INDIANAPOLIS—On Thursday, Senate Republicans voted an amended HB 1001 out of the Legislature to be signed by the Governor. Assistant Minority Leader Shelli Yoder (D–Bloomington) offered the following statement: 

“I called this budget a disappointment on the floor, and I think all of its iterations have been exactly that. I think the process has been an absolute mess—I’ve never heard of a budget going through this many iterations at the last minute, and I have my doubts that the atrocious public school losses we saw in the first version were an ‘error.’ I think it’s more likely that Senate Republican members saw those school funding losses and realized that Democrats have always been telling them the truth—that school privatization bleeds districts across Indiana.

“I also denounce, in the strongest possible terms, the ‘defunding’ of IU’s Kinsey Institute: this is a renouncement of reason and an embrace of paranoia and low-rent conspiracy as policy. We have billions of dollars in surplus, but our majority still has no real vision for an Indiana that works for the poor, the vulnerable, and the middle class as well as the wealthy.”