In Trump vs. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6-3 the president has some immunity from prosecution for breaking the law. This ruptures the notion that no one is above the law in this country. I plan to take my time to understand the high court decision. I went outside for a shift in the garden.
After watching a bee covered in pollen (so much it couldn’t fly until after shaking some off), planting eggplant and lettuce in the covered row, and harvesting greens for vegetable broth and enough zucchini to choke a neighborhood, here is how it will roll. I will lurk to let pundits, analysts, content creators, & social media weirdos weigh in on the immunity decision before opening my mouth. Couple weeks, maybe. Also, I ask the question, “What else does this Roberts Court have in store for us next year?”
We survived the announcement. From here on I advise having a listen to Marilyn Sellars rendition of One Day at a Time then work to elect Democrats.
The final week of June must have come directly from hell. There was substantial action at the state and federal level — none of it good — and despite that, the presidential debate pushed everything aside leaving a landscape littered with the broken dreams of sensible people. It is difficult to comprehend just what happened. What did happen? What should be our focus going forward?
First things first. The Iowa Supreme Court decision to lift the injunction against the so-called heartbeat bill turned out to be anti-climactic. The law bans abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically at six weeks of pregnancy before many women know they are pregnant. Despite a thoughtful dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Susan Christensen, scattered protests by political activists around the state, and 60 percent of Iowans supporting access to an abortion, this decision was a sleeper. Can reproductive freedom impact the 2024 and 2026 elections? Yes it can, as I previously wrote. The event of Friday’s Iowa Supreme Court decision release neither helped nor hindered that possibility.
Let’s discuss the presidential debate on Thursday, June 27. I had no interest in watching it live, or afterward, nor did I. I see what you people are saying in your posts. Give it a rest. If it’s time for Joe Biden to withdraw from the race for president and retire, he will. As Biden said on Friday, “When you get knocked down, you get back up.” I sense there will soon be a speech about his campaign.
On Friday, Julie Gammack of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative quoted former Senator Tom Harkin as saying, “Last night was a disaster from which Biden cannot recover.” I love the senator, yet not so fast!
Biden has not changed during the last week. He needs space to see where his campaign is heading after the debate, one in which he admits he did not do well. I see polls taken since the debate flipped from slightly favoring Trump to slightly favoring Biden. Polls are brief snapshots in time and we shouldn’t make much of them. I land the same place Bill McKibben does regarding the post-debate environment.
…the tectonic plates shifted. And in ways that open up the possibility not just of decisively defeating Trumpism, but of pulling the country out of the polarized death spiral we’ve fallen into. But it’s going to take a while to play out, I think—time that we should grant Joe Biden, who’s at one of those hard, interesting, decisive points that come in the course of a life and of a nation. (Bill McKibben from The Crucial Years, June 29, 2024).
I would like to have been a fly on the wall at Camp David over the weekend when three generations of Bidens informally gathered. Those who know Biden recognize any change in course on the path to a nomination (for which he already has the pledged delegates) will be decided by Joe and Jill Biden. If he is considering retirement now, there is no public indication of it.
Overshadowing the presidential debate and parochial issues in Iowa was the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises, et.al. vs.Raimondo and Relentless, Inc., Department of Commerce, et.al. which overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had something to say about this in the following excerpt from her press release after the decision was announced.
June 28, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) released the statement below following the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the long-standing precedent that courts provide deference to an agency’s interpretation of ambiguous federal statutes.
“This is a seismic shift. Congress passes laws and then federal agencies use their deep knowledge and expertise to implement them. In overturning decades of settled law, this extreme Court has given itself the power to second guess even the most complex regulatory decisions. This decision will result in chaos and undermine our ability to protect the health and safety of all Americans.”
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Klobuchar has emphasized the importance of the Chevron doctrine, and specifically asked each of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, all of whom joined today’s decision to overturn the landmark decision, if they would respect Chevron as precedent.
