GOP – Page 4 – Sheila Kennedy

Our Selective “Anti-Tax” Legislators

In Indiana, Republicans always, always talk about reducing the “tax burden” on Hoosier citizens. They incessantly brag about their solicitude for taxpayers, and Indiana’s status as a “low tax” state.

Well…it turns out that their solicitude is pretty selective; it’s focused on the folks who are most likely to support them, either financially or with their votes. Businesses, corporations, rich folks…Struggling students, not so much.

In fact, not at all.

President Biden’s continuing effort to relieve millions of Americans from a real burden–student loan debt–has already benefitted 35,000 young Hoosiers. A provision of Biden’s American Rescue Plan also amended the Internal Revenue Code so that the discharge of that debt would not be taxable. (As you may or may not know–but your accountant will confirm–if you owe someone money, and that someone “forgives” the debt, the IRS considers the amount forgiven to be income, and you will be taxed on it.) Taxing student loan forgiveness would rather obviously go a long way toward reducing the relief being provided.

Indiana’s legislators–those solicitous “anti-tax” Republicans–looked at the situation and said “not so fast!”

The Indiana Department of Revenue explains.

The IRS excludes federal direct student loan forgiveness from federal income tax due to an exemption in the Internal Revenue Code. Although the computation of Indiana’s adjusted gross income (AGI) begins with federal AGI, Indiana is a static conformity state, meaning that Indiana’s tax code is linked to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) as of a specific date. For a provision that impacts federal AGI, the effect on Indiana AGI depends on whether the Indiana General Assembly wholly or partially decouples from the federal provision during the legislative session.

When the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) expanded IRC section 108(f)(5), excluding student loan discharge under certain circumstances from federal gross income, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law decoupling Indiana from that provision in the IRC, and enacted a state provision requiring Hoosier taxpayers to add back the excluded amount to their Indiana AGI.

In 2022, this provision was clarified retroactively to provide that discharges resulting from total and permanent disability, death, or bankruptcy were not required to be added back. That law, IC 6-3-1-3.5(a)(30), still stands; therefore, federal discharge of some student loans between 2021 and 2025 must be added back to Indiana’s adjusted gross income. This includes the one-time student loan forgiveness under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Student Debt Relief Plan, even though the plan was not part of the ARPA.

Nice of them to say that if the loan was discharged because you died, were permanently disabled or bankrupt, they’d let you off the hook.

Indiana thus joins Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin (last I looked, Arkansas was still considering the matter). Students elsewhere in the country are not being penalized.

Things are different for corporations. Indiana is one of only twelve states with corporate tax rates under 5%. That’s in contrast to states like Minnesota (9.8 percent), Illinois (9.5 percent) and Alaska (9.4 percent). The higher corporate rates in those states evidently made it unnecessary for them to tax students’ debt relief. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that corporations can afford lobbyists and students can’t.)

A statement issued by Representative Greg Porter at the time student loan repayments resumed (they’d been paused during the pandemic) elaborated on that point. Porter wrote:

More than 900,000 Hoosiers currently have some form of student loan debt, with the average Hoosier owing about $32,000. With repayments beginning soon, many Hoosiers will face financial stress, a stress the Republican supermajority has done nothing to ease for constituents.

“Indiana is one of the few states that taxes an individual’s student loan forgiveness or an employer paying off the student loan for an employee. Last session, my bill to make loan forgiveness dollars exempt from taxation never received a hearing. This is a shame, because Indiana Republicans never shy away from dispensing tens of millions of dollars in tax credits to large companies seeking move to Indiana but refuse to take action to make conditions better for Hoosiers living and working in our state.

The next time you hear Indiana politicians talk about their concern for us poor, struggling taxpayers, you might ask them just which taxpayers they want to relieve–and which ones are unworthy of their solicitude.

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Anecdotes Are Not Data

An often repeated mantra in academia is a reminder: anecdotes are not data. Your run-in with a devotee of the Second Amendment isn’t reflective of majority opinion on the subject of guns; the sermon your pastor delivered about abortion isn’t evidence of a monolithic religious position on reproductive choice…etc. etc.

I know that. I really do.

But anecdotes can be intriguing, even if they don’t amount to statistical evidence. And I’ve been involved in recent conversations that have me mulling over their possible larger meaning–especially since they have displayed an unexpected similarity. I am filing them under “possible omens for November.”

Here’s the context.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been working as a volunteer on Marc Carmichael’s campaign for Indiana’s open U.S. Senate seat. Marc is running against Jim Banks, who may be the most odious example of MAGA Republicanism running for public office this year, and yes, I know that is really saying something. Among the tasks I’ve taken on is an effort to recruit Republicans willing to identify as “Republicans for Carmichael.” Banks is so extreme (and, from all reports, personally unpleasant) that even many Republican voters detest him, so I figured my odds were good.

