Tag: politics

Tomorrow night is the biennial organization meeting and election of officers for my county’s Democratic party. I plan to attend in person, even though video participation is available. I’m fit to be tied about our state-wide politics for a couple of reasons, yet mostly because Democrats lost our ability to hold back the extreme politics of the opposition.

We need a path to fixing this.

Former county supervisor Pat Heiden filled me in with a fundraising email on Tuesday:

Hello! I’m reaching out to you today because we need your help! The Iowa Democratic Party is initiating an aggressive plan to rebuild the Democratic Party in Iowa under the leadership of our new chair, Rita Hart.

It begins with us in Johnson County.

Email from Pat Heiden, Feb. 28, 2023.

I’m glad Heiden remains involved with party politics. She already worked a full career before winning her election. Instead of taking it easy after leaving office, she remains politically engaged. Good for her.

I previously received a fund raising email for the same event, to which I replied,

Happy one month left of winter!

You can take me off your political fund raising list. I won’t have extra cash for political donations until I hit the lottery or get our house fixed up whichever comes first. Also, I’m 80k words short of finishing my book, and pretty busy until I write them.

I’m a bit overdosed with these four speakers in any case. They are very available, apparently everywhere.

Have a great spring, if it ever arrives!

Regards, Paul

Email sent Feb. 25, 2023.

Gone are my days of seeking to be a recognized political activist. As a septuagenarian I’m more interested in conserving resources and preparing for elderly living, especially if I become infirm. I’m still fit to be tied.

After decennial redistricting, we landed in a Republican-leaning Iowa House and Senate District. Our Democratic senate candidate worked hard to win the 2022 election and came up short. Our Democratic house candidate was unopposed in the primary, yet took a new, demanding job after filing that prevented her from running the kind of underdog campaign that was needed. After living through the 2012-2020 cycles with Bobby Kaufmann winning all five contests, experience shows it unlikely we will be able to get these seats away from Republican incumbents. That is, unless the county party does something more to win in 2024. This is one of the reasons I plan to attend the organization meeting in person tonight.

Is it that bad? Yes, it is.

Our State Senator Dawn Driscoll is part of Republican party leadership. While she does communicate through a weekly newsletter, she has supported leadership initiatives, notably, school vouchers and setting liability caps for medical malpractice and the trucking industry.

She is floor manager for Senate File 443 which would reorganize how county supervisors are elected, requiring large counties like ours to eliminate at-large supervisor elections and establish districts where each voter picks only their own supervisor. This is a significant change. If it passes, rural voices will be less relevant than ever because to evenly divide the districts by population, urban voters will be part of and dominate every district.

Our State Representative Brad Sherman has sponsored 16 bills as of this writing. The list of bills resembles the playbook of right-wing interests. Included in his sponsorship list are bills covering means-testing for public assistance, anti-trans discrimination, K-12 social studies curriculum, prohibition of drugs used for abortion, a Second Amendment preservation act, voter suppression, changing the Iowa Civil Rights Act, closer scrutiny to books available in school libraries, nullifying the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and prohibiting abortion in the state. None of this is surprising. Elections matter and Driscoll and Sherman won fair and square.

Yesterday the national cancer registry released it latest report, saying Iowa was second in the nation for incidence of cancer. We are the only state where the rate of cancer cases is growing. Likewise, our public schools used to be considered best in the nation. We’ve fallen to 24th in K-12 schools, according to U.S. News and World Report. This is not to mention our deteriorating water quality, lack of population growth, and a workforce shortage that negatively impacts business.

While these things are not really news, everything is hitting at once. Iowa as presently configured is not a state I would choose if I weren’t born here. Young people wised up and chose to live and work elsewhere.

So, yes. I’m fit to be tied and young enough to try to do something about it. It will take all hands on deck to steer the ship back on a reasonable, responsible course.

While my spouse was being fitted for eyeglasses, I tried on a few pair of frames. I am not used to looking at myself in the mirror, yet my reflection was okay: hair reasonably combed, I didn’t look dumb. I don’t pay much attention to looks, so seeing myself was a bit of a shock. I appeared younger in the mirror than my age.

I delayed new glasses. If there is a prescription update at my April screening, I want the latest lenses. I keep eye wear for years after they are new.

Our Iowa life does not include vision insurance because it is a loser. Between advertised sales and self-imposed delays in updating our glasses, it is cheaper to pay cash for optometry service. The technician covered every common type of available discounts and insurance during the conversation with my spouse. By then, I had moved on, sitting on a bench in the mall reading my mobile device while the transaction concluded.

My news and social media feeds told a story of Iowa undergoing historic change in our governance. Republicans are just getting started. It will be a new Iowa when they are done.