In 2017, during Justice Neil Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation hearing, Klobuchar pressed Gorsuch on his view, articulated as a lower court judge, that Chevron should be overturned. His views on Chevron were part of the reason Klobuchar did not vote to confirm Gorsuch.
In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, Klobuchar questioned Kavanaugh on his views, wherein he stated that “Chevron serves good purposes… [AND] courts should not be unduly second-guessing agencies.”
In 2020, during Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation process, in response to written questions submitted by Klobuchar, Barrett affirmed that Chevron was “a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis.”
Obviously, stare decisis has flown out the window with this and other laws decided by a radical Supreme Court. It is a big deal. For more details, read Senator Klobuchar’s entire statement here.
Like many Iowa Democrats, I was not enthusiastic about Joe Biden during any of the three times he sought support in the Iowa caucuses. The fact is, his administration has performed reasonably well on issues that matter to progressives… and to everyone. He’s not perfect. What president has been? If he continues to run, and he said he will, we must do everything possible to elect him. Our work doesn’t change no matter who is the nominee.
We are all aware of the ticking clock to the November election. After a week from hell, we need to take a moment to collect ourselves, and then get back to work electing Democrats. The consequences of doing otherwise could be worse than hell.
How does one cope with the fact Republicans hold all four Iowa congressional seats? Figure out a connection to some other Democrat. For me, that’s Jan Schakowsky who represents Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, including Skokie, where our child lives. Her periodic newsletters keep me up to speed without all the high drama of following Democratic leadership, and avoids the complaint-filled disinformation of my Republican member.
The passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) is always a dogfight. Rep. Schakowsy tells it like it is as a Democrat. The good thing about following her is it gives me a starting point in discussing politics with our child. She is also in the thick of what’s happening. Here is her June 19 newsletter about the NDAA passing the U.S. House:
Last week, I joined nearly all Democrats in voting against passage of the shortsighted and harmful National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025. The original NDAA that passed out of committee 57-1 included numerous provisions that would make life better for service members and their families, including a 19.5% pay raise for junior enlisted troops, a 4.5% increase for all other service members, increased investments in childcare, and a restoration of the full Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH). These policies would go a long way towards helping ensure our military personnel and their families have what they need and deserve to thrive.
Unfortunately, the version of the NDAA that made it to the House floor included poison pill provisions that would make it impossible for women in uniform to get access to the reproductive health care they need, eliminate the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Department of Defense, and attack the rights of LGBTQI+ service members and their families. This bill would do active harm to our national security and military readiness, and I could not vote for a bill that assaults our fundamental freedoms and attacks countless Americans.
In closing, I would like to take time to recognize Juneteenth National Independence Day. It was on this day, 159 years ago, that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with word of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. At long last, the remaining slaves were freed.
Black history is American history, and it should not be ignored, morphed, nor hidden. Juneteenth is a day for us all to come together to talk about our past and look towards our future. We cannot allow those who peddle fear and prejudice to take our country backwards. I will continue to use my platform to fight for a more equitable nation for all.
Have a great rest of the week, Jan.
If you seek to follow your children’s congressperson, or anything happening in the U.S. House, here is a link to the House master alert page. Follow this link to find a specific congressperson.
Breaker boys picking slate from coal using a coal breaker in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Photo Credit – Wikipedia
A breaker boy was a coal-mining worker in the United States whose job was to separate impurities from coal by hand in a coal breaker. The use of breaker boys began in the mid-1860s, according to Wikipedia. Although public disapproval of the employment of children as breaker boys existed by the mid-1880s, the practice did not end until the early 1920s, after the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act was signed into federal law in 1916. Later, along came Governor Reynolds, the Iowa Legislature, and a group of lobbyists like the Iowa Restaurant Association to change things around regarding child labor.
Governor Reynolds signed Senate File 542, an act relating to youth employment, into law on May 26, 2023. Legislators, the governor, and lobbyists had every reason to know the new law conflicted with standing federal law. The U.S. Department of Labor weighed in almost immediately, saying outright that Iowa’s new child labor law conflicted with federal law. Republicans and their crew did not care.
