In this edition of IMPORTANTVILLE, scroll down for the deets on how Sens. Todd Young and Mike Braun are bucking their own party, intra-party drama in the Marion Country Democratic Party involving City-County Council President Vop Osili and Marion Country Democratic Party Chair Kate Sweeney Bell, as well as which former staffer for Todd Rokita is now working for Florida Governor and 2024 hopeful Ron DeSantis.
Indiana’s U.S. Senators Todd Young and Mike Braun are frequently derided on Hoosier Twitter as lackeys of Donald Trump’s Republican party, but the reality is further from those caricatures.
Consider their actions within the last week.
For starters, both distanced themselves from the Republican National Committee’s Jan. 6 resolution that labeled the events of that day as "legitimate political discourse.” That was the same resolution that RNC General Counsel and Indiana Republican Party Chairman Kyle Hupfer defended in an interview with me as he boarded a plane from the Salt Lake City gathering on his way back home to Indianapolis.
“I don’t know any American that regards that as ‘legitimate political discourse,’” Young told CNN recently. “I certainly haven’t encountered them here in the state of Indiana. That is a fringe group.”
“That’s not normal political discourse just like it wasn’t normal political discourse in all the riots we had in 20 or 30 cities when you’re burning businesses down,” Braun told the Anderson Herald Bulletin. (Former Vice President Mike Pence tried to thread the needle like Hupfer, arguing that the resolution applied to people who weren’t in D.C. that day and yet still find themselves targets of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation. “I just don't know too many people around the country, including my friends at the RNC and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who have any different views than it was a tragic day,” he said this week.)
And then there was Braun pressing his Balanced Budget Amendment ahead of a possible government shutdown as Senate leaders struggled to forge a spending deal through March 11. (They ultimately did, but Braun’s amendment failed 47-45.)
As he championed the amendment in a call with Indiana press, Braun criticized virtually all of his fellow Senate Republicans. “Our side gives [balanced budgets] lip service, but [it’s] very unlikely that we roll up our sleeves and do it,” Braun told reporters.
I asked Braun whether he would be willing to raise taxes in addition to cutting expenses to fully remedy the national debt. He seemed to signal an openness to the idea. “It’s a really good question,” he told me. “When you got low taxes and a strong economy, you get more economic growth that way. But if you try the high-tax route, you get tepid economic growth. If we take a combination of both, most here are only interested in growing the economy faster than our debt, because the withdrawal symptoms that would probably take place when you're this heavily in debt and it gets harder every year going forward.”
Flexing his own independence, Young, meanwhile, sat for an interview with Democratic messaging guru David Axelrod, formerly the head of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago (Young is an alum of the Booth School there). Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, praised Young throughout the interview in a way that might’ve made his Democratic challenger Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott Jr wince. Axelrod praised Young as a “serious person” at least three times, as Young frequently criticized his own party.
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