By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Sometimes, the universe tries to teach slow learners a lesson.

They rarely get it.

Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, just announced that he tested positive for COVID-19. His diagnosis casts in doubt, once again, whether the Indiana General Assembly’s 2021 legislative session will begin as scheduled on Jan. 4 – and how it might be conducted when it does begin.

Huston’s news came down around the same time that the nation learned that the elevated speaker of New Hampshire’s House of Representatives, Dick Hinch, had died of COVID.

Hinch, a Republican, had spoken just one week before about how thrilled he was to assume the speakership. He fought tears as he told his colleagues he was “humbled” by their trust and support.

He was 71.

His death prompted Democrats to call for stricter health and safety standards. And several of Hinch’s fellow Republicans chastised members of their own party for exposing the late speaker to the coronavirus by refusing to wear masks and observe the social distance.

Few were more brutal – more eviscerating even – in their criticisms of the anti-mask crowd than New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican and a staunch conservative.

“For those who are just out there doing the opposite just to make some ridiculous political point, it is horribly wrong,” Sununu said. “Please use your heads. Don’t act like a bunch of children, frankly.”

Amen.

Here in Indiana, the same deadly disease that killed Hinch now threatens his Hoosier counterpart. Huston is not alone in battling the coronavirus.

It took about seven months for the first 5,000 Hoosiers to die from COVID-19. It took just a few more days for the state to reach the tragic milestone of 6,000 dead – and the number climbs daily at a steady and increasing clip.

By some measures, Indiana now is the state most afflicted by the coronavirus. The disease rages across the Hoosier landscape, striking communities rural, suburban and urban. As it does, it leaves dead citizens and neighbors behind, along with families and friends who grieve for them.

Gov. Eric Holcomb has responded to the rapidly escalating threat by extending the period in which Indiana is in a state of public emergency and ordering that all non-essential surgeries be postponed until the COVID numbers have abated.

Holcomb’s response to this crisis – mild and cautious as it is – has prompted a small but vocal minority to call him a “tyrant,” among other terms of endearment.

Holcomb’s critics like to present themselves as constitutional purists. They say theirs is a sacred duty to defend this nation’s founding charter. The government doesn’t have the right to tell them they have to wear masks, even when lives are at stake.

What absolute nonsense.

If they had read the Constitution, they would find not far into what is known as the general welfare clause. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 says, “The Congress shall have the Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

A little further down, in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 18, they would encounter the necessary and proper clause – also known as the elastic clause. It says that Congress has the power “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or any Department or Officer thereof.”

Those are sweeping statements.

If the founders of this nation intended to hamstring government so that it – and government here means us, because we live in a self-governing society – could not meet threats to the general welfare such as the coronavirus, they had a funny way of showing it.

The reality is that the anti-mask crowd’s opposition to public safety measures is about as ideologically driven and principled as a preschool child’s temper tantrum.

While people die, they want to keep playing games.

New Hampshire’s conservative Republican governor is right. They need to stop acting like children.

But they won’t.

Slow learners stick to their guns even when the universe tries to teach them a lesson.

That’s what makes them slow learners.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.