BLM Republicans
By Richard Moss
AmericanThinker.com
July 22, 2020
I watched the interview of my friend and former political opponent, Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, on the Tucker Carlson show recently regarding the topic of BLM and police reform. I know Senator Braun because we are both from Jasper, Indiana, a small town in south-central Indiana, population of 15,000. Braun is an immensely successful businessman whose company employs more than 600 individuals. I came to know Mike when we ran against one another for the state representative seat for Indiana’s 63rd district in 2014. We spoke before the same audiences and sat at the same tables. We discussed issues and philosophies. He defeated me handily.
I would not describe him as a movement conservative, which meant he was likely to move leftward once ensconced in D.C. after winning the Senate seat in 2018. He favored lower taxes and large deductibles for health insurance coverage. All well and good, but limited. Beyond that, I felt he knew little. Not on national or international matters, on energy or immigration. Nor on cultural issues, which Republicans have ignored, to the nation’s detriment, for decades. Braun provided a clue of the direction he would take when in his very first year in the Senate he joined with Senator Chris Coons, (D-DE) to form the first Senate bipartisan caucus on “finding solutions to ‘climate change.’” Not a good start, Mike. Still, I thought, in most ways, at least, he would have conservative, common-sense instincts as a Jasper man, Midwesterner, and successful businessman.
As many have seen, I could not have been more wrong. Braun’s response to the post-George Floyd rioting was to introduce a bill named the “Reforming Qualified Immunity Act.” This bill would have taken aim at “qualified immunity,” which protects police from frivolous lawsuits pursued in the regular discharge of an officer’s duties. Braun, in so doing, was accepting the BLM-leftist premise that one of the significant problems confronting blacks in America was the statistically invalid claim that there is widespread police brutality targeting blacks. He neglected to mention the exploding rates of black out-of-wedlock childbirth, welfare dependency, educational failure, drug addiction, criminality, incarceration, and the formation of an entrenched black underclass since the Great Society. Braun felt that cops needed to be held accountable. He brought up the cases of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor. He signaled his support for Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization that has called for the killing of police and the abolition of the “Western-prescribed nuclear family.”
The Rest…HERE
