Inside Mike Braun's next moves

Indiana's junior senator on a possible gubernatorial bid, what he hopes to accomplish next, and what happened on January 6.

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Mike Braun is still finding his place in Washington.

Coming up on two years since his November 2018 win, the Indiana Republican is still weighing whether he wants to be in D.C. for a second term or return to Indiana to run for governor in 2024.

One recent late afternoon at Books & Brews in Zionsville, in a socially distanced interview, Braun told me he finds the dynamic in Washington “frustrating”—Congress, after all, moves slower than the speed of the business world that he occupied as the CEO of Meyer Distributing, a truck accessories company. “There's just a lot more that you can directly measure,” he told me (Braun declined a beer, but said he could use one).

But there are some things that can be measured. In the 116th Congress, for example, Braun touted nine bills signed into law, nine provisions signed into law via larger bill packages, and four approved resolutions. His proudest accomplishments: The creation of the Climate Change Caucus and a measure that increases transparency and access to group health plans (enacted as part of H.R. 133, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021, Public Law No: 116-260).

There are times, too, where Braun has seemed uncertain of himself, whether it was backing down on qualified immunity reform in 2020, or acknowledging Joe Biden as president-elect on December 14 only to reverse himself and express support for voting against certification of Electoral College results only to reverse himself again after the Capitol siege, and ultimately voting for certification.

In a wide-ranging interview, Braun said he accepted no culpability for Jan. 6, sounded off on a potential run for Indiana governor in 2024, and explained his hopes for legislative accomplishments throughout the next year. (The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length).

In interviews, you have at times conceded that you’ve accomplished little in Washington due to impeachment and contending with the coronavirus. What accomplishment are you most proud of during your time in office so far?

So when we compiled what exactly made it through, we had nine bills that covered a wide gamut. I'm guessing the nine free-standing bills would be a decent accomplishment, especially the fact that we only really had a year. It was not completely occupied by impeachment and COVID, and I've got a great team legislatively in D.C. Probably what I got the most interest in would have been starting the climate caucus. That's done from a deep interest in conservation and climate.

You’re a tree farmer.

Yep, and I still do that as my therapy for my new job, but I started doing that back in the late Eighties. And also involved with farming to the extent you can be. And those work hand in hand.

You passed a measure to increase transparency and access to group health plans.

That'd be the number one [accomplishment]. That's the one that I spent the most time and effort on, and there's a lot that can actually be done bipartisan on that subject once we get down to business here this year.

I sometimes get the sense that the Senate has been frustrating for you as a self-described “doer,” as a businessman, not seeing a lot of movement in Washington on priorities that matter to you. Are you happy in the Senate?

I knew that getting into it, so that still is frustrating. Because when you’ve been a CEO of something and also our chief financial officer for all those years, there's just a lot more that you can directly measure. Here, I got into politics at this level because I was frustrated that I did not see enough of that kind of ability to take knowledge of a subject and translate it into something that was going to work better, make more sense. All the work I did in my company that reformed healthcare, it could work for government. When I tell that story, almost anyone that listens to it is amazed by what it accomplished. (Braun "held premiums flat for ten years for his employees," according to his website.)¹

And a lot of that, if you can get through the labyrinth of obvious invested interests…you can get into conversations like this and get legislation through when you're really not chairing a committee. I haven't been there long. Most of that occurs after you've been there at least a term or two, and a lot of that has to do with, I think I've got a really good team there that knows how to get us in a position to get stuff done. A lot of this didn't happen until late in this year when stuff finally made it through. And when something does start to move like an appropriation bill Covid package, you've got the opportunity for good ideas latch on to it.

Republicans I talk to here in Indiana say that you're interested in running for governor in 2024. Is that true?

I'm going to tell you this. As hard as it was to get into the arena, I'm going to stay involved in politics until I view that there's no marginal return left in doing it. Also weighing the chronology, the clock, too, because most ask why I didn't retire. Of course I'll never do that. I've got too many interests, things that I do, even if I weren't in politics. But I'm going to carefully measure where I can have the most impact, and then stay involved until I'm either fatigued of it or find out that it's not worth the time to do it.

Do you accept any culpability for what happened on January 6th at the Capitol?

In what regard? For being a Republican?

No. You made some very high profile comments in November and December about election fraud. You blamed reporters², you went on George Stephanopoulos and propagated what many are objectively calling the “big lie.” Do you feel like you were honest with Indiana voters about the 2020 election results?

