Someone needs to find a hobby for Todd Rokita.
Clearly, serving as Indiana’s attorney general and tending to the legal interests of the state and its citizens aren’t enough to command his full attention. He keeps looking for ways to occupy his time and energy—some of them destructive to Indiana law and Hoosiers’ interests.
It’s only a matter of time before he creates a mess that can’t be cleaned up without wasting a lot of taxpayers’ money.
First, he wanted to keep a job in the private sector while serving as the state’s top lawyer. Only exposure and an outcry prompted him to back away from that ill-advised scheme.
Then, he signed our state onto a Hail-Mary attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. That effort was launched by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment on felony securities fraud charges for six years and has sought with increasing desperation to delay his day of reckoning in court. That desperation may have prompted the Texas A.G. to file the suit in hopes of securing a presidential pardon while Donald Trump was still in office.
Rokita also committed Indiana to a hopeless tilt at challenging the Affordable Care Act, even though the U.S. Supreme Court already had upheld Obamacare twice. This time around, the nation’s highest bench treated the challenge from Rokita and his cohorts with something resembling contempt, saying they lacked both standing and a case.
If Rokita and his cronies had managed to get their way, 31 million Americans would have lost their health coverage.
And, of course, Rokita has done his best to make Indiana’s genuine constitutional crisis — the dispute between Gov. Eric Holcomb and the know-nothing caucuses in the Indiana General Assembly over who can call the legislature into session — even worse. He did so in a particularly adolescent way by arguing that he should have maximum authority with minimal or nonexistent accountability. He contended that he alone could serve as counsel for both the governor and the lawmakers while also filling a role as arbiter—judge—in the dispute.
Most people think only God can serve as both advocate for and judge of all living things, but one suspects Rokita thinks the deity has lost a step and needs some help.
All these moves have been made with Rokita’s own interests in mind, not those of Hoosiers. He wants to be Indiana’s next governor so bad he would do anything to get there.
Including costing millions of people their health care or disenfranchising voters by the tens of thousands.
He has concluded that the best way to become governor is to capture Trump voters in the 2024 Indiana Republican gubernatorial primary. He reasons, likely correctly, that winning the nomination will be a tougher challenge than winning the general election.
To that end, Rokita now has waded into the debate over critical race theory by issuing a “Parents Bill of Rights.”
In typical Rokita fashion, he did so without consulting with the Indiana Department of Education — which also is in Republican hands—or, it seems, with anyone but his own smiling visage in the mirror.
Much of Rokita’s bill of rights is boilerplate. There are explanations of how to run for school board and how to contact the DOE.
But much of it also includes fulminations against critical race theory and arguments that Hoosier students shouldn’t ever be taught anything that might encourage them to…learn something. Rokita’s thesis is, “the dumber we are, the happier we will be.”
That is, of course, the heart of the argument against studying how systemic and institutional racism might have affected American culture and history. God forbid that we ever might be encouraged to consider things from another person’s point of view.
The really distressing thing about this is that we are not quite three years away from the 2024 primary. That’s a long time for Todd Rokita’s ambition that knows no rest to ramble around, looking for difficulties to exploit and problems to make worse.
We could try to find him a hobby, but it appears he already has one.
Running for governor.
Every minute.
Every hour.
Every day.
All the time.
He’s even got a slogan: “Ignorance is bliss.”
With Todd Rokita, it’s not just cliché.
It’s a campaign strategy.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to [email protected].
