First, its members run out of good ideas.
Then, they run out of fresh ideas of any kind—good, bad or indifferent.
So, finally, they start to resurrect bad ideas that have already been tried and rejected. They do so in the hope that conjuring up these discarded notions will obscure the reality that they have nothing new to offer—that, in fact, whatever intellectual energy animated them and their movement at the beginning has long since dissipated or even disappeared.
That explains Indiana Republicans’ renewed fixation with posting the Ten Commandments on state property and in Hoosier public schools.
This was a cause dear to the GOP culture warriors almost 30 years ago. I know because I was part of those fights. I served as the executive director of what was then the Indiana Civil Liberties Union and now is the ACLU of Indiana.
The Republican crusade to have government co-opt the Decalogue crashed and burned for several reasons.
The first, of course, was that the prohibition in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is clear. Government cannot establish or endorse a state religion.
Hoosier Republicans at that time tried to use a gimmick to get around the establishment clause. They said the state wouldn’t be endorsing religious expression by posting the Ten Commandments on state property. Rather, they’d be delivering a history lesson about a key source of law in Western civilization.
That little trick ran into a problem, too. There are at least three different versions of the Decalogue—one each for the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant faiths.
To have the state determine that one faith tradition’s version was the historically valid one—and the other two weren’t—just deepened the constitutional problem. It also reaffirmed why the founders of this nation decided to keep government out of religious affairs.
The last buzzsaw Republicans ran into with their Ten Commandments campaign was an unexpected one. Many Hoosier clergy members objected to having a text sacred to them trivialized by having politicians turn it into a political football.
One minister even said he resented having the Decalogue “treated like a lucky charm.”
He didn’t use the word “blasphemy,” but it hovered in the air as he spoke at a press conference.
For all those reasons, the GOP’s attempts to transform the Ten Commandments into a campaign poster withered and died then.
But the idea is back now because there really aren’t many policy initiatives of substance that Hoosier Republicans haven’t already been able to put into place over the past two decades. That’s why so many of their proposals—restoring firing squads for implementing the death penalty, for goodness’ sake—for this legislative session of the Indiana General Assembly range from the pandering to the preposterous.
That’s because they’ve emptied the cupboard and now are rooting around in the trash cans and recycling bins.
There is reason to feel sadness about this.
When Mitch Daniels returned Hoosier Republicans to the governor’s office in 2004 and kicked off the GOP’s long reign here in Indiana, he brought with him a tremendous amount of intellectual energy. His ambition to turn this state into first a laboratory and then a model for conservative governance was boundless.
One could disagree with many of his plans and initiatives—I certainly did—but it was impossible to dispute that Daniels genuinely was trying to apply conservative and market principles to meeting persistent social and economic challenges in Indiana.
He wasn’t posturing—well, most of the time, anyway, because all politicians must posture upon occasion.
He was problem-solving.
Or at least trying to solve problems.
That’s not the case with the folks who resurface rejected notions just to polarize public opinion and hide the fact that they have flat run out of ideas.
This is the problem with having one party in power—and it doesn’t matter which party it is—for too long. Genuine competition between the parties stimulates creative thinking.
And the absence of competition stifles that thought.
Lord Acton famously said that power corrupts.
It does, but it also exhausts.
That’s why political monoliths such as this longstanding Hoosier GOP reign don’t help anyone.
Not the people.
Not the state itself.
Not even the party holding power.
