A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

SB 82 – Prohibiting Polling Locations at Schools

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Sen. Niemeyer has introduced SB 82 which would prohibit counties from using schools as polling places after December 31, 2023. It also contains a provision allowing a school to request that its property not be used as a location prior to that date. (Disclosure: I’m going off of the bill digest. I can’t get the body of the bill to load. The General Assembly’s website continues to be almost unbearably clunky as it’s been since its PDF/frame-heavy redesign many years ago.)

As with so many things, this is a decision the school should make. I don’t know what the stated rationale for this bill will be. If I’m being cynical, my thought is that the “wrong” sorts of voters tend to be in and around schools (especially if a school referendum is on the ballot!) There is a superficially plausible security argument to be made. Having a bunch of strangers coming in and out of the school could potentially create some anxiety. But the fact that this change can apparently wait for four years undermine the idea that this is a security concern. And, again, a school would be in a better position to make that call.

This will potentially add expense to the voting process as the election officials might have to rent space that the schools might have otherwise made available to them for no charge.

Impeachment

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There are plenty of takes on the impeachment of Donald Trump, but for posterity’s sake, here is another. Donald Trump has been impeached with 230 votes in favor.

I think the impeachment and removal process is an extraordinarily serious thing. I thought the impeachment of Bill Clinton was frivolous, I never supported the impeachment of George W. Bush, and I wasn’t particularly supportive of calls for Trump’s impeachment early on in his Presidency. All that throat clearing aside, I think it was appropriate in this case. Trump was using the power of his office and national security money to shake down the President of Ukraine to have him interfere in a U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. Using the power of the Presidency to invite a foreign power to meddle in a domestic election is exactly the kind of thing the Framers had in mind when they put the impeachment process into the Constitution.

Trump supporters mostly didn’t even try to defend Trump’s actions. They made some half-hearted effort to say that Trump just had an abiding interest in fighting corruption. But this was severely undercut by Trump’s general indifference to appearances of impropriety and the fact that his concern for corruption seemed to begin and end with Biden, not to mention the Trump family’s own struggles with nepotism. What they lacked in convincing argument, Trump enthusiasts tried to make up for in volume, loudly complaining about the process. It’s the sort of defense that will look familiar to anyone who has ever seen a sovereign citizen challenge his speeding ticket. (You don’t have any jurisdiction over me! The flag in the courtroom has gold fringe!) Also, the “it’s a Republic not a Democracy” rhetoric used to promote the sanctity of the Constitution’s electoral college process after Trump lost the popular vote was conveniently forgotten in favor of an abiding concern for the “will of the people” when faced with the Constitution’s impeachment and removal process.

I don’t think the Senate will remove Trump. Tribalism being what it is, I don’t think there is a particular political upside for Democrats. But sometimes you have to do the right thing, and impeachment in this case was the right thing.

(Side note: Tulsi Gabbard voted “present,” which shows you that the Democratic primary voters who have stayed away from her in droves kind of had her number all along.)

State of Indiana Claims Right to Take Local Government Property Without Compensation

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West Lafayette Community School Corporation has sued Governor Holcomb in his official capacity (Cause 79C01-1909-PL-115 in the Circuit Court of Tippecanoe County) to challenge a law that requires local school corporations to make unused buildings available to charter schools for a dollar before they can sell them, leave them vacant, or (the law is less clear) lease them for non-school purposes. West Lafayette has an old building, Happy Hollow, that’s on its last legs and the school corporation has long term plans to use the site, likely as an early education facility, once it gets a solid model put together and can line up the proper funding. In the meantime, it’s being leased to the City of West Lafayette as a temporary city hall for which the City is paying the School a healthy lease payment which, in turn, is being used to fund School operations.

Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed HB 1641 which added IC 20-26-7.1 featuring the $1 lease/purchase requirements. (If a school sells real estate in violation of this requirement, proceeds from the sale go to the State to fund charter school grants). In the case of Happy Hollow, the school corporation arguably has to forego a revenue stream from the City lease or put long term plans on hold if a charter school expresses interest and an intent to get a charter school up and running in the next two years.

