the long session of the 126 Indiana General Assembly officially concluded one week ago it was House and Senate chambers burning midnight oil so that they could wrap themselves around a forty four and a half billion dollar state budget.

>> That bill leads to a list of more than two hundred and fifty other pieces of legislation approved over the four month session among the measure signed by Governor Eric Holcomb those that will allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control establish a pilot program for speed cameras and work zones automatically enroll middle school students in the state's 21st Century Scholars program and exempt military members from paying state income taxes.

There were bills passed that impact the LGBTQ people in the state provided a process of banned books deemed obscene from public school libraries provide a state funded handgun training program for teachers and expand County Health Department Services to improve Hoosiers health rankings in areas like obesity, smoking and life expectancy.

Well tonight we'll ask our guests about their legislative takeaways on this second program reviewing the recent General Assembly session.

And welcome to Prime Time.

I'm Bruce Haines and with us today our friend McKissic, editorial page editor for the Journal Gazette, Leo Morris with the Indiana Policy Review and Andy Downs, director emeritus of the Mike Down Center for Indiana Politics at Purdue Fort Wayne .

And as always we invite you to join the conversation.

>> You have a question or comment as usual the number that you see on the screen as we widen out and we are all here.

>> Look at that.

That's why your TV is rectangular.

We have Andy Downs, Fred McKissic, William Morris and gentlemen, thank you very much for being here.

>> Well, thank you for reading all two hundred and fifty two past bills already.

Yes.

Yeah we are out of time.

>> So appreciate that.

And a highlight is in the mind of the beholder and we'll figure out what yours all are too.

>> But we should probably start with the end in mind which is the reason they call these budget sessions.

>> We talked about that about four months ago now four months later there is a budget.

Governor Holcomb is calling it a generational impact budget, a blueprint for growth.

>> Let me take you all in order and ask you what do you call the budget that was built in?

>> I call it really big.

I mean forty four billion dollars we were talking about this right before we went on air.

I used to have students put together a budget as part of an exercise in class and break them into a House and the Senate and make them form the committees put together a budget by broad categories.

I went back to check an earlier version of this and in 2013 the budget they were putting together was twenty nine billion dollars and it is now forty four billion dollars.

>> That is a huge increase in revenue for a state like Indiana.

It's a very, very significant increase in revenue.

And the question is what are you going to do when you get that much money?

Clearly they did spend some money.

I'm not going to get too much into the expenditures right now because I'm sure we'll talk about that more later.

But for me one of the big surprises was all that talk about looking at whether or not we should cut taxes one way or another sort of evaporated.

And there was there was this big talk that we're going to look at all the tax structure we're going to give you your money back, et cetera, et cetera and then just a little bit of tweaking around the edges for it.

I was really thrilled with the health care funding that came out of this budget.

I mean the fact that it was you know, wanted to the governors what the governor was looking at and while the governor didn't get what he totally wanted, the fact that they you know, the Senate in the House really took it seriously said a lot.

I mean what was it we rank 48th in public health care funding.

Thirty six dollars per person around the state around the United States I think is ninety one dollars many Waldron of the Allen County Health Department told us a couple of weeks ago that it was sixteen dollars here in one county.

So getting that funding is really important and we're talking about helping with infant mortality which Allen County has really bad.

You know, horrible infant mortality issue, children's health smoking, obesity issues.

I wish that we had come up with a tax for cigarets to help continue to pay for smoking cessation succession programs as well as anti tobacco programs and vaping is going to become a bigger and bigger issue.

But I have to say give it the thumbs up for where it would happen.

I would generally agree with thumbs up as Andy said, they fiddled with taxes here and there, you know, income tax down a little bit.

Gas tax up a little bit.

>> But overall Hoosiers will come out of hand on the tax and and they are spending a lot of money but they are doing some good things with it in public health , especially with gratified to see the mental health funding lagging in that for a long time and especially the addition of mobile crisis teams because that might take the pressure off police departments who sometimes don't have the wherewithal to deal with situations involving mental health .

If I have a big gripe and I talked earlier and I give the impression to be a solid B but my gripe is when we spend big money they don't follow through and see how it's working.

They're spending a large chunk of the public education money is going to expand the choice program and I have no trouble with choice and providing an alternative to public schools but they're throwing an awful lot of money on it and they tend not to look at it and say why did we get for that same thing economic development they're spending over a billion dollars on that large chunk of it going to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation which is a quasi public agency that doesn't have to they can avoid a lot of public scrutiny.

So again, you know, I want better schools.

I think you can get in through choice.

I want a good economy at but they're worried that they're throwing a lot of money at something and not going back later and seeing what we got for it.

>> And speaking of a lot of money, it was like a tale of two revenue forecasts from December to April.

