INDIANAPOLIS — Mike Pence wasn’t pleased with Indiana’s top leaders in the early 1990s as they tried to block out-of-state trash from landing in Hoosier landfills, and in his reach for an argument, he wrote an essay comparing their efforts to how Nazi Germany had treated “politically unpopular” Jews.

His May 1992 article, published in the Indiana Policy Review and obtained exclusively by POLITICO, centers around moves by then-Gov. Evan Bayh and Sen. Dan Coats as they tried to block New Jersey and other states from shipping their garbage more than 700 miles across the country bound for Indiana’s dumps.


Pence, then the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, wrote in his conservative think tank’s monthly journal that the politicians’ “bipartisan assault” amounted to a “state-sponsored interruption of a private contract between the trash hauler (who has the garbage) and a landfill operation (who has the space for the garbage).”

“There is no coercion here,” the future GOP running mate to Donald Trump added in the essay. “This is a simple contract between a Hoosier and an out-of-state hauler that presents no imminent threat to the public-at-large.”

Pence then likened what Bayh and Coats were doing to Nazi leaders as they started seizing the assets of banks owned by Jewish minorities.

“The issues come into high relief when one lifts the unpopular business of landfill operation out of the equation and replaces it with, say, a German bank owned by an objectionable religious minority in the year 1930,” he wrote. “The operation of the bank was legal, but the operation, and the operator, were politically unpopular. Then, as now, various legislative and administrative initiatives were brought to bear on the elimination of the offending businesses and their proprietors. Then, as now, the power of the state was brought to bear to coerce a legal, but politically unpopular, business out of existence.”

In the concluding paragraph of his essay, Pence acknowledged he was touching on a sensitive topic but insisted his comparison was sound. “Is the example too extreme?” he wrote. “Not when history teaches that private property and personal liberty are inextricably linked. That’s precisely why our forefathers wrote the Commerce Clause into the Constitution. Let’s hope Indiana’s politicians become as interested in guarding our freedom as they are in guarding our garbage dumps.”

Pence’s article is titled “The Politics of Solid Waste” and includes this secondary headline: “German Jews of the 1930s would know exactly what to call the Coats-Bayh assault on the private property of unpopular individuals engaged in an unpopular enterprise.”

POLITICO found a copy of Pence’s article in the Indiana State Library, where some of the foundation’s writings are archived. A spokesman for Pence, now Indiana’s governor and Trump’s pick to be vice president, did not respond to request for comment about the essay, which was written during Pence’s time leading the organization from 1991 until early 1994.

Pence ultimately stepped down to focus on his fledgling talk radio career and what The Associated Press at the time reported were “disagreements over administrative matters among him and some of the foundation’s five board members.”

During his time leading the foundation, Pence penned several other items in the Indiana Policy Review, including an article that slammed the widely reported talk in GOP circles at the time that President George H.W. Bush should boot Vice President Dan Quayle from the 1992 reelection ticket and replace him with James Baker, then the secretary of state.

“Rubbish,” Pence wrote, placing the blame for the Republicans’ political challenges that cycle instead on several controversial moves by the president himself. “Whether it was Bush’s cynical reversal of the ‘no new taxes’ pledge or his vacillation on the 1992 Civil Rights (quota) Act, he has managed to alienate a sizable portion of the presidential campaign.”

“Somehow, miraculously, Dan Quayle has kept his distance from those objectionable acts and has, more than any other politician in America, engendered real credibility as a spokesman for the strong-defense, free-market and tradition-driven platform of that coalition,” Pence added in defense of his fellow Hoosier, a former GOP senator whom Bush picked in 1988 as his surprise running mate.

Quayle had campaigned for Pence during his two unsuccessful House runs in 1988 and 1990. And Pence returned the favor in his essay by advancing the argument that the vice president was the reason Bush still had a chance of winning the general election against Bill Clinton.

“Whether the president’s men think the thought laughable or not, the vice-president is the only real asset of the Bush campaign,” Pence wrote. “He is the sole member of the Republican hierarchy with a true base in the electorate. Dan Quayle holds the minds and hearts of the conservative, church-going voters who have created the contemporary Republican Party. George Bush does not.”

How the GOP treated Quayle as the party headed to Houston a month later for the Republican National Convention “will tell you all you need to know not only about the outcome of the November election but about the future of the Republican party,” Pence added.

“Our prediction?” he concluded. “If Bush cans Quayle, conservatives will make sure that Bush is dumped as well. They will have projected that four years of ‘James Earl’ Clinton followed by eight years of Jack Kemp is a better deal than four more years of Bush-Baker followed by eight years of Mario Cuomo.”

In a third essay, Pence slammed Indiana’s General Assembly for redrawing congressional district lines to the point that the state in the 1992 election “will have fewer competitive congressional elections than in any year in recent memory.” In the same article, published as part of the foundation’s book, “Indiana Mandate, an Agenda for the 1990s,” Pence complained that the Indiana General Assembly and Congress also weren’t in step with public opinion in their resistance to setting term limits on legislators.

“So many politicians have explained to me their opposition as merely a ‘desire to give voters the opportunity to choose whomever they will.’ If you believe that, you’ll want some ocean-front property in Arizona,” Pence wrote.

In 2000, Pence won election to Congress and served for 12 years, rising at the end of his House career to win election to his party’s leadership as the GOP Conference Chairman. He gave up his seat in 2012 to run for Indiana governor.