So that’s the background. Being a strong proponent of local government and of public schools, it will come as no surprise to anyone that I take the school’s side on this one. But that’s not what prompted me to write this.

In defending the lawsuit, Governor Holcomb (by counsel) has made the breathtaking argument:

“[T]he Takings Clauses and Just Compensation do not apply to the State’s relationship with political subdivisions.”

“[M]unicipalities and subdivisions of the State cannot request just compensation even if there is taking[.]”

The State’s argument does not offer any limitation to this principle which is unique to schools. The State can take local government property and not pay for it. Full stop. The argument is that local government is merely a “subalternate instrumentality” of the State government — in other words, local government is just a tool of State government, so there’s really been no loss if the State commandeers local property for its own purposes.

There is an old United States Supreme Court case, Board of Commissioners of Tippecanoe County v. Lucas, 93 U.S. 108 (1876) where the Court said, “the legislature of a state possesses the power to direct a restitution to taxpayers of a county or other municipal corporation of property exacted from them by taxation, into whatever form the property may be changed, so long as it remains in possession of the municipality.” (emphasis added)  It’s true that the State has a lot of power to direct the affairs of local government. So, if the State said that the school had to sell vacant property at market value and, for example, use the proceeds to buy school buses for itself, the “taking” argument would be much weaker. Yes, the State is meddling in local affairs, but taxes paid by local residents are not being diverted to other entities.

But that’s not the argument the Governor is making. Local government property can be used for any purpose the State wants. It doesn’t matter if taxpayers supported a local tax rate precisely because decisions about the use of those taxes were being made by the city council or school board. This goes well beyond taking local school property to subsidize charters. In principle, it could be used to sell off the Wayne County Courthouse in Richmond and use it to subsidize toll road operations in northern Indiana. Or whatever. Like I said, the argument doesn’t offer any limiting principle to the State’s authority to seize local government property without paying for it.

Now, if I had to guess, this is probably the case of an attorney operating out of Indianapolis trying to grind out a win without having run the argument past any political types. I highly doubt that Gov. Holcomb knows anything about this argument even though it’s being made in his name. I suspect the political types would understand that an assertion by the State of unfettered control over local resources is unlikely to be well received outside of the State House.

Elizabeth Warren and Charter Schools

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I made a Facebook post that seemed like it would be reasonable to turn into a blog post, so here we go. Chalkbeat has an article about Elizabeth Warren’s meeting with charter school activists. Per the article:

Warren’s education plan, which she released last month, proposes limiting charter schools in a number of ways. It promises to ban for-profit charter schools and eliminate federal funding for new charters. Warren’s plan also seeks to limit who could authorize charters — the kind of change that could threaten existing schools, though one that it’s unclear whether a president could pull off.

This prompted push back from charter activists. Warren promised to go back and look at her plan to make sure that charter schools are on an even playing field with traditional public schools. Charter schools like to claim that they are on an even playing field — maybe it’s even tougher for them. Traditional public school advocates strongly disagree. My thoughts in that Facebook post I mentioned:

1) The profit/non-profit distinction for charters favored by some candidates (not sure about Warren) doesn’t mean a lot unless we have some clarity on whether the management companies hired by the charters are themselves for-profit or not; and

2) There seems to be some evidence that charters can produce positive outcomes under the sorts of tight regulation Massachusetts has. Indiana is absolutely not going to impose that kind of close regulation and I’m guessing the charter advocates aren’t going to be supportive of that sort of regulation going nationwide.

From a previous blog post of mine, quoting a piece from the Harvard Political Review:

“It appears that Massachusetts’ charter laws are responsible, at least in large part, for the superior performance of the state’s charter schools. Indeed, Massachusetts prohibits for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs), and its process for authorizing charter schools is particularly rigorous. According to Alison Bagg, director of charter schools and school redesign at the Massachusetts Department of Education, Massachusetts is one of the few states in which the Department of Education serves as the sole authorizer of charter schools. “You have some states that have hundreds and hundreds of charters schools, all authorized by these districts or non-profits,” Bagg explained to the HPR. In Massachusetts, by contrast, “it has been historically very difficult to get a charter,” and the state has been recognized by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers as “one of the leaders in charter school authorizing nationwide.”