After the Iowa child labor law passed, restaurants and other covered workplaces began to enact its provisions. NOT SO FAST! said the feds, who fined improper users of child labor tens of thousands of dollars in accordance with federal regulations. The governor decried the penalties as EXCESSIVE! and scheduled a press conference in North Liberty on June 24 to air grievances.
Unaware as she appeared to be at the time to what is actually going on in Iowa — namely severe flooding in Northwest Iowa — she did cancel the labor press conference to spend time where she should have been all along, touring the flooded areas, asking President Joe Biden and FEMA for help, and doing what is right for Iowans in time of natural disasters. The latest news is Governor Reynolds plans to reschedule the child labor press conference on how mean the federal government is for enforcing the law.
What in the Sam Hill is going on? They knew the new law conflicted with federal law. I don’t believe it is about that. All roads lead to abortion in Iowa politics and here’s a connection.
Historian, raconteur, and chronicler of our daily lives in the United States Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following on the second anniversary of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization:
In the decision, written by Alito, the court said that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level. This construction of American law is central to the right-wing project of dismantling the federal government which, under the Fourteenth Amendment, is charged with protecting equal rights in the states. Centering the states, which determine who can vote within them, enables a minority to dominate the majority. (Letters to an American, June 24, 2024).
Does the federal government have primacy through the Fourteenth Amendment in protecting the rights of children who work outside the home? Despite being wrong in Senate File 542, Reynolds and her Republican crew make the assertion that children should be allowed to work under less restrictive rules and employers should be held harmless. Iowa, and other similar Republican states, attempt to drive the train of what is permissible within state boundaries. The ultimate goal of bad laws, and ensuing lawsuits and conflicts, is the distraction from a coarsening of Iowa life which includes restrictions on abortion, defunding public education, and in this case a permissive child labor law. A majority of Iowans support protecting children (and all workers) in the workplace. Republicans in our government simply don’t care because they have an agenda of dismantling the federal government and cementing themselves in power.
Groups like the one who quickly scheduled a counter-press conference in North Liberty on June 24, headed by State Senator Zach Wahls, County Supervisor Rod Sullivan, and others, are important to hold the line against the governor’s aggressive approach to implementing bad labor policy.
At our most human level, we know abusing children in the workplace is wrong. What is worse is when our government favors the desires of business to keep their costs low and permits such abuses. Even if it means breaking federal law. Everyone knows it is wrong for children to work in coal mines. Our government should know that by now. Thank goodness the coal fields in Iowa have diminished or Republicans would be revisiting using breaker boys again.
It’s time to take a break from writing. For a while, I must explore my daily life, my environs, and enjoy them. I may sit for spells in my chair, or out in the yard, and just breathe.
Thanks so much to everyone who reads my posts. It means a lot to have people return for visits, especially if we have not met. I receive fewer views here than when I wrote for newspapers, yet the positive side is I can visit your sites and see what you are writing and doing. That is a gift.
Enjoy the rest of June. Will I return in July? I’m not sure. I looked up my life expectancy on the Social Security web site. Based on that calculation, I have 14 more summers to enjoy. Beginning now, I plan to make the most of each one of them. That begins with long walks to feel the sun’s warmth on my skin and a summer breeze on my face: ambition enough for now.
Hope to see you again on the flip side.
UPDATE: I’ll be covering vacations and such in July at Blog for Iowa, I’ll cross post that writing here.
Tomato plot is planted and fenced on June 21, 2024.
Using the rough reckoning of my life, I am about three weeks behind in the garden this summer. I did finish the tomato plot Friday, and while there are a couple items left in the greenhouse, planting can be called done. I picked the first zucchini, and cucumbers won’t be far behind. As mentioned previously, two plots will remain fallow this year. As soon as I clear the greenhouse, I’ll put it into storage and focus on other yard work besides gardening. It has been something of a slog to bring the garden in.
