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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Jim Tomes- 2023 Update [1]

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Date: 2023-02-26

In 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as in 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published its profiles of Indiana State Senator Jim Tomes, who after being elected in 2010, did not face a primary opponent or a Democratic challenger in the general election for his first eight years in office. Jim Tomes started making more of a name for himself in 2016 by being the sponsor of Indiana's SB 35, one of those transphobic bathroom cop bills that the Republican Party is pushing to make sure that nobody relieves themselves in a bathroom outside of the gender they were born as. He even frames the need for his bill as being necessary with the gem of a quote that, "Shouldn’t we also ask about…what about the other sector of society of people that who have all through the decades women been using women’s restrooms and men been using men’s restrooms and kind of like that and kind of expect that level of privacy?" It should come as little surprise that he would do such a thing, though, considering he also co-sponsored and voted for Indiana's "religious freedom" law, SB 101, back in early 2015, that he voted against SB 220, which would classify assaults motivated by the victim's gender identity as a hate crime, and in 2014, he voted for an amendment to be added to the Indiana state constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. If he were any more homophobic, he would have been caught digging up Liberace’s grave to put a stake through his heart.



Perhaps the only thing Jim Tomes seems to enjoy more in his role as a legislator than legislating to restrict the rights of the LGBTQ community is to go out of his way to let gun owners have ridiculous amounts of leeway, including trying to legalize school teachers having guns in public school classrooms, as well as trying to legalize guns in the state capitol itself. Since Tomes is arming everyone and their uncle in Indiana, you might be worried that gun violence would end up out of control in Indiana. Well, don’t worry, Jim Tomes has a plan to make sure everyone is a fine, upstanding citizen... to force schoolchildren to have to recite the Lord's prayer at the start of their school day. Because as we all know, there's not any sort of constitutional precedent for a separation of church and state, or mandatory prayer in schools, right? I mean, unless you count Engel v. Vitale.



Add in the fact that Jim Tomes has supported legislation to regulate abortion so stringently in Indiana that it would have effectively closed down every clinic in the state, and that he supports the perpetually failing conservative policy of drug testing welfare recipients (when laws of this type are always overturned as violations of the 4th Amendment, and they even fail to find enough drug use among the poor to justify having the testing in the first place), and you realize how much of an extremist he really is, in terms of his policy stance. In 2017, he submitted a bill that had it passed, would have tested the limits of the right to protest, since it was written that police would be allowed to disperse protests by “any means necessary”.



In spite of Tomes ditching out on the debate for his Indiana Senate seat because the newspaper that hosted it had run a few opinion editorials that he felt “weren’t nice” and “hurt his feelings”. Seriously.



Tomes has decided to sooth the wounds from the media being critical of him by continuing to attack the LGBTQ community again over the past few years, sponsoring legislation to try and deny transgender citizens from changing their gender on their driver’s licenses. So at least we know he hasn’t changed. What was a more recent behavior from Jim Tomes, however, is how he wanted to make it impossible for people to anonymously report environmental violations illegally carried out by corporations, sponsoring SB 73 to silence whistleblowers and make them the targets of fear or intimidation should they choose to do the right thing and report a crime against the planet itself. Again, Tomes is only rabidly pursuing smaller government as it pertains to making wealthy people wealthier, and cannot get over his obsession with legislating people based on their genitals.



Our 2021 feature on Jim Tomes is related to Covid-19, because of course this absolute mother***er is more concerned about the impact the virus has on businesses than he does keeping people alive. How drastic are we talking? Tomes didn’t just attack medical experts for advising the use of masks or social distancing, he’s enough of an extremist that he challenged them on the benefits of washing your hands, and the logistics of how to do it:

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/26/2155048/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Jim-Tomes-2023-Update

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