The charter renewal process is also quite rigorous, according to Bagg. The state monitors charter schools closely and has the ability to close charter schools that have achieved poor results—a practice that is not universal across states.”

In Indiana, by contrast, we get a school corporation like Daleville sponsoring the Indiana Virtual School charter which then takes state money for kids who are dead or have long since moved out of state.

Five years after two students moved to Florida, they reappeared on enrollment records for Indiana Virtual School and its sister school.

And nearly every one of the more than 900 students kicked out of Indiana Virtual School and its sister school in the 2017-18 school year for being inactive were re-enrolled the next school year, included in per-pupil funding calculations that netted the two online schools more than $34 million in public dollars last year.

These were among the ways that Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy allegedly inflated their enrollment to at least twice its actual size, according to the findings of a state examiner’s investigation[.]

Under Indiana’s charter system, Daleville was allowed to receive 3% of the state tuition dollars directed to the charter schools it authorized. In the case of IVS and IVPA, that amounted to $1 million. It’s not clear that a whole lot of oversight was being done.

Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World

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The last week or so, I keep thinking of the line in the Declaration of Independence, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

When I first really focused closely on the Declaration, the word “candid” jumped out at me. Because I’d only really ever heard the word in the context of “Candid Camera,” it was a little jarring. I hadn’t connected the word to “candor.” I looked the word up somewhere and, in addition to the meanings I was familiar with, there were things like unbiased and “free from malice.”

So, that’s in the back of my mind when I read disingenuous and specious commentary on social media. I realize I’m throwing out a lot of twenty-five cent words here. Ever since I got picked on in junior high for using big words, I try not to do it gratuitously. (Ha!) But, George Orwell pointed out that in order to fight against disagreeable things,  it’s helpful to have the proper vocabulary.  “Disingenuous” means “not candid or sincere, usually by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.” “Specious” means “superficially plausible, but actually wrong.”

The flood of overly simplistic memes, deliberate misconstructions of candidate and policymaker statements, and outright false information, make one wonder whether there is a candid world out there to consider facts and arguments; that  the deliberate and sometimes malicious misconstructions seen online are perhaps representative of the world at large. Ultimately, if that’s true, I guess we’re already screwed. At that point, communication becomes noise and force is the only means available to resolve differences. So, probably the best course is to assume that your fellow citizens and other people in the world are possessed of some degree of candor; and also to be candid in your own statements, arguments, posts, and tweets. To do otherwise is to contribute to a degradation of communication that will ultimately have harmful consequences in the real world.

Some thoughts on Red for Ed, Caleb Mills, and Indiana’s School Policies

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Read, Circulate, and Discuss

The recent $40 million failure of the ILEARN test has prompted the “Red for Ed” rally scheduled for November 19, 2019 at the State House when the General Assembly gathers for its annual organization day. Among other things, the movement is asking for schools and teachers to be “held harmless” from the consequences that the legislature has tied to such testing. That would include not penalizing schools for performance on this test, stopping the clock on the time given to “failing schools” to improve (since this testing year was essentially wasted), and not penalizing teachers based on data generated by this test. 

It is also a good time to revisit our overall approach to education policy in Indiana. What we have now isn’t really a “system” per se in that its component parts don’t work well together. Rather than our current ideologically driven approach based on what policymakers think ought to work, we should evaluate the systems and curricula that actually are working in places like Singapore, Canada, Finland, and Japan and adapt their approaches as best we can to Indiana. Ultimately, a good educational system will have to be built on the quality of its teachers. That means attracting the best and the brightest high school students to the teaching colleges. It means preparing those incoming teachers to teach the curriculum which, in turn, requires a stable approach to education. And, once trained, it means retaining those teachers.  

There has been some criticism of the Red for Ed rally and its goals by school privatization enthusiasts. But it has mostly been hand waving. Shane Phipps, writing at Inside Education does a pretty good job of addressing some of these criticisms. 

