By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Republican Party is very upset with Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Jennifer McCormick.

Who also happens to be a Republican.

McCormick agreed to be part of a listening tour with Indiana Sen. Eddie Melton, D-Gary. Melton is sizing up a 2020 run for governor.

The news that McCormick would be traveling around the state listening to Hoosiers set Indiana GOP Chair Kyle Hupfer’s teapot to full boil.

“After being on stage at our Republican Conventions in 2016 and 2018, running on GOP ideals in 2016 and accepting campaign aid from thousands of Republican Party supporters across the state, it begs the question whether Jennifer McCormick is still a Republican,” he said in a press release. “I’m sure someone will ask her that soon.”

Hupfer also accused McCormick of auditioning to be the Democratic Party’s lieutenant-gubernatorial nominee next year.

McCormick’s response was little more than a scoff.

“I expect that at the federal level, just because of the political allegiance games being played,” McCormick said of Hupfer’s fulminations. “At the state level, it’s disappointing. I think we have to do better than that. For me, it’s not about a political party. It’s about kids.”

To be fair to Hupfer, he may have been angry about something other than McCormick sharing a stage with a Democrat.

He also might be hot and bothered about the fact that she plans to listen to people.

When it comes to education, listening is not something Hoosier Republicans like to do.

To their eyes – and ears – listening isn’t just bad.

It’s dangerous.

Listening might encourage Hoosiers to start questioning.

They might start asking why an Indiana education reform movement that began as a quest to increase accountability in schools now has been transformed into a therapeutic campaign to make parents feel better about how their children are doing in the classroom, regardless of what the scores may say. It’s a kind of new entitlement.

Normally, Republicans aren’t thrilled with entitlements, but in this case they’re okay with the idea.

If the listening continues, Hoosiers also might inquire about why, as taxpayers, they now are paying for not one but two systems of public education. One provides funding for the traditional public schools, which must educate every child who walks through the school doors and must comply with all laws banning discrimination.

The other, though, uses parents to launder tax money through vouchers and funnels millions of dollars to schools such as Roncalli and Cathedral, which fire people for having legally sanctioned marriages. This makes taxpayers party to discrimination.

Last, but perhaps most damaging, this listening tour on which McCormick will embark might encourage Indiana’s citizens to start asking when the GOP’s grand education strategy will start working.

Republicans have guided the state’s education policies for nearly 15 years now. At the beginning of their crusade to dismantle traditional public schools, they promised to bring about stunning increases in student achievement.

It hasn’t happened.

Hoosier test scores and other standards of measurement at most have remained static. About the best that can be said of Indiana student progress is that we haven’t lost ground as fast as some other states struck by the market-driven education-reform fever.

At some level, Indiana Republicans may grasp this. That’s why they have worked so hard to remove charter and voucher schools from many of the accountability standards and processes imposed on traditional public schools.

Accountability, for the GOP, is essential for traditional public schools.

For other schools that receive massive amounts of state aid, not so much.

It’s also why, in the name of empowering parents, they stripped those same parents of the right to vote for the state’s top educator by making the superintendent of public instruction an appointed rather than elected position.

You see, an elected superintendent such as McCormick might do something dangerous.

Such as listening to people.

And that would be bad.

UnRepublican, even.

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.

By Victoria Ratliff
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS—Attorney General Curtis Hill said he expects to appeal the state’s latest loss after a federal court judge ruled that Indiana’s newest abortion law is unconstitutional.

Hill said Tuesday in a written statement that his office is reviewing the ruling issued late Friday by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker that blocked the abortion law passed in the 2019 legislative session.

The ruling is one in a string of losses in federal court for the attorney general’s office and it could lead to the state paying out more money in legal fees to the ACLU of Indiana, which represented the plaintiffs. The state’s Legislative Services Agency has noted in the past that the state has paid out about $290,000 in legal fees to plaintiffs and their lawyers.

In April 2019, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed House Enrolled Act 1211 into law that would ban a certain type of second trimester abortion called D&E—dilation and evacuation. D&E is the most common second trimester abortion method.

The law, which would have made performing that type of abortion a Level 5 felony, was supposed to take effect July 1. The ACLU along with Dr. Caitlin Bernard, one of two doctors in Indiana who offer the D&E procedures, filed a lawsuit in late April. The other physician who does the procedure is Dr. Hua Meng.

Barker, who was originally appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, found that the ban on D&E abortions “imposes an ‘undue burden’ on a woman’s right to decide to have an abortion,” and limits a doctor’s ability to fully judge what the patient needs.

Bernard said in a written statement released by the ACLU that the law made it impossible for her to fully do her job, and that doctors must be able to use their best judgment without government interference.

“I am relieved that I can continue providing the best care for patients without risking prosecution,” she said.

ACLU of Indiana’s legal director and attorney for the case, Ken Falk, also said in the press release that he wasn’t surprise that the legislation was blocked.

“HEA 1211 would undoubtedly interfere with a woman’s access to abortion. This law is clearly unconstitutional,” he said.

Rep. Peggy Mayfield, R-Martinsville and author of the law, issued a statement saying she is disappointed in the ruling and will support Hill if he decides to appeal. She noted that a section of the law requiring additional reporting when there are complications from an abortion has gone into effect.

The state, in defending the law, argued that allowing the D&E procedure devalues human life. But Barker rejected that claim.

“Absent from Defendants’ submissions is any evidence that the provision of D&E in Indiana by physicians like Dr. Bernard and Dr. Meng has in any way coarsened or cheapened the attitudes of Hoosiers towards human life,” she said in the opinion.

Most of all, Barker found that the new law would severely limit women’s access to safe abortions during the second trimester.

She said alternatives to the D&E procedure “subject women to increased risk of physical, psychological, and economic harm for no medical benefit,” and that “they variously increase the cost of the procedure, the duration and pain of the procedure, the medical risks of the procedure, or all three.”

Barker, in striking down the law, said it requires alternatives that are medically riskier, more costly, less reliable, and in some instances simply unavailable, “while accomplishing little more than expressing hostility towards the constitutionally fundamental right of women to control their own reproductive lives as established in Roe.”

The state’s appeal would be filed with the 7^thU.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

FOOTNOTE:  Victoria Ratliff is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.