I spent 35 years as an active Republican, and most of the people I worked with in what was then still a political party are still alive, so I thought I was an ideal person to make the ask. I began calling former colleagues who I had found to be reasonable, “good government” partisans.

And one after another, I got virtually the same response: I’m no longer a Republican.

A lawyer friend who was a long-serving Republican ward chairman told me he’d not only left the GOP, he’d also cooled relations with friends who’d remained.

A Republican who formerly served as Mayor of a northern Indiana city said he’d love to help, but he was now a Democrat.

A friend who was a former Republican Speaker of the Indiana House said he was no longer a Republican, and didn’t understand how any thinking person could embrace the party’s transformation into MAGA extremism or consider putting Donald Trump back in the Oval Office.

A friend who served two terms as a Republican county-level office holder told me “Sorry, I ‘came out” as a Democrat on Facebook last year.”

Over half of the people I called had similar responses. A couple volunteered to help the Carmichael campaign, but pointed out that it would be incorrect–even fraudulent– to include them in a list of Republican supporters. As one of them said, they are now “proud to be ex-members of the GOP.”

Most of the individuals I have thus far managed to recruit (a list will be announced by the campaign in due course) expressed extreme distaste not just for Banks and Trump, but for the current iteration of a political party they had worked for and supported financially for many years. But they are hanging in, hoping for a turn back to sanity.

I draw two conclusions from these conversations. One is obvious: when so many former party workers and elected officials have left, expressing disapproval and anger at today’s iteration of the GOP, it’s a reasonable assumption that membership in the Grand Old Party is shrinking. Admittedly there is no way of knowing or estimating the size of the cohort represented by these “high information” individuals. It’s possible that the people I talked to don’t represent significant numbers who have disaffiliated. It’s equally possible, however, that there are hundreds more who–for similar reasons– no longer consider themselves Republican.

My second “take-away” is more a theory than a firm conclusion. I have often shared my bewilderment that any sentient American can support Donald Trump, who–in addition to lacking any redeeming personal, ethical or intellectual qualities– is clearly, deeply, and increasingly mentally ill. My inability to get my head around support for Trump extends to my reaction to MAGA folks, who are opposed to every value that really does make America great.

My repeated discussions with individuals who have fled the GOP, as well as my conversations with those who are struggling with their choice to remain, suggests to me that people who clearly see the danger posed by an explicitly racist and fascist movement are largely drawn from the ranks of more informed citizens–people who not only follow political news but who possess the knowledge and experience to understand the nature and extent of the threat posed by the MAGA cult.

Perhaps neither of my conclusions is correct. After all, my evidence is anecdotal.

In the meantime, if anyone reading this still identifies as Republican and is willing to join Republicans for Carmichael–shoot me an email.

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Evidently, The GOP War On Cities Isn’t Limited To Indiana

When the Indiana legislature is in session, residents of urban areas don’t feel safe–and there is ample reason for our angst, as this blog has repeatedly documented. A sad side effect is currently playing out in the Indianapolis City County Council, where the Democratic majority is trying to quiet one Counselor’s expressions of anger over the arrogance of a legislator who says he knows best what sort of transit city folks are entitled to. The Democratic caucus is evidently worried that open resistance will make the legislature even harder to deal with.

The bottom line, of course, is that Hoosiers–both city dwellers and rural folks–are absolutely helpless to influence our legislative overlords. Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, legislators in Indiana choose their voters, not the other way around, and Indiana lacks the ability to mount referenda or initiatives. We are truly subjects, not citizens.

There’s no mystery about why.

Our Red state legislature makes war on the cities that provide virtually all of the tax dollars they spend–the cities that are demonstrably the economic engine of the state–because cities are where Democrats live and vote.

It turns out that Indiana is not the only retrograde Red state engaging in these tactics. According to a recent article in The American Prospect, Republican-led states have now taken to blocking liberal cities from even thinking about legislating on behalf of their residents.

There’s nothing historically novel about America’s politics dividing along urban vs. rural or cosmopolitan vs. parochial lines. One has to go back a full century, however, to find a time when the nation’s political fault lines ran so clearly along the city/country divide as they do today.

“Those people” tend to live in cities, and they tend to vote Democratic.

In the 1920s, cities were too Catholic and Jewish and freethinking for the countryside’s Protestant traditionalists, and new urban-based media (radio, movies) brought the taint of the new to rural communities whose susceptible young people were lighting out for the cities. Today, culture wars and economic conflicts also play out largely along urban/rural lines. Of the top 35 cities in America by population, only four have Republican mayors, and one of those, Eric Johnson of Dallas, Texas, was elected as a Democrat and switched parties in 2023.

