Brian Howey

I ran into Mark Souder at the Fort Wayne City-County Building just days before the 1994 Republican 4th CD primary. I didn’t know him very well. I asked him about his prospects. What followed was about a seven-minute instant analysis, going down to a granular, precinct level. On Election Night, he won a crowded primary,…

U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn was at a conference in Hungary when a coup d’etat toppled Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1991. A Soviet contact called him. “You’ve got to get over here,” Nunn was told. “Big things are happening; great opportunities and huge dangers.” Once in Moscow, Nunn would spend half a…

During the closing minutes of a podcast with The Bulwark’s Mona Charen last week, Mitch Daniels once again speculated on his tombstone epitaph: “He raised four wonderful daughters and reformed the BMV.” By Sunday, the Frugal Hoosiers for Mitch Twitter feed appeared to revise its intent: “#runmitchrun … for Governor … or President would be…

On Sept. 15, about five weeks after the male-dominated Indiana General Assembly passed and Gov. Eric Holcomb signed some of the most sweeping abortion restrictions in the nation, SEA1 goes into effect. Some of the reactions have been predictable. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to block the new law and, in a second…

Three weeks ago, the FBI recovered hundreds of pages of top secret documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort, some from U.S. intelligence human sources. If you or I or David Petraeus or Sandy Berger had hoarded these documents, we would be facing federal felony charges, and, with a law signed by President Trump in 2018…

 This past month, Indiana was bookended by two “thousand year” floods, coming in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky, in which at least 37 people were killed. This comes on the heels of a July 6 rainfall event in Fort Wayne that yielded nine inches, as well as a June 13 derecho that snapped hundreds of…

For a delegation that easily logs more than a million highway miles every year, Wednesday’s news of the death of U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski and staffers Zachery Potts and Emma Thomson was a staggering, drop-to-your-knees moment of shock and then overwhelming grief. Lee Hamilton once told me it could take him five-hours to cross the…

Mike Pence and I used to compare career notes at Acapulco Joe’s back in the days when he was beginning his radio show and I, Howey Politics Indiana. In 2010, I wrote that the congressman should run for president, saying it might be his best and only opportunity. Then there was Aug. 8, 2019 column,…

With the Indiana General Assembly and Gov. Eric Holcomb on the precipice of historic abortion restrictions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court rendering Roe v. Wade moot with its Dobbs ruling, the architect of what happens beyond July 25 will likely be Terre Haute attorney James Bopp Jr. Asked if he is currently…

Democracy. Republic. Sedition. Treason. Obstruction. Inflation. Stagflation. Recession. These are the terms that are driving our politics of today. After Indiana Republicans struck the word “democracy” from their convention platform last month, replacing it with “republic,” I thought it would be altogether appropriate to review the definitions of these words in the context of today’s…