>> I read that the narrative was totally rewritten, the April number almost doubling what came out in December.

>> But what people should remember is it wasn't that long ago that we had a long stretch of budget projections being wrong in the other direction.

We failed to hit them month after month after month after month.

Now we're in a situation where the estimates have been pretty conservative but they're coming in ahead.

And so yeah, we suddenly we're looking at a lot of money that we didn't know we were going to have hence forty four billion dollars to spend in a year and even with that an opportunity to accelerate state income tax reduction while there's a commission coming together to take a look and find out if we can really live without all of it, I don't think that'll happen honestly.

You know, it's never just a matter of eliminating a tax.

You either have to keep the revenue stream the same which means increasing other taxes or bite the bullet and cut spending which is also difficult.

So I suspect they'll keep dribbling, you know, a cut of percent here and a percent there.

>> But I don't think it's ever going to go anywhere.

Fred, you heard Leo give the legislature a grade and we can work within our grading system.

Where do you come in on overall between budget building and the other 250 plus measures that have moved to governors?

>> Yeah, it was a twenty two percent of the bills that were introduced.

We passed a boy this is really difficult B minus B minus C plus I mean show your work.

>> Yeah well like I said when we were talking earlier there are things for me that I thought were really good like health care funding and 21st century scholars I thought was one of the smartest things they had done, particularly when you look at what businesses are saying about why they would like to build in Indiana but need a you know, more educated workforce that helps out a lot.

I think, you know, the school textbooks piece something that people didn't really, you know, dig into but I thought was fantastic.

>> I moved here and you know, I was like what we're paying for textbook fees.

We were one of the one of eight states now down to seven things.

>> Yeah, yeah.

I was like this but it was good that we did it.

But I like that we've left it as an actual line item so it's like we wanted to tell everybody who reads the budget see look we're not we're not making you pay for textbooks any longer.

>> It's a line item.

It's here.

Right.

That brings up a good point.

We've been talking about huge sums of money sometimes what's the most impact can come from the smaller amounts just a few million for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library which will provide books for kids of zero to five good quality books which means since kids five don't read much that their parents will have to read to them which is probably the single best way to get kids ready for school on the negative side something that doesn't a drop in the bucket when it comes to budget humongous raises for the governor or lieutenant governor and top elected officials.

>> Hey, you know in the what, 40 to 80 percent range?

I mean that's that's without any discussion tank thrown in at the last minute and the argument that I'm without that money we can't get good people to run for office.

Right.

And we're not going to attract the quality of governor we want if we don't unless we give them a sixty percent raise that that really did some no.

>> I mean once again it was look to me the big problem I think we would agree with this and I know transparency we'll just talk it in here and this is what we had to do when they should have had the debate out in the open and that would have made much more sense.

>> And I you know, it's interesting in the midst of this you've said this on several programs that it's never over till it's over pieces of legislation that appear dead resurrect and find themselves attached to another bill may be germane but maybe just germane enough.

>> And we had that regarding the notion with Senate Bill twelve hit the hit the rocks the language about whether or not books in school libraries would would be seen as obscene or inappropriate.

>> It's still found its way through.

Well, germaneness first of all is in the eye of the beholder.

We have to keep that in mind and the chambers have had differing versions of germaneness over the years.

>> But once we get to that moment of conference committee when when a bill passes either chamber or both chambers but it's different form, it automatically goes to a conference committee in most cases I should say go to a conference committee where they try to work out the differences between the two bills.

The reality is at that point as long as you're talking about the same subject matter, what's in the bill can just completely disappear.

I was talking with somebody who was watching her first session earlier this year.

She was asked me about conference committee.

I said well this is how it works.

I said it's a magical place because we're never quite sure what will happen in there.

And she was like, well why are you saying that?

Then she called me back after conference committee and she said You're right, it's true.

It's a magical place and she actually used that legislation or that language as an example of that when when we get to the crunch time unfortunately unless you are in Indianapolis in the building talking with legislators, it becomes really difficult for us to follow what's happening in the early part of the session.

It's easier to keep track of legislation.

It's easy to see what's happening to bills and where things are moving.

But in the end, boy, that's a lot of stuff that just sort of happens in hallways and I'm not saying they're violating any laws.

It's just they're trying to get stuff done in a hurry so they start talking to each other in smaller and smaller groups.

They come to agreements and legislation comes out at least with the library bill however else we might agree or disagree about it, it was something that had been talked about and thoroughly debated.

Nobody was surprised at what was in it, whether they agreed with it or not.

The thing about the salaries was no discussion.

>> It just came out of the blue and it was a complete surprise to everybody.

