Is it Ladybugs for Loretta Rush?

With so many waiting to sing, "Ding Dong, the ........ is gone!"

How long can CJ Rush keep power?

Not the movie picture you had in mind?

If the Rush-Massa era was no golden age and age of political hacks, not legal scholars in charge at the SCOIN that has done irreputable harm to the rule of law and to so many (too many) Hoosiers to be ignored any longer by the main street press and powers that be.

The widespread injustices have led to a state where lawyers are both scared and ashamed, and students don't desire to study law, law students leaving brain drain in their wake, and legal deserts which even Rush can't deny or ignore.

In South Bend people — good people—were frame, police tapes are still sealed from the publi, and victims of court abuse. Fake legal ethics cases or at least ones where confessions of guilt were by the use of purjuy traps that remain uncorrected as Indiana's legal system has failed under the hacks’ wicked and even ignorant leadership, and that's a fact.

So what is next? More nothing burgers from the Rush, Massa & Co., or action by the Governor and AG, or the FBI? Boys it’s long overdue!

The impending exit of the Indiana Supreme Court’s long-standing old guard of Justices isn't a tragic fall— it will never be spun accurately as retirements, even if it is a long-overdue, clearing of the board for reform and restorative justice.

For a vocal contingent of the Indiana legal community, the current court has spent years acting strange, and mostly talking like a beacon of justice but being more like an insulated, predictable club, slow to adapt, never correcting errors, and increasingly out of touch with the grit of everyday trial law and plight of lawyers under increasing pressures even before AI.

They thought JLAP was a solution, but it was tool to target sick lawyers, often made sick by the very environment JLAP and high court created.

If this high court is Troy as the photo above implies, it is a fortress that has grown stagnant.

More important HE has heard form of the suitors lining up at the gates aren't trying to preserve a legacy; they are looking to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.

As Governor Mike Braun prepares to hand out the crowns, the contenders are pitching themselves as the disruptive force Indiana desperately needs.

The Bureaucrats vs. The Reformers: The Appellate Chieftains

For those who view the current court as overly academic and detached, the Court of Appeals offers candidates who claim they can streamline a sluggish system.

They present themselves not as extensions of the old regime, but as the fixes to it.

Judge Leanna K. Weissmann: While she is an appellate insider, her supporters argue she brings a pragmatism missing from the current high court bench. Having spent decades in private practice dealing with the fallout of rigid Supreme Court rulings, she knows exactly where the gears of the state's legal machinery are grinding to a halt. She’d be qualified as woman unlike the women appointed by Mitch Daniels who as a lawyer himself abhorred a powerful third branch or at least one he didn’t control.

Judge Paul A. Felix: If the current court is criticized for being too isolated in Indianapolis, Felix is the suburban heavyweight ready to shake it up.

Coming from Hamilton County, he represents the fast-growing, practical core of Indiana. He has a reputation for wanting efficient, clear-cut dockets rather than verbose, winding legal opinions.

Judge Peter R. Foley: Foley’s appeal lies in his blunt, small-town trial roots. He represents the faction that believes the Supreme Court has spent too long focusing on esoteric legal theories while ignoring how its decisions practically disrupt local county budgets and rural law enforcement.

The Mutiny from the Trenches: The Trial Judges

The harshest critics of the current Supreme Court era sit on county benches—too many name.

To them, the high court has spent years handing down ivory-tower mandates that make daily trial work a bureaucratic nightmare. They want a complete regime change.

Judge Hunter J. Reece (Warren Circuit Court): Reece is the anti-establishment choice for rural Indiana. His candidacy is a direct challenge to the idea that the Supreme Court should be dominated by Indianapolis elites. He deals with the immediate reality of the state's opiate crisis, underfunded public defenders, and rural property disputes—the raw law that the high court rarely touches.

Judge Marshelle Dawkins Broadwell (Marion Superior Court): Broadwell handles the absolute chaos of the state's heaviest criminal and civil dockets. If the current Supreme Court is perceived as soft or slow, Broadwell represents the antidote: a battle-hardened judge who understands that justice delayed by endless appellate hand-wringing is justice denied.

Unlike the current justices, there are many who like Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump's Department of War appointment, there are plenty of judges who have been in the field of battle, and know the problems and issues intimately.

The Rebels of the Lecture Hall: The Constitutional Iconoclasts

If the current court's jurisprudence is viewed as uninspired, a legacy appointment from academia wouldn't just change the court's personnel—it would blow up its entire philosophical foundation.

Professor Gerard Magliocca (IU McKinney): Magliocca is not a creature of the Indiana judicial establishment, which is exactly why his name carries weight for those wanting a hard reset. He doesn't owe anyone in the state capitol a favor. An originalist titan, he could single-handedly drag a court criticized for playing it safe into a bold, sharply defined constitutional era.

James O'Brien, CPA/JD, a Notre Dame professor, who started his legal career with Barnes and Thornberg and has since maintained a broad private practice in downtown South Bend. O'Brien is conservative a faculty advisor the ND YRs, and former County Councilman, and a true scholar with the means, pensions, skills and mindset to do an honest job. No current justice could put a candle to his intellect, wcperince, and common sense.

The New Architecture

For movie goers, Odysseus isn't coming back to save this house, and for many, that is the best news in a decade.

When the dust settles on the Braun's future SCOIN appointments, the goal won't be to restore an golden age of fairness, reason, and real justice for all. It will be to build an entirely new structure—one that is faster, sharper, and far more aggressive -- smarter.

Maybe AI can decide disputes within the small claims amounts or draft opinions for debate by the parties to ethics cases to speed up justice for lawyers, limited today to Rule 23 only.

HE will advocated for the adoption of Doug's Law to avoid any future lawyer being at risk to lose their law license from someone they never met, which the current court erred in allowing.

Doing so will boost lawyer morale and increase law school enrollment and the numbers of law graduates willing to practice law in Indiana again. But Justices Massa and Rush must "retire" sooner rather than later to see things change for the better.

Now, as any court can decide: yes, “it is ladybugs for Loretta Rush” and it’s time for her to garden in retirement.