At root, there is a lack of appreciation as to what a world-class educational system provides and possibly a lack of ambition by policymakers. Can we afford one? We can’t afford not to have one. Opportunity is slipping away from Hoosiers because we’re allowing our foundation to erode. The high stakes testing and privatization approach that have been in place for the better part of a generation have put us in a downward spiral. Teachers have been scapegoats and their salaries have remained mostly stagnant as their burdens have grown.

When it comes to education, we are too often shrewd with our pennies but foolish with our dollars. This is an investment. As Caleb Mills, the father of Indiana’s common school system observed in the 19th century, a good education system adds to the social, literary, and intellectual capital of the citizens and adds materially to the real and substantial happiness of everyone. Mills said that we must “convince the ignorant man that knowledge would increase his happiness and satisfy the prejudiced man that he has only misapprehended the best means of securing his own welfare.” In 1848, a referendum was put to the people of the State, asking “are you in favor of free schools?” The result was narrowly in favor, but it was significant that the opposition came chiefly from the areas with the highest level of illiteracy. The people with better educations recognized the tremendous opportunity provided by public education. 

There is a charitable, moral argument for paying to educate your neighbors. But, even on the level of simple self-interest, we have an interest in the proper education of all who are socially and politically connected to us. Better schools lead to (as Mills pointed out) “more valuable real estate, productive capital, lightened public burdens, increased social enjoyments, and security of possession.” Investment in education pays further dividends in reduced expenses from crime and costs of punishment.  What’s more, for most areas, the school serves as the nucleus of the social fabric. It’s an important part of what turns a collection of individuals into a community. 

Mills again: “There is but one way to secure good schools, and that is to pay for them.” How much should we pay for them? As much as they are worth.  Taxes are absolutely part of the equation. This will require some courage from legislators as taxes inevitably cause initial dissatisfaction. Per Mills, “a legislature that would wait for a harmony of views before action would never affect anything great and noble.” As with any investment, benefits come later.  Politicians who crow about surplus funds and low taxes while we are unable to attract and retain teachers should receive the same reception as a homeowner who brags about a shiny new car and a healthy bank account while the foundations of his home are crumbling. The State has taken over the business of funding schools. Locals lack the power to move the needle very much. If we want good schools, we will have to persuade the legislators we have or get new ones. Because the State made the decision to swallow the elephant of public education, it now represents about half of the state budget. As such, there is a strong argument to be made that education should be a central focus of every legislator and that the General Assembly should be judged based on the resulting quality of Indiana schools. In 2021, as the Governor takes total control of the State’s education system (by virtue of the Superintendent of Public Instruction becoming an appointed position), a gubernatorial candidate’s education bona fides should be one of the electorate’s primary concerns.

Ultimately, we need to produce the best teachers at our institutes of higher learning and pay teachers commensurate to their training and value. We are entrusting them to instill in our children the capacity to be productive citizens. What’s that worth? To attract and retain teachers of the highest caliber, we need to recognize what society gains by attracting the best and the brightest to the profession. Mills describes the situation in the 1840s:  “What inducement had a youth of commanding talents, noble and generous aspirations, to spend years of time and hundreds of dollars [19th century money] to fit himself for an employment that would not command a higher compensation than was given for services requiring no intellectual training or moral culture?” The young men you would have wanted as teachers chose instead to become preachers and lawyers. History may not repeat, but it certainly seems to rhyme. 

The privatization fad isn’t working. Voucher and charter schools do not produce better results than traditional public schools and there is some evidence that they produce worse outcomes. A fractured approach to education cannot produce consistent results. If we’re looking to be responsible with our money, we can’t afford to have education dollars sucked up by self-dealing charter management companies with opaque accounting or vouchers sent to private institutions with books closed to the public. We can’t spend tens of millions of dollars on tests with arbitrary faulty metrics. The reason we’re having so much trouble with the tests and vouchers and charters is because the arguments for them were always pretexts. The tests weren’t designed to provide feedback to improve education — they are designed as cudgels for proclaiming that public schools are failing (and to redirect public money to testing companies.) Vouchers weren’t designed to give poor children attending public schools a way out — they were designed to subsidize religious education and give “good families” a way to keep their kids away from undesirables. If we were serious about our approach to charter schools, we’d consider the rigorous accountability process used in Massachusetts. But, we’re not, so we get charters authorized by tiny Daleville and overseen by apparently nobody. 

