Local Control? Surely You Jest…

The anticipated conclusion of the 2026 session of Indiana’s legislature is February 27th, due to an unusually early start; the statutory deadline is March 14th.

Let’s hope they meet the target date of February 27 th. The end can’t come soon enough…

Every year, the intrusions of Indiana’s legislative overlords into local decision-making makes me wonder why Hoosiers even bother electing Mayors and city councilors. This session is no different. At this point in the session, some of the more egregious measures have–thankfully–been deep-sixed (I’m thinking especially of an outrageous bill that would have overruled local zoning affecting billboards–undoubtedly a bill near and dear to the hearts of lobbyists for the billboard industry). But plenty of the intrusions remain viable, and look likely to pass.

Mirror Indy has reported on a bill that aims to forbid county councils from using state road funding for projects picked by individual councilors. While the measure would apply statewide, the proposal probably targets Marion County, where reports emerged last year asserting that a few city-county councilors had used their share of a $25 million pot of money to fix roads in front of their homes or near their workplaces.

Assuming those reports were accurate, the appropriate response in a small-d democratic system would come from the voters. Inappropriate decisions about where to spend public monies are a time-tested political issue, and in a properly functioning system, would become campaign issues the next time those accused of self-dealing were up for re-election. In other words, local voters would decide whether the accusations were accurate and if so, whether the behavior of these particular councilors–when considered alongside other performance by those councilors–required their replacement.

Instead, the legislature has moved to restrict all counselors statewide from having a say in the way these funds would be spent.

This example is hardly a one-off. Just this session, Indiana’s legislature has moved to preempt local rental regulations. HB 1210
would block local governments from adopting or enforcing rules that limit homeowners’ ability to rent out their property,
overriding existing local ordinances in cities like Carmel and Fishers that limit short-term or unit rental caps.
Cities and towns would no longer have the ability to tailor rental housing rules to the specific needs of their communities or to respond to the particularities of their local housing markets.

HB 1001 is even more egregious. It would impose statewide standards on local zoning and permitting–usurping the historic prerogatives of local officials to respond to neighborhood desires and other specific situations in their communities  The measure is presumably prompted by a not-unreasonable desire to increase housing supply, although how that goal would be furthered by the imposition of statewide criteria for lot sizes, parking and density, or by the removal of local control over design requirements, is–to be charitable–difficult to understand.

Even worse, SB 176 would prevent local governments from using zoning/land-use powers to restrict or ban shooting ranges. (I wasn’t aware that Second Amendment rights extended to zoning…)

There’s more, but the overall picture reinforces the obvious belief of the GOP super-majority that Indiana legislators are elected to supervise all lawmaking within the Hoosier State, not simply matters that are usually and properly considered state issues.  The 2026 session continues a longtime trend in Indiana, where state lawmakers believe they know more than local officials and feel free to preempt lawmakers who’ve been elected to exert local control. In previous sessions, the legislature has overruled local lawmakers on issues ranging from puppy mills to the use of plastic bags.

There are numerous problems with this legislative arrogance. Local government officials are closer to the people they represent, and more accessible. In areas that still have local media covering local governments (another problem, granted), it’s easier for voters to monitor their performance. Political theorists since Alexis de Tocqueville have pointed out that robust local governance strengthens democratic habits and builds civic competence. It also allows for what political scientists call “better policy fit and contextual sensitivity.”

There can certainly be differences of opinion about when standardization is desirable, but that sort of thoughtful discussion has generally been absent from the rulemaking in Indiana’s General Assembly, where far too many legislators are unfamiliar both with accountability and with the virtues of an appropriate humility.

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Ranked Choice Voting

As I write this, Indiana’s legislature is close to passing Senate Bill 12, a measure that would prohibit the use of ranked-choice voting in Indiana. The bill was co-authored by Republicans who are evidently worried that the state might use the system some day in the future (it is not in effect now and has not, to the best of my knowledge, been proposed). 

What, you may be asking, is ranked-choice voting, sometimes called “instant runoff” voting?

It’s simply a system that allows voters to rank candidates in their order of preference, rather than forcing them to select just one. In other words, voters rank the candidates–first choice, second, and so on. The vote count begins with the first choices; if one candidate receives over 50%, that’s it. Election’s over. If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and his or her votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates based on each voter’s next highest preference. The process of eliminating and redistributing continues until a single candidate achieves a majority of the remaining votes.

Organizations concerned with fair elections support ranked-choice voting. Indiana’s League of Women Voters supports it because–among other things– the system would “give voters meaningful choices to reduce the toxicity of negative campaigning.” Indiana’s Common Cause supports ranked-choice voting because the organization finds the system makes elections more equitable, allows voters to choose among more diverse perspectives, and provides more choices.

