It should be a deep dive. It should account not just for all the taxpayer funds Rokita spent on the outside law firms he hired to represent him in his increasingly senseless and non-job-related squabble, but also all the opportunities his profligacy cost Hoosiers.
The latest example comes from Ball State University.
Last fall, following conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s murder, Rokita launched a taxpayer-funded campaign to prevent anyone at an Indiana university or college from saying anything critical about Kirk.
It was part of an ongoing effort by Rokita to suppress thought and expression with which he disagreed. He’d already picked fights with other Hoosier institutions of higher learning, including Notre Dame.
Only Todd Rokita would think that he had both the legal and moral standing to instruct Notre Dame on how to be Catholic.
Not long after Kirk died, a Ball State staffer, on her own time and on her own dime, took issue with the hagiography that accompanied the MAGA icon’s passing. She posted something scathing.
Was it intemperate?
Perhaps.
But it also was constitutionally protected expression.
Still, Ball State, in this era in which college and university budgets are stretched to the breaking point, was—like so many Indiana schools—wary about engaging in a fight with a rogue attorney general who, courtesy of the taxpayers, has almost unlimited funds at his disposal to wage his private jihads.
If Ball State was going to have to fight, better to battle with a staffer who would have limited funds at her disposal.
So, the university fired the staffer.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana agreed to represent her and she sued. (Disclosure: More than 20 years ago, I was the executive director of the ACLU of Indiana.)
Everyone who has even the most modest understanding of constitutional law knew that she was going to win. The only question was: How much?
Ball State decided not to risk letting a court answer that question. The university settled with the staffer, paying her $225,000.
Before Ball State threw in its weak hand, though, the school wasted another half-million dollars on outside counsel trying to defend the indefensible.
That brought the total for this Rokita-inspired foolishness to $725,000.
In state tuition at Ball State is just under $4,500 per semester—or $9,000 per year. That means Rokita’s performance art pandering burned through what could have been 80 scholarships to Hoosier students.
But the real number may be higher.
When a government institution loses or settles a case involving a violation of constitutional rights, the state—meaning the taxpayers—also often has to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. If so, Ball State would be on the hook for the ACLU’s legal fees, too.
All because our feckless attorney general wanted to grandstand before MAGA voters.
And because Ball State chose not to defend either its staffer or the constitutional principles that make, among other things, genuine intellectual inquiry possible.
This is a pattern with Rokita.
He picked a truly stupid fight with conservative commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz early in his tenure in office. When observers—including me—started asking how much this vendetta was going to cost the taxpayers, Rokita shut that squabble down.
But then he devoted goodness knows how many hours and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars to persecuting Indiana Dr. Caitlin Bernard for performing a legal abortion for a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been raped.
And then there are these costly and idiotic fights with Indiana colleges and universities.
At Ball State, he just cost 80 young people the scholarships that might have changed their lives and altered their career possibilities. He also cost the rest of us the increased productivity that those better-educated, better-trained young people would have devoted to the tasks before them in the decades ahead.
That’s why the question matters.
Just how many police officers, teachers and other essential workers has his nonstop pandering to the unthinking right cost us? How many opportunities will his penchant for pointless and losing fights deny students across this state?
Put another way, for how long can Hoosiers afford Todd Rokita and his spendthrift foolishness?
