Another legislative session for the Indiana General Assembly has come and gone.
I suppose this one could be considered a modest success because it didn’t end in a lawsuit entangling all three branches of government.
The session that prompted Gov. Eric Holcomb to sue the legislators in his own Republican Party for attempting to usurp the executive branch’s authority to meet public emergencies set the standard for Three-Stooges-like pratfalls by Hoosier leaders. The Indiana Supreme Court ultimately had to decide the question—in the governor’s favor—but not before consuming much time, energy and taxpayer money, diverting the attention of all three branches of state government to settle a dispute that could have been avoided if the state’s MAGA lawmakers had bothered to read the state constitution.
Ah, well, it wasn’t their money they were wasting.
Just ours.
Given the low bar by which we should judge the efforts of Indiana lawmakers, any session that doesn’t end in a constitutional crisis should be chalked up as a moral victory.
By any other measure, though, this was a dreary session.
Even the bits of unintentional comedy were tired, the monkeyshines and slapstick weary in both spirit and execution.
The moment that gathered the most attention came almost by accident.
Indiana Rep. Jim Lucas, R-Seymour, spotted some Muncie high school students who had come to the Statehouse to petition the government for more sane gun laws.
Well, actually, any sane gun laws.
Lucas, who loves firearms with an obsessive’s furor, decided to demonstrate to the students that individuals could be trusted to handle guns by flashing his weapon. The students, who had come to the Statehouse because they already were concerned about the easy abundance of deadly weapons in America, weren’t reassured by Lucas’ gesture.
The episode made national news, but the furor soon died.
Two things accounted for that.
The first was that the Muncie students tired quickly of the spotlight and the often-nasty attention Lucas’ fellow gun lovers focused on them. (A note to gun advocates: If your goal is to convince people they can have faith in your ability to manage firearms responsibly, threatening teenagers and calling them names because they disagree with or question you doesn’t get you closer to your objective.)
The second was that, at this point, seeing Jim Lucas do something clueless and insensitive lacks shock value. He’s made short-sighted and self-absorbed his brand.
There were other moments of unplanned absurdity.
Perhaps the most surreal was Senate Bill 202, a measure to have government regulate and “balance” political thought on state university campuses.
The rationale for this bill was Orwellian in nature. It argued for extending freedom by denying it, using the mechanism of forcing state schools to tally just how much thought on each side of all questions had been expressed.
The lunacy of such a proposal is quickly evident.
If taken to its logical extreme, this “balancing” legislation will require history professors to take seriously arguments that maybe, just maybe, Adolf Hitler had a point when he murdered millions of people based on their faith, their race, their national origin or their sexual orientation.
And if it is not taken to its logical extreme, the question of who gets to draw the line becomes essential. There are 150 lawmakers in the Indiana General Assembly. Each one of them would draw it in a different place.
But that’s not the most important consideration.
No, the most important consideration is that they’re asserting that they—not we—get to determine that question for us.
They’re doing this, they say, in the name of achieving “balance.”
All we need is for the authors of this bill to slip on pig masks and spout George Orwell’s famous line from “Animal Farm”—“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”—and the farce would be complete.
But this is often the way it is in election-year legislative sessions. The lawmakers veer toward hot-button, divisive issues to force political opponents into costly votes or stances.
The problem now is that, thanks to gerrymandering, the most dangerous political opponents for officeholders often are those they may face in a primary.
So, the posturing and pandering have become ever more extreme.
All in the name of proving which pigs are more equal than others.