The transition began with spurning the black president and Democratic governance in 2010. Obama won Iowa in 2008, but Democrats lost the governorship two years later as Terry Branstad returned to office with Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds. It intensified when Republicans gained control of the Iowa governorship, House and Senate in 2017.

The evangelical movement in Iowa politics is partly responsible for Republican dominance. Evangelicals are less about religion and more about authoritarian behavior. I mean, I met Bob Vander Plaats when he ran for governor and he is no more religious than a broken garden spade.

What is the political evangelical movement about? Getting back to a mythical past, one that never was real, and tearing down anything that conflicts, for example, education, tax structures, licensing requirements, rules about hunting, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on. The only thing sacrosanct is allegiance to corn, soy, and livestock farming. True believers genuflect at the altar of corn ethanol.

Before the 2010 three judges campaign, the one where evangelicals rallied to ouster three Iowa Supreme Court justices because they were part of a unanimous decision that an Iowa law restricting marriage to one man and one woman violated the state’s constitution, Iowans may have given evangelicals a pass. They are religious, how bad can they be? As the Iowa legislature prepares to enable young children to work in slaughter houses and other dangerous jobs, and parents assert ownership of children as property, we should now know.

The mall was deserted when I sat down. There weren’t enough shoppers to keep the lights on. It was during the middle of the day when seniors tend to business, but still. If I owned that mall, I’d be worried.

If the mall closes and the eye wear retailer moves, we’ll go there. Even though my prescription needs an update, I can still see clearly enough to know that Iowa will never be the same once Republicans are done with it.

It will be a new Iowa, one I hope all of us can tolerate.

Toward the end of Monday afternoon I was following three live video streams opened in browsers on my desktop. With recently improved data stream from our internet service provider, and an upgraded router/modem, the video was crystal clear, the sound excellent. I didn’t like all I was hearing.

One window was a Twitch streamer during a session titled “Makers and Crafting.” They were making chain mail for use with a cosplay character. I enjoy Makers and Crafting streams more than those that play video games or are “just chatting.” It felt like we were getting something accomplished.

The other two streams were the Iowa House and Senate debates over the governor’s public money for private schools bill, the Students First Act. There was never a question the bill would pass. This morning it is heading to the governor’s office where she is expected to sign it yet today. I couldn’t listen to all the speeches and shut my desktop down around 5 p.m. to prepare dinner. Everything we expected was happening and I couldn’t bear watching the disaster in real time.

As unsettling as anything about this bill was the photograph of lobbyist and consultant Corey A. DeAngelis with the governor. The out of state consultant has been pushing for the bill and with the governor’s assistance, he got his way. This photo reminded me of a photo then-governor Terry Branstad took with Drew Klein of Americans for Prosperity when the legislature gutted Iowa’s collective bargaining laws for public employees. Apparently Iowa Republican governors have an affection for lobbyists when they destroy long-established traditions.

In the post I made about this bill I wrote, “Since Jan. 1, 2017, Republicans held a trifecta, controlling the governorship, and both chambers of the legislature. They are remaking everything about state government, and in turn, about Iowa. Schools are just one part of their agenda.” According to DeAngelis and company, the governor is not finished with school choice in this session of the 90th Iowa General Assembly. I doubt she is finished re-making Iowa.

The Democratic planning for and execution of a 2022 campaign was lackluster at best. While some candidates, like state senate candidate Kevin Kinney, had money and hired an organizer, others didn’t have good planning, execution, or adequate financial resources. It was like Democrats forgot how to campaign since Obama won Iowa in 2008 and 2012. I appreciate the work House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst and Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls are doing to rebuild the party. It is not fast enough to make a difference this and probably the next couple of sessions.

On Saturday the Iowa Democratic Party State Central Committee is electing someone to replace Ross Wilburn as chair. I hope they pick someone young and energetic because what the state party has been doing of late won’t cut it if we want to claw our way back into legislative leadership. We have good people in the party. I hope one of them steps up, wins, and does well.

What matters more is the Democratic state central committee is increasingly irrelevant to people like me. Of course, I retired and am a pensioner now, so less people will take me seriously. If the party’s future is in younger, new people, I’m all for it. I have plenty to do in the coming years and crossing politics off my list would be a boon.

As the 90th Iowa General Assembly revs up with an early win for the governor, they have much they want to do in the next two years. I doubt I’ll like much of it. They followed commonplace advice that if one is to eat a bucket of frogs, eat the biggest frog first. With the Students First Act out of the way, and with it the big distraction it was, Iowa Republicans can be expected to continue remaking the state in their image. For me, that means it’s time to head for the exits.

