A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

Indiana, Article V, and Delusions of Grandeur

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Article V of the U.S. Constitution describes a couple of ways to amend the U.S. Constitution.

Amendments may be proposed by either:
#two-thirds of both houses of the United States Congress; or
#by a national convention assembled at the request of the legislatures of at least two-thirds of the states.

To become part of the Constitution, amendments must then be ratified either by approval of:

#the legislatures of three-fourths of the states; or
#state ratifying conventions held in three-fourths of the states.

Congress has discretion as to which method of ratification should be used.

The only amendment that isn’t permitted is to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate without its consent.

Today, the Indiana Senate adopted SB 224 and 225 concerning a Constitutional Convention.

224 purports to limit a delegate’s authority to duties on which the delegate receives instruction by joint resolution of the Indiana General Assembly. 225 provides criteria for appointing a delegate – the person has to be over 18, an Indiana voter, not a lobbyist, and not a federal official. Votes for the delegate have to approved by majorities of each chamber.

I don’t have any particular objection to these provisions on their own terms. And if the provisions were just introduced in isolation, I wouldn’t mind the legislation as a “be prepared” measure that the General Assembly expected to gather dust over the decades. But it’s not an isolated measure. It’s of a piece with the John Birch Society Kool-Aid we’ve been seeing in the General Assembly lately: the nullificationists, the sovereign citizens, the Constitutional Sheriff’s movement – to name a few. It also comes combined with SJR 18 which tries to call a Constitutional Convention “strictly confined to consideration of amendments concerning the limitation of the commerce and taxing powers of Congress”. (Good luck picking just those two worms out of the can once you open it.)

There is a refusal to recognize that we are ordinary people living in ordinary times. Despite the reality that we have a moderate federal government making incremental changes, we hear cries of tyranny and desperate pleas to “take our country back.” This attitude is akin to — and, I think linked to — evangelical insistence that the end is nigh and persecution is everywhere. The Slacktivist speculates on the reason for the persistence of what he calls the “Christian Persecution Complex”:

[B]y pretending we’re a persecuted minority rather than the hegemonic majority we actually constitute, then we’re also able to pretend that we’re: 1) Noticeably different in our dreams, desires and daily lives from those otherwise indistinguishable-from-us neighbors who share our culture but not the particulars of our faith; and 2) Noticeably and intolerably more virtuous and righteous than those otherwise indistinguishable-from-us neighbors who share our culture but not the particulars of our faith.

My theory, in other words, is that we’ve chosen the illusion of self-righteousness over the actual hard work of becoming the kind of love-driven, love-shaped people Jesus called us to be.

In another context, I offered that it’s OK to be an insignificant part of an enormous universe:

It seems to me that, with some people, there is a driving need to see one’s self as a heroic figure in the consequential drama of one’s life. And that need leads to a view of the world that doesn’t comport with reality which, in turn, leads to interactions with the world that aren’t healthy and which aren’t helpful to others.

In this category, I also see the fervent believer with a personal relationship to God that helps them withstand the persecution that is everywhere while they are engaged in a noble effort to stand against evil; perhaps through a desperate battle to save America by battling its destructive cultural decline.

There hasn’t been a Constitutional Convention in the 230 years or so since our Constitution was adopted. There is no reason to think one is anywhere near the horizon; the Indiana Senate’s call to arms notwithstanding. Our time isn’t more laden with importance than normal. It’s grandiose to think it is. The barbarians are not at the gate. The bills don’t hurt anything on their own (though the resolution is irresponsible), but they look to be symptomatic of disturbing pathology in our political psyche.

Muncie Juvenile Detention Center Having Troubles

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Keith Roysdon, reporting for the Muncie Star Press, has an article entitled Detention center has trouble with state inspections. The Cedarbridge Detention Center was found to be in “minimal compliance” with Department of Correction standards. The company that runs the center apparently has some sketchy financial underpinnings and “DOC cited problems with staffing, food service, medical care and the run-down nature of the facility.”

That’s unnerving if we’re committing children to this facility. According to the report, the facility’s juvenile inmates are mostly from out of the Muncie area.

HB 1483 – Drug Testing for Welfare Recipients

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HB 1483 which requires drug testing of TANF recipients has passed the Indiana House by a vote of 78 to 17.

Only 17 representatives voted against this measure despite the experience of other states showing that it’s a waste of money. Welfare recipients are no more likely to be drug abusers than the general population and may well be less likely. They must not have read John Cheese’s Cracked article “Four Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People.” Number 2 is “Poor People Aren’t Rampant Drug Addicts.”

Drugs are a huge problem with the poor, and I most definitely don’t want to be handing my tax dollars to someone who’s just going to blow it on … well, blow.

That’s what all of these states thought, and some of them still think that. Then they did the testing and found out that, actually, the poor are pretty much as clean as the rest of us.