The legislators opposed to the system insist it is “too complicated”–that there is something “unAmerican” about allowing voters to say, in effect, “my first choice is candidate X, my second choice is candidate Y, and if neither of them wins, I suppose I can live with candidate Z. Evidently, they think voters in states that currently use the system, like Maine and Alaska, are smarter than Hoosiers. (Given some of the people we’ve elected, maybe they have a point.)

Interestingly, according to Governing Magazine, in 2020, the state Republican Party used the method to select delegates.

In an article on the subject, Indiana’s Capital Chronicle noted that the award of the Heisman Trophy is the result of ranked-choice voting. The article explained why using that method ensures that the candidate with the most support wins.

This is the same reason why so many states and localities have adopted ranked choice voting for elections for governor, state legislature, city council and other offices. It is an incredibly useful tool for voters in any race with more than two candidates. 

It ensures a majority winner in a crowded field. Voters can choose the person they like best, without fearing that their vote might go to a “spoiler” and help elect the person — or the quarterback — that they like least.

The article then turned to Indiana Republicans’ current effort to ban the system, pointing out that in a state where some 3% of voters are libertarians, ranked-choice voting would mean Republicans would no longer need to worry that a Libertarian candidate might tip the race to the Democrats — and Libertarian voters could support the candidate of their choice without that fear, as well.

Why prevent Indiana and its localities from giving voters more choice? The bill’s sponsors suggest that ranked choice voting is confusing, and that they want to protect Indiana’s current election system. But every poll conducted after a ranked choice election shows that huge majorities of voters — often even bigger than Mendoza’s Heisman margin — like it, find it easy to use, and want it expanded to other elections. 

Beyond the flaws of SB12 are other questions: Why, in a short session with limited time to address other pressing issues, has the GOP super-majority decided to spend time banning something the state isn’t doing anyway? Why is our legislature overruling– in advance–the ability of Indiana’s local jurisdictions to adopt a voting measure used in hundreds of cities and counties across the country?

As the Capital Chronicle quite properly concluded, we need to reject this nonsensical ban. “Ranked choice voting produces more positive campaigns, majority winners, and puts an end to spoilers. It’s proven and it’s easy. If Indiana’s political parties, cities and towns want to adopt it, they should have that right.”

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Vice Signaling

The Guardian recently published an article addressing the degraded rhetoric ushered in by MAGA and employed non-stop by Trump.

We all are familiar with the concept of “virtue signaling”–-defined as publicly taking progressive positions that can seem performative–efforts to burnish one’s moral credentials, or demonstrate “right-thinking” (with a lower-case r.) As the article says, it can be easy to lampoon. (When I purchased my first Prius, a colleague suggested that driving a hybrid fell into that category.)

Trump, of course, has exhibited the opposite–what the article calls “vice signaling”–a penchant for dehumanisation that is the  opposite of decency. They’re not in the same rhetorical category. It began with his campaign launch, when he announced that he would build a wall between the US and Mexico in remarks the article described as ungrammatical with a vocabulary that was vague and repetitive. (The embarrassing third grade level characteristics of “Trump speech” that we have now come to expect.)

This is classic vice-signalling, breaking taboos in this case both general (against hate speech) and more specific (against falsely associating base or criminal traits with a race or ethnic group). He was signalling that he was prepared to go there –- say what the establishment would not allow, and assert himself as a politician who is authentic and courageous, who cannot be muzzled.

The recent video depicting the Obamas as apes was consistent with the racism he’s been signaling for decades. The linked article points out that such behaviors garner media attention and “break down established barriers to entry.”

What is far too infrequently discussed is what a society loses when civility of discourse is abandoned, and insults and hateful rhetoric displace respectful disagreement.

Research confirms that civil discourse leads to greater institutional trust– that tone strongly influences whether citizens view institutions as legitimate, even when they disagree with specific policies or outcomes. Without trust, compliance with the law declines and, as we are seeing, polarization deepens.

In “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argued that democracy depends on “mutual toleration” and “forbearance”—both rooted in civility. Studies in social psychology show that civil environments increase people’s willingness to listen to each other and increase cross-ideological understanding—even when opinions don’t change.

Other research suggests that civility is economically consequential–high-trust, low-conflict environments attract investment, and reduce both transaction costs and regulatory friction. Social scientists like Robert Putnam have demonstrated that social capital–trust and reciprocity–leads to stronger economic growth.

