Tuesday July 26, 2022; 7:31 PM EDT
- Driving north from Indianapolis, the signal from the Indiana Statehouse hearing wavered. It appeared that the Senate committee had finished deliberating on the new abortion bill and was voting on whether to send it to the Senate for deliberation and a vote later this week.#
- Some members of the committee voted, and others briefly explained their vote as well as voted. Two members said, roughly, that this is a bad bill and that they hoped it would be improved by amendments later this week during Senate deliberations. One said, roughly, that he'd never voted Yes before on a bad bill with the hope that it would be improved in the next stage. #
- So, two Indiana state senators voted yes on a bill they dislike. The final vote was 7 to 5 in favor of the bill, and so it will go forward to the Senate, and then presumably to the House. Because the Republicans have gerrymandered themselves an unstoppable supermajority in both houses, whatever they pass will almost certainly become law, very likely without compromise with anyone outside the Republican Party.#
- While Indiana certainly leans to the right in its politics, the state did vote for Obama in 2008, and we have often had one Democratic and one Republican senator in Washington. So it's not a severe tilt to the right here. But gerrymandering makes it look otherwise. A few years back, when the discriminatory RFRA law threatened the state's reputation nationwide, the Republicans went back into conference and changed it, softened it. They knew they did not need to consult a single Democratic legislator, and to the best of my memory they did not.#
- So that Hoosier "democracy" where you get away with whatever you can, and GOP state senators vote for a bad bill because in these divisive times you'd have to be brave to vote against your party.#
- At least one of the two said that if the bill wasn't improved in deliberation, to which a single day seems to be scheduled, he'd be voting against it.#
- And inside the building itself, a religious group filled the central spaces of the three main floors with speeches and chanting. Oh, yes, and there was a SWAT team on lookout maybe 60 yards away from the west entrance. Rifle, tripod, scope. I placed a couple of photos of that on Twitter.#