The Fiscal Impact statement estimates that this program will result in a net loss to Indiana of $1.1 million for the first year of operation.

But, hey, why worry about cost if it lets us hate on the poors a little bit?

Medicaid & Obamacare: Mind the Gap

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Eric Bradner, writing for the Evansville Courier Press has an article entitled BRADNER: Pence, some lawmakers at odds on Medicaid expansion. Rep. Clere’s HB 1581 is the vehicle for Indiana’s Medicaid expansion. Gov. Pence doesn’t like it.

The back story, for those who haven’t been following, is that Obamacare was designed in two major pieces – one as an expansion of Medicaid for those between the current threshold up to 133% of the poverty line. Those above the 133% line have to buy insurance; with subsidies being supplied to poorer people who are required to buy that insurance. The Supreme Court decision threw a monkey wrench into the process by saying that the legislation had to allow the States to decide for themselves whether to implement Medicaid expansion. This leaves the people between the current Medicaid threshold and 133% of the poverty line in a bad way when it comes to paying for healthcare.

And, as we have recently learned from Steven Brill’s long piece in Time Magazine (and a recent Indiana Supreme Court case), these people in the gap are the most at mercy of the bloated prices of the hospital chargemasters. (Nobody else actually pays these prices except for the uninsured.)

Other very conservative governors have agreed to sign on to the Medicaid expansion — paid for almost entirely by the federal government. So, Pence has political cover if he wants to do what’s good for Hoosiers and their health. That’s what a number of Republican and Democratic members of the General Assembly would like to do. It remains to be seen if Gov. Pence wants to continue battling a fight against Obamacare that’s already been lost.

More Skills Gap Mythology

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Nice column by Arthur Foulkes in the Terre Haute TribStar entitled Closing the Skills Gap: The Issue: Matching employee job skills with job openings. He notes that, among the political class, there is little doubt that the skills gap exists and that it is a significant source of unemployment. In the academic community, however, the consensus seems to be that the skills gap is a myth.

High unemployment is mainly the result of a deficiency in aggregate demand and slow economic growth, not because workers lack the right education or skills. The skills of the labor force did not suddenly erode between 2007 and 2009, when the unemployment rate more than doubled, so it makes no sense to claim that high unemployment in 2009 and through today has been caused by a soaring number of “unqualified” workers.

Wages are another pretty significant tell. If there was unmet demand for skilled laborers, you’d see wages rising to attract the existing supply. That’s not happening.

Nevertheless, it’s a pretty good bet that Indiana is going to spend money based on legislators’ unfounded belief in this myth; creating the Indiana Career Council and handing out a contract for development of a “Workforce Intelligence System.”

My sense is that the love for the skills gap myth has to do with the underlying desire to view the economy as a morality play where the hard working and clever prosper while the only ones who suffer are those who are too lazy or stupid to make money. The idea of a skills mismatch gap allows lawmakers to “do something” without disrupting that narrative too much. After all, what else are we supposed to do? You can’t just stimulate demand by giving people money to spend or having the government hire them to build infrastructure because freedom and communism. Also too, immoral.

Criminal Sentencing Reform Contains No Provision for Funding Increased Use of Local Programs

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Maureen Hayden, writing for CNHI, has an article entitled Rewrite of criminal code goes forward with no funding for locals. I’d written before on HB 1006 which revamps the Indiana criminal code. Part of the effort is to keep small time offenders in local correctional programs instead of sending them off to DOC. No problem with that; most of the time that makes sense. In that past post, I wrote:

[I]f more offenders are going to be using those local programs, increased funding at that level will be necessary[.]

Maureen Hayden’s article does not allay my concerns. If the state is saving money by shifting its criminal justice responsibilities to local government; that money has to fund the local operations. Without that, the user fees are going to go through the roof. Community Corrections is funded through a combination of DOC grants and user fees. If the grants don’t get any larger, that leaves user fees. (The last thing local government wants to do is to raise taxes to subsidize a state government surplus and provide services to criminals.)

Philosophically, I’m not against criminals paying for the costs of their own punishment, but at a certain level, you’re just setting them up to fail. These are people – keep in mind – who couldn’t function properly under the ordinary burdens of life. Now you have all of those plus a criminal conviction plus a bunch of fees they have to pay. And if they don’t pay their fees, they get kicked off the program and end up back in the DOC anyway. Alternately, if you don’t kick them off the program for nonpayment, you have to charge the other offenders higher rates to subsidize the ones who aren’t paying; which in turn increases the chances that they won’t keep up with the payments. Rinse. Repeat.

Brill on Medical Pricing

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I am in the middle of reading what looks to be a very important piece by Steven Brill in Time Magazine entitled Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. I’ll be keeping an eye out at my new favorite medical policy blog, the Incidental Economist to see if they have any thoughts on it.

Early on in the piece, he talks about the chargemaster and how the hospital administrators would try to steer discussions away from it:

However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant.