Trail walk conversation
Sometimes I meet someone with whom I have a long history on the state park trail, as I did this week. The conversation covered these topics: The rain/hot temperatures were good for the garden, tomatoes especially. How the Iowa political climate changed since 1993 when I moved here. Prospects for Christina Bohannan, candidate for U.S. Congress, and for our state senate candidate Ed Chabal, and house candidate Jay Gorsh. How did education fall from its pedestal in Iowa? No answers. Need for septuagenarians to get out of the heat and humidity. It’s not the heat but the humidity.
Hand cramps and tomato patch.
Friday was a big day in the garden. Mainly, I finished putting in the tomato plot. That involved laying the rest of the ground cover, attaching the outside row tomato cages to their stakes, and installing deer fence around the rows. After an unsuccessful experiment in growing tomatoes last year, I returned to the method I had previously developed. It took about four hours to get that done. I cooled down and then took a nap. When I woke, both hands and my right leg cramped, causing some pain. I worked through it, yet I don’t recall that kind of work creating such cramping before. By the next morning cramping subsided.
Saturday was a lost day
On Saturday I drove to Williamsburg for a political meeting at 8 a.m., went grocery shopping for the soon to be arriving house guests, lay down, and slept a solid several hours. I ended up skipping dinner and went back to bed, having a more normal night’s sleep. Missing days like that is not the best. I finally feel rested, yet I’ll never get the day back.
This week I felt moments of creativity coupled with moments of physical exhaustion. It was not the worst of weeks. It was a time of pushing my limits and acknowledging they exist. Something as the male of the species I am not enthusiastic about doing.
Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said the message for Democratic candidates is clear in 2024. There are two issues: reproductive freedom and public education. Both are equally important. Where the rubber meets the road, during local political canvassing, many voters equate a discussion about “reproductive freedom” with one about “abortion.” In fact, Konfrst used both terms in her speech to delegates at the June 15 state convention. My question is will “reproductive freedom” do the work?
In my latest iteration as a political canvasser, beginning during the 2004 election cycle, I’ve been meeting with voters where they are. No one keeps track of how many voters they contact, yet certain themes stand out. One of them is abortion.
There is a hard line for people who oppose abortion. It’s the first question they ask of a canvasser, and the first one to shut down any dialogue if the answer is wrong. “Your candidate wants abortion to be legal? This conversation is over.” The main purpose of the canvass was accomplished: This voter is in the no column. It’s time to move on.
Polling done by the Des Moines Register is clear: “61 percent of Iowans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases and 33 percent said it should be illegal in most or all cases.” Establishing the ability for women and their physician to choose to have an abortion as part of women’s health care has broad support. The key question is will that matter in a hyper-partisan election? The Magic 8 ball returned “Reply hazy, try again.”
At one of my workplaces, my supervisor was an anti-abortion activist. That made for interesting conversations while traversing the countryside together in a rental car, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and making sales calls. I can’t count how many times I heard statistics on abortions from him. Some facts: before Dobbs, in 2021, there were 3,761 recorded abortions in Iowa. 625,978 were reported to the Centers for Disease Control that year. Literally millions of children were being killed by abortionists, my supervisor said. This was the same person who enabled me to meet John McCain, allowed me to register people to vote in the workplace, and let me lobby for the company with Dave Loebsack while we were in D.C. It was a weird work experience.
My point in telling this story is I learned the anti-abortion crowd is well financed, highly organized, and well connected. Groups like Heritage Action, part of the dark money Koch network, plan to keep awareness of how to restrict abortion rights front and center. They are in it for the long haul and are willing to spend resources and time accomplishing their objectives.
It is important to remember anti-abortion activists worked continuously for five decades to overturn Roe vs. Wade. They will not walk away from an electorate because polling shows voters favor the ability to have an abortion. We recently saw debates about abortion pills, in vitro fertilization, military policy toward abortion, and more. Women’s health care will be a constant presence in the election, creating a haze of what-aboutism, misinformation, disinformation, and outright deception. The intent is to obfuscate and by doing so, prevent Democrats from getting elected. Konfrst is right: we need to address this head on through our campaign messaging.
