Tag Archives: Rokita

Indiana’s Embarrassing AG

He’s at it again.

I don’t know how many pixels I’ve wasted on discussions of Indiana’s ridiculous Attorney General, Todd Rokita. When I took a look at the history of this blog, I realized that reports of his problematic behaviors began while he was still in Congress, and  accelerated when he became AG. 

Rokita’s self-importance isn’t matched by even a modicum of self-awareness, a lack that has led to admonitions of him from Indiana’s all-Republican Supreme Court. His tireless efforts to play to the craziest fringes of MAGA (and those are some fringes!) have led to his efforts to smear the IU Ob-Gyn who performed a legal abortion on  a ten-year-old rape victim, a recent request that the Trump administration send federal troops to Indiana, and his maintenance of an unvetted list of school teachers who are reportedly sharing “woke” positions in their classrooms.

Rokita’s sustained assault on public education has erupted again, via a bizarre lawsuit Rokita has filed against Indianapolis’ Public Schools for failure to assist ICE in terrorizing students. IPS has had the nerve to demand legal authority before allowing ICE agents into its classrooms.

As the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported, Rokita “filed suit against Indianapolis Public Schools — with help from a conservative think tank — accusing the state’s largest public school district of ‘thwarting’ federal immigration enforcement.”

In response, the IPS board re-affirmed the district’s commitment to “ensuring safe, supportive, and welcoming learning environments for all students.” (It isn’t difficult to picture the eye-rolls that must have accompanied the response–and the “here he goes again” sighs…) Per IPS,

As has always been the case, we will continue to uphold the law while keeping these commitments,” the board added, before knocking Rokita’s intentions.

While IPS takes all legal obligations seriously, we respectfully hope that all concerned parties will recognize the heavy burden that silly litigation and political posturing places on students, families, and taxpayers,” the statement continued. “Every dollar spent on defensive legal posture is a dollar not spent on instructional support, teacher development, student services, or enrichment. In this case, Mr. Rokita prefers those dollars go to fight gratuitous political battles, as has too often been the case.

A very tactful way of saying “we really don’t want to pay for his incessant grandstanding.”

IPS requires that officers have a warrant signed by a judge unless there is an emergency situation, and the school system’s legal counsel must authorize the access. That policy certainly appears reasonable; after all, school systems are legally charged with acting in loco parentis, and with safeguarding the children in its care. Rokita, however, argues that the district should allow individual employees to “voluntarily comply” with ICE demands.

Rokita’s office began “investigating” (harassing) IPS in February, and communications have evidently gone back and forth since, with Rokita’s most recent demanding immediate changes.  As the IPS response noted,

Unfortunately, despite taking six months to craft his opinion on IPS’ policies, Mr. Rokita permitted only five business days from the time IPS received his review to respond, and then refused IPS’ request for any additional time….Yet, these important issues deserve thoughtful, deliberative weighing of important legal rights — not impulsive, superficial efforts for political gain.

Board members also criticized Rokita’s use of the term “aliens” for noncitizen children and their families, accusing him of  “willfully dehumanizing” them.

Assisting Rokita in this effort at bullying the system is something called the America First Policy Institute. (I guess a name really does say it all…) The institute says the Indiana case is part of its mission to hold “rogue” government entities accountable. Evidently, it’s “rogue” to protect children from being terrorized without legal authority.

In the wake of the suit, the Indiana State Teachers’ Association affirmed its belief that “every child in Indiana, regardless of background or immigration status, has the right to a safe and welcoming public school.” The organization confirmed the  professional and moral responsibility of educators “to protect the wellbeing of their students and ensure schools remain places of learning, trust and stability….Turning schools into extensions of immigration enforcement threatens that trust and undermines the learning environment every student deserves. Our focus must remain on educating and protecting students, not politicizing their safety.”

A local immigration attorney interviewed by WTHR believes the lawsuit is part of an effort to increase ICE’s presence in Indianapolis, and characterized it as fear mongering playing to the base….”the idea of federal agents often masked and in full uniform and flak jackets going into schools is just diabolical.”

