BREAKING: Mike Braun confirms he's running for governor of Indiana in 2024

The senator tells Crossroads Report that we can save the country from the federal government in the states - Is supporting a Constitutional Convention of States!

Governors matter.

We learned this during the pandemic as some took advantage of emergency powers to order churches and schools to close and declare most small businesses “non-essential.”

Indiana’s governor, Eric Holcomb, was one of the worst of the Republican governors. In July of 2020 he imposed a statewide mask mandate, though the science was clear by that time that masks weren’t working to contain the virus.

Also, he announced initially that violations of the mask mandate would be a *crime* publishable by up to one year in jail. He dropped this from the executive order only after Attorney General Curtis Hill issued an advisory opinion saying the governor didn’t have any authority to issue such a mandate.

Holcomb is in his second term, and with a two-term limit, is ineligible to run again in 2024.

So Indiana will get a new governor in two years.

We’d better choose better this time around.

This is what I had in mind last week when I reached Sen. Mike Braun on the phone for a story for another publication and asked him if he is planning to run for governor, as has been rumored for the last two years.

He pretty much told me he is.

Here’s what he said:

“I think I am. I term-limited myself. Believe in it more than ever now that I’ve been there and seen the place up close, how it works.”

He went on to say WHY he wants to be governor of Indiana.

“I'm thinking that we save the country from the federal government by making sure our states stay in good shape,” he said. “And to be honest, I wasn't happy with how we migrated to a lot of the things that we did in our own state vis a vis Covid, for instance.”

Braun referenced the mandatory business closures ordered by Holcomb in the spring of 2020.

“Bureaucrats saying you’re essential and you’re not. That’s crazy,” said Braun.

Sen. Mike Braun blasted the Biden Administration in the fall of 2021 after President Joe Biden announced that OSHA would be issuing an emergency regulation requiring all corporations with 100 or more employees to mandate that their employees be vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine.

“The woke larger companies, actually many of them, were for it,” said Braun. “And that was not the culture in most mainstream businesses, I can tell you that. They were really scared.”

Braun is a businessman himself, of course, and told me in the fall of 2021 that many of his long-time employees in Jasper did not want to get the vaccine, and that he would therefore be among the business owners affected by the mandate.

But he also said at the time that he did not feel comfortable talking about vaccine injuries, though his friend Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was doing so, saying he felt that the issue hadn’t yet “ripened.”

When asked if he would stand up to the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and the Indiana Manufacturer’s Association, both of whom pushed for the right of private corporations to be able to force vaccines on their employees, he deflected, saying he didn’t think this would be an issue by 2024.

Is Braun’s zeal for liberty focused on corporations and not individuals?

Government exists primarily to safeguard individual liberty — not to protect corporations.

But a bit more on Braun….

He grew up in Jasper — a German Catholic town in southern Indiana that has prospered as a manufacturing hub.

After getting his MBA from Harvard Business School, he returned to Jasper to live and work and raise a family. There he founded a turkey farm, and then went on to found an auto parts distribution company called Meyer Distributing.

In 2014, he ran for state representative and won, serving in the Indiana General Assembly until 2018, when he jumped into the U.S. Senate race, challenging Democrat Sen. Joe Donnelly.

He was an interesting entrant into that race because no one in the state knew who he was, and he was going up against two members of Congress in the Republican primary — Todd Rokita and Luke Messer.

But he ran a smart campaign, with ads showing him in a blue button-down shirt walking through the Meyer distribution center, and others showing him carrying around cardboard cutouts of Rokita and Messer and pointing out to voters on the street that both were lawyers who’d never practiced law — successfully framing himself as the successful entrepreneur and “can-do” guy contrasted with a couple of career politicians.

In Washington, he’s been frustrated to see how things really work. Or don’t.

“There will never be self-correction on the part of the people that have been running the show over the last three-to-four decades,” he says.

On September 29, he took to the Senate floor to call for a constitutional Convention of States, which could be invoked under Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution if 34 states are for it. There are now 32 states that have voted for it.

“This plan is extremely popular because it makes sense,” said Braun. “It puts political will and backbone into this place that we don’t normally have.”

On the Senate floor, Braun said when Americans look at the nation’s capital, they see, “a twisted knot of lobbyists, corporate interests and a mountain of debt that just gets higher and higher.”

The numbers are staggering.

“We now spend over a trillion dollars more each year than we take in,” he said. “And recently, that’s gone up to $1.5 trillion.”

He went on to say that because Congress is refusing to act to stop the outrageous spending, two things are needed:

1. Term limits for members of Congress.

2. A constitutional convention to take power from the “DC establishment” and put it back in the hands of the people.

A Convention of States would allow the states to discuss and vote on amendments to the U.S. Constitution that would “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and place terms limits on federal officials.”

You can read more about it here.

It’s specifically authorized under Article 5 of the Constitution as sort of a safety lever for the people and states to use if the federal government should ever become too big, too powerful, too out-of-control.

But the states are also a problem, as we saw during the pandemic.

After all, it was governors who directed the response to Covid-19, for the most part. Only a handful of them stood up to the CDC and FDA and the media and protected the liberties of their citizens.

While Braun would be an improvement over Holcomb, and while his support for the Convention of States is intriguing, it’s not clear he’s the man of the people we so desperately need.

Your thoughts?