State level lawmakers may not be the brainiest of people, but a number of them have figured out that–as the saying goes–there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Since Republican legislatures and governors can’t stop city residents from electing Democrats, however, they’ve devised a whopper of a Plan B: negating majority rule in those areas by denying those cities the right to enact any laws or promote any policies that run counter to the preferences of the governor and the legislature.

The article lists a number of examples. North Carolina’s legislature nullified a Charlotte ordinance protecting LGBTQ rights. When the city of Birmingham passed a municipal minimum-wage statute, the Republican state legislature outlawed municipal minimum-wage laws.

More recently, majority-Black and majority-Democratic Jackson, Mississippi, has had a crime problem, so the Republican Mississippi state legislature responded by enacting a law that stripped criminal trials from the jurisdiction of Jackson courts and established a new group of courts, with judges to be appointed by the state’s Republican chief justice. When Democratic Nashville established a civilian review board for its police, the Republican legislature and governor passed a law that banned civilian review boards. The underlying racism in such preemptions is never very far from the surface. The Republican neo-Dixiecrats who dominate Southern legislatures can no longer keep Blacks from voting, but they’ve found a way to keep Blacks, in the cities where they constitute clear majorities, from governing.

And of course, there’s always Texas.

In the past, the state had enacted laws to stop municipalities from creating local ordinances that protect tenants facing eviction and to stop cities and counties from regulating fracking within their boundaries. Last summer, however, the Texas legislature passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law HB 2127, which its sponsors gloatingly called the “Death Star” bill for local governments. The law prohibits municipalities from enacting local ordinances that go beyond any state laws that deal with agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and property.

The sweeping law negated local statutes like those that Dallas and Austin had enacted to require employers to give water breaks to construction workers in torrid summers. It further forbade cities from enacting any such ordinances that climate change or conscience might require. It’s so broad that it’s not clear just what kind and how many local laws and regulations it would negate.

Knowing that Indiana isn’t alone really doesn’t give me any comfort.

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The Stakes

Bret Stephens is a regular opinion writer for the New York Times. He is a self-described conservative who shares a Monday column with liberal Gail Collins. Stephens is a “never Trumper”–and very clear-eyed about the threat posed not just by Trump, but by the current GOP, and he has a wicked way with words. A few days ago, when Collins asked him what the remaining sane Republicans would do about the immigration bill, his response was dead-on perfect:

So-called sane House Republicans are basically passengers in a car being driven at high speed by a drunk. There’s no getting out of the car. And they don’t dare tell the driver to slow down because who knows what he’ll do then.

As Hoosiers are being inundated with advertisements from the candidates vying for the GOP nomination for Governor, the accuracy of Stephens’ description is evident.

On the one hand, we have the MAGAs. Mike Braun is promising to fix problems that are matters of federal jurisdiction (why not stay in the Senate, Mike, if those are your issues?) and repeatedly reminding voters that he is Trump’s choice. Creepy Eric Doden is quoting the bible, promising to “protect life” and “always back the Blue.” And we have Brad Chambers– the least scary of the lot (which isn’t saying much)–trying to avoid climbing into the drunk driver’s speeding car by focusing on job creation and his “outsider” claims.

I’ve missed ads from Lt. Governor Susanne Crouch and disgraced former Attorney General Curtis Hill–I assume we’ve been (mercifully) spared those due to the lack of zillionaire status that allows the others to spend lots of their own and their families’ money.

All of them support Indiana’s abortion ban. And that raises a question: how much weight will Hoosier voters place on the abortion issue when it is one issue among others on the candidates’ agendas?

Every state that has voted on the issue of reproductive rights in a stand-alone vote has upheld those rights, even deep-red states. Pundits argue, however, that voters will be less likely to vote against candidates whose anti-choice positions are only one position among many. When the issue is separated from a campaign for public office, presumably, it is simpler for voters to understand what’s at stake and to register an “up or down” preference.

That belief may have been what has convinced pro-Trump groups to formulate an “Anti-Abortion Plan for Day One.”

In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access.

Many of the policies they advocate are ones Trump implemented in his first term and President Joe Biden rescinded — rules that would have a far greater impact in a post-Roe landscape. Other items on the wish list are new, ranging from efforts to undo state and federal programs promoting access to abortion to a de facto national ban. But all have one thing in common: They don’t require congressional approval.

“The conversations we’re having with the presidential candidates and their campaigns have been very clear: We expect them to act swiftly,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told POLITICO. “Due to not having 60 votes in the Senate and not having a firm pro-life majority in the House, I think administrative action is where we’re going to see the most action after 2024 if President Trump or another pro-life president is elected.”