It would be nice if Rokita would stop his constant pandering to MAGA’s looney-tune fringe and spend some time doing the job he was elected to do, but I’m not holding my breath…

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It’s All Out In The Open Now

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the days when our American bigots used to chafe at the “political correctness” that kept them from openly expressing their disdain for those despised “others.” As I have previously pointed out, the most consistent “through line” of America’s current, terrible administration has been its open assault on the civility that once kept people from broadcasting their hatreds; it has consistently conveyed its permission–indeed, encouragement–to voice them.

The Trump administration and Red state MAGA culture warriors enthusiastically attack anything that smacks of efforts to level the civic playing field–going after any program that hints of acceptance of diversity. At the federal level, Trump has fired talented and competent people of color and replaced them with wildly incompetent clowns whose most obvious (and often only) qualification for the job is White skin. Closer to home, our embarrassing and unethical Attorney General is harassing teachers and nonprofit organizations that display any concern for fair play or inclusion (one of the unfortunate teachers who made it onto Rokita’s threatening list of teachers he deems too liberal to be in a classroom is deemed guilty of being “unAmerican” because she included a rainbow flag in her room…).

Recently, media reports that the Trump administration has fired FBI agents who had the temerity to kneel in support of racial justice protests

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.

The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20…

The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

These firings follow others that targeted agents who investigated the January 6th insurrection, or who looked into Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents. Lawsuits stemming from those actions, which were patently illegal, allege that those dismissals are part of an ongoing effort to remove any FBI officers who investigated Trump or his cronies.

There is, rather clearly, also an effort to rid the FBI of officers who display support for racial justice.

In the short time Trump has been in office, he has gutted the Justice Department and turned the DOJ and FBI into compliant tools of his corrupt and lawless administration. Lawmakers and government lawyers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s multiple grifts, allowing him to run the administration like a Mafia boss, and rake in billions of dollars in what are outright bribes. Investigations of Trump allies have been dismissed, while efforts to take vengeance against those who have incurred Trump’s anger have ramped up, leading to meritless indictments (Comey) and invasive and publicized searches (Bolton).

Needless to say, these are the tactics of fascists and autocrats, not the proper activities of an American administration.

And that brings me back to what constitutes the underlying strength of this horrifying, unAmerican cabal: racism (with a side of misogyny). I cannot account for the corruption of the six “Conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, but it has become quite obvious that the Republicans in Congress are completely in thrall to the GOP’s MAGA base–the White supremacists who continue to support Trump because he’s making bigotry acceptable again.

Are groceries more expensive? Is health insurance becoming unaffordable again? Has America’s position and power in the world declined precipitously? Are masked thugs snatching people off the streets? Is public health declining? Is your city struggling due to the federal cutoff of previously authorized funds? Are free speech and the rule of law under attack? Has persistent incompetence and dysfunction caused a government shutdown?

None of that matters to MAGA folks so long as Trump gives them permission to express contempt for those detested “others.”

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When You Elect Despots…

Stephen Colbert. Jimmy Kimmel. A close relative. Just three of the many victims of our Mad King’s effort to erase the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.

Most of you reading this are already aware that the Trump administration’s threats–to block mergers and pull broadcast licenses–led their cowardly networks to pull comedians off the air, despite huge audiences and excellent ratings. Many of you have also been reading about the ordinary citizens who have been fired or suspended for comments made on social media. In all these situations, the comments at issue were protected by the First Amendment–and most of them were anything but inflammatory. 

One of our Mad King’s favorite accusations is that he is the victim of a “witch hunt.” Like most of his pronouncements, it’s projection. What we are seeing now is a witch hunt, carried on by the administration and MAGA–and it threatens more than the First Amendment. 

