Another week came and went in Indiana political circles. It brought fresh examples of Hoosiers in positions of power saying and doing things that were, at best, nonsensical and, at worst, inexcusable.
Let’s start with the nonsensical.
U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Indiana, never has been a model of personal stability or intellectual consistency.
She earned the dubious honor of being named by congressional staffers as the worst boss on Capitol Hill. Her support for her native land of Ukraine has wavered like a weathervane in a hurricane during that nation’s war to defend itself against Russian aggression. And she threatened or promised to leave the U.S. House of Representatives so many times that political scorekeepers threw up their hands and stopped keeping count.
A few days ago, though, she gave political observers fresh reason to shake their heads in disbelief.
Spartz announced that she was not going to serve on any congressional committees—where much of the important legislative work takes place—or caucus with her fellow Republicans.
Instead, she said, she was going to focus on government efficiency and federal debt reduction.
She said she wanted to work with incoming President Donald Trump to get the government’s deficits under control.
That’s what prompted the collective head-scratching.
Trump is many things, but a deficit hawk isn’t one of them. He increased the debt in four years almost as much as his predecessor, Barack Obama, did in eight.
Obama’s deficits occurred because he was pulling the United States out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression and because he extended health care to tens of millions of Americans who did not have it before.
Trump’s deficits happened because he wanted to give his fellow billionaires a massive tax cut—a tax cut that did surprisingly little to stimulate the economy and significantly expanded the gulf separating the haves and have-nots in this country.
If Spartz really wanted to get deficits under control, she’d tell Trump and his cronies that they really don’t need a tax break for that desperately needed 12th mansion or fourth luxury yacht.
But doing that would make sense.
And making sense really isn’t on brand for Victoria Spartz.
During many weeks, Spartz’ latest departure from reality would be the big Hoosier political news.
But then Indiana Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, decided to make a horrible situation even worse.
The Indianapolis Star reported not long ago that three different women had accused Taylor, the Indiana Senate minority leader, of sexual harassment.
The Star followed that reporting with accounts from another three women—and supporting witnesses—saying that Taylor harassed them, too.
When the first three women came forward, Taylor offered a half-hearted apology that implicitly acknowledged unspecified misbehavior but stopped well short of being a statement of genuine contrition.
When the second trio of women told their stories, Taylor responded by denying everything, even though doing so contradicted his earlier semi-apology.
Worse, he suggested the stories were part of a conspiracy to topple a Black man from the dizzying heights of serving as Indiana Senate minority leader.
At least two things make Taylor’s posture absurd.
The first is that his Democratic Party controls only 10 of the 50 seats in the state Senate. About the only government position in America that has less power and prestige than that of being Senate minority leader here would be serving as a crossing guard at the loneliest country road in the most remote part of Alaska.
The second is that it ignores the fact that the late Indiana Sen. Earline Rogers, D-Gary, provided the political, policy and intellectual muscle for Senate Democrats for years. A Black woman and one of the finest Hoosier lawmakers of the past half-century, Rogers was the powerhouse in the Indiana Senate Democratic caucus regardless of who served as the nominal leader.
If there is a concerted movement to do something, it’s a coordinated effort to get the Indiana General Assembly to take sexual harassment seriously and stop degrading female interns, staffers and lobbyists who just want to do their jobs.
Just as Spartz now has an opportunity to embrace common sense by saying the uberwealthy don’t deserve a pass on bearing their share of the tax burden, Taylor has a chance to exhibit common decency.
The bet here is that neither will do so.
Again, where do we find these people?
