Tag Archives: Indiana legislature

Extremism’s Costs

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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I have lived in Indiana almost all of my life. I was born in Indianapolis and raised in a small Indiana town (Anderson). After a brief hiatus in college, I returned to the state and have spent my adult life here. I’ve participated in the state’s civic and political affairs, and been part of Indianapolis’ government. During my stint as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I sued the state on more than one occasion.

Given that history, I think I’ve earned the right to comment on the state’s deficits–deficits that have grown more concerning over that timespan.

On this platform, I frequently criticize what former NUVO editor Harrison Ullmann called “The World’s Worst Legislature.” Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, that body is controlled by extremists–culture warriors pandering to the White Christian Nationalists who want to eviscerate the very notion of a diverse “public” entitled to a government that serves the common good rather than the interests of political donors and fundamentalist churches.

The most vivid example of the General Assembly’s misplaced emphases–but most definitely not the only example–was the legislature’s unseemly rush to impose a ban on abortion in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. That ban ignored medical science, endangered the lives of pregnant women, and rode roughshod over the rights of women whose religious commitments differ from those of fundamentalist Christians.

Indiana is now reaping the negative consequences of that ban.

We’ve already seen reports that the state has growing  ob/gyn “deserts,” where women–including but not limited to pregnant women–must travel long distances to access a wide range of care. (The legislature’s decades-long effort to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics had already made it difficult for poor women in much of the state to get birth control or mammograms.)

We’ve already seen reports that doctors of all specialties are leaving the state, and that fewer medical students are choosing to intern in Indiana’s hospitals.

Now we are seeing evidence that others are joining those medical refugees–that people are choosing not to live in Red states with abortion bans.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the majority of justices decided that the right to an abortion should be left up to individual states. Two years later, thousands of Americans in parts of the U.S. with strict abortion bans are deciding to leave those states, new research finds.

Following the Dobbs decision, the 13 states with strict abortion bans, from Alabama to West Virginia, collectively lost a net 36,000 residents per quarter, meaning the difference between the number of people leaving the states versus those migrating in, according to the analysis from economists at Georgia Institute of Technology and The College of Wooster and published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The analysis, which is based on change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service, found that the state impact is larger among single-person households, which may suggest that younger people are moving out of abortion-banning states at a higher rate than families. That could be due to the greater challenges for families in trying to move, given the need to change schools or uproot careers for parents.

The freedom of young people to choose where they will live carries significant implications for states’ economies. States with bans are already having difficulty attracting and retaining workers, especially younger workers. Indiana companies are reporting such difficulties, which will likely have a negative impact on the state’s already struggling economic development.

“Younger Americans are paying attention to a state’s access to reproductive care. In a 2022 Axios poll, about 6 in 10 people 18- to 29-years-old said a state’s abortion laws would sway their decision on where to live from “somewhat” to “a lot.”

Surprise!! It turns out that things like quality of life and respect for individual liberty have a greater impact on young people’s residential choices than low tax rates.

Researchers found that most states with strict abortion bans also fail to provide adequate social safety nets. They make it difficult to access programs such as food stamps, and have growing numbers of maternal care deserts. That is certainly true of Indiana, where our legislature routinely imposes punitive measures on–and erects barriers to– people needing public assistance.

People who claim to be pro-life, who advocated for these abortion bans, often suggest that these policies are designed to protect children, women and families,” said Dr. Nigel Madden, lead author of the study. But weakness in the safety net shows “the hypocrisy of that argument.”

The kindest thing one can say about the culture warriors who dominate Indiana’s legislature is that they are incapable of connecting the dots.

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More About Those “Rutabaga” Districts..

A few days ago, I wrote about the problem posed by what I called “rutabaga” voters--Hoosiers who would elect a vegetable if it had an “R” next to its name on the ballot. In that post, I focused on District 88, but I’ve received an email from a very politically-savvy friend about another district that is eminently winnable if the sane candidate has sufficient resources to get his message out. My friend has long been negative about Indiana voters and Democratic chances in the state, so his belief that this district is winnable is consequential.

Here’s that email in its entirety.

Friends,

I have had multiple discussions with people regarding how to make a meaningful and impactful impact on elections here in Indiana. That is genuinely a challenge these days. After chatting with knowledgeable people, the most meaningful thing we can do is to try to help the Democrats win enough seats to end the Republican supermajority in the Indiana legislature.

If we are going to be successful in doing so, the most challenging seat to flip will be in IndianaHouse District 24. If we win this district, however, we impact the Republican’s ability to keep their uncontested grip on Indiana governance.

Indiana House District 24 encompasses Westfield (54%), Carmel (33%), Sheridan (7%), and portions of Zionsville (7%). It is a lean Republican District with much new suburban growth since 2020. Joe Biden received 45.7 percent in 2020. Since 2020, registrations have increased by 70% inWestfield. These registrations bode well for Democrats, as new voters are mostly under fifty and tend to lean Democrat. House District 24 is an open seat.

