tactic is far and away the most effective form of voter suppression. There’s a reason Indiana’s turnout is one of the lowest in the country; voters deprived of competitive contests see no reason to cast a ballot. (What’s ironic is that several of these districts would actually be competitive if turnout increased…)

Indiana also lacks an initiative or referendum. Hoosiers thus have absolutely no recourse, no way to counter legislation that ignores the preferences of the majority. And our GOP overlords routinely ignore those preferences–polling regularly shows citizen sentiments at odds with the extremism of those we’ve “elected.”

A friend with Hoosiers 4 Democracy looked at Governor-elect Mike Braun’s recently published policy agenda, and shared examples demonstrating that deviance.

She noted that Braun promises to “faithfully execute SEA 1 (2022).” SEA 1 was the draconian abortion ban passed by our legislature immediately after the decision in Dobbs. Polls of Indiana voters consistently demonstrate that a large majority of Hoosiers support access to abortion through at least the first trimester, and narrower majorities support access beyond. Nevertheless, Braun’s policy agenda includes a promise to  “Ensure SEA 1 (2022) implementation is in accordance with statute in a way that provides transparency and certainty for the public and medical providers.”

How nice of him to advocate for “transparency” of a measure with which most Hoosiers strongly disagree–a measure that has already created “maternity deserts” as Ob-Gyn practitioners flee the state.

Then there’s Braun’s promise to “protect Hoosier girls from biological males who attempt to compete in girls’ sports.” That language joins a provision to “respect the rights of parents”–language we hear from the extreme Right-wing parents who’ve been trying to ban books and require school officials to “out” children. Here’s the language he uses to beat up on trans youth:

In 2022, the Indiana General Assembly passed HEA 1041 to protect the girls on the field of play. The State should continue to ensure that biological males will not compete against our girls on the court, in the pool, or invade the privacy of their locker rooms.

Require schools to respect and uphold the rights of parents as the decision-makers in their children’s lives, education, and upbringing. This includes directly notifying parents about any physical or mental health concerns that arise at school, such as requests to use a name or pronouns that are inconsistent with biological sex.

In 2023, the Indiana General Assembly passed HEA 1608 to protect this fundamental parental right.

In other parts of the document, Braun inadvertently highlights the logical outcome of Indiana’s regressive legislation. He notes that “Indiana continues to struggle in retaining college graduates as nearly 40% of graduates leave within one year of graduation, and more high school students are choosing to attend university elsewhere (8%).” He also notes that too few Indiana students pursue a college education. “Every year, approximately 75,000 Hoosiers graduate from high school. While half of these students enroll in college the other half pursue other opportunities…. ”

That’s even worse than it sounds. As the friend who sent me Braun’s agenda noted, of the 75,000 who graduate, 32,500 enroll in college. But enrollment isn’t the same thing as completion. Indiana’s college degree completion rate is 66%.  Approximately 21,000 students will graduate within 6 years, and of those, 40% leave the state. That means Indiana has approximately 12,500 new college graduates who join the state’s workforce each year (about 140 per county if they were equally spread out–which they aren’t. Most choose to live and work in cities–primarily Indianapolis–where employment opportunities and social amenities are more plentiful.)

The fact that Indiana has fewer educated citizens than other states is a major reason we have trouble luring employers, and the reason that–as Braun’s agenda also notes–“Indiana faces workforce shortages (e.g., additional 5000 nurses needed by 2031), skill mismatches, and struggles to retain college graduates.”

Bottom line: legislators and administrators who gain public office by choosing their voters can–and do–ignore the wishes of their constituents. Citizens stop participating in the political process, believing it’s a waste of time and effort. They tune out. As a result, the only people who cast ballots are the most committed partisans.

We end up “electing” statewide candidates who, like Braun, go along with the current GOP’s extreme, anti-American “agenda,” or the even more extreme (and embarrassing) Christian Nationalists like Beckwith and Banks, or corrupt posturers like Todd Rokita.

Indiana isn’t a democracy, and our overlords want to see to it that we don’t become one.

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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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The Climate-Denial Party

How, I wonder, do climate-denying Americans manage to ignore the mounting evidence of climate change? I suppose I can understand that people might once have dismissed the overwhelming majority of scientists who’ve been warning us for many years. After all, the changes we actually have experienced until recently–things like spring coming earlier each year–have been subtle. But you’d think our recent episodes of weather disasters, the fires following unusual droughts, and the hurricanes made more powerful and destructive thanks to their paths over warming oceans, would have convinced them.

Evidently not. At least not Hoosier Republicans.

Not only did Mike Braun and Jim Banks vote against added funding for FEMA, Braun and Rokita have opposed Indiana utilities plans to phase out their dependence on coal. According to the Capital Chronicle, Braun just sent a letter to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) opposing a coal plant’s proposed conversion to natural gas.

He urged commissioners to deny the conversion, and encouraged collaboration with policymakers to preserve coal’s role — “the most reliable baseload fuel” — while “looking to the future.”

Todd Rokita, Indiana’s embarrassing Attorney General, has been an even more avid protector of the fossil fuel. As another article from the Chronicle has reported, the Attorney general has urged utility regulators to deny early coal plant retirements.