People rarely pay those prices, was usually the reason for being dismissive about it. One problem with that rationale in Indiana, however, is that our state Supreme Court has told Hoosiers that, in the absence of contractual language to the contrary, they’re bound by the prices in that chargemaster. By virtue of Indiana Rule of Evidence 413, the chargemaster rates also effectively set the default amount you’ll have to pay for someone’s medical expenses if you get in an accident with them — regardless of how much that person actually paid.

Brill’s article shows that this chargemaster rate can be on the order of 1,000% of the market value of the service. I expect this article is going to make me very angry by the time I get to the end. “[W]e spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia.” In return we get outcomes that are no better and often worse.

SB 371 – Abortion Clinics Not Required to Have Particle Colliders . . . Yet

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SB 371 passed the Senate Health committee on a 7-5 vote.

One provision requires clinics supplying abortion-inducing pills to have the same facilities as those providing surgical procedures; e.g. surgery and resuscitation equipment and defibrillators. (The requirements go into some detail – including a reception desk, a waiting area, a lavatory, and a drinking fountain among other things.) This is widely seen as being directed at the Lafayette Planned Parenthood that provides RU-486.

According to one supporter of the measure, the requirement that these pill dispensaries have this stuff is justified because there might be complications and they’ll need follow up care. But why stop there? Having an abortion might prompt deep questions about the nature and meaning of the universe. So maybe the legislation ought to require that these clinics have particle colliders — just in case. Or a pizza oven – someone might get hungry. Or the tears of a virgin — just to screw with them.

The other measure getting a lot of attention is that it determines that ultrasounds are so nice a woman has to get them twice.

SB 371 also requires the physician providing such a prescription to provide the patient with materials–colors specified!–oversee ultrasound imaging, and document efforts to have the woman return in two weeks for a follow-up examination and ultrasound.

As Sheila Kennedy notes – “this bill has nothing to do with women’s safety. It has everything to do with limiting the availability of safe and legal abortion.”

Karen Celestino-Horseman noted some irony at the imaging requirements. This bill was introduced by Sen. Holdman who has also introduced SB 373 which makes it illegal to take video of agricultural operations with the intent to harass; the message apparently being: video tape lady parts – not livestock!

Demoralized Teachers

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This post by Kyle Stokes entitled Why So Many More Teachers Hate Their Jobs Now was written almost a year ago; but I just stumbled across it. It meshes with what I know from teachers I’m friends with.

These are not lazy people or people who want to coast or people who resent changes to the status quo. But, they are tired of a lot of things; not least of which is being a political punching bag for those who want to liberate education money from the public sphere and get it into the pockets of the right sorts of people.

I’d regarded it as sort of background noise, but I guess I’m becoming a little concerned about narrowing curricula focused on teaching to the test. I’m all for my kids learning the fundamentals; but if they don’t develop agile minds, I’m going to be doomed to boring Thanksgiving dinner conversations for the next 30 years.

Hoosiers over Spartans 72 – 68

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Austan Kas, writing for the Crimson Quarry has a blog post entitled Road warriors: Indiana rallies past Michigan State. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, the Crimson Quarry is a great blog for following IU sports.

This most recent post was on the subject of Indiana’s first basketball win at Michigan State in 22 years. If that drought were a person, it would’ve been legally drunk after last night’s game. It was a near thing and hard to watch at the end. I don’t know if I can blame last night’s officiating on the NCAA’s worst referee, TV Ted Valentine. But, he was there, so I will. The guy running the Breslin Center’s game clock became mysteriously unable to start the clock when MSU was down by a couple of points with 13 seconds to go. After a vigorous monitor review, the officiating crew decided it’s not a foul when a MSU player punches Cody Zeller in the nuts. However, by contrast, it is a three-point shooting foul when Will Sheehey stands still and straight up while an MSU player shoots.

That grousing out of the way, the Hoosiers pulled off a narrow win on the strength of some strong play from Zeller, Watford, Hulls, and, of course, Oladipo. My favorite Oladipo play last night was when he was inbounding the ball under the basket. An MSU player was guarding an IU player with his back turned to Oladipo. Oladipo threw the ball off the MSU guy’s back, stepped in bounds, grabbed the ball, and laid it in. Meanwhile, Dick Vitale and Magic Johnson were too busy gabbing about something or other to even discuss the play at first.

So, the players and coaches – IU and Michigan State alike were high quality. The officiating, clock running, and commentating were all horrible. And IU gets a road win over the 4th ranked team in the country. In doing so, it solidified its hold on the Big Ten, its place at #1, and continues to make a case for itself as a 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. It still has big games against Ohio State and Michigan left on its schedule, then the Big Ten tournament; so there is a lot of tough basketball to come. But, after some time in the wilderness, it’s great to see the Hoosiers back among the top teams in the country.