And Todd Rokita never would play fast and loose with the truth or the law just to advance his own interests, now, would he?

In his expanded screed—er, manifesto—called “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” Rokita argues over 54 scintillating pages that parents should rise in outrage over the questionable doctrines being forced on students in Indiana schools. He says Hoosier schoolhouses are awash in dangerous ideologies, such as teaching that human slavery was wrong.

If he’s right—and with Todd Rokita’s unimpeachable record of probity and integrity, who at this point possibly could doubt that he is?—this raises a question.

If things are so bad in Indiana schools, why didn’t Rokita and his fellow Republicans do anything about it?

After all, the Indiana governor’s office has been in GOP’s hands since January 2005. Republicans have controlled both chambers of the Indiana General Assembly—with supermajorities at that—for the past decade.

Indiana’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, which Rokita was part of from 2011 to 2019, also has been overwhelmingly Republican. And both of our state’s U.S. senators are Republicans.

In fact, Indiana has elected only two Democrats to statewide office in the past 15 years. Joe Donnelly served a single fluky term in the U.S. Senate.

And Glenda Ritz won the Indiana superintendent of public instruction race in 2012. Her victory so outraged Republicans that they put her in a cage, then rammed through legislation to take any decisions about Hoosier schools out of the voters’ hands.

They made the superintendent an appointed, rather than an elected, office so that Republicans and Republicans alone could make decisions about the state’s schools and students.

That means, if Indiana’s schools now are hotbeds of Marxist ideology, it’s because Hoosier Republicans wanted it that way.

Then there’s the question of what Rokita himself was doing all this time.

Come the first of the year, Rokita will have been on the public payroll for 18 of the past 20 years. He was secretary of state for eight years, then served in Congress for the next eight. After losing in a primary election for the U.S. Senate seat Mike Braun currently holds, he bided his time for two years and then ran successfully for attorney general.

If things were so bad and his fellow Republicans were turning Indiana schools into sleeper cells, why wasn’t Rokita sounding the alarm over the past two decades?

Maybe he was distracted.

When he was secretary of state, he spent much of his time supporting draconian voter identification laws, seeing a problem that neither the evidence nor anyone else could detect.

That’s how visionary he is.

Then, when he was in Congress, he was diverted by flirting on national television with CNN news anchor Carol Costello—“Carol, you’re beautiful,” the smooth operator said while the cameras rolled—and issuing Marie Antoinette-like memos about how his staff should approach him.

Never make eye contact with his personage and when departing his presence, back away slowly, bowing and scraping with each step….

Then, after he was elected attorney general in 2020, he tried to hold onto his lucrative private-sector gig and turn the state’s top law-enforcement job into something resembling a side hustle.

That’s a lot to keep a man occupied, even one as relentlessly grasping—er, hardworking—as Rokita is.

Now, though, his focus is undiluted and clear.

That means he’s got all the time in the world to show how he and his Hoosier fellow Republicans have screwed up Indiana schools. He can focus every bit of his energy on finding Communists in the state’s schools, board meetings, and heck, even under Hoosier beds.

Indiana Republicans may find Rokita’s efforts discomfiting or even embarrassing, but they shouldn’t.

He is their boy.

They made him.

It’s only fair that they receive the benefit of his attention now.