As usual, Indiana’s MAGA Governor has hopped on the Trump/Rokita train, threatening the state’s teachers, and announcing that “The Secretary of Education has the authority to suspend or revoke a license for misconduct and the office will review reported statements of K-12 teachers and administrators who have made statements to celebrate or incite political violence.”  In a Sept. 12 X post, Rokita encouraged people to report teachers who “celebrate or rationalize” Kirk’s Sept. 10 killing so they can be included in his office’s government dashboard. That platform has been used to list and condemn instances of “objectionable” political ideology entering the classroom. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith has also asked for such reports.

Orwellian.

You might wonder how these purported opponents of “cancel culture” justify their 180-degree turn on that issue. You might suggest they take a remedial course on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But far worse than this display of hypocrisy and constitutional ignorance is the real-world effect of igniting actual witch hunts.

Rokita’s “dashboard” and Braun’s statement are invitations for disturbed or angry people, or people with grudges, to slander the objects of their hostility. My relative was a recent object of such vilification. That relative teaches at a charter school; an individual that relative has neither met nor heard of — a person who had evidently disagreed with my relative’s political postings on Facebook for some time– decided to “send a report” to virtually every public official in Indiana, along with numerous parents and funders of the school. The “offensive” posts consisted of statements that Rightwingers have been responsible for more violence than people on the Left (a fact found by the FBI that the Trump administration has now scrubbed from the official website), and one comment to someone else’s post to the effect that calls for empathy were inconsistent with Charlie Kirk’s own statement that he did not believe in empathy.

Hardly hate speech. Certainly not a call for violence. But a clear warning about the actual effects of a “snitch” society.

If MAGA folks were able to learn from history, they might take a lesson from other times and places, where people seeking favor from autocratic governments, and people with personal grudges, were encouraged to “turn in” friends and neighbors considered insufficiently loyal to the regime. Those societies weren’t pretty.

Frederick Douglas, among others, was eloquent on the importance of free speech, saying: “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government.” Dougles also said that freedom of speech “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”

There can no longer be any doubt that Trump–ignorant and incompetent and mentally-ill as he is–is a wanna-be tyrant. But he isn’t the real threat. The real threat comes from the powerful people who obey in advance, the businesses happy to discard integrity in exchange for official permissions, the GOP elected  officials who “suck up” to their cult leader rather than standing up for civil liberty or even for their own prerogatives. 

What’s worse is that those who are bending the knee would easily prevail in a court of law. 

We have a would-be King who is so thin skinned that he can’t even take a joke, and a political party that is a joke. But it’s not funny, and we need to reverse it. 

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Protection Of Religion?

Well well well…I think the veil has just come off the Indiana GOP’s pious concern for (certain) religious beliefs. 

Indiana media outlets have reported on a Church “Bill of Rights” recently authored by two of the state’s most embarrassing Christian Nationalist officials, Todd Rokita and Micah Beckwith. Interestingly, that document mostly focused on the churches’ “rights” to engage in specified political advocacy: How churches can participate in the electoral process; what election-related activities a church can engage in without risking the loss of its tax-exempt status; whether the First Amendment offers any protection to churches when they engage in election-related activities; and whether religious objections to vaccines are protected in the workplace. In other words, the document outlines how much protection the law offers churches that want to engage in far-Right political advocacy.

But what about legal protections for religions pursuing more progressive values? Well, as the saying goes, that is a horse of a different color….

For those churches, “Christian” Warrior Todd Rokita has a very different message. The media has recently reported on Rokita’s “investigation” of Notre Dame, an effort to determine whether that institution might be–horrors of horrors–engaging in the DEI practices forbidden by the Trump administration.

DEI–like “woke”–is a term adopted as an all-purpose (and highly pejorative) epithet describing people who believe that their God and/or their understanding of moral behavior requires efforts to ameliorate past injustices, to foster equal treatment, and to welcome all persons to full participation in the civic enterprise. 

Rokita has informed the Catholic university that

Publicly available materials suggest that various aspects of Notre Dame’s operations may be governed by University policies that treat individuals—including students, prospective students, faculty, staff, and job applicants…differently based on the individuals’ race or ethnicity… employ race in a negative manner… or utilize racial stereotyping.”