Coal plants have historically had 50-year lifespans, according to a 2019 article published in Nature Communications. But they can last longer with fixes and upgrades.

U.S. coal plants are about 44 years old, in a capacity-weighted average, according to an analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Plants scheduled for retirement this year averaged 54 years of age: almost a decade older.

But coal plants decommissioned amid their expected decades-long lives have become a political flashpoint.

The IURC says it lacks the authority to prevent a utility from converting from coal–that the agency’s jurisdiction is limited to assessing the reasonableness of rates and other tasks spelled out in the legislation that established it. Rokita, however, argues that the IURC doesn’t need explicit authority. Meanwhile, Indiana’s Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would grant the IURC that specific authority. The article noted that the legislature might also require that such action be made mandatory and not discretionary.

House Bill 1382, introduced last session, would’ve spelled that out. It also laid out conditions utilities would’ve had to meet in order to apply for permission to close any “fossil fuel fired” plant. The proposal never got a hearing and died.

The Hoosier Environmental Council said that bill would slow Indiana’s transition away from coal, a dirty fossil fuel, to greener energy sources.

“Besides adding an unnecessary burden to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, this bill encourages our public utilities to keep their current energy generation sources running as long as possible, which are majority fossil fuels,” the council said on its website.

Indiana’s GOP characterizes concern for the environment as an attribute of “far Left liberalism.” 

The digitally-altered Braun attack ad against Jennifer McCormick is telling. (It was also illegal…) That altered ad was intended to demonstrate to Hoosier voters that McCormick is “unacceptably liberal.” The evidence for that assertion included her prior support for Hillary Clinton and her current support for Joe Biden, a purported attack on gas stoves, and her intention to create a state office that would focus on environmental issues.

The altered ad was visually and textually dishonest. McCormick had never even mentioned gas stoves, and has made it clear that she’s concerned with weightier matters–like women’s reproductive rights. But that accusation was clearly intended to buttress the case for her “unacceptable liberalism.”

What is truly notable about that bit of egregious dishonesty is the obvious assumption that voters will agree with its premise: the only Americans who take climate change seriously are “far Left”–  that people who care about the environment are by definition “too liberal” for public office.

According to Indiana’s GOP, basic scientific literacy–not to mention common sense–is disqualifying. 

I don’t understand when climate change became a culture war issue. I don’t understand people who dismiss knowledge and expertise as some sort of phony elitism. And I really don’t understand how anyone even remotely aware of Hurricanes Helene and Norman can continue to ignore the evidence of their senses.

The Republicans’ rejection of fact, science and evidence does explain the party’s animosity toward education, and GOP support for the vouchers that encourage parents to send their children to schools that will “protect” them from “theories” like evolution and climate change.

It’s just another example of Republicans’ rejection of reality. Hoosiers need to vote Blue.

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Braun And The American Idea

If you were hiring someone to manage a manufacturing business, would you hire someone who didn’t know anything about the product your factory produced? What about a nonprofit executive who disagreed with the organization’s mission?

The answers to those questions is pretty obvious, but for some reason, when it comes to government, we don’t require evidence that candidates for office understand what government is and– just as important– is not supposed to do.

As early voting gets underway in Indiana, Hoosier voters are going to the polls to choose between two statewide tickets. One of those is composed entirely of candidates who neither support nor understand America’s constitutional system. Beckwith, Banks and Rokita are out-and-proud Christian Nationalists waging war against the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State. They simply reject the system put in place by the Founders. Braun–who seems motivated only by a desire to be important–rather clearly doesn’t understand the role of government or the structure of American federalism.

One of the TV ads being run by Jennifer McCormick–who does understand those things–shows an earlier interview with Braun in which he enthusiastically endorsed the Dobbs decision that allowed state-level governments to ban abortion. When asked if he would also support criminalizing the procedure, he said he would. Less well-known was his opinion, shared in another interview, that decisions about same-sex and inter-racial marriages should also be returned to the states.

Evidently, Braun has never encountered the Fourteenth Amendment, which–among other things– requires state and local governments to govern in a manner consistent with the Bill of Rights, and forbids them from denying to their citizens “the privileges and immunities” of American citizenship. For over fifty years, those privileges and immunities have been protected by a doctrine called substantive due process, often called the “right to privacy.” That doctrine confirmed the principle that  “intimate” individual decisions—including one’s choice of sexual partners or the decision to use contraception (or more recently, the choice of one’s marriage partner) are none of government’s business.

Permit me to slip into “teacher mode.”

Constitutional scholars argue that the right to personal autonomy has always been inherent in the Bill of Rights, but it was  explicitly recognized in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut. Connecticut’s legislature had passed a law prohibiting the use of birth control by married couples. The law prohibited doctors from prescribing contraceptives and pharmacists from filling those prescriptions.The Supreme Court struck down the law, holding that whether a couple used contraceptives was not a decision government is entitled to make.