Will voters who support restricting abortion rights crossover and vote for Joe Biden and down ballot Democrats? I wouldn’t think so. We must know who they are and formally identify them in our database. Talking to them may be a lost cause, yet it is part of the canvassing work.
Democrats can bridge the gap where people live. There may be people, regardless of party registration for whom right to choose is valued. According to the Register poll, there are a lot of them. Once we find those people we must give them support, and if needed, some cover in return for a vote. That’s a lot different from asking whether they will vote for a specific candidate. It requires a longer term commitment to community that goes beyond elections. It would be good for Democrats to learn how to do that, and fast.
When it comes to messaging for the November election, we should follow the lead of our political leaders. To the extent Democrats do that, and frame the discussion as one of “reproductive freedom,” winning is possible. In the end, though, we will be talking about abortion because that is the vernacular voters use. There is no escaping it. We should embrace it.
The metaphor Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart used at the June 15 state convention was apt. After saying Democratic candidates had a tough road ahead, she likened the work leading to the November election to clearing rocks from a farm field. Hart talked about her experience farming in Iowa, having to pick rocks from fields with her siblings, reported the Iowa Capitol Dispatch.
“Sometimes, I think we’re in a rocky place right now, right?” Hart said. “And we’ve got to pick up that rock that makes the most sense for us. … Find the thing that you can do, that you can contribute to this effort, and do it in spades. That’s what we’ve got to do from now until November.”
Democratic political operatives are more used to having a specific plan, falling in line, and then working the plan. “Find the thing that you can do…” is counterintuitive. People scratch their head and ask, what does that even mean. I believe Hart is getting at the idea that Democrats must take more ownership of our politics now that the coordinated campaign is in the rear view mirror. There is no presidential campaign to filter down directives on what should be happening on the ground. As individual Democrats, we own this campaign. If we do the work, we have a chance of winning. There will be no more bitching about the coordinated campaign because it’s permanently gone. Simply the work remains.
It will also be challenging for Iowa Democrats to stay on message during the upcoming fall campaign. That’s mostly because the Republican Party is such an unruly, authoritarian mess. Legislation passed in recent sessions obfuscates the legislative terrain and serves as chaff clogging the radar of Democrats getting their bearings.
A case in point is the law passed last session related to immigration. Democrats and everyone with half a brain knew from jump street the law would not pass judicial muster. Republicans didn’t care if they would be sued over it. When U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction, everyone knew the argument that federal immigration law preempted the state law would prevail. As reported by the Cedar Rapids Gazette, “As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Locher wrote in his decision. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”
Whether it be abortion, education, immigration, or whatever, poorly written, Republican-backed legislation is expected to raise a number of political issues this year. Attorney General Brenna Bird will be busy. It will serve as a distraction from Democratic work to focus messaging on women’s health care, abortion policy, and education.
At the convention, Iowa House Democratic Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst had a message for all Iowa Democratic candidates for this fall’s elections: When talking to voters, stay on message, and that message should be about reproductive freedom and education policies.
“Message discipline is critically important this year, every year,” Konfrst said as reported in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. “But this year especially because Iowans are voting on two issues this year: What’s on their mind is public education and abortion and reproductive freedom. And guess what. They’re with us. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. … “(Republicans) are wrong on public education and reproductive freedom. They’re wrong, and Iowans aren’t with them. Iowans are with us. So we’re going to talk about the issues that matter to Iowans, not just to us.”
Democrats own a clear goal for concise messaging. Republicans are all over the map with bad laws, lawsuits, negative reactions to the federal government, and generalized hubris cluttering the campaign battlefields. I don’t know if that creates an electoral environment where Democrats win. It clears the field for a new kind of politics. What do Democrats have to lose?
Stonehenge with orange powder paint applied by vandals on June 19, 2024. Photo Credit: BBC.
