Masson's Blog
Since I’m obviously doing a slacker’s job of keeping up with this blog so far this summer, anything of note on your mind? I just got a charcoal chimney that has been making me pretty happy during this grilling season. I guess it’s hard for me to focus on law and politics outside of work when there is beer, cooked meats, and the great out doors to enjoy.
Open thread.
Barb Berggoetz, writing for the Indy Star, has a report on the Assembly formerly known as the “Mount Vernon Assembly”. Apparently people who are part of legislatures in various states are congregating for the purpose of setting up a framework to have a Constitutional Convention to propose amendments of some sort to amend the Constitution.
State legislators from 33 states began a two-day session Thursday to develop policies and rules for holding that convention in the future. They hope to amend the U.S. Constitution in a process that bypasses Congress.
See also this earlier report where
Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, a key leader in the movement, says the nation’s growing fiscal crisis is the reason he is pursuing this approach. He believes Washington politics are so broken that solutions won’t likely come from the federal government.
This seems like such a Rube Goldberg approach. Draft the substantive language you want in the Constitution. Ask federal legislators to pass it in the traditional manner via the Congress. If that doesn’t work, and you still think it’s a good idea, then try going the State route.
The way they’re doing it, it feels like they are trying to get some momentum going before offering something unpalatable.
Mother Jones has a story on Jared Miller, the man who murdered two Las Vegas police officers as some sort delusional anti-government revolution. In that story, Miller’s comments on SB 1-2012 are referenced. SB 1-2012 was the legislature’s response to Barnes v. State wherein the Indiana Supreme Court declined to recognize a common law right to resist unlawful entry by law enforcement officers. On SB 1-2012, Miller said:
“I live in Indiana and recently a law was passed named the right to resist law. As i can make out from it, if a police officer kicks in my door and is not there legally, then I may shoot him.”
My criticism of the law then and now is that the person resisting law enforcement might have a very tenuous grip on what was legal and what wasn’t. Miller seems like a poster child for a certain willful ignorance of the law.
Jerad and Amanda (nee Woodruff) Miller are accused of killing police officers in Las Vegas, Nevada on Sunday. It appears they had moved from Lafayette, Indiana to Las Vegas this past January.
According to this write up, Jerad noted the presence of two police officers eating lunch in a pizza place, left the store then returned shortly thereafter with Amanda. Jerad shot one of the officers in the back of the head. As the other officer started to react, both opened fire on him. They apparently pinned the Gadsden Flag on the corpses of their victims. After that, they went to the Walmart next door. Jerad fired a shot and ordered everybody out saying, “this was the revolution.” One armed patron went to confront Jerad but overlooked Amanda, and she shot him in the ribs. Eventually they were in a gun battle with other police officers when Amanda apparently shot Jerad police officers appear to have shot Jerad and Amanda appears to have shot herself.
Several weeks ago, Jerad also turned up in news coverage of the Bundy Ranch standoff saying that he didn’t want violence but that if federal agents were violent, they’d be violent back. Jerad’s Facebook page is a litany of conspiracy minded, anti-government rhetoric with the last one being, “The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it.” Some of his more recent posts had to do with Benghazi, global warming skepticism, a post that echoes the “redemption” idiocy I posted about a few years ago, and a whole lot about being anti-gun control. On May 2, he posted:
There is no greater cause to die for than liberty. To die for that cause is easy, to live for it is another matter. I will willingly die for liberty. Death, in a sense is freedom from tyranny. Death, is the easy way out. Most notably is the “suicide by cop” routine. Yes, standing before despots is dangerous and most likely does not end well for you. I know this, my wife knows this. Soon they will come for us, because they don’t like what we think, and what we say. They don’t like the fact that we, simply will not submit to fascist rule. We don’t have much, but we are willing to sacrifice everything…….for you, for your freedoms. Even if you wouldn’t let us have ours. We know who we are and what we stand for, do you?
And, on March 25:
I have compromised enough. Either you stand with freedom, or you side with tyranny. There is no middle ground. We have deluded ourselves into such a notion. There is no grey area. Now, I know that some peoples definition of freedom has been compromised. Mine has not and I will not be dismissed and ridiculed because my definition of freedom may seem extreme to those who’s definition has been deluded. I stand firm in my convictions and stand prepared to die for them. Those that have been misled, are you prepared to die for yours? Or will you send hired goons to do your bidding for you? Send those impoverished by your greed to silence me? Giving them table scraps as you have no blood on your hands, yet force them to wash away thiers for the rest of their lives? The day of your judgment will come, not from my hand, for you will make me a martyr. Your judgment will come from those that will bite the hand that feeds them. Grow paranoid, and distrustful of those that protect you. They will wake up to your monarchy, they will rise in our name, those who died fighting the oppression. Those you chose to silence, like me. Come for me, free me from your slavery. Give me the death a hero deserves. Help wake the masses to your corruption and treason. I fucking dare you!