The Court held that recognition of a right to personal autonomy—the right to self-government—is essential to the enforcement of other provisions of the Bill of Rights.  Justices White and Harlan found explicit confirmation of it in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—which is where the terminology “substantive due process” comes from. Wherever it resided–in a “penumbra” or the 14th Amendment—the Justices agreed on both its presence and importance.

The doctrine of Substantive Due Process draws a line between decisions that government has the legitimate authority to make, and decisions which, in our system, must be left up to the individual. I used to tell my students that the Bill of Rights is essentially a list of things that government is forbidden to decide. What books you read, what opinions you form, what prayers you say (or don’t)—such matters are outside the legitimate role of government. The issue isn’t whether that book is dangerous or inappropriate, or that religion is false, or whether you should marry someone of the same sex, or whether you should procreate: the issue in America is who gets to make that decision.

Not the federal government. Not state governments. Individual citizens.

I will refrain from pointing out the impracticality of “states rights” on these intimate issues. (If you are in an inter-racial marriage and move to a state that forbids such unions, are you suddenly unmarried?) The more fundamental point is that allowing any unit of government to decide such matters violates the Bill of Rights and the libertarian philosophy that underlies our constitutional system.

Indiana’s MAGA GOP is offering voters an entire statewide slate of men who neither understand nor respect the Constitution–men who are applying for jobs without demonstrating any familiarity with the job descriptions.

Voters who feel comfortable allowing Indiana’s deplorable legislature to decide who they should be allowed to marry or whether they should be required to reproduce should vote for Braun and his merry band of theocrats. The rest of us will cast our votes for the Democrats.

Note: I voted early afternoon yesterday, on the first day of early voting. I stood in a fast-moving line for nearly an hour. If this year’s election will be decided–as I believe it will be–on turnout, it was a fantastic sign. 

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Some Arguments Just Go On And On…

Back in the day, when I served in the Hudnut Administration, I marvelled at the persistence of some issues. The city battled over drainage, for example, year in and year out. And while the particulars have changed, Hoosiers–and all Americans–have engaged in pitched battles over education policies as long as I can remember. Can children be required to pray in the classroom? Is racial segregation constitutional? Can universities engage in affirmative efforts to diversify their student bodies?

What about privatization–aka “school choice”?

Many of these issues have more in common than appears at first glance. “School choice” programs, for example, especially appeal to parents who want their children ensconced in classrooms occupied primarily by others who look and pray like them.

I have frequently posted about the importance of public schools and the damage done to those schools and to civic cohesion by Indiana’s costly voucher program. That damage is one reason among many to vote for gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick, our former Superintendent of Public Instruction, and not Mike Braun, who wants to make Indiana’s vouchers universal. 

We now have enough experience with vouchers to assess the original claims made for privatizing our schools.

We know, for example, that vouchers don’t improve educational outcomes, that they are used primarily by wealthier families, that they increase racial segregation, and that they are particularly harmful to public schools in rural areas that lack sufficient population to support private competitors. There has been less attention focused on the educational deficits of a large number of participating private schools, although we do know that many religious academies substitute creationism for science and deliberately whitewash American history.

A few years ago, a colleague and I wondered how many of Indiana’s voucher schools taught civics. Did they teach about America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights? About democracy? The structure of government? Was civics instruction a condition of their receipt of public money? After all, the civic mission of public schools is central to their importance.

The (depressing) academic article reporting our research is here. Here’s the abstract:

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the enthusiasm for “privatization” and contracting-out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs and to a lesser extent charter schools mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally; however, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. We explore the unique role of primary and secondary public schools in forging a broad consensus about the nature and importance of America’s constitutional ethic, and growing concerns that vouchers, in particular, are failing to address, let alone facilitate, an ethic of citizenship.

As we noted, arguments about providing educational competition ignore both the civic mission of education and the multiple ways in which education differs from ordinary consumer goods.

The civic mission of public schools includes the teaching of America’s history and the transmittal of the country’s core constitutional values, what I call the “Constitutional ethic.” A sound and accurate civics education provides students with an understanding of the genesis and evolution of the rules that shape and constrain public service in the United States.  The public mission of the schools requires teaching students about this country’s approach to and experience with the principles of democratic self-governance. As we wrote,

When citizens lack a common understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of America’s approach to governance and fail to form an ethical commitment to those common undertakings, a diverse polity inevitably fragments into tribal components contending for power and influence.

Indiana has very good standards specifying what our public schools must teach. As we discovered, however, oversight of the private–overwhelmingly religious–schools receiving vouchers runs from minimal to non-existent. As a result, the past few years have seen several scandals, including “virtual” schools that falsified enrollments, defrauding the state of millions of dollars.

There has been little to no research investigating the impact of voucher programs on civic knowledge and cohesion. There are no standards or procedures for assessing whether individual schools are even trying to create knowledgable, responsible American citizens.

It’s telling that Mike Braun’s pitch for a universal voucher program is “parental choice”–not educational outcomes and certainly not fiscal prudence. 

Early voting in Indiana starts today. I will cast my early vote for Jennifer McCormick, who understands that reproductive choice is good, and educational “choice”–aka vouchers–isn’t.

Join me.

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