The Democrat candidate is Josh Lowery. Josh and his family live in Westfield. Josh ran for the state senate in 2022. His wife Alexis ran for Westfield City Council in 2023 and lost to a well-funded Patrick Tamm by thirty votes. So, the Lowry name identification is better than average, particularly in the population center of Westfield. Josh is an attorney. Josh and Alexis are well-known in the community beyond their political participation. They are foster parents and have fostered twelve children, five of whom they have adopted.

Hunter Smith is a former Indianapolis Colts punter who lives in the Zionsville portion of House District 24. Hunter Smith is a disciple of Republican Lt. Governor candidate Micah Beckwith and his extreme Christian nationalist agenda and the most extreme elements of the Republican party. He supports Beckwith’s positions, including those he took as a member of the Hamilton East Public Library when he voted for a book-banning policy that put Hamilton County in the national news.

Smith won a contested GOP primary where he ran to the right. He is pro-life without exceptions, pro-parents’ rights in school, pro-school choice, and anti-LGBTIQQ, particularly emphasizing he wants to ban Pride Month because it promotes the “wickedness of the LGBT agenda.”

House District 24 is winnable and a key district in House Democrats’ push to flip four seats to break the Indiana House Republican’s supermajority in the House. While it is a lean Republican District, Josh Lowry is more aligned with the district than the far-right extremist Hunter Smith. Lowry’s hopes are enhanced by the top of the ticket, where both Kamala Harris and Democratic Gubernatorial nominee Jennifer McCormack are currently polling above expectations in that district.

This race is winnable if Josh can raise the necessary funds to inform voters that Hunter Smith is one of the most extreme candidates in the state on the Republican ticket this fall.

I am not holding a fundraiser or going to pressure anyone to donate. Still, I wanted to share this information if you are inclined to do something that could make a material difference for Indiana. It takes relatively little money to make a meaningful difference in a legislative district, and winning this district could have an oversized impact on the Indiana government. If you are inclined, you can learn more about Josh and donate online at www.lowryforindiana.com.

That’s the end of the email.

I have sent a contribution to Lowry, and I hope many of you reading this will join me. The last thing we need in this state is a pro-censorship, anti-choice clone of theocrat Micah Beckwith buttressing a GOP super-majority in Indiana’s already-terrible, culture-war legislature.

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Let’s Send A Message

I have occasionally quoted my cousin Mort, a noted cardiologist, on issues involving medical care. He recently shared with me his concerns over the challenge of providing appropriate–or even barely adequate–medical care to women in the wake of the Dobbs decision. In Indiana, this is a huge problem, because–unlike other states– We the People lack any effective electoral mechanism to reverse our GOP-dominated legislature’s assaults on reproductive liberties.

As I was reading my cousin’s email, it occurred to me that while Indiana voters might not be able to mount a referendum, we do have a way to send a message to the pious, self-important legislators who think that occupying a gerrymandered seat in the General Assembly entitles them to overrule people with specialized expertise who actually know what they’re doing.

That message is our vote.

Here’s my proposal: Every pro-choice voter in Indiana should go to the polls and vote Blue “all the way down.” In addition, they should make sure their state senators and representatives know that their vote is tied to reproductive choice–by posting on social networks, writing their legislators, or by carrying a sign or wearing a t-shirt saying “pro-choice voter” when they go to the polls.

As my cousin knows–and Indiana’s Republican legislators evidently don’t– reproductive autonomy isn’t just about being forced to give birth; it is often a matter of life and death.

The U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee’s Ranking Member, Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), has recently released a 40-page report detailing the findings of a 10-month-long investigation into the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs vs. Jackson ruling on the practice of obstetrics and gynecology. This was the court’s decision on June 24, 2022, that took away a woman’s previously recognized constitutional right to abortion and gave states the right to limit or outlaw abortions.

In September 2023, Pallone launched the investigation to examine how providers and, by extension, their patients, are impacted by the Dobbs decision. In conducting the investigation to determine the effects on medical practice, the Democratic Committee staff interviewed OB–GYN educators and resident physicians. The investigation disclosed alarming effects that included the following:

  • Providers are seeing sicker patients suffering from greater complications due to delayed care caused as a result of the Dobbs decision.
  • The Dobbs decision has harmed the training of OB–GYN residents in restrictive states.
  • Residency applicants are increasingly concerned about the quality of abortion training programs offered in restrictive states.
  • Residency directors are finding restrictions on clinical communication are degrading trust between providers and patients and are robbing patients of the ability to make informed decisions about their health.
  • The training of OB–GYN residents in abortion-protective states has been harmed as programs in those states strain their capacity and resources to help train out-of-state residents from restrictive states.
  • Restrictive state laws are already leading us to a future with a provider workforce less prepared to provide comprehensive reproductive health care.
  • OB–GYN residents and program directors are increasingly frustrated, discouraged, and experiencing negative mental health effects in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision.
  • Residency program leaders who participated in the report universally agreed that abortion care is integral to other components of reproductive health care and should not be eliminated or isolated from residency training.
  • After Dobbs, OB–GYN residency applicants more strongly preferred programs in states that permit abortion access.
  • A patchwork of state restrictions is leading to disparate systems of reproductive health care, worsening reproductive and maternal health care shortages, and fracturing the OB–GYN workforce.

