Iowa: You're on the Menu

Iowa House chamber on a weekend in March 2023

The Iowa legislature wrapped up its session last week, so it's time for my annual pan-the-legislature post. Again this year, the Republican majority took a pass on the problems of their economically-stressed, brain-drained parts of the state, while using the legislative process to target people they don't like. From larger cities to public schools to the transgendered, the majority had plenty of wrath to throw around, and the Governor was only to happy to sign it all. So, kind of the same story as 2022, 2021, 2019, or any year since the Republicans achieved the electoral trifecta (Governor, Senate, House) in 2016. Judging from the election results since then, their crowd is very pleased, even if their places continue to decline. 

Jack Whitver, Iowa Senate majority leader

This year, however, felt special, no matter which side you were on. Senate majority leader Jack Whitver (R-Grimes) argued: "If you look at that list of agenda items laid out [by the Governor], we were able to accomplish every single one of them. So I think overall it was a very successful session" (Murphy, Barton and McCullough 2023).

Maybe it was the sheer volume of culture wars legislation that passed? Maybe because this year's barrage is likely to have real impacts on, for example, state government operations and the public schools? Maybe because the efforts Iowa legislature is echoed in other states and the U.S. Supreme Court? When Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis visited Iowa to test the waters, he and Governor Reynolds remarked on the similarity in the legislation passed this year in the two states. Perry Bacon Jr. writes from Kentucky:

The just-completed session of the state’s legislature was full of new laws that won’t fix any of Kentucky’s problems but instead seem aimed at annoying Democratic voters.... Perhaps the worst bill of all was one that the pro-LGBTQ rights Trevor Project called “among the most extreme anti-trans pieces of legislation in the nation.” 

He could have been talking about Iowa, or Florida, or Texas. a whole lot of other states (see Radcliffe and Rogers 2023). Iowa hasn't silenced a transgendered legislator like Montana, or expelled two black legislators like Tennessee, but it all seems connected to the same war going on here. Maybe, as Texas Democrat James Talerico suggests, this is all "the death rattle of a dying worldview" (quoted in Waldman 2023). In the meantime, though, problems are going unsolved, and people are getting hurt, or at the very least pushed away.

Here then are the principal laws passed in the 2023 Iowa legislative session (list from McCulloch 2023, and Opsahl 2023, with my comments in parentheses):

• Education savings accounts (promoting private religious schools mostly in urban areas)
• Government reorganization (for greater control by the governor over state departments)
• Restrictions on 
• LGBTQ topics in public schools and library books (don't say gay or you're a "groomer")
• gender-affirming care for minors (we support parents' rights but only to do or say things the majority likes) 
• transgender students' restroom use ("We don't look at it as going after any one specific group," said House speaker Pat Grassley (R-New Hartford) (Murphy, Barton and McCullough 2023))
• Property tax cuts (the major revenue source for cities and school districts)
• Loosened regulations on teenage employees' hours and tasks
• Restricted eligibility for Medicaid and food assistance (when food banks are already seeing record numbers)
• limits on civil suits against corporations in medical malpractice and trucking accidents 
• cuts to public universities (obviously important to their Democratic-dominant home counties, but active all around the state so this helps no one)
• requiring presidential nominating caucuses be held in person (defending what is essentially a homey myth while attacking Democrats who are trying to add a mail-in option for '24)

(And this is just legislation. The list does not include budget cuts for water quality monitoring, nor  does it include executive actions, like Attorney General Brenna Bird's suspension of a state program providing emergency Plan B and abortions to rape victims (Rappard 2023), or the University of Iowa encouraging research engineer Chris Jones to retire because his environmental blog posts might threaten the university's state funding (Lenz 2023, Strong 2023).)

Iowa House Democratic leadership office, March 2023

Some of these measures can be argued individually, and some of their parts like property tax transparency and over-the-counter birth control are genuinely good. On the property tax and labor bills, minority Democrats were able to win concessions, so those weren't just rammed through. It's the entire collection I'm calling out--what's in, who gets benefits and who pays the costs--and calling it hateful. The thread that unites all the legislation listed above is it's doing something to people the majority would like to do stuff to, because they're the majority and they can.

(Source: clipground.com)

"If you're not at the table, you're on the menu" is practically the political equivalent of a Newtonian law, and this year transgendered people especially youth, public school employees and students, the Democratic state auditor, and the poor were on the menu, just as in other years immigrants, abortion providers, and racial minorities have been on the menu, for the entertainment of Republican constituents.

Opportunities to rebuild our communities, unleash the innovative power of cities, ensure environmental and fiscal sustainability, and welcome people who are different from us... all not taken. Instead we send all manner of signals that we don't like you, while the majority consolidates power and rewards its political allies. Our legislature, as usual, is doing the opposite of what it should be doing. This year just had a whole lot more of it.

[Finally, much of the media coverage of the session, and comments like leader Whitver's quoted above, focus on the central role of Governor Reynolds in making all this happen. I'm not as clear on that, though surely her pugnacious Condition of the State speech in January did much to frame perceptions of the session. To be sure, I wasn't there, so I can't comment on her personal day-to-day role in policy formulation and coalition-building. But it seems that if Iowa is doing pretty much what other Republican-controlled states are doing, then the value added by any individual leader is zero. No matter who was Governor, as long as the Governor was Republican, a legislature with this big a Republican majority in both houses would have produced this exact pile of legislation.]

New Bo Lofts, May 2023

I'm writing this while, outside my window, another building is going up in New Bohemia. Make no mistake, a lot of good things are happening here. The economic vitality of Cedar Rapids and other Iowa cities is keeping the state afloat. The legislature can help spread the wealth (see Zaluska 2023 for a hopeful example), or it can squander these successes by taking cities for granted and promoting intolerance towards the people we need to sustain it all. Stop selling nostalgia and resentment for political points, and start building places of value.

MAIN SOURCES

Perry Bacon Jr., "I'm a Progressive in Kentucky. I Think Republicans Want Me to Leave," Washington Post, 30 March 2023

Caleb McCullough, "Impact of This Year's Legislative Session," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 May 2023, 1A, 7A

Erin Murphy, Tom Barton and Caleb McCullough, "Lawmakers Conclude 'Historic' Session," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 5 May 2023, 1A, 8A

Robin Opsahl, "Lawmakers End 2023 Legislative Session with Most Republican Priorities Met," Iowa Capital Dispatch, 4 May 2023

Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers, "Red State Voters Support Anti-Trans Laws. Their Lawmakers Are Delivering," FiveThirtyEight, 18 April 2023