Well, I was thinking last year with the permanently carry legislation that stripped it stripped it out of the bill about marijuana and having a study group and you know, suddenly it was there and I'm like who wanted this?

>> I mean, you know, all of the data said we don't want this the state police association.

We don't want it.

You know I didn't want it but hey, we have a route to take so they took the route.

Yeah, You know, it's just shocking sometimes what comes out of that.

>> You know, we go back to the start of the budget building session and hearing comments along the side that said let's focus on the importance of the bricks and mortar of why we're here.

Let's give social issues a rest and it's education, the economy, it's workforce development.

>> Yeah, you seem surprised.

Not so much.

Yes.

Yeah, well that's going to happen every session there were there have been a couple of sessions.

Governor Daniels of course as we all remember said hey, let's try to get our get get rid of the social issues.

Let's focus on let's put them on the back seat for a while.

Let's focus on the economic issues because we are an economic hard position.

Our position economically I should say and there were a couple of other years where they said we can kind of put this.

I think that I think David Long I think Brian Bosma did a pretty good job of pacing those things out.

But the reality is there was sort of a pent up frustration coming, building, building, building.

A lot of legislators began to say wait a minute, you told me I'd get my chance and now as you look at legislators coming in who are a little bit less respectful of tradition saying the bill I'm going to get it introduced and by the way, I have to be a chair of a committee so I'm going to make sure it gets a hearing or I know somebody who's chair of a committee.

I'm going to get it a hearing.

So I think that's part of the reason the leadership might want to stay away from those issues.

But the reality is between the legislators who are there, between what they're hearing from their constituents, what we're hearing nationwide because we really have taken a lot of national issues and brought them down to the state level bam those things are going to show up whether you want them to or not.

>> But you know, it's you know, looking the gender firming care issue you know you want these debates to be like, you know, the West Wing or you know, Kaito appears and Cicero and Barbara Jordan, you know Sam Ervin and then what you get is a Simpsons episode where oh I was it during the testimony they failed to find a single instance of a child receiving surgical intervention, a single instance.

But yet you would think that you know, you can you know, go to Jiffy Lube and you know, get the car done and get the kid done the way they had presented it out.

That to me is a sign that we have to have an issue that galvanizes people in a very negative way rather than galvanizing people in a very positive way.

Mental health , you know, all sorts of issues that they could have done.

But there's this and I don't think we look good doing it and future generations are going to look back at this and shake their heads and wonder what the problem was.

>> Let me just say part of that is the reality of how we play the game of politics right now.

>> We we do not expect to have a long, wonderful debate on the floor any longer between candidates.

What we expect now is for people to fight with one another which of course riles up the base which is good if you're running for office and it depresses turnout between among those who are in the middle.

>> Right and for people who are running for office as bad as this sounds, that's a good thing because now they just have to worry about whether there are enough people in their base to win an election or not and if there are, then they are incentivized to actually try to get people talking about the negative thing and not the positive thing, right?

>> Yeah, Your take on this?

>> Oh, I have a little bit different take on some of the social issues which is there is there is a I don't I hate to use such rhetoric but a war or battle or a contest of wills between two different visions on when comes to social issues and it's OK to say this isn't you know, there is a bad book in the library here that there's surgery isn't done here.

It is happening in other places and so you can't just say what's not happening here.

You have to argue the issue by issue.

Is it good or bad?

>> And conservatives, if I may put in a word for them don't really initiate they react.

So if they're reacting, they're reacting to something which and you can't tell me if the Democrats had a supermajority they wouldn't be introducing stuff on the other side of these social issues.

You just you won't convince me that we can't know.

>> Well, we don't get well people people are people you know they're going to behave in predictable ways.

>> But I think we agree on a number of things which might shock people.

>> But but when it comes to social issues again, the pathos parts of me come out and I look at miscegenation, you know, the fact that I could not have married my wife of twenty five years we've been together because of state laws that were constructed around the idea of keeping the social order again.

I mean I understand that we can have these debates and have these discussions but you know, it's not there really to save anything.

It seems to be there to like you said and to rile up the base.

I'm I would love to have a discussion with somebody about a social issue where we go back and forth and have this.

But if your discussion really is I need votes, I need money really bastardizes your position.

I think when I could have a great discussion about it but then we don't have much power.

>> Let me let me allow you to have a concluding thought on no we can argue this we can have this another half hour because we're going to have seven hours and yeah.

Yeah, just another thought occurred to me which was we're talking about how rowdy it is now and new members coming in and in that respect, you know, I remember having conversations where we complained the other way oh my God, the chairman of the Ways means as way too much power and the leader the president of the Senate has way too much power.

Whichever way you have it, it's going to be you're going to have problems with it.

So we have problems now with the rough and rowdy Wild West atmosphere.