The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project — a coalition that includes Students for Life, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and other anti-abortion organizations — is drafting executive orders to roll back Biden-era policies that have expanded abortion access, such as making abortions available in some circumstances at VA hospitals. They are also collecting resumes from conservative activists interested in becoming political appointees or career civil servants and training them to use overlooked levers of agency power to curb abortion access.

The linked article details the plans, and makes it very clear that the the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy will be at the very center of the 2024 federal election. It will also be at the center of Indiana’s election for U.S. Senate–a contest that will likely pit “anti-woke” culture warrior Jim Banks, who supports a national ban with zero exemptions, against Marc Carmichael, who wants to codify Roe v. Wade.

In November’s election, we’ll see whether voters understand that they are choosing between “forced birth” candidates and those who will protect women’s health and equality.

I’m pretty sure they will.

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I Guess My Prediction Was Just Premature

One of my biggest faults (as my husband, children and multiple others will confirm) is impatience. It manifests pretty much everywhere–reading a mystery, I want to skim over the clues and get to the part where it’s solved; watching a rom-com, I am anxious for the concluding kiss … I can share all kinds of other examples.

Which brings me to my frustration with the slow-motion disintegration of the Republican Party.

I’ve been predicting the demise of the GOP for at least the last twenty years. Back in “the day”–before the party morphed into a White Christian Nationalist cult–I focused on the growing rift between what we then called “country club Republicans” and the culture warriors that were fringe then, but who now control the party. The country club contingent was composed primarily of business people who were focused on economic policy and tended to see the fringe folks as useful worker bees with a nutty agenda that could safely be ignored once the election was won.

The divorce between those two incompatible factions has taken a lot longer than I once predicted, but today’s MAGA reality has accelerated it.

A couple of years ago, a Washington Post column focused on the widening gulf between corporate America and today’s GOP. The columnist began by pointing to those ubiquitous television ads with their “stream of multicultural and often mixed-raced families buying cars, taking vacations, planning their retirements, doing laundry and laughing at the dinner table.”

You don’t watch television? Just pay attention to the pop-up ads when you surf the Web. See the smiling faces — the sea of Black, Brown, tan and golden faces — that make it clear that corporate America knows that scenes of White families are no longer the only aspirational groupings that make customers want to open their wallets.

The column described the diverging goals of the GOP and corporate America as “two very interesting but very different branding exercises.” It then addressed the increasingly uneasy partnership between the two branches of the party.

For years, these two campaigns allowed both sides to maintain their mutually beneficial arrangement. In recent days, however, the two branding campaigns have collided over the most basic question in our democracy: Who gets to vote and how? Which brand will emerge from this collision in better shape is already a foregone conclusion. But the reason may have less to do with right and wrong than profit and loss.

Under the old arrangement, corporate America would reliably deliver huge sums of money to GOP campaigns and causes, and Republicans would deliver lower taxes on income and capital gains in return. If big companies did not endorse everything the party stood for, they remained mostly silent in service of their bottom line.

As we know, the GOP has morphed into a White, largely evangelical and largely non-urban cult hostile to immigration, science, foreign engagement and Black people. Meanwhile, much of corporate America has evolved in a very different direction. Business sees its interests and bottom lines enhanced by immigration and dependent upon science. Foreign markets give companies a stake in global affairs, and as America’s demography has diversified, so have their target markets.So that increasing gap between business and today’s version of the GOP has continued to grow.

The finally accelerating divide between business and the GOP is not the only sign that the party is disintegrating. Intra-party divisions became significantly more pronounced after Trump’s election.

We are seeing more primary battles between the MAGA Republicans aligned with Trump and the few remaining, more traditional incumbents. Those challenges have not only weakened party cohesion, but have frequently resulted in the nomination of candidates who are considerably less electable in general elections.

During the Trump years, the GOP has gone from differences on policy issues to the abandonment of policy (not to mention the constitution) altogether, making it abundantly clear that GOP candidates are running solely to exercise power, not to govern–to “be someone” rather than “do something.” Internal fights are no longer about policy, but about devotion to Trump and the autocratic MAGA movement; those fights have led to situations in which state and local Republican parties have censured or even expelled members who have deviated from MAGA obsessions.

The disintegration of a once-respectable political party is finally speeding up, but political inertia is still providing drag. Meanwhile, the damage being done to America is enormous. Today’s Republicans have demonstrated that they cannot govern, but they can–and have–brought governance to a halt, delaying and/or killing critical legislation.

The only thing that will accelerate the death of the GOP and the creation of a substitute center-right party is a massive loss in November.

I’m impatiently waiting…

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