The letter directly threatens Notre Dame’s non-profit status.

Failure to correct such policies and bring them into compliance with state and federal law could result in legal action by my office pursuant to Indiana Code § 23-17-24. I ask that the University respond to the questions contained herein to assist my office in evaluating whether further action is warranted to ensure Notre Dame is acting consistent with the terms of its nonprofit status. 

You might wonder what happened to Rokita and Beckwith’s purported concerns for the ability of religious organizations to follow their beliefs without legal concerns or government harassment. (That’s a sarcastic question, because the answer is obvious.)

It seems that our Christian Nationalist officials are only concerned to protect certain religions. 

This contempt for citizens who follow non-fundamentalist and non-Christian religions is hardly new to Indiana. When the state passed its ban on abortion (following a Dobbs decision that ignored precedent while reflecting Justice Alito’s Rightwing Christianity), our “pious” legislators ignored testimony that other religions disagreed with Christian fundamentalists about such terminations. Jewish and liberal Protestant clergy objected to the ban on religious liberty grounds, noting that the obvious basis of the legislation was religious dogma from some–but certainly not all– religious traditions, and that the application of the ban to people of other religions (or none) was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Silly folks! In Indiana, our elected “faith warriors” protect only the “real” religions–those that support their theocratic political ambitions.

The juxtaposition of these two announcements–the issuance of the “Church Bill of Rights” and the investigation of Notre Dame–perfectly illustrates the Christian Right agenda: If your religion teaches you that God wants Republicans in office, that He (in these churches, God is most definitely a White male) wants women and minority folks to be submissive and subservient–why then, the laws of the land will be interpreted to protect you.

If, however, your religion happens to teach that all people–even women and those with dark skin (Beckwith’s three-fifths)– are entitled to human dignity, and that all persons should be welcomed and treated as equals in our various communities, such beliefs are not entitled to legal protection.

And if you happen to fall within the growing number of “nones”–if you depend upon a considered philosophy or moral framework to guide your interactions with your fellow humans, rather than adopting the dogma of a particular organized religion–our elected theocrats will simply ignore your right to intellectual autonomy, a right protected by the real Bill of Rights.

Have I mentioned how obvious and embarrassing these people are?

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Rokita Again…

Among the worst results of the recent election was the local–and sadly predictable–victory of Indiana’s statewide Republican ticket. Mike Braun can be expected to obediently follow the Trumpist/MAGA line. Micah Beckwith and Jim Banks are self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist and an embarrassment to the state (and, actually, to intelligent humans pretty much everywhere.) But Todd Rokita may actually be the worst choice Hoosiers made, if only because he was running for re-election after a term in which he displayed what he is for all to see–an unethical publicity hound consistently pandering to the very worst of the MAGA base.

And he is at it again–(mis)using the resources of his office to pursue ideological, rather than legal, ends. This time, it’s an effort to intimidate Indiana organizations that serve immigrant populations.

One of those organizations is Su Casa, a nonprofit organization that was issued a civil investigative demand by the office of the Indiana Attorney General. The purported reason was an inquiry into human trafficking. Su Casa–along with many other entities in Indiana that serve immigrant communities– are being “questioned” by the AG’s office, probing how they serve migrant communities.

Su Casa was founded in 1999 as a response to the increase of Latin American immigrants arriving in Columbus, Indiana.  The majority of them had limited English proficiency, and Su Casa provided assistance and removed barriers to essential services in that community. It’s mission is to “increase self-sufficiency, health, economic independence, education, and ensure Latino families feel safe and belong here.” Its website says “Su Casa believes that all residents should have equitable access to the tools and support needed to be successful regardless of socio-economic or immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, or beliefs.”

MAGA cultists like Rokita consider such beliefs unacceptably “woke.”

When I did some research, I discovered that the Attorney General has initiated investigations into several organizations– including nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses– that work to facilitate what the cult deplores as an  “influx of migrants into Indiana communities.” These investigations purport to be about labor trafficking and “the strain on local resources due to increased migrant populations.”

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