John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – The end came almost as quiet as a whisper.

The 2014 legislative session of the Indiana General Assembly finished with a soft flurry of activity.

In the last days of the session, lawmakers, working almost in a hush, met in conference committees and moved to the governor’s desk bills limited either in geographic scope or in sheer ambition.

Making the march toward becoming law were measures designed to allow Central Indiana to decide it wants a mass transit system, create a small pre-kindergarten educational pilot program, give businesses some tax breaks while still allowing local governments some control over their revenue sources and spend some more money on Indiana’s battered roads.

The last three items on the list – pre-K, business tax breaks and road money – were on Gov. Mike Pence’s agenda, but in much larger form. Pence put the best face he could on a bad situation and told the legislators that theirs was a “job well done,” but the reality is that, if Christmas came this year in March for the governor, it was a pretty meager one. He only got a sliver of what he asked for from Santa.

The only real storm and noise at the session came over a strange, misguided bill designed to allow guns onto school property. At the conference committee hearing on the bill, lawmakers decided it was less important to hear testimony from those opposed to the measure – gun control advocates, teachers and other educators – than it was to bully and berate them when they tried to talk.

The National Rifle Association liked the bill. Gun-control advocates, the Indiana State Teachers Association, the Indiana Association of School Principals, Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, Indiana School Boards Association, Indiana Urban School Association, and the Children’s Coalition of Indiana didn’t like it.

The NRA won.

The NRA is coming to Indianapolis for a convention in April. Maybe, while they’re here, the NRA’s top officials will find a few minutes to stop by the Statehouse and carve the organization’s logo into the Statehouse’s stone walls.

They clearly own the place and everyone should know that.

The gun bill was about the only tumult that came in the session’s waning days.

Such a quiet end to the lawmakers’ work didn’t seem likely just a few weeks ago. At that time, Indiana seemed likely to tear itself in two over a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

The fight over the proposed amendment, House Joint Resolution 3, filled the Statehouse with agitated protestors on both sides of the issue. Early on, the atmosphere was testy. House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, shifted the measure among legislative committees like a pea in a shell game and the Elections Committee chairman, Rep. Milo Smith, R-Columbus, tossed an opponent of HJR 3 who happened to be a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force out of a hearing for making a silent gesture of protest.

Tempers flared, but then the House stripped a key provision out of HJR 3, the Senate refused to reinstate it and the measure got kicked down the road a couple of years. The earliest any proposed constitutional same-sex marriage ban can make it onto the ballot now is 2016.

After that, aside from a bizarre Twitter-fueled meltdown by HJR 3 supporter Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, the issue faded to silence and lawmakers turned their attention to quieter matters.

Predictably, there are critics who charge that legislators accomplished little during this session and squandered opportunities to make needed changes.

The fact, though, is that the state has made many sweeping changes in recent years – including creating the most expansive school voucher program in the nation and rewriting labor law to make it more business-friendly – and not enough time has passed to determine the effectiveness of those big changes. It probably is wise to wait and see if the moves we’ve already made actually are working before we charge further down the road.

Hoosiers also have been through two bruising family battles – right-to-work legislation and the same-sex marriage struggle – in the past couple of years. It’s probably smart for us to take a break from tearing into each other.

Sometimes a little silence can be a good thing.

John Krull  is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.