IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓

Public admin/policy background. Following IN & US politics, public policy. Opinions herein are my own & do not reflect those of my employer.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff: This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand—that our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas.

Americans are not a race, we're a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions, and that is what makes us exceptional

[Ben Inskeep @Ben_Inskeep]

🚨Big scandal brewing in Indiana after the State admitted it doled out a shocking $655 million 💰💰💰 in data center sales tax exemption subsidies in 2025.

It previously had claimed it had given less than $1 million in subsidies in 2025.

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

Is this yours @NRSC?

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

The Republican Party quietly deleted their own ad attacking Ken Paxton's record on crime... because Paxton is now the Republican Party's nominee to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate.

Figured if the ad is important enough to delete, it's important enough to see...

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

@TheJFreakinC Constitutional rights are nothing more than fancy words on an old piece of paper when the government routinely violates them and also has the power to excuse its unconstitutional actions via rubber stamp at SCOTUS.

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

Please consult a property attorney ASAP. Most states have relocation assistance and property acquisition rules for eminent domain the closely resemble or mirror the federal URA.

You have a right to just compensation, a right to order your own appraisal, a right to negotiate, a right to relocation assistance in some cases, and a right to settle in court if it comes to that.

Exhaust every right you have to push back and receive actual just compensation and assistance if you can’t fight the eminent domain order itself.

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

Did Micah and TPUSA forget that the primary is just the primary…? None of the winners unseating incumbents are in the senate today.

The same senate that rejected redistricting in December 2025 isn’t going to magically change its mind before the general election this year. Odds are the newly sworn in 125th General Assembly will revisit this for the 2027 general session though.

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

Garten has become increasingly more unhinged over the past decade.
If Bray goes down and Garten takes the wheel you can expect the Senate to go from being the (slightly) more sensible chamber to another rubber stamp for the Trump admin. Hoosiers don’t need another MAGA mouthpiece shoving D.C. directives down their throats.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The Supreme Court issued the Callais ruling this morning. By afternoon a Republican senator had sent a letter to the DOJ demanding a nationwide review of minority-drawn districts. Within minutes, Harmeet Dhillon - who runs the DOJ's Civil Rights Division - replied publicly: "Senator - we are ON IT!"

Read that sequence again. The department that exists to enforce civil rights law is now using the law's gutting to go after the districts that law produced.

Schmitt's letter asks the DOJ to do four things: issue guidance implementing the ruling, reopen every existing Section 2 redistricting case, compile a nationwide list of districts drawn with race as a factor, and give California's congressional map "immediate review." The Trump DOJ had already tried to block that map in court and lost. Callais is the new legal pathway to try again.

If you are a Black or Latino voter who lives in a majority-minority district anywhere in the country, the federal government is now compiling a list that may include your district. The agency that was supposed to protect your right to representation is the one building it. The ruling dropped this morning. Dhillon replied this afternoon. That is how fast this moved.

[Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 @NickKnudsenUS]

BREAKING: This ad, when tested, moves voters 4.1 points to Democrats to win the House

That’s HUGE MOVEMENT!

Voters are angry that Trump’s judges are coming for abortion rights. Again.

You know what to do. SHARE. THIS. EVERYWHERE.

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

Can someone let the AP know that violating court orders is not a sign of "executive power. " It is a sign of contempt, lawlessness and authoritarianism.

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Matt McNally @McNally4Indiana]

It’s really pathetic that Micah Beckwith uses his position as the Lt governor to bully high school kids. It’s equally pathetic that as pastor of his own church he says nothing about the child sex abuse scandal in his church.

[Abdul-Hakim Shabazz @AttyAbdul]

In Indiana, everyone is a mandatory reporter. Every adult. No clergy exception. Reason to believe a child is abused? Call DCS (1-800-800-5556) or law enforcement. Immediately. Not after a meeting or a "restorative process." Did they pick up the phone?🔗 https://t.co/lffy9TjQjM

[John Jackson @hissgoescobra]

This has gone too far. We cannot have tech companies that are intertwined with our national security making these types of social-engineering pronouncements. If they don’t know their place and accept it, they must be brought to heel. Time to regulate.

[IN Policy Nerd🖖🏽🤓 @INpolicynerd]

I agree with you on this. Tax abatement programs are a massive drain on local and state revenues. Local legislative bodies are just as at fault as our general assembly.

When these programs are approved based on nothing more than a pledge and a pinky swear, the only one benefiting is the multimillion-dollar corp that doesn’t need actually need those incentives.

America first should mean people first, not corporations — especially ones not domiciled in Indiana!

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. #ApostolicJourney #Cameroon https://t.co/bKteFZ3iWE

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Destroying the @InternetArchive's @WayBackMachine would be the equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria - one of the worst losses of knowledge in history.

Media giants are now threatening to do this.

We can't let this happen.

Pass it on.

[Nick Offerman @Nick_Offerman]

•The U.S. Senate may hold a floor vote TODAY which would overturn a 20-year moratorium on sulfide-ore copper mining on 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest land in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) Wilderness in northern Minnesota. The Boundary Waters is the most visited Wilderness in the United States. 

🛶 Enjoying the Minnesotan/Canadian wilderness by canoe or other lesser watercraft is one of our nations greatest available pastimes, and one I have personally enjoyed my entire life. We must protect these public lands from the rapacious capitalists threatening to turn them into a poisoned wasteland.

•This vote in Congress would open the door to copper mining at the headwaters of this entire ecosystem. This kind of mining produces toxic pollution, including acid runoff and heavy metals, that can contaminate nearby waters.

•The Boundary Waters supports a major outdoor economy that sustains thousands of jobs and generates over a billion dollars a year - built on clean water and intact public lands. But this vote would clear the way for toxic mining that puts all of that at risk. It would also set a dangerous precedent, making it easier to roll back protections for public lands across the country, including wilderness areas, national monuments, and national parks. 

•This is a defining moment. If you care about clean water, public lands, and protecting places we can’t replace, now is the time to speak up.
•Protect the Boundary Waters, and vote NO on House Joint Resolution 140. Let’s save this treasured place for all of us—forever. https://t.co/JhNAR6Za2O

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

A reminder that this is how politics - and shame - is supposed to work. A politician is accused of major scandals, crimes!, and their party disowns them and they are forced out not just from a race from but from public life.
You’re not supposed to re-elect them to the presidency.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Stephen Miller has a law degree. He knows what the Tenth Amendment says.

In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Printz v. United States that the federal government cannot commandeer state and local law enforcement to enforce federal law. That’s not a liberal legal theory. It was written by Antonin Scalia. The 287(g) program - the voluntary agreement Maryland ended in February - is voluntary precisely because it has to be. States cannot be forced to participate.

Maryland’s ban on 287(g) agreements explicitly preserved cooperation with federal law enforcement for violent offenders. Governor Moore said it plainly at the signing: the law “does not prevent Maryland from working with the federal government to hold violent offenders accountable.” The Community Trust Act now moving through the final days of session requires a judicial warrant for immigration detention holds - with a carved-out exception for felony sex offenders.

A judicial warrant. The thing the Fourth Amendment requires.

What Miller is describing as “end all cooperation” is a state declining to use its own law enforcement resources as unpaid staffing for a federal agency - an agency that has fatally shot two American citizens in Minneapolis this year. Two American citizens.

This is not “mass looting of a civilization.” It is a state exercising its constitutional authority to draw a line between its own policing functions and a federal enforcement operation it has concluded violates constitutional standards.