A grader notices things. I got a newspaper route in the seventh grade and managed my own business. First it was the Des Moines Register and then the Times-Democrat. There were nice people and deadbeats among my customers. Nice people were friendly. They paid on time and talked to me like an adult. The deadbeats, not so much. They wouldn’t pay their weekly bill. When I told the office to cut them off after a couple of weeks, the customer called the office and blamed me for them not paying, even though I knocked their door for collections twice every week when they were delinquent. Whatever the deadbeats didn’t pay came out of my margin. Even though there were losses, I had enough money to take the bus downtown to pay my newspaper bill and buy a few things on Saturday mornings.

One of my favorite downtown places was the automat at the M.L. Parker Department Store. I would wait outside for them to unlock the doors so I could be the first one in. I occasionally bought a pre-made hamburger and warmed it under an infrared light bulb. We didn’t have such a heating device at home.

I stopped at W.T. Grant, F.W. Woolworth and occasionally went to Petersen’s, inconveniently located across a busy Second Street. I also stopped at Louis Hanssen Hardware Store where they had a centralized cashier operation connected to the sales floor by a small trolley system.  There was a coin shop which was almost never open as early as I was downtown. The idea coins passing through my hands on the paper route were worth more than face value was fascinating.

I had vague notions that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X existed, yet they had little impact on our daily lives. I don’t remember seeing a news story about the assassination of Malcolm X even though it was in February of the last year I delivered newspapers. I heard about it later in high school. Like many, our family viewed King’s speech at the march on Washington on television. We believed everyone should be treated equally.

I encountered black kids my age at the YMCA swimming pool and at summer camp. It seemed like no big deal, although I bore a kind of racial prejudice without recognizing it. I knew black kids were kids like me yet I didn’t encounter them often. These experiences put into perspective something it’s important not to miss: I grew up in white culture with white privilege.

I had heard about the 1960 sit-in at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in school before starting my newspaper route. That prompted me to enter the Woolworth’s in Davenport one Saturday morning and check it out. It didn’t seem that special, even if it was to those four North Carolina college students. No one was dining at the counter when I arrived. The woman behind the counter asked if she could get me anything. I don’t remember if I did that time, yet I added the lunch counter to my rotation of places to eat on Saturday mornings. I don’t know how the black kids I swam with at the YMCA would be treated if they tried to order something.

Our family saw images of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis after Dr. King’s April 4, 1968 assassination. We watched news coverage on television. The night shots of the scene were confusing and upsetting. Added to the recent assassination of President Kennedy I wondered what was going on in society. Assassination of our leaders was plainly wrong.

Today we celebrate Dr. King’s birthday. He would have been 94 years old had he lived. Here is the speech.

Iowa Democrats took a shellacking during the 2010 general election for U.S. Senate. We ran Des Moines attorney Roxanne Conlin against incumbent Chuck Grassley in a historic campaign. Grassley won 718,215 votes to Conlin’s 371,686.

In an email to supporters after the election, Conlin wrote, in part:

I don’t want you to be sad about the outcome of this election. There are other reasons to run besides winning. We talked issues that otherwise might not have gotten a hearing, we met lots of young women and girls who loved seeing an Iowa woman running for high office. And I hope that we motivated a lot of voters who would not have otherwise come out to the polls.

We stood strong for our principles. And we conducted our campaign with dignity.

[…]

As Ted Kennedy famously said, “the work continues, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream will never die.”

Email from Roxanne Conlin dated Nov. 4, 2010.

I would rather Conlin had won that election.

The Iowa Republican legislature and governor seek to change how schools are funded. It is the latest in a long-term agenda to radically remake Iowa into something completely different from the one in which I grew up. Since Jan. 1, 2017, Republicans held a trifecta, controlling the governorship, and both chambers of the legislature. They are remaking everything about state government, and in turn, about Iowa. Schools are just one part of their agenda.

We consider Republican legislators to be stingy in their support of public schools, although they say each year they have been generous. The fact is the cost per pupil in public schools is rising much faster than what the legislature provided each year in funding. Here is a a chart of expenses from the legislature’s website. The funding shortfall seems obvious.

What exactly do Republicans think they are funding in public schools? A change in education that walks away from basic assumptions about the long-time role of public schools in society. Let’s go in the Wayback Machine to the 1950s thanks to Frances FitzGerald’s 1979 book America Revised:

There is a growing consensus that the schools should assume a primary responsibility for basic functions of education which were once almost entirely performed by family and church. These include moral and spiritual education, character education, education for home and family living, and other aspects of personal and social adjustment.

Unnamed Report by the National Council for the Social Studies quoted by Frances FitzGerald in America Revised.

