Republicans Launch Wingnut Trench War For Open Indiana Senate Seat

Not looking good for Team Sanity, TBH.

They call it the Indiana Two Step. It's like the Texas Two Step, but with snow tires and worse food. As Governor Eric Holcomb will be term-limited out in 2024, Senator Mike Braun will vacate his US Senate seat to run for governor. And that in turn leaves a hole in the Senate, which Rep. Jim Banks is pretty sure he's the right guy to fill.

WAIT, WHO?

Look, Jim Banks may not have the knack for bug-eyed histrionics of Reps. Jim Jordan or James Comer. But make no mistake, this guy is fucking crazy, or at the very least, totally craven and willing to go pedal to the metal on culture war issues instead of governing. And there's a reason that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his nomination to the House January 6 Select Committee — not that it stopped him from cosplaying as its ranking member and sending a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland demanding information about the attack on the Capitol.

Banks isn't interested in governing, per se. He's part of a new breed of edgelord Republicans who think that misgendering trans folks is hi-freakin-larious and it's the height of sophisticated thinking to pretend that taxation is theft. Naturally he announced his candidacy by promising to banish trans athletes from sports and ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools. How he will accomplish this from the Senate he does not say.

But as Politico points out, the point here isn't to actually set out legislative priorities. Banks needs to differentiate himself from former Governor Mitch Daniels, his likeliest primary rival in what is almost certainly a safe Republican hold. Daniels, who is a full three decades older than Banks, can seem like a man out of another time — a time when Republicans had dumb ideas, but they hadn't yet lost their goddamn minds.

In 2011, Daniels called for a "truce" on social issues and for Republicans to return to championing tighter fiscal and budgetary policy.

“If you don’t believe that the American public is mortally threatened — as I do — by this one overriding problem we have built for ourselves, then of course I’m wrong,” he said. “All I was saying was, we’re going to need to unify all kinds of people, and we’re going — freedom is going — to need every friend it can get.”

Well! when you're a countermajoritarian party hanging onto power by fracturing the body politic and whose only issue is tax cuts wrapped in a neverending culture war, this aggression will not stand, man! Naturally Daniels's heresy earned him a rebuke from then Rep. Mike Pence, and made him an enemy for life of the anti-tax Club for Growth, which has grokked that the best way to drown government in the proverbial bathtub is to make sure it's totally ineffective. Toward that end, they've lined up behind Banks, promising to drop $10 million on the primary, where they're already running ads saying that Daniels is “not the right guy for Indiana anymore.”

Meanwhile, Banks promises that he'll "never be calling for a truce on social issues or cultural issues,” when Hoosiers are “looking for a fighter in the United States Senate."

Culture war today, culture war tomorrow, culture war forever. Just as white Jesus and the Founding Fathers intended.

[ Politico ]

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