Indiana Gov. Mike Braun often seems to want to outsource both his job and his thinking.
When he was in the U.S. Senate, he made clear from the beginning of his six-year term that he wasn’t there to serve the people of Indiana.
No, he was in Congress to do the bidding of President Donald Trump. He often abased himself in media opportunities with the then 45th president by swearing his unwavering fealty and avowing his willingness to perform any task, however menial or humiliating, for the truculent commander-in-chief.
Braun said—often—that he would vote in the Senate however Trump wanted him to.
This prompted some people to wonder why Indiana should even bother sending Braun to the Capitol. Wouldn’t it have been more efficient just to give Braun’s vote to Trump and not waste time and money on someone who had no understanding of or interest in performing the Senate’s deliberative and oversight functions?
After a single term in the Senate, Braun decided to come home to Indiana to run for governor. He won handily, outspending less wealthy Republican rivals in the primary and then burying an overmatched Democratic challenger in the general election last year.
Any hopes that the change of location and office might inspire Braun to grow a spine and start thinking for himself came crashing back to earth when Trump started leaning on Indiana Republicans to gerrymander even more aggressively—and possibly illegally—ahead of next year’s election.
Braun did not bother to disguise his motivation for kowtowing to the president this time. He said Indiana should do Trump’s bidding out of fear that the president would do something crazy to the state in retaliation for not bowing to his whim.
Braun dithered for a time, hoping that enough other Hoosier Republicans would be as willing to abdicate their responsibilities, their consciences and their senses as he was.
But many Hoosier lawmakers balked, in part because Trump’s plan is as crackpot as ideas come and in part because they, unlike Braun, were savvy enough to realize that there was nothing in the president’s scam for them or the Hoosier voters they represent.
That put the governor in a predicament.
Trump, having read Braun like a favorite book—that is, if the president actually were to read a book—leaned hard on the Indiana governor.
And Braun collapsed like a cheap lawn chair.
He announced that he was calling for a special session of the Indiana General Assembly to implement Trump’s harebrained redistricting scheme.
He did so even though Republicans in the legislature said, publicly and loudly, that they didn’t have the votes to pass the president’s plan.
No matter, the governor said. The lawmakers would come back into session on Nov. 3.
By doing so, Braun hoped to make his problem with Trump instead a problem for Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, and Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, R-Martinsville.
Huston and Bray, though, returned serve.
Hearing from Indiana lawmakers who needed more notice to rearrange their lives and mindful that Trump’s redistricting plan was polling among Hoosier voters about as well as a sexually transmitted disease, the two legislative leaders said, “not so fast.”
Huston said a date would be set for the special session within the next 40 days.
Given that time is of the essence—congressional primaries are just a little more than six months away—the delay served as elegant means of extending a middle-digit salute to both the governor and the president.
It also will give opposition to the gerrymandering effort time to organize and put pressure on Hoosier lawmakers whose knees might be beginning to wobble.
So, where does all this soap opera-style maneuvering leave us?
Well, here in Indiana, we have a governor who doesn’t care to govern anything larger than a college campus, a president who’s more concerned with avoiding having to work with anyone who doesn’t completely agree with him than he is about creating jobs or bringing inflation under control and state legislators who, in spite of being dazed and confused, clearly are feeling their oats.
Just how all of this makes American great again is anyone’s guess.
That shouldn’t be surprising.
Put a reality TV star in charge of things and soon you’ll have a reality TV show for a country.
