Loretta Rush Keeps Talking. Indiana Should Ask Why So Many Questions Surrounding Her Still Have No Answers

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Click on the Arrow above to Watch This 13 second comment from your "Mental Midget," who somehow is serving as Indiana Chief Justice of SCOIN

By Hoosier Enquirer Staff

INDIANAPOLIS — Chief Justice Loretta Rush has spent years telling Hoosiers how courts should work. She speaks about justice, trust, judicial independence, transparency and the importance of public confidence in the third branch of government. Just last week, Rush visited Battle Ground Middle School and told students that courts are often the least understood branch and that seeing judges at work helps young people understand what justice looks like.

Now She admits what HE could guarantee, "She wouldn't be a Supreme Court Justice in any other state." And this is because she is not a serious legal scholar or even a previously qualified judge or practicing lawyer. She was lucky to have the right connections at Purdue where Gov. Daniels wanted a job and to have the correct sex, a female, for him to appoint her without scrutiny. Then told Pence to promote her to Chief Justice. He liked a weaker judiciary as part of his overall view of governance.

The problem is that Rush’s own rise to power remains tied to a 2012 chronology that has never received the kind of scrutiny she so often says strengthens public confidence. The question is not whether Rush can deliver another speech. She plainly can. The question is whether Indiana will ever get a complete accounting of how a Tippecanoe County trial judge became a Supreme Court justice during the same summer Gov. Mitch Daniels was preparing to leave state government for the presidency of Purdue University.

One Summer, Two Remarkable Appointments... And Never Investigated by Indiana's Empty FBI Agents!

Purdue trustees selected Daniels as the university’s next president in June 2012 while he was still governor. The appointment immediately raised questions because Daniels had appointed Purdue trustees himself, and the Indiana Inspector General reviewed the matter before concluding that Daniels had not violated the state ethics code.

Less than three months later, Daniels selected Rush for the Indiana Supreme Court from three finalists submitted by the Judicial Nominating Commission: Rush, Hamilton Superior Judge Steve Nation and attorney Geoffrey Slaughter. Rush took office in November 2012 and, by August 2014, had become chief justice. That is an unusually rapid institutional ascent from a county trial bench to leadership of Indiana’s entire judicial branch.

That sequence does not prove corruption, and HE cannot pretend it does. But legality does not make the chronology uninteresting, and it certainly does not make questions about it illegitimate. The has every right to know whether the two episodes were entirely unrelated or whether there were communications, relationships or institutional considerations that have never been fully aired.

The Trouble With a Story That Never Quite Settled -- Was There Political Corruption and Quid Pro Quo -- Did Daniels Sell the Bench for His New Job?

Hoosier Enquirer has repeatedly examined the Daniels-Rush timeline and has also acknowledged the limits of the public evidence. There is no publicly produced email, bank record, text message or sworn testimony proving that Daniels promised Rush a Supreme Court seat in exchange for anything connected to Purdue. HE has said that before and should continue saying it.

What remains fair to ask is whether every relevant record has ever been independently examined. Daniels was selected by Purdue while he remained governor. Rush was a Tippecanoe County judge. Daniels then exercised his gubernatorial authority to choose Rush for the Supreme Court before leaving office for Purdue. Those are documented facts. The unanswered part is whether the public has seen the whole documentary trail surrounding those decisions.

If there is nothing improper in the record, that is worth establishing conclusively. If there is more to the story, Indiana deserves to know that too.

Rush Likes Transparency. The Standard Should Apply to Her, Too.

She likes it until the bright light is on her. Just like she likes checks and balance but not her court, or her own erred rulings -- which are too many. She has ruined lives of good people.

Rush’s public record is filled with her hypocrisy and language about transparency and public trust. Her court has promoted traveling oral arguments, public judicial-selection meetings, school visits, judicial education programs and outreach designed to make the judiciary more visible. The court also credits her tenure with electronic filing, unified case management, problem-solving courts and administrative reforms.

Those accomplishments are part of the record. So is the extraordinary amount of authority attached to the office she now holds. Rush chairs the Judicial Nominating Commission, leads Indiana’s judicial branch and sits atop a system that includes lawyer admission and discipline. That is a great deal of institutional power, and the public is entitled to expect something more substantial than ceremonial openness when questions concern the history of the person wielding it.

A traveling oral argument is not transparency about 2012. A Constitution Week speech is not accountability for an old appointment process. Handing out judicial education certificates may be worthwhile, but it is not a substitute for answering hard questions about how power was accumulated.

Qualifications Are Not the Same Thing as Vindication

Rush’s defenders try to say she was legally qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. She had practiced law and served about 14 years as a Tippecanoe Superior Court judge before Daniels appointed her, so she met Indiana’s constitutional requirements. But she was a juvinile court judge dealing with family law cases, and most would say not good, Terminating parental rights and ruling for adoptions at questionable rates.

A law license, which she has taken from far better qualified lawyers, answers the minimum-qualification question only.

It does not answer whether she was the strongest candidate among the finalists, whether political symbolism influenced Daniels’s choice, whether Purdue relationships mattered or whether every material interaction surrounding the two 2012 appointments has ever been disclosed. She was clearly DEI and she had an ace up her sleeve: Purdue?

Those are different questions, and they deserve to be treated as such.

The Public-Relations Judiciary

There is a noticeable pattern to Rush’s public life. She appears at conferences, gives speeches, discusses judicial reform, visits students, accepts awards and participates in national judicial organizations. Her visibility has helped create the image of an energetic, nationally connected chief justice who is constantly explaining the importance of courts and judicial legitimacy.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem comes when public presentation begins to substitute for public accountability.

Indiana’s judiciary has become very good at presenting itself. The harder question is whether it is equally comfortable submitting itself to the same kind of scrutiny it expects from lawyers, litigants and citizens who come before it.

Public confidence is not created because officials repeatedly say confidence matters. It is created when powerful institutions show they are willing to tolerate scrutiny, disclose records and revisit difficult questions without treating criticism as illegitimate.

Why HE Keeps Calling for Outside Review

HE has previously called for an independent federal examination of the 2012 chronology. That does not mean the FBI should assume Rush or Daniels committed a crime, and the public record presently does not establish bribery, honest-services fraud or another federal offense.

But an outside review would have one advantage Indiana institutions cannot easily provide: distance.

A truly independent examination could reconstruct the timeline, identify surviving records, review relevant communications and interview people involved in the Purdue and Supreme Court selection processes. It could determine whether the two appointments were entirely unrelated or whether there are facts the public has never seen.

If the evidence clears everyone, publish it and end the speculation. If it reveals something else, follow the facts where they lead. That is what serious accountability is supposed to look like.

Indiana Has Heard the Speeches

Rush has now served on the Supreme Court since 2012 and as chief justice since 2014. She was unanimously reappointed chief justice in 2024, and the other four justices supported her continuation in the role. Indiana voters also retained her in 2024 by a wide margin.

Those facts matter, but they do not erase the importance of the unanswered questions surrounding 2012. If anything, they make scrutiny more important because Rush is not a marginal figure. She is one of the most powerful officials in Indiana government.

Indiana has heard the speeches about justice, trust and transparency. It has watched the ceremonies, conferences and traveling court sessions. What is still missing is a complete documentary accounting of one of the most consequential political and judicial transitions in modern Indiana history.

Rush has spent years telling Hoosiers why they should trust the courts. At some point, the public is entitled to ask whether the courts — and the people running them — are willing to earn that trust ? Clearly, she is too powerful and too dumb to stop blabbing....her slip ups and words matter, and warrant investigation. Read the related articles below for background.