There are also personal costs to marinating in an increasingly hateful and uncivil society. Medical scientists warn that chronic exposure to hostile rhetoric raises cortisol levels and increases anxiety; political science tells us that civility increases the likelihood of participation in civic life. Political science also tells us that rhetoric routinely delegitimizing elections, courts, journalists and civil servants leads to a greater tolerance of violations of important social norms, to institutional weakening, and ultimately, tolerance of violence.

As we’ve seen in our dysfunctional Congress, inflammatory rhetoric makes compromise difficult, if not impossible. It increases policy gridlock; worse, it creates a situation in which expertise is belittled and dismissed as partisan. (If you doubt that, just look at what RFK, Jr. has done to public health, or consider the consequences of Trump’s dismissal of climate change and embrace of coal mining.)

Civility isn’t silence. It isn’t the absence of protest or disagreement. It’s fundamentally a recognition of civic equality, in the sense that civil discourse implicitly recognizes that every citizen has a right to express an opinion. When discourse and even very strong disagreements are voiced in a civil and respectful manner, governments (and all institutions) benefit.

I’m not naive. I understand that individuals will often express themselves in dismissive or vulgar terms. (I am not exempt.) But when the people we have empowered–those we’ve elected to public office, or those whose celebrity means their comments will be widely shared–use demeaning and ugly rhetoric, “punching down” on those of lesser authority or status, the negative results don’t just fall on the people being demeaned. They are felt society-wide.

Every day, we learn of the profound, concrete damage this administration is doing. We learn of the corruption, the assaults on the rule of law, the efforts to reinstate Jim Crow…on and on. These assaults understandably consume our attention, but while we are compiling our lists of things we must correct once these horrible people have been ejected from our public life, we need to put “restoring civility” near the top.

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How To Disenfranchise A Population

Every American who paid even the least amount of attention in history class is familiar with the phrase “No taxation without representation.” It was a rallying cry during the war for independence, and it has re-entered our national conversation. As economists have pointed out, Trump’s insane tariffs are really taxes on American consumers, taxes that our elected Senators and Representatives did not impose, despite that pesky constitutional provision to the effect that taxation is exclusively within the legislature’s jurisdiction.

Lincoln Square has recently considered the issue from another perspective. The linked essay argues that–thanks to systemic flaws–We the People no longer have representation. Neither the tax burden nor policy decisions are guided by the votes of citizens.

The analysis is persuasive. The essay points out that gerrymandering has diluted representation, that establishment of a 435-member ceiling for the House of Representatives caused representation to continually thin as the population grew, and that the Electoral College allows Presidents to be elected by a minority of voters. Add to that the growing malapportionment of the Senate and a variety of what the essay calls “veto points”–very much including the filibuster–and we have structures that have–little by little– given popular minorities durable governing power without requiring explicit legal disenfranchisement.

I keep thinking of that “frog in boiling water” analogy…

Under Trump, these flaws are being further exploited to permit wildly unpopular and damaging policies (environmental, health, ICE), and what the essay calls “conditional provision of services.” The administration has withheld or delayed delivery of congressionally authorized funds to institutions and programs of which Trump disapproves, and especially to Blue states. Taxation without representation? “When residents of those states continue to pay federal taxes while services are delayed, conditioned, or withdrawn, the resemblance to the original colonial grievance becomes difficult to ignore.”

It’s hard to dispute the author’s assertion that these structural flaws, resulting in minority rule, vote dilution, and conditional governance—have created a legitimacy crisis, and represent “the most serious institutional stress test of the American political system since the Civil War.”

The claim is structural: the United States has long maintained systems capable of separating contribution from control. Minority rule through malapportioned institutions. Vote dilution through engineered districts and capped representation. And—most destabilizing in practice—governance that becomes conditional, where baseline services and administrative capacity are experienced as leverage rather than as citizenship guarantees.

In a weird way, our present situation mirrors that of the Revolution. As the author notes, those participating in the Boston Tea Party weren’t just objecting to a tax. They were objecting to a system in which “representation existed in theory but not in practice.” American victory in the Revolutionary War was followed by the establishment of a system that may have been democratic in aspiration, but was–as the essay asserts– oligarchic in structure, not to mention selectively enforced.

And as the essay reminds us, those undemocratic mechanisms are still with us, albeit in altered form. Gerrymandering has replaced the explicit disenfranchisement of disfavored populations with “engineered outcomes.” The cap on House membership has diluted representation. The Senate is the epitome of minority rule–states with some thirty percent of the population have the same number of Senators as states with seventy percent, while the Electoral College enables presidents to assume office despite losing a majority of the vote.

