Tag Archives: Indiana legislature

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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They Really ARE Crazy

Between the Indiana legislature and the lunatic caucus in Congress, I’m increasingly reluctant to read the news these days. I scan the headlines and I force myself to read the articles I really need to see, but the process gets more difficult every day.

The Indiana legislature is ignoring most of the actual work they are elected to do, in favor of protecting gun manufacturers (they’re on the way to passing a measure that would void Gary’s lawsuit against those companies) and ignoring child safety (they deep-sixed measures that would have required parents to store weapons safely); they’re doubling down on their war against Indianapolis (they’re halfway to revoking a measure passed just last year that allowed the Ciity-County Council to tax our downtown, because the Council had the nerve to actually do so, and it’s in the process of substituting the “wisdom” of our legislative overlords for the desires of the 70 percent of Indianapolis residents who voted for public transit.)

And just for good measure, the legislature has reminded citizens that the prejudices and ignorance of the self-satisfied super-majority are more important than whatever Hoosier voters might prefer: among other things, it refused to extend Indiana’s shortest-in-the-nation voting day, and refused to approve a non-binding ballot measure asking voters if we might want the ability to mount initiatives–a right voters in other states enjoy. Don’t want anything disturbing their gerrymandered power!

And then there’s Congress, which is in thrall to the most ignorant and dangerous fringe of the ignorant and dangerous cult that used to be a political party.

The House looks increasingly likely to reject a hard-won bipartisan immigration agreement negotiated in the Senate– even before they know what is in it, and even though it reportedly gives the GOP measures they have long claimed to want–because Republicans want to run for re-election on the issue. Desperately needed aid to Ukraine is contingent on passage of that agreement.

American politicians used to take pride in the fact that partisanship stopped at the water’s edge–that foreign policy was approached in a nation over party manner. If Russia wins its war of aggression against Ukraine, the balance of power in the world will shift, and not in our favor–and Republicans don’t care.

With Ukraine in the balance, with the world  dangerously close to widening war in the Middle East, what are Indiana’s GOP Congressmen doing? Well, Jim Banks has moved forcefully into the breach–he’s demanding that the City of Carmel terminate its sister city relationship with Xiangyang, China. Showing his foreign policy chops!!

Banks has long been a member of what the New York Times calls the “wrecking ball” Congress, echoing the nutty conspiracy theories and endorsing the White Christian Nationalism of the fringe of  the fringe. And that lunatic fringe just gets crazier by the day.

If you think calling the Right crazy is unfair, allow me to share one news item making the rounds: Taylor Swift is an operative of the deep state.

As Philip Bump writes,

There are lots of manifestations of this, including multiple presentations on the right’s preferred cable news channel. The iteration that attracted perhaps the most attention, though, came from former presidential candidate and Donald Trump cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy (speaking of people who suddenly emerged in the public consciousness to polarizing effect).

In a social media post, a prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist linked Swift to … let’s see here … ah yes, George Soros. In response, Ramaswamy offered a prediction.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” he wrote. “And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months.”

The implication (again: forgive my telling you something obvious) is that the Chiefs are being ushered to the Super Bowl … somehow … to secure Swift’s endorsement for President Biden….

How would this work? Did the Baltimore Ravens take a dive? Did someone pay them? Are they just that committed to Democratic politics that they all agreed to lose? Did the Buffalo Bills before them? And the Miami Dolphins before the Bills? Or does the government have some Havana-Syndrome-esque device that it trains on opponents, causing field goals to go wide right? What’s the mechanism, exactly?

There will be a lot of important things decided by November’s ballots, including the future of reproductive rights and American democracy. It appears we will also decide between sanity and lunacy–between reality and a world in which terminating a sister city relationship is the conduct of foreign policy and Taylor Swift is an election psyop.

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