Brian Howey

To the congressional Republican rank and file, Democrats today are often described as “radical leftists” or “socialists” and even “Marxists.” There have been Hoosier Republicans who described Democrats as partisans who “don’t love our country.” I would have loved to have seen the reaction to this type of criticism from the last Indiana Democratic governor,…

In March 2022, Gov. Eric Holcomb vetoed a transgender athletics bill that quite possibly could end his political career. In his veto letter, Holcomb said that the legislation was a “solution” for a problem that didn’t exist in Indiana. “It implies that the goals of consistency and fairness in competitive female sports are not currently…

Let’s crank up the CPAC time machine. On March 20, 1981, there stood President Ronald Reagan, who told the Conservative Political Action Conference, “We’ve come to a turning point. We have a decision to make. Will we continue with yesterday’s agenda and yesterday’s failures, or will we reassert our ideals and our standards, will we…

By BRIAN A. HOWEY I am a descendent of two Hoosiers who fought in the American Civil War. Two of my great-great grandfathers enlisted in Indiana regiments to preserve the United States. When an emerging Republican congressional “leader” – U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – used “Presidents Day” to call for a “national…

When Vice President Joe Biden met with Russian President Putin at the Kremlin in March 2011, he recounted, “I looked into his eyes and I said, ‘I don’t think you have a soul.’” To which Putin responded, “We understand one another.” When ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asked President Biden years later, “You think he’s…

Perhaps it was poll after poll showing congressional approval hovering around 18%. Or that he never had that horde mentality; Mitch Daniels has been for the past three decades the leader of the pack. Or, perhaps, it was the Cooperstown busts of two native Hoosiers – Major League Baseball commissioners Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Ford…

I spent my first 10 years living in Michigan City, which is 35 nautical miles from Chicago. I was a Cold War kid. Our bogeyman was Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who made a lasting impression when he took off his shoe at the United Nations, hammering the podium while threatening to “bury” the U.S.…

In the coming days or weeks, Mitch Daniels will make a decision about whether to return to politics by running for the Senate seat Mike Braun is vacating to seek the open governor seat. After serving as White House budget director, then two terms as Indiana governor followed by a decade at the helm of…

When it comes to switching parties, the list is a long one and recently dominated by the Southland, which in the wake of the 1965 Great Society Voting Rights Act prompted an overt migration from the Democratic to the Republican party, as President Lyndon B. Johnson aptly predicted. The list includes some titanic American figures,…

When my State Affairs Indiana colleague Kaitlin Lange asked Gov. Eric Holcomb what he was playing on his Spotify music list, he responded, “Feeling Stronger Every Day” by the legendary rock band Chicago. It was a revealing answer because after U.S. Sen. Mike Braun announced he would seek the open governor’s seat in 2024, I…