When President Donald Trump’s determined and deluded campaign to redistrict Indiana’s congressional maps in the middle of a decade came up for a vote in the Indiana Senate, it fell.
31-19.
That’s a decisive number all by itself—anytime 62% of any group vote against something, it’s telling—but a number hidden within that total demonstrates how complete the defeat of the president and his dwindling band of allies was.
There are 40 Republicans in the Indiana Senate.
And 21 of them voted against a president, a vice president, a governor and a lieutenant governor of their own party.
More than half of the Indiana Senate GOP caucus summoned the will and the courage to stand up to the relentless political pressure from the White House and the Indiana executive branch, to the swattings, to the threats of pipe bombings and to all the other forms of intimidation exerted by political leaders and operatives more interested in power for its own sake than any principles, including those they, with their hands on the Bible, pledged to uphold.
It was a fine moment, one that is likely to restore at least some faith in the integrity of Hoosier legislators and the durability of American institutions.
That matters.
This country and its states depend a great deal upon the good faith of those who hold government offices. We count on the people who take oaths to uphold the Constitution to mean what they say and adhere to their pledges.
If we have learned anything during the era in which Donald Trump has dominated the national stage, it is about the fragility of our institutions and our guiding principles when good men and good women lack the will to abide by their oaths and do the right thing.
Faith in our country and even in the idea of representative self-government—the belief that free people can rule themselves—dwindles and then perishes when that happens.
That is what makes this episode in Indiana and U.S. history so satisfying.
So redemptive.
The members of the Indiana Senate, Republican or Democrat, are not exceptional people. Almost all of them were not born with extraordinary wealth or remarkable natural gifts.
No, with all their virtues and flaws, they resemble the people who sent them to the Statehouse. That is what makes them representative.
They come from the very people in whose name and with whose consent they govern.
The losers in the struggle to rig Indiana’s maps are easy to determine.
President Trump, of course, is one of them. His attempt to cheat his way through the next election cycle is as ethically indefensible as it is single-minded.
In this instance, though, the trust fund baby accustomed to buying, blustering or bullying his way through all difficulties and opposition ran into a force he couldn’t move.
Plain Hoosier decency.
Vice President JD Vance also suffered a defeat. He tried to serve as Trump’s enforcer in Indiana and only reinforced the idea that he’s a man whose moral core is as malleable as soft clay.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, who cringed and flinched before Trump like a frightened puppy, will have a tough time going forward convincing anyone inside or outside the Indiana General Assembly that he’s anything more than a presidential lap dog.
Then there’s Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who strutted through this whole drama as if he were a genuine power broker, a puppet master with his hands on all the strings.
As events unfolded, though, it became clear that he was a band leader without a band, which made him just a guy standing around waving his arms in the air to no effect. He bleated in defeat that Republicans in the Indiana Senate lacked “courage” and only made clear that he has no idea what the word means.
As for the winners, well, they’re easy to identify, too.
Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, R-Martinsville, established himself as a power—perhaps the power—in Indiana state government. The Senate itself reasserted its longstanding role as Indiana’s legislative killing field, the place where bad ideas and bad bills go to die.
But the biggest victor was something more ethereal and important.
It was an idea, one as old as the dream of the republic itself.
The belief that a free people could keep the faith.
And govern themselves.