As my cousin concluded (I could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears!), Dobbs was yet another example of the naivete and hubris of a politicized Supreme Court. The Court flouted scientific evidence, overruling knowledgeable and skilled medical practitioners in a field in which they were totally unqualified.

I will readily admit that my recommendation–vote Blue to send a message–might require a few Hoosiers to be single-issue voters this November. Those of us who have already surveyed the caliber of candidates being offered by Indiana’s GOP and the issues they are peddling will have no problem voting Blue from top to bottom, but pro-choice Republicans may find it more difficult (although really, Republicans–have you looked at your statewide ticket? Those MAGA theocrats sure don’t resemble the Republicans I used to know…)

Trump keeps saying that abortion/reproductive liberty is no longer a “big deal” electorally. He’s so wrong.

Even one election cycle that turned Indiana Blue–or even purple–would send a much-needed message to our legislative overlords. And we might even elect competent and thoughtful public servants for a change!

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Complicated–And Consequential

The virtue of America’s current battle over a woman’s right to control her own body is its clarity. Either a woman has the right to determine whether she will give birth, or the government has the right to force her to do so, irrespective of the consequences for her health and well-being.

It’s either/or. 

Other threats we face are much more subtle and complicated. Policy changes that may seem innocuous or even reasonable on the surface have the potential to undermine rules that demonstrably serve the common good. An example is the passage this year of bills in Indiana, Nebraska, and Idaho that propose to end “judicial deference.”  Judicial deference is a doctrine that requires federal or state courts to “defer” to administrative agencies’ interpretations of agency statutes and regulations. Instead, those bills require courts to apply de novo review — to examine executive agency actions without bothering to give weight to that agency’s interpretation of the statute or regulation in question.

The bills were based on model legislation: the Judicial Deference Reform Act, developed by The Goldwater Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation. Those bills might not have been necessary, though–our radical, rogue Supreme Court, unconstrained by precedent, appears ready to junk that doctrine, called The Chevron doctrine after the long-ago footnote that established it. 

Why should we care about this arcane bit of jurisprudence? As one recent analysis explained, overturning the Chevron doctrine would allow individual judges to implement their partisan policy preferences instead of abiding by agency expertise.

Under Chevron deference, courts have been obligated for the past half-century to defer to career expert civil servants in agencies who created rules based on their statutory authority when the statutes were ambiguous or silent, as to highly specific and technical areas of regulation. Chevron deference has been used in more than 19,000 cases and is the basis on which Congress has enacted broadly worded statutes granting agencies regulatory authority for the past 40 years. Now, the Supreme Court is poised to throw the baby out with the bathwater by overturning the very authority it directed Congress and federal agencies to operate under….

The court also appeared ready to return to the Skidmore v. Swift & Co. doctrine, which preceded Chevron and, ultimately, would give federal courts more power to implement their policy preferences and ignore agency expertise. As Justice Elena Kagan aptly pointed out, Chevron replaced Skidmore because “judges [were] becoming too partisan in interpreting regulations,” which “dampens that kind of ideological division between courts.” She also reasoned that “Skidmore is not a doctrine of [judicial] humility.” Meanwhile, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emphasized that Chevron allows Congress to delegate policy choices to executive agencies and voiced concerns that “if we take away something like Chevron, the court will then suddenly become a policymaker.”

As the linked article notes, the conservative legal movement’s long effort to use the legal system to serve the interests of  corporate behemoths at the expense of sound policy and the broader interests of the American public seems increasingly likely to succeed.

The doctrine requires “deference”–not submission. If evidence produced at trial shows that an agency’s interpretation of a rule is unreasonable, the courts can and should overturn that interpretation. But discarding the requirement that courts should defer--not “buckle under”–is yet another blow to respect for knowledge and expertise. 

Executive branch agencies increasingly deal with matters requiring considerable subject-matter knowledge. Officials of the EPA are highly likely to know more about unsafe levels of arsenic in drinking water than a judge presiding over a case brought by a company that has been fined for exceeding that level in its discharge into a local river. Officials at the FDA have met professional standards for evaluating the safety of food and/or the efficacy of drugs. Recently, we’ve been reminded of the importance of informed FAA oversight of aircraft manufacturers like Boeing. The growing complexities of modern life–in technology, in medical science, in product safety–requires acknowledging the importance of specialized expertise.

