Charles Bookwalter

We are working in Boone County to take our county back for the people and making good progress. I’ve been a contributor to several liberty candidates and have volunteered my time on weekends, going door-to-door to talk with voters and to ask for their support for candidates who are committed to fight for them.

Many of them have won their elections in the last three years.

I’ve also gone to the Statehouse twice to testify in opposition to S.B. 4, the bill (now signed into law) that will give the Indiana Department of Health $200 million in additional funding and much more power over Hoosiers while rewarding the state for its disastrous response to Covid-19.

It’s hard to understand why our legislature would have passed this bill over the opposition of so many members of the public. But it’s clearly part of a bigger problem. Too many politicians are self-serving and too few of them are willing to risk their political careers and their reputations to do what’s necessary to preserve liberty and stop our nation’s rapid decline.

We are in peril. There is not much time left. This is the reason that in 2022, I filed to run for Congress in the 4th Congressional District, to primary sitting Republican Congressman Jim Baird.

Like many conservatives, I wanted to just work, take care of my family and enjoy the life we’ve built.

But then Covid-19 hit, and as our government put extraordinary pressure on small business owners like myself, I looked around and realized we had no one standing up for us.

No elected official in Indiana or in Washington, D.C., spoke up when I and other business owners were being pressured by our county health department to keep people six feet apart and force employees and customers to wear masks. No one who represents us objected to businesses being labeled as “non-essential” and shut down for weeks, or told us how we were supposed to pay our bills if we couldn’t work.

When it became clear that my employer, Intuitive Surgical, was going to impose a vaccine mandate on all employees, there was no one speaking up for the rights of Hoosiers to decide what is injected into their bodies. With no options, I resigned, leaving behind a great career.

It was then that I realized that I had to fight back.

Unfortunately, I was challenged and removed from the ballot in 2022 over the state’s new two-primary rule.

The two-primary rule, which was passed in 2021 by the Indiana General Assembly, says that a person must have voted in two party primaries or get his county chairman’s signoff to be eligible to run for office with that party affiliation – any office!

While in theory we can understand why a political party would want candidates who have been taking part in the party’s primaries on a regular basis, most Republicans in our state don’t vote in primaries because in many races, there is only one candidate to vote for: Only the incumbent is on the ballot.

It’s a cycle of disenfranchisement, with voters ultimately deprived of the ability to choose who represents them.

So I filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the two-primary law. Our case has been winding its way through the courts and on March 30, was heard by a three-judge panel of the Indiana Appellate Court. In April, the court decided against us and I’m now appealing to the Indiana Supreme Court.