He’s one of the best at wasting money.
Taxpayer money.
Our money.
Two recent episodes put this Rokita skill on full display.
Ball State University just settled a lawsuit with a former staff member who lost her job because of a post she made on her personal social media page following the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder. The staffer was not a Kirk fan.
In his ceaseless quest to pander to MAGA’s authoritarian sensibilities, Rokita vowed to use the full weight of the attorney general’s office to crack down on any Indiana college or university employee who dared to criticize anything Kirk had ever said or done. He claimed that the BSU staffer had foully besmirched Kirk’s name.
There were at least two big problems with Rokita’s argument.
The first was that he amplified the staffer’s criticism far more than the staffer herself possibly could have done. If he had stayed out of it, only a few people would have seen her post.
Once the attorney general decided to pander, though, her criticisms reached a statewide and even national audience.
This is on brand for Rokita.
When he launched his vendetta against Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who performed a legal abortion for a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been raped, he went on Fox News to charge the doctor of, among other things, violating the girl’s privacy by telling her story to an Indianapolis newspaper.
It never seemed to occur to our attorney general that Bernard’s comments to the newspaper reporter—which scrupulously shielded the little girl’s identity—reached thousands of people.
When Rokita told the same story on Fox, he blabbed about the little girl to millions of people.
The guy might as well be a walking megaphone—one without an off switch.
The second problem is that, in a dispute such as the one involving BSU and the staffer, Rokita should have had two primary clients.
Neither of them was Charlie Kirk.
Or his estate.
Our attorney general’s first client always should be the Indiana Constitution, which protects—again, among other things—free expression. Rokita’s duty in this instance should have been to our state’s fundamental charter.
His second client should be the citizens of this state, the ones who pay his salary and put him in office. He should have been protecting that BSU staffer’s right to speak her mind, even when others disagreed with her.
He should have been protecting her.
Instead, she needed to be protected from him.
Because of Rokita’s insatiable attention-seeking, Ball State had to write the staffer a check—doubtless a sizable one.
Doubtless, BSU students and parents will think that money was better spent on subsidizing our attorney general’s campaign to always claim the spotlight than it would have been on lowering tuition rates or creating new educational opportunities.
Rokita’s other example of wasting time and money involved his role in one of this state’s more senseless political tussles.
The Indiana Election Commission has been weighing a longshot challenge to remove a candidate from the ballot before the May primary. The effort is part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to punish six Indiana lawmakers for listening to their constituents rather than him regarding his foolish and quite possibly illegal attempt to redistrict the state in the middle of the decade.
The election commission has sought legal advice from the attorney general’s office—a reasonable request, given that the attorney general is supposed to be the commission’s lawyer.
Supposed to be … but apparently isn’t.
Rokita, who abases himself and his office before Trump on a routine basis, basically has told the commission to talk to the hand.
In all likelihood, we Hoosiers never will know how much of our money the attorney general’s office has wasted on Todd Rokita’s foolish fights and pointless pantomimes. He hired expensive outside counsel to represent him in his silly but meanspirited dispute with Caitlin Bernard—and capped the expense at $20 million.
A bargain.
The terms of the Ball State settlement apparently are sealed. Determining how much he will cost us by forcing the election commission to get other counsel or go without counsel is an impossible task.
All we know is that every dime spent on these foolish forays was spent advancing Todd Rokita’s interests.
Not ours.