Sure, because it was never for that purpose. And my only interest had nothing to do with propagating a lie, nothing to do with subverting democracy, or overturning an election. That is what was attributed to anyone that thought that you may want to have some type of independent look into any irregularity, anything that was a mess to track it down as being not worth considering, or something that you might want to at least look at. And in the context mostly of maybe doing it through not from the Senate or from a national government, because is the bailiwick of states anyway, for election law.

What changed, though? Because at the beginning of December, you issued a statement recognizing Joe Biden as the duly elected president of the United States.³ And then a few weeks later, you said that you were going to vote against certification.

I just said that there were two thresholds. One was the state's certifying, that was December 14 if I recall, and man counting of the electoral votes, which is a perfunctory function and never was any of us that did have a formal objection out there was it with the intent of doing anything to overturn. It was mostly about doing what you do often when you make a statement, it's to say that maybe the issue doesn't end there. Todd Young and I had both spoke to a group from Bartholomew County, I don't know if you saw that.

What did you tell this group differently than Sen. Young?

Rebecca Tan @rebtanhs

Republican senators are being swarmed by Trump protesters on the Hill. Here’s an exasperated @SenToddYoung saying he won’t vote against certifying the election. “I took oath under God... does that still matter in this country?”

I told them that they... Because Todd was really wrestling with that. He had not spoken out about any irregularities at all, and irregularity is not anything proven. It's just something that you might have a concern about, and I told them that nothing is going to happen to them including the issuance of an objection. And they understood, or it was their thinking that first of all, vice president Pence could do something, and I said that there's nothing he can do. I said any of us that are objecting, it has no chance of actually occurring.

One of the media outlets in DC when they heard that a couple of weeks earlier said that was cynical. I didn't think it was cynical, I thought it was just keeping a concern alive that was going to not get fixed through the jurisdiction of courts between the election on either the 14th or January 6th. And now if you read who's doing what, there are some legislatures that are not only looking at that, they're also looking at... Georgia for instance, is looking at the phone call to Trump.

And to me, when you come through an election that was so different from what any recent election had been and you dig deeper into it, a lot of it was local election commissions and jurisdictions that legally changed the rules that may not have been constitutional and that's what legislators need to look at.

None of it could have overturned the results of the election at that end. Anybody that said that and if it was interpreted from something that I did say was never my intention.

So you accept no culpability for what happened on January 6th?

No, because why would one individual have anything to do... I was appalled by what occurred, and I stated that, if you listen to what I told the folks from Columbus.

Then why did you change your vote at the last minute on January 6th?

Because I didn't think it was going to get litigated and people were actually thinking that it could. And with what happened, it didn't make sense to push forward on something that was punctuated in that way and that clearly was going to be taken up if there were issues by the individual states.

What big legislative to-do items are you hoping to cross off your list the rest of this year?

So number one, what would you cite as a big legislative accomplishment? I mean, I haven't seen one since I've been there.

The biggest one that was ballyhooed in addition to the one that went through without a democratic bill that I think was most impactful for what we'll measure now when you look at the Biden agenda, was the Jobs Act and Tax Cut in December of '17.

When it comes to a major accomplishment, I don't think you're going to find many of them unless you would use reconciliation, because those are major differences in, impacting fiscal policy, because it's got to be related to that or else it runs into the Byrd rule where it's not germane, that's why the minimum wage discussion…Biden's even been on record recently that he didn't think that's going to make it through in a final COVID package. When you go beyond reconciliation, I think I'm going to be involved as much as any Senator there, even ones that have been there a long time, because I've led on the two biggest issues that are out there.

Number one, still the high cost of healthcare in that we've got a broken system. One side wants to bring more government into play. I'd like to reform the system first. I think I'm going to get enough Democrats and Republicans to go along to where we'll do some healthcare reform bills that would be a prelude to whatever they may want to do, and then it's a question of whether they're going to, or anything more significant, get rid of the filibuster to do it. And in climate, one of the first bills that could get through would be the growing Climate Solutions Bill that's already bipartisan.

Debbie Stabenow is now the committee chair. She and I are the lead authors on it. And it, especially among your generation, seems to be more important than healthcare. And I can see among young conservatives it drew a lot of attention as well as from farmers, evangelicals, and some that make up the conservative side of the ledger.

1. There were questions during the 2018 Senate campaign about the efficacy of the healthcare Braun offered his own employees, according to POLITICO.

2. In an editorial, Braun wrote that the media “fundamentally failed the public by refusing to investigate any question about the integrity of widespread mail-in voting.”

3. Braun acknowledged Biden’s victory on December 14.