But there were problems with the a lot of power concentrated in a few hands to be honest.

>> I mean the whole thing's a pendulum swings back and forth and almost all these issues end up on a pendulum.

Before the show we were talking about centralized control of things and we have seen decentralization.

>> We've seen the centralization just keep swinging back and forth so we don't even have to look for the hot social issues to find examples of that pendulum swinging back and forth.

>> Well, let me ask you about some of the adjustments that have been made to the voting process going into this election.

If you're an absentee voter, you've got a couple of extra hurdles now.

>> Well, we talked about this I believe when when when we started out or maybe it was the middle of the year when the voter ID law went into effect in Indiana.

It was for those who are showing up to vote in-person and at that time there was research that showed the majority of errors that happened, attempts at fraud were being done by people who were voting by mail but the law did not affect them.

So when the law went into effect for those who were voting in person, a bunch of people said get ready because this is going to happen.

And the real question was why did it take so long?

So if you are going to vote by mail, get yourself ready to find your voter right your your driver's license or your state ID number because you're going to have to call that in or include that on the application and if it doesn't match up, someone's going to have to contact you and figure out what the difference is.

Was there a mistake?

Did we misread a number all those sorts of things?

They're going to be a few of those.

It's not going to be something that happens to everybody but some of them will happen and if somebody submits their application at the last minute, then we're starting to run into the possibility of disenfranchizing a voter.

>> We're at that point in the program where each one gets two minutes but to a special piece of legislation that you were glad something happened to or regret that something more was or wasn't done.

Maybe the the highlight point you want to be sure that is shared in our time together.

>> Fred, let me start with you on that one and then we'll sort it around one piece of legislation that I liked was the Consumer Data Protection which Senator Brown actually was championing and I thought that was very important for us and a smart move to protect our data.

But thing really bothered me was a bill that the Senate passed a pretty good majority sorry the House passed with a pretty good majority 78 to 19 which was decriminalizing HIV exposure.

Those laws were written in the 90s, early 90s and we're let's be honest, very homophobic.

It's matched on criminal penalties to people with HIV and you know, the author of the bill, Wendy McNamara is a Republican from Evansville.

So this wasn't a Democrat doing it.

It received a really good notice.

I think people thought that was going to happen and it, you know, died in the Senate and it again it just seems like there is a when we can be progressive and and and show that we've learned and developed over time something like this comes along and just kind of you know, amazes me write me check with your neighbor on your spotlit bill one way or the other.

I like the fact remerging blessings Porgie blessings and a state senator who's been trying for years and years and years to get cursive taught in schools.

She didn't make it again but she got a bill for this for the school districts have to monitor how whether cursive is being taught and at what level so she'll get a report out of it handwritten I'm sure we did not unfortunately have a state sandwich come out of the legislature.

>> We don't have we don't have a state motto.

So if you're calling yourself a Hoosier, you're probably an outlaw.

>> I to two things that bothered me state overreach.

We've talked before about local control in the states love hate relationship with home rule.

It has a tendency to mess and local issues when it shouldn't improve the downtown improvement district taxing district for Indianapolis when people in Indianapolis have made it clear they have nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, they told Valpo they can't count streaming services as video services and charge a fee the way like Fort Wayne has always charged a fee for Comcast.

You know you can debate whether or not the streaming should be considered that but you know for the state to step in and say yes here Indianapolis no they're Valparaíso and the the other one we haven't talked about yet is that I think a twenty five foot safety zone for police.

There's an argument on both sides of that.

One is it's for public safety and we don't want to interfere with police.

The other is that civil libertarians say it's to prevent people from knowing what police are doing, which is kind of a weak argument given you know how good cell phone cameras are now.

Thank you for that.

And I would just let people know about eleven sixty seven which says certain public meetings have to be live streamed.

So for a lot of public schools we're going to be able to watch those meetings whether we're there or not.

And I will point out there was a long, vigorous debate about the origin of the term Hoosier.

>> So perhaps that's a good thing that didn't pass that you know, they didn't they didn't have trouble with the term it was the back story that was the picked one out of many that could have been yeah.

>> It was actually pejorative.

So when I moved here I had to write editorials we Hoosiers I'm like boy, he knew we'll talk about it over a pork tenderloin.

We've got to figure it out and we'll have them all back again.

You watching and enjoying and we're all learning from Andy Downs and Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics Review Fort Wayne Director Emeritus Chris McKissack, editorial page editor for the Journal Gazette.

Leo Morris with Indiana Policy Review.

>> Thank you gentlemen and thank you for allowing us to be a part of your evening for all of us with Prime time.

I'm Bruce Haines.

Take care and we'll see you again next week.

Good night