The courts have operated under Chevron deference since 1984. That deference has not kept them from invalidating unreasonable or overbroad interpretations of statutes and regulations. It has, however, required judges (who come to the bench with a very different kind of expertise) to listen carefully to the reasons agency personnel interpret a given rule in the way that they do.

Most Americans have never heard of Chevron; in Indiana, Nebraska and Idaho, most citizens are blissfully unaware of the passage of laws discarding the doctrine.

The threat posed by overruling the doctrine is far less obvious than the threat to women’s autonomy–but that doesn’t mean this assault on expert knowledge isn’t significant.

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Indiana’s Autocratic-And Delusional–Legislature

The most positive thing I can say about Indiana’s just-departed legislature is that at least it was a short session.

I have yet to address one of the most offensive bills passed by our legislative overlords: Senate Enrolled Act 202, which presumes to overrule accepted academic standards and procedures in the name of “intellectual diversity.” As numerous professors and other educators have pointed out, the bill is a thinly-veiled effort to combat what its proponents believe is “liberal bias” in higher education. (Unfortunately, as a popular meme proclaims, facts have a well-known liberal bias.)

The bill aims to emulate Ron DeSantis’ war against education and “wokeness”–turning Indiana into Florida, but without the water and sunshine.

Actually, as faculty and students overwhelmingly and unsuccessfully argued, in addition to having a chilling effect on free expression, the proposal is first and foremost an effort to micromanage Indiana’s higher education institutions. And that effort highlights the most prominent characteristic of our legislature’s Republican super-majority: its unbelievable hubris.

Hubris is defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.” It comes from the Greek, and denotes an excess of ambition and self-regard that ultimately causes the transgressor’s ruin.  It is the overwhelming trait of the Republicans who control Indiana’s Statehouse.

Do Indianapolis citizens want public transportation? Our legislative overlords will restrict the kinds of transit for which we can tax ourselves (no light rail, for reasons that escape most of us). If we are finally allowed to proceed, self-appointed mavens in the legislature will overrule transit experts on issues of implementation.

Did the City-County Council pass a tax to support special needs in the city’s mile square? The legislature will tell them who can and cannot be subjected to that tax. (Gotta protect those political donors…)

The same hubris that is evident when the legislature routinely overrules local government decisions about transit, taxes, puppy mills and plastic bags extends to the idiocy of Senate Enrolled Act 202.

As the Capital Chronicle recently described the Act: 

Included are changes to institutions’ diversity-oriented positions and their policies for tenure, contract renewals, performance reviews and more. It also establishes new reporting and survey requirements based on “free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

Garrison noted that, as part of Senate Enrolled Act 202, Indiana “is one of the few states” that now requires boards of trustees to establish diversity committees on our campuses.

Under the new law, those diversity committees must make recommendations promoting recruitment and retention of “underrepresented” students rather than the “minority students” specified in current law….

The law additionally requires institutions to establish complaint procedures in which school students and staff can accuse faculty members and contractors of not meeting free-expression criteria.

Institutions will have to refer those complaints to human resource professionals and supervisors “for consideration in employee reviews and tenure and promotion decisions,” according to the law.

From a legal standpoint, I would argue that language in the bill is unconstitutionally vague, but of course, that’s the point.

It is glaringly clear that the intent of the measure is to warn professors who might be advancing “liberal” ideas that they are jeopardizing their tenure. Of course, what constitutes a “liberal” classroom lecture and a lack of “intellectual diversity” is pretty subjective–and in our current political environment, subject to constant change. If a biology professor teaches evolution and fails to give equal time to creationism, has she failed to be “intellectually diverse”?  Is a professor teaching about the Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage prohibited from agreeing with its reasoning?

And about that encouraging of complaints….

When I taught, it was abundantly clear that most students who filed complaints against my colleagues were students who got poor grades. (I didn’t get any official complaints, but one student did sue me in Small Claims court for giving him a B-, a grade that was actually a gift. He lost.)

There is much more that is truly horrible about Senate Enrolled Act 202, but what is even more troubling than its content is that its passage represents the majority’s hubris and lack of self-awareness. Someone needs to tell these self-important examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect that election to the Indiana Statehouse (courtesy of gerrymandering) is not a grant of  authority to rule everything in Indiana.

At some level, Indiana lawmakers must recognize that they’re on thin ice–why else would they adamantly refuse to extend the hours our polls are open, or allow citizen referenda or nonpartisan redistricting?

Until Indiana’s weak, ineffective Democratic Party is able to run credible candidates in every one of Indiana’s gerrymandered districts, Hoosiers will continue to inhabit an autocracy governed by culture-war know-nothings with wildly inflated self-images.

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