In other words, while voting has persisted, power no longer follows. As the essay concludes, real representation has become lost within “a dense architecture of veto points capable of absorbing popular dissatisfaction without producing institutional change. Elections became mechanisms of rotation rather than accountability.”

At this point, America’s election outcomes increasingly fail to direct or even influence national policy. We have formal “democratic” participation, but actual power continues to be exercised by a wealthy, entitled and entrenched minority.

When the Trump circus implodes (and thankfully, there are signs that that blessed day is coming), we need to elect true democrats–small d–who will address the structural and systemic flaws that have turned American governance by We the People into a charade, and have once again created a situation in which we have taxation–and policy–without representation.

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Religion, Common Sense–And Snark

Yesterday, I shared signs that the resistance to MAGA/Trump is gaining steam. Among those positive signs is the emergence of religious leaders who are now coming out in force to rebut the performative piety of the White “Christian” nationalists who make up a significant part of the MAGA cult.

The recent growth of participation by genuinely religious leaders is welcome, but we shouldn’t overlook clerics who have been addressing the evils of the administration and the hypocrisy of those “Christians” for quite some time. One of those brave souls is local Quaker pastor, Phil Gulley, who is also a noted humorist and author. (Phil now has a Substack, and if you don’t get it, you absolutely should.)

Phil is a friend, and has graciously allowed me to quote liberally from one recent essay, titled “Can I Get An Amen?”

He began by describing an incident where he was invited and subsequently dis-invited to address a Southern Baptist gathering, Gully noted that the Southern Baptist Convention “is to spirituality what Donald Trump is to education. Speaking of Donald Trump, seventy-two percent of Southern Baptists voted for him in the last election, which gives you some idea of their moral acumen.”

Gulley then turned to Trump’s “hour long dronefest” at the National Prayer Breakfast.

As rich a spiritual event as the National Day of Prayer breakfast was, I can’t help but wonder why Billy Graham, back in 1952, thought it a good idea to pray to a man who told his followers, “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret…” Then again, religion can be a mysterious undertaking and maybe back in 1952 Jesus changed his mind and told Billy Graham to go ahead and rent out a hotel ballroom, fill it with big shots, invite the press, and have at it.

Gulley noted that Franklin Graham, Billy’s son, had skipped the event, and wondered whether

he and God might be on the outs since this past November when Graham said, “The Epstein files are nothing compared to God’s files.” I had no idea God, as Graham seems to suggest, is an even bigger pedophile than Jeffrey Epstein and I think Franklin Graham needs to tell us what he knows and when he knew it.

The essay’s conclusion is vintage Gulley.

As annoying as all these things are, what bothers me most is that the prayer breakfast was held on February 5th, my birthday, and I would have happily traveled to Washington D.C. to speak to those folks. There are things I’ve been wanting to say to Donald Trump and the Southern Baptists for some years now and it would have saved me a lot of trouble to only have to say it once, when they were all together. Since they didn’t afford me the opportunity, I’ll say it now. Do us all a favor and go into your closets, close the doors, and shut your pieholes. Leave the running of the country to those of us who still believe in the Constitution. Can I get an Amen!

I certainly say Amen!

I will also note that there is much to be said for employing humor in the face of looming disaster. (There’s a reason so many comedians are Jewish…we know a lot about disaster.) On the local level, a pundit who regularly serves up excellent–and informative–snark is Abdul Shabazz. Abdul is a lawyer; he publishes Indy Politics and serves up astute commentary with a penetrating wit as he surveys Indiana’s legislature and the Hoosier political environment.

A recent edition considered “Rino Season in Indiana.”

There’s a new sport in Indiana politics, and it’s not deer season or turkey season, or even rabbit season.

It’s RINO season.

No Quarter PAC has burst onto the scene with all the subtlety of a foghorn and the emotional range of a campaign mailer written entirely in bold. Their grievance is simple: twenty-one Indiana Republican state senators voted against a congressional map President Donald Trump wanted, and as a result, Indiana remains 7–2 instead of the allegedly holier 9–0.

Apparently, 78 percent Republican control is now considered a rounding error.

As Abdul points out, there’s nothing wrong with primaries. “If Republican voters want to replace incumbents over redistricting strategy, that’s their call. Parties have internal debates all the time…But this isn’t just a debate about maps. It’s about discipline… about turning every procedural disagreement into a loyalty test.”

As he notes, in Indiana politics, there’s apparently no shortage of hunting licenses.

If you want some excellent snark in which to marinate your daily political depression, subscribe to both of them.

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