If the concern was truly that Indiana’s traditional public schools were not performing as well as they should, the rational approach would be to look to those school systems in our country and around the world that are producing the desired outcomes. That’s not what we did because those systems would not have provided a rationale for subsidizing private, religious education; reducing the influence of teacher’s unions; or redirecting public education money to friends and well-wishers of privatization enthusiasts. So, they had to come up with this cobbled together mess of half-measures and contradictions they could market to the public with rhetoric about “choice,” “accountability,” “empowerment,” and “the market.” When the results fail to materialize they either ignore the results or just say we have to do it harder. Privatization can’t fail, it can only be failed.

We have been some place like this before. Prior to creation of common schools, Indiana’s commitment to public education was more aspirational than real. The qualifications of teachers were left to local trustees. The quality of education was wildly uneven. There was a powerful disincentive for educated Hoosiers to become teachers. At a time other institutions were becoming well organized and efficient, the schools were struggling with unequal lengths of term, incapable teachers, dishonest trustees, diversity of textbooks, lax enforcement of school laws and school discipline, neighborhood quarrels over school sites, narrow views of education, and a lack of wise leadership. (Worley at p.6) This description reminded me powerfully of our recent charter school debacle at the Indiana Virtual School. 

We pulled ourselves off the educational floor once. So did Finland and Singapore and Ontario and any number of places that now surpass us in educational outcomes. We can do it again. But we have to look to examples that work and craft a system with pieces that fit together, one enhancing the other. A Hobbesian war of all-against-all, even if marketed under the banner of “choice,” will inevitably result in a cacophony of cross-purposes. We need to rethink our policies.

—One of the People

 

OK Boomer

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So, the “OK Boomer” meme is making the rounds. There is an energy to the discussion that makes it sound like the retort is something more significant than the time tested strategy of a younger person rolling their eyes at an older person. Someone asked “what does this mean?” I didn’t get around to responding, but I thought it was a combination of:

Generational warfare is kind of fun, but ultimately probably unproductive. Still, if this serves as an antibody to the persistent whining about “kids these days,” then maybe it’s useful. Also, since I’m GenX, this was funny:

School Matters on Referendums

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Steve Hinnefeld at School Matters has a good post on school referendums in Indiana. There are several of them on the ballot across the state today. Oversimplifying a bit, but generally, when the State took over funding school operating costs, they gave districts the opportunity to request that voters approve an increased property tax to supplement that funding. Interestingly, the wealthiest districts and the poorest districts are most likely to initiate the referendum process with schools in the middle quite a bit less likely to ask the taxpayers for more money. The richest districts tend to get less “complexity” money from the State. (This is money that supplements the base amount and is calculated based on a district’s number of kids getting free/reduced lunch, SNAP benefits, and the like.) So, the rich districts are getting less money and have locals who are willing & able to pay extra. The poorest districts are up against the wall, having greater needs and also initiate the referendum process.

For those schools in the middle, it’s tough to say whether they haven’t needed the money or school leadership simply felt that the voters wouldn’t go for the tax increase. Anyway, I recommend the School Matters post – it has links to some other resources if you want to dig in.

The Democratic Primary

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It’s no secret that there is no way Trump would ever get my vote. He’s emotionally fragile, intellectually bankrupt, and utterly corrupt. He believes that the office of the Presidency is there to serve him rather than the other way around. His trading on public resources to induce foreign powers to meddle in our elections was exactly the kind of thing the Founders were concerned about when they wrote the Constitution. Federalist 68: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

Also, for good or bad, we have a two party system. If Trump is the Republican nominee, that means the choice is either him or the Democratic nominee. So, if an inanimate carbon rod gets the Democratic nomination, that’s who is getting my vote. Right now, Joe Biden is the Democratic front runner. And he may well come out on top. But I was listening to the latest episode of Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History.” He’s on part 3 of his series on the rise of Japan in the late 19th century and its subsequent actions in World War II. He describes a scene in December 1941 as the Japanese are taking down a battleship with aircraft. It’s becoming apparent that there’s a new development in warfare. Powerful, expensive ships can be taken down by low cost, easily replaced aircraft. But that’s a bit of an aside. As relevant to the primary, Dan compared the scene to a pack of predators taking down a larger animal bit by bit. As the larger animal takes more damage, it becomes less maneuverable and the pack goes in for the kill. It made me think of the Biden campaign as compared to the pack of other Democratic contenders. Maybe that’s not how it will go — I’m terrible at these sorts of predictions — but that’s the analogy that came to mind.