Today’s Republicans reject what used to be a consensus about education. During the previous two legislative sessions a proposal to advance public funding of private schools was held at bay because it is widely unpopular.

Governor Kim Reynolds, during her swearing in speech on Friday, Jan. 13, addressed what she is doing and why she persists in providing public funds for private education.

“Trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”  Psalm 32:8 

Having that perspective has given me freedom. A freedom to be bold and not beholden. 

Not beholden to others, to elections, or even to what’s popular. Instead, I have the freedom to do what I believe is right. Right for our state, right for our citizens, and, most of all, right for our children—regardless of the personal consequences to me.  

Press Release from the Iowa Governor’s office, Jan. 13, 2023.

The text of Senate Study Bill 1022, the Students First Act, was filed shortly after the legislature convened. While the governor’s proposal has not been popular, it may pass this session. The question and answer on last week’s Iowa Press explains.

Erin Murphy It’s bigger (comparing previous, similar legislation to SSB1022). Is it a slam dunk in your caucus? Is this bill your expectation that it will pass?

Pat Grassley And I think you touched on something that’s so important where the dynamic has fundamentally changed since last session. There’s been an election, and this issue has been out there. Candidates for the House all across the state were very successful and almost all of them at least campaigned on this part of their campaign strategy and their platform moving forward.

Iowa Press, Jan 13, 2023. Link

Regardless that the governor believes this path for public education is the right one, and Republicans campaigned on public funding for private education and won, the bill is flawed. It is also expensive, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the first four years alone. I wrote in opposition to SSB1022, attempting to address the flaws in the bill as well as the need for legislators to work together on resolving the shortfall in Iowa public education funding:

I oppose SSB1022, The Students First Act, as written. I was educated first through twelfth grades in a private school without direct public funding. Our church paid the entire cost of physical plant and operating costs, including teachers. If the current Republican majority campaigned on change as outlined in SSB1022, and were elected because of it, some form of the legislation may pass despite protests. The bill’s language was filed just this week. I encourage Republicans to work with Democrats to make the final product much better than it is today. Consider and accept amendments now, and during debate. If Iowa will go down this path and give public funds to private schools, inclusion of the broadest possible input is needed. There is no hurry to get this done. Take your time. Do what’s right for Iowa. For me, that means rejecting the bill as written.

Public comments on SSB1022 in the Iowa Legislature. Link

We shall see what Republicans do during public dialogue on SSB1022. If it becomes law, Iowa will change in ways no one anticipated. The reasonable approach to elections exhibited by talented yet losing candidates like Roxanne Conlin will not be enough.

Last night, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds gave the condition of the state address in the House chamber, live broadcast on Iowa Public Television. In it, she introduced this year’s version of her voucher plan, calling it the Students First Act. In part, she said,

Regardless of the reason, every parent should have a choice of where to send their child—and that choice shouldn’t be limited to families who can afford it. 
 
My school choice bill will create education savings accounts for families who choose to send their child to a private school. The State will contribute $7,598 to that account, which is the amount of funding the State provides for each child who attends a public school.  
 
For students currently attending a private school, the plan will be phased in, focusing first on the families with the lowest income levels. And in three years, every family will have a choice in education. And no child will be limited by income or zip code. 
 
My education plan starts with school choice, but it doesn’t end there. As I said, this is about making sure every child receives a quality education, regardless of the school system they’re in. 

Governor Kim Reynolds Condition of the State address, Jan. 10, 2023.

Senate Study Bill 1022 dropped. Here’s the link to the bill.

There is speculation the bill might get a committee hearing in both the Senate and House today.

I wanted to get this information out on the internet. I’ll have more to say later.

While driving north on Southeast 14th Street in Des Moines, the Iowa State Capitol rose above the horizon in brilliance befitting its 19th Century aspiration. If something happened to the structure, I’m not sure it would be rebuilt with the stunningly beautiful design I witnessed on Saturday.

The 90th Iowa General Assembly begins on January 9. Republicans have a majority in both chambers of the legislature, so Democrats will play defense. Tuesday, Jan. 10, is the governor’s condition of the state address, although we pretty much know what she will say. Despite the Republican trifecta, Democrats stand ready to fight for Iowans like me.

“There’s no question last year was tough for Iowa Democrats, but I’ve got hope. I’m not giving up on my state and the place I’ll always call home. House Democrats are ready to get to work and fight for you and the people of Iowa,” wrote Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst in an email.

I signed up for the legislative newsletter from my State Senator Dawn Driscoll. If my State Representative Brad Sherman has one, I’ll sign up for it as well. I plan to watch the legislature more closely than I did last year. Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty, according to the July 8, 1817 Vermont Gazette. That is more than evident this year.