The Courage of Indiana Republicans

Courage in public life has become so scarce that when it appears, it startles. Worse, its rarity compounds the cost: the fewer who are willing to speak or vote against the grain, the heavier the burden placed on those who do. In Congress, this dynamic is now painfully familiar. When an obviously unfit nominee advances or a reckless piece of legislation lurches forward, resistance is almost always reduced to the same small cast—Murkowski, the ever-concerned Ms. Collins, occasionally Rand Paul, and, in his later years, even Mitch McConnell. Their names alone bear the weight of dissent.

This is what made the recent Indiana Senate redistricting vote so instructive—and, frankly, admirable.

The vote was not close. A bloc of Republican senators—I believe nine—voted against the proposed map. Predictably, national figures trained their fire on leadership, and Mr. Trump singled out the Senate leader Rodric Bray by name. But what mattered more was what didn’t happen: no single senator was isolated, no lone dissenter left exposed to carry the moral and political burden alone.

By acting together, these Indiana Republicans did something quietly radical. They distributed the risk. They denied the machinery of intimidation its usual leverage. And in doing so, they reminded us that courage in a legislature is not merely a matter of conscience—it is a matter of arithmetic.

There is a broader lesson here, and it is not limited to Indiana. Too many Republican members of Congress—especially in Washington—have been granted an unspoken exemption from expectation. We “know” they are reasonable. We “know” they understand the stakes. But we stop asking for their votes anyway. Jon Thune. Bill Cassidy. Others like them. We lower the bar so far that silence becomes indistinguishable from assent.

Meanwhile, we fixate—often unfairly—on the handful who do occasionally break ranks, castigating them for not doing more, not sooner, not always. I include myself among the guilty. But it is not Murkowski or Collins who force this recurring drama. It is the dozens who choose safety over solidarity.

Indiana Republicans showed another way. Courage shared is courage sustained. And if this Congress—or the next—ever intends to reclaim its institutional dignity, it will not be because one or two senators stood alone, but because enough of them finally stood together.