There were also a few posts favoring drug legalization. That stands to reason as he had something of a record for drug offenses in Tippecanoe County. In 79D04-1012-FD-185, he was convicted of dealing marijuana and possession of a controlled substance on April 12, 2011. He was found guilty of violating the terms of his probation on May 23, 2013. That seems to have prompted his Youtube video to Amanda when he was about to serve his time.
He complains about Community Corrections and the financing of house arrest here. (Bonus – he shows the Tippecanoe County Courthouse and calls it a “monument to authoritarianism.”)
Amanda’s Facebook page has a lot less vitriol — in fact it seems to be a more run of the mill Facebook page with a lot of cat pictures and notes about day-to-day life. Though there are a few anti-gun control posts scattered here and there. (As a father, I was especially struck by a post on her father’s Facebook page from June 5 with Amanda as a cute, smiling little girl. On June 6, she protested playfully, “why dad, why, lol?” And her father responded, “Will always think of you around this age. I think most parents try to remember their children at a favorite age.” Then a couple of days later, she’s making the national news because of a horrific murder.)
Also, they seemed to be comic book and video game fans (there were pictures from more than one occasion where he’s dressed up as The Joker and she’s dressed as Harley Quinn). From her Facebook page, we find that they moved from Lafayette to Las Vegas in January or thereabouts. She seems to have worked for Hobby Lobby and to have been a graduate of Lafayette Jefferson high school. Court records suggest that she was 23 years old and he was older, about 31, and that they were married in the fall of 2012. They posted a video outside the Tippecanoe County Courthouse participating in something called the “Million Mask March,” protesting authoritarianism.
Obviously the story is developing, but as I see it now, I don’t know that there was anything particular about Las Vegas that prompted them to start murdering innocent people out there instead of here in Lafayette. Maybe the Bundy Ranch experience elevated them a notch or two above where they were while they were in my back yard. Most people can consume the paranoid rhetoric that Jared in particular was quoting and re-posting without murdering someone. But, I suppose there is a personality type for whom being a martyr against an unmitigated evil — even an imagined one — is a better fate than living in a state of mediocrity, constantly stressed by the more ambiguous sorts of challenges most of us face in our lives.
This weekend was the state’s GOP convention, and from my casual observation, there were three matters of note that took place which were, in declining order of significance:
1. Dark horse candidate for the state Treasurer nomination Kelly Mitchell won on the third ballot. She defeated Marion mayor Wayne Seybold (the “establishment” candidate) and Don Bates (the “Tea Party” candidate). The first ballot had all of them taking roughly 1/3 of the vote. When it became clear that Bates would not win, most of his delegates jumped to the Mitchell camp. Mitchell is an employee at the Treasurer’s office. Normally, I’d say that’s a good thing for a position like this — Treasurer isn’t a position you want making headlines — it’s just one where you want the job done competently and quietly. And, maybe her experience is a good thing. My only reservation is that Richard Mourdock has been running that office for the last 8 years. I’ve had a decidedly dim view of his judgment since his self-aggrandizing nonsense with the Chrysler bankruptcy.
2. The party adopted a platform plank stating: “We believe that strong families, based on marriage between a man and a woman, are the foundation of society.” By implication, strong families based on other arrangements – same sex marriages, single parent households, widows and widowers, extended families – are second class. My thought is that strong families are to be valued no matter how they are composed. So, the culture wars will continue on that front until further notice, I suppose.
3. Not content with being known for venturing a public statement presuming to know the mind of God and his intent that a rape result in pregnancy, state Treasurer Mourdock decided to go the full Godwin in his farewell speech:
The people of Germany in a free election selected the Nazi Party because they made great promises that appealed to them because they were desperate and destitute. And why is that? Because Germany was bankrupt. . . . The truth is, 70 years later, we are drifting on the tides toward another beachhead and it is the bankruptcy of the United States of America.
. . .
Over the next several years, every time a program began to fall apart, Mr. Hitler’s party was very, very good at dividing Germany by pointing to this group or that group,” he said. “First they went after their political opponents. Then they went after the aristocrats. Then they went after the trade unionists. And ultimately of course they went after the Jews. They deprived them of their property, their rights, their citizenship, and for millions their humanity. Because they were bankrupt!”
(See also – here for quote.)
His grasp on history is clearly tenuous if he sees strong parallels between the current U.S. and 1920s and 30s Germany – reeling as it was from the horrors of World War I and the burdens of Allied reparations. But, really, you don’t have to be a scholar to avoid these sorts of missteps. If you’re a public official and you are thinking of saying something about rape and Nazis other than to observe they are evil. Just don’t. Come up with a non-rape, non-Nazi way to make your point. (Pro-tip: slavery too.)