In the first place, it is difficult to recognize this gathering of large rocks in the photo as Stonehenge. Mostly, the significance of an act of vandalism may have been more prominent in the minds of two vandals than in anyone else. I get it. Summer was about to begin. That’s a big day for some. Just Stop Oil, the organization behind the vandalism, said their motivation was to demand the next UK government end extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030. Whatever. Apparently it took an oversized hair dryer to blow the powder paint from the rock surfaces without harming colonies of lichen that developed there. If people know about the incident, it’s been forgotten by now.
Having done my tour of duty on the Salisbury Plain, my memories are scant. I stayed at a youth hostel, and made visits to Salisbury, Bath and Stonehenge. Another traveler, who spent the previous few weeks wandering about the moorland of southwest England, invited me to accompany him. I declined. It sounded too much like Iowa, and a bit dreary. I bought a post card at the Stonehenge gift shop and worked my way from the chalky plateau to the chalk cliffs of Dover and then to Calais, where my journal of Salisbury and England was pinched with my backpack after crossing the channel in a hovercraft.
I never looked back on England, and don’t understand the fascination with Stonehenge at solstice. It is an old thing, shrouded in lost history. I’m more thankful the days start getting shorter, and planning for autumn can begin in earnest.
One surviving account of my visit to Stonehenge remains.
Very sunny here today near Stonehenge, and other ancient ruins. Stonehenge yesterday brought to attention the very tourist like notions of seeing something only to tell your friends about it when you get back. It may be that these days this is the notion you should have or at least most common, but it is also a notion of which I refuse to partake. It is only a very insensitive person who will go look and come back in one hour as the tour bus takes, but then there’s hours and barb wire fence to keep you from doing it any other way. Yet here too comes the notion that since there are so many books and pictures and articles about Stonehenge why even bother the few minutes to even see the thing.
On the way from the rocks to the return bus, the drivers were talking and one said to another, “It’s too bad it started to rain. It spoiled their trip.”
Here it seems that there is such a “holiday” preconception among these drivers (and all Britons as well) that it prevents them from seeing what is really, actually there: some rocks with barb wire about them with people crowded within these premises. At any rate, I was no different from the others when I paid my 65p and walked, took some photographs, and bought some postcards which I today mailed to the states.
Journals, Winston Churchill Gardens, Salisbury, England, 11:45 a.m. on Aug. 27, 1974
In the 5,000-year history of Stonehenge, Wednesday’s protest is less enduring than the lichen that over millennia colonized the massive stones. I don’t wish ill on the two vandals. I just hope they receive their just desserts. I’m sure the ancient druids could care less about this week’s events.
If you do not like the song Heat Wave by Lamont Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland something may be wrong with you. Few things characterized my youth like listening to the Martha and the Vandellas recording on my hand-held, red transistor radio. It would not seem like summer in 1963 and ’64 without that song. Perhaps things changed.
We have no new songs of summer today. The heat dome that lived over the upper Midwest the last few days was oppressive and steamy: so uncomfortable my 70-year-old frame couldn’t take the heat after a few hours in it. It has been good for the tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and tomatillos in the garden, so there’s that.
At least we are not in a drought the way we have been during the past few years. In 2012, a time when Iowa field crops were substantially impacted by dryness and crushing heat, I couldn’t wait to get indoors to escape. This heat dome is less severe than that, yet summer heat has a wicked resonance after that fateful year.
What can be done about this heat wave? Hunker down and stick it out.
We will make our home here, and in doing so, make the current heat wave the stuff of legends. We’ll develop grand stories, legends, to be told on blogs, on telephone calls, and video conferences. We’ll tell it in Twitch chats, on Discord, and on text-based social media. We’ll make something out of it like the salsa the heat wave is helping produce.
We’ll make our own musical stories, even if it may not be as good as what Martha and the Vandellas sang. It will be our experience. We will own it. That will be enough to survive the heat wave.
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