Rep. Ed DeLaney: An open letter to Rep. Jim Banks: Learn from history

Jim, you and I briefly served together in the Indiana General Assembly. More importantly, we both served as junior officers in the U.S. Navy, although I got there much earlier.

I would have hoped that we would have learned many of the same lessons about loyalty to institutions and about what has built up our military since World War II. That is why I am so troubled by your attack on our service academies, including Annapolis. You have accused the academies of “continuing to violate the Constitution” by seeking to make sure all elements of our society are represented in their student bodies. You have included them as targets in your efforts to defeat the “woke” threat you focus so much attention on.

All this is because the academies insist on using lawful affirmative action as a tool to build a representative officer corps.

Let me give you a different perspective. You see, Jim, my generation of officers from the 1960s never had the chance to serve in an office corps that looked like America. I rarely dealt with a Black officer. Female officers were relegated to administrative jobs. Neither group got much respect. There were no Colin Powells.

I’ll bet you never saw a fight between Black and white officers at the officers’ club. Sadly, I did. I hope you never met young Black veterans who had been relegated to relatively menial work. These problems are not all in the past, but they are being dealt with.

Jim, it might help you if you paid more attention to the words of Adm. Sean Buck, the current superintendent of the Naval Academy. Like us, he is a Hoosier, one with 40 years in the Navy. He told you and your committee that, “Each incoming class [at Annapolis] should be a cross section of America.”

How else could the class lead in a military where so many enlisted members are from our minority populations? Do you really reject his goal that his faculty and staff should come from a variety of backgrounds? Do you really contend that Adm. Buck is carrying out an unconstitutional effort at integration that was started by Harry Truman? That it’s somehow been wrongfully followed for decades?

I hope we can both agree that the Founding Fathers and Congress for over two centuries have shown in both belief and practice that we only succeed when our institutions succeed. I fear that that understanding is eroding.

The military is a key institution that seems to be under attack. As an example, the Marine Corps is without a commandant because one senator refuses to allow a successor to be named. Your assertion that the academies are acting outside the Constitution flies in the face of the Supreme Court decision in the Harvard admissions case. The court found the academies to be a special case and chose not to apply new limits on affirmative action to them. Let the generals and the courts decide.

Meanwhile, please don’t discourage our young people from applying to our service academies. The attack on people you view as “woke” should not be allowed to undercut the success we have had in making our academies, and our military, look like our people. It did not hurt me as an officer that I was Irish, but I would have welcomed a chance to serve with all elements of this blessed nation. I trust you had that chance.

—Your fellow Navy veteran, Ed.•

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DeLaney, an Indianapolis attorney, is a Democrat representing the 86th District in the Indiana House of Representatives. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.

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