Vaughn Hammers His Caucus

Council President, Ryan Vaughn, sold his soul to the devil, and has been busy hammering the daylights out of his Council Republican caucus to get them to sell theirs as well.

You know, I used to think the driving force was to place Party interests over the welfare of the community. But, now I am inclined to think that Vaughn puts the interests of Barnes & Thornburg, his employer, over the interests of the Party -- and the interests of the community doesn't have one neuron associated with it in his brain. The distinction is slight, I grant you, as B&T owns the Marion County Republican Party, the Mayor's office, the Controller's office, and Vaughn.

Just Tuesday night, the Council Committee on Committees, chaired and unilaterally run by Vaughn, unceremoniously dumped Councillor Christine Scales from the Public Safety Committee. This was a) to punish Scales for not getting in line and casting the same Stepford vote all the other Republican Councillors have been casting, and b) to send a strong signal to all the other Rs that they best stay in line.

Meanwhile, Vaughn has doing backroom deals to ensure that the pork runs to his district first and, if there is any left over, to downtown. And while working the system behind the scenes and out of sight of the public, he refuses to recuse himself in matters where he has a clear conflict of interest.

If any of the other Republican Councillors have any glint of high standards left, they will remember why ran for office in the first place. In doing so, they just might see their old selves in Christine Scales. If they still have any fire for right and wrong, they would stand with Scales and tell Ryan Vaughn that they elected him to his position, and they can unelect him. They can say, that the game doesn't need to be played this way. They can say it is dead wrong to put the community dead last. They can declare that every Councillor should vote in the best interest of the community - not for the best intests of the Party, not for the best intests of B&T, and not in the best interests of Ryan Vaughn.