For my part, I don’t mind Biden, but I like Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t have strong feelings about Bernie himself, but his online supporters have been fairly off-putting in a way that doesn’t seem nearly so common for supporters of other candidates. In a perfect world, I should be comparing policies, but Presidential campaigns are won or lost on the basis of personalities. The electorate says they care about policy, but when it comes time to vote, they mostly don’t understand the policies and have shaped their understanding of the policies to conform with their personality preferences. I may have better than average understanding of some of these issues, but ultimately, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of federal laws, rules, and regulations to truly assess the candidates’ plans beyond a pretty superficial level. Nevermind the fact that whatever they propose will have to navigate the legislative process. I’m going to have to trust that the person will do the best they can and will generally make sound decisions.

To me, Buttigieg and Warren have the deepest understanding of the issues. So far as I can tell, they both have the best interests of the country in mind. Last night, Pete gave a speech in Iowa that was very impressive. He’s still a long shot, but it made me think that this election might not be unwinnable for him.

There are thousands of people offering their takes on the Democratic primary, so I’m not sure I’m adding a lot of value to anyone’s day with this. But, writing helps me evaluate my own thinking on the subject, and I don’t feel like I’ve been doing enough writing lately. So, here you go.

The Peculiar Hoosier Opposition to the Congressional Armenian Genocide Resolution

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Those of you who have been around the Internet long enough may have some familiarity with Usenet which was a collection of newsgroups that pre-dated the World Wide Web. I first started reading some newsgroups in 1994. Something strange I noticed was a persistent and vocal posting about the Armenian Genocide. This was apparently one of the first instances of spam bots posting. It was probably counter-productive inasmuch as the spam tried to minimize or deny that the genocide had happened. I hadn’t been aware of the history at all, so what the spam did was make me curious and caused me to become aware that, during the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Turks systematically expelled and exterminated 1.5 million ethnic Armenians. Per Wikipedia:

The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases—the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.

On the recommendation of the Better-Late-Than-Never committee, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted Resolution 296 recognizing and condemning the Armenian Genocide. The resolution recounts some history and then resolves:

That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that it is the policy of the United States to—

(1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance;

(2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States Government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and

(3) encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the United States role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity.

There is nothing particularly controversial here. It passed the House 405-11. In these polarized times, it’s amazing to get that level of bipartisan support for anything. Sometimes it feels like apple pie would have trouble getting more than a 60% vote and mom might have trouble mustering a majority. But, here is the strange thing: of that 11, four of them were from Indiana. Representatives Baird, Brooks, Buschon, and Pence voted against. Fully one-third of the “nay” votes came from Indiana. Put another way, a resolution that passed with 97% nation-wide support garnered only 56% support in Indiana.

Why the particular opposition to genocide recognition among the Indiana delegation? This is not a particularly partisan thing. Republicans and Democrats alike overwhelmingly voted in favor of the resolution. This is an Indiana thing. (Representatives Baird and Pence were also on the wrong side of a 403 – 16 vote on H.R. 4695,  “sanctions and various restrictions related to Turkey’s military invasion of northern Syria.”)

Update: Adam Wren is on the case: He reports sources telling him that Indy Eleven (soccer team) and Keystone Construction (lots of public construction projects) owner, Ersal Ozdemir, who is from Turkey lobbied the Indiana delegation hard to vote “no” on the resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide. When asked, Rep. Susan Brooks didn’t deny speaking with Ozdemir and Rep. Greg “Do You Know Who My Brother Is?” Pence, also doesn’t deny speaking with Ozdemir and asserts that this vote against recognizing the genocide is somehow reflective of his confidence in Trump’s Middle East strategy.