Tom LoBianco, writing for the Associated Press, has a story on the lobbying within the state Republican Party on the subject of marriage equality in advance of the party convention. Some want to include a plank that prefers heterosexual marriage. Others want to leave that plank out.
At question is whether the party’s platform, its official statement of party values, should oppose gay marriage. The fight to win over the roughly 1,700 Republican delegates to the convention has been waged with the trappings of a professional campaign: Postcards and fliers have been hitting mailboxes, and volunteers have been calling delegates for close to two weeks now.
The ever-present Jim Bopp is confident that the marriage clause will make it into the platform. Megan Robertson, who led the campaign for Freedom Indiana opposing SJR 3/6, is working to keep the language out of the platform.
Cheryl Musgrave, a delegate out of Vanderburgh County (and former head of the Department of Local Government Finance) is quoted as saying:
“Our party platform should have broad-based support and concentrate on issues involving lower taxes and smaller government. I don’t believe the marriage debate is an appropriate thing for a party platform to be discussing.”
The convention is this weekend, so I guess we’ll see how that shakes out.
The Indiana Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Ponce v. State (pdf) overturning a conviction based on a plea agreement where the defendant in Elkhart County did not speak English and was advised of his rights through a faulty translation.
The Supreme Court found that the translation was so inadequate that the defendant could not be said to have meaningfully understood and waived his rights. It further observed that meaningful access to the courts requires that the accused actually be able to understand what’s being said.
This is an issue confronted by all state courts to one degree or another. It’s my understanding that translators are engaged by the courts on a county-by-county basis. Seems like the General Assembly might consider establishing (and funding) a state translators’ office administered by the Indiana Supreme Court which would certify the translators as: a) being competent translators; and b) having a working understanding of the judicial process such that they can communicate those concepts to a defendant. Those translators would then be made available to the state courts in the various counties. Some courts and languages could justify a more or less permanent assignment to one county or another. Others don’t have the volume, but if the demand was aggregated statewide the result might be a more efficient allocation of translator resources.
If I was in the habit of dumping my trash in the neighbor’s lawn rather than paying to have it removed from my house, I would have a rational motivation for resisting passage of anti-dumping laws. I’d still be kind of a jerk, but I’d have my reasons.
That’s kind of how I think of Indiana officials when I read that they plan on resisting anti-emission rules by the EPA designed to reduce pollution.
“Indiana ranked seventh among the states in coal production in 2012, and coal-fired electric power plants provided about 84% of Indiana’s net electricity generation in 2013,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration website.
. . .
So when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule Monday for reducing carbon emissions by as much as 30 percent, Hoosier officials lashed back.
“Indiana will oppose these regulations using every means available,” Gov. Mike Pence said in a statement.
“The EPA’s proposed rules amount to a backdoor energy tax that will damage Indiana’s economy and hike electric bills for all Hoosiers,” Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., said in a statement.
I sympathize with the pain this sort of thing might cause, but when your business model relies on dumping your trash on someone else, it’s not a good business model. Externalizing your costs means you are imposing them on someone else who isn’t necessarily a party to your transaction — this distorts the price of your product, artificially lowering it because of the involuntary subsidy being provided by the third party (in this case, all the people breathing the air and paying for the environmental consequences of the emissions.) And, because the price is distorted, it sends bad signals to the marketplace, creating incentives for suboptimal economic activity.
Rather than bellyaching, Indiana’s lawmakers should figure out ways to help Indiana’s energy and other businesses shift to a more sustainable business model.
I came in touch with Chris primarily through his work with the Hoosier Beer Geek a fine website that, near as I can figure, I first mentioned on my blog in early 2007. The rise of Indiana brewing and Indiana blogs seemed to coincide, and Chris was involved with both. I was sad to hear of Chris’s passing. After a struggle with cancer, Chris died at the age of 37. Jim has posted a moving remembrance at the HBG site. My condolences to his friends and family.
(H/t Ben and Derrick). About eleven miles north of Richmond, near Bethel, tower the commanding heights of Hoosier Hill. At 1,257 feet, the hill stands an imposing 30 feet or so above the surrounding country side.
But this proud land feature is in danger of being usurped.
Indiana’s new high point?
Atlas Obscura reports:
Hoosier Hill was also the final state high point visited by A.H. Marshall, the first person to ascend all 50. However with the land being as flat as it is in Eastern Indiana, there was been some controversy in recent years as a landfill in neighboring Randolph County has requested permission to stack its garbage above Hoosier Hill’s elevation, thus potentially making the highest point a peak of refuse. It is unknown whether the garbage pile has bested Indiana’s natural peak, but it certainly is not as well cared for.