Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn, who was the first Libertarian elected to partisan office in Iowa, is considering a bid for U.S. Senate in 2026.
The Thomas Laehn Exploratory Committee filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission in December, but the committee’s campaign website, Laehn4Iowa.org, was just launched in late July.
Laehn spoke to Bleeding Heartland by phone last month about why he may run for Senate and what factors will influence his decision.
“IF I RUN, I’M GOING TO RUN TO WIN”
Laehn joined the Greene County attorney’s office in 2017 after finishing law school and was unopposed as a candidate for county attorney in 2018 and again in 2022.
“A number of people,” both within Libertarian circles and personal friends, have “for some time” encouraged him to run for higher office, Laehn told me. He started to have more serious conversations about the idea last year.
So far, Laehn’s exploratory committee has raised $15,360 from about a dozen donors, including former Libertarian candidates Rick Stewart (who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020 and for governor in 2022) and Keith Laube (who ran for state treasurer in 2014 and for Jasper County supervisor in 2016). The only expenditure reported to the Federal Election Commission at this writing is $300 for building the campaign website.
Laehn emphasized that he is unlikely to decide on a Senate bid before the summer of 2025. “If I run, I’m going to run to win.” A lot of Libertarians, “God bless them,” run for office in order to help maintain major-party status, or “to affect public opinion on some issue,” such as decriminalizing scheduled substances.
Laehn said he isn’t planning to run just to influence public opinion, or to help the party put a name on the ballot line. He would need to be a “credible” candidate, which will require a lot of groundwork to see whether voters are interested in his message.
“I believe that the people of Iowa want a third party. They want real change. They’re tired of voting for the lesser of two evils on both sides,” Laehn said. So many have told him they are voting for the lesser of two evils, “and as long as we keep doing that, we’re perpetuating an evil system.” He feels “the time is ripe” for a third-party candidacy.
That message appears near the top of the front page of the campaign’s website.
Thomas is not running against the Republican Party. He is not running against the Democratic Party. He is running against the two-party system itself.
A vote for the lesser of two evils is a vote for a system that produces only greater and lesser evils. So long as Iowans keep voting for Republicans and Democrats on Election Day, we will never have meaningful change.
OPPOSING “THE MONARCHICAL PRESIDENCY”
Republican Senator Joni Ernst has told reporters she plans to seek a third term in 2026. Asked where he sees his main policy differences with the incumbent, Laehn said the two major parties are “totally ignoring” the issues he’s most concerned about. “They’re almost complicit in drawing the public’s attention away from the real problems in our country.”
One of his biggest fears is “the growth of presidential power.” Before going into a legal career, Laehn earned a PhD in political science and worked as a college professor. He told me that his study of ancient Roman history and politics makes him fear “we are on the same trajectory as Rome, moving from republic to empire.” For example, Congress has handed over huge powers to the president, granting emergency powers to the office. Presidents are “making law by executive order,” and “executive agreements have largely supplanted treaties.”
Laehn mentioned President Joe Biden’s recent ten-year security pact with Ukraine, announced in June. “As a political scientist, it’s totally unclear to me where this authority came from to enter into that agreement. The Constitution says you can’t have a treaty unless it’s ratified by the Senate.”
No one’s talking about this problem, Laehn said. A good friend who’s a Democrat criticized him for challenging Biden’s exercise of presidential power in support of Ukraine. He responded, “Yes, but what if Trump wins? Does he have authority unilaterally to terminate the agreement with Ukraine and instead enter into a ten-year security pact with Russia? Do we really want to have one man have that much power?”
Laehn sees the “growth of the monarchical presidency” as hugely important for the future of the U.S. “and whether we want to preserve a republican form of government or shift toward some sort of constitutional monarchy—which, just objectively we might already be there.”
Members of Congress from both parties see it in their interest to delegate responsibility for war-making, the economy, and other domestic policies, “so they can focus on fundraising and meeting with interest groups, and you know, constituency service and all the things that help them get re-elected, and just leave the task of governing to the White House.”
AGAINST “PERPETUAL WAR”
Opposition to excessive presidential power dovetails with other concerns. Laehn thinks the U.S. “should not be engaged in all of this war-making globally,” especially without any formal declaration of war from Congress. That hasn’t happened since World War II.
We’re militarily involved all over the globe. But in Laehn’s view, “Veterans who fought to defend our country didn’t fight so that we could be involved in perpetual war. They fought so we wouldn’t have war, so we could have peace. But that’s not where we are.”
Laehn promises on his website to “fight to bring our men and women in uniform home, to block foolish wars declared by presidents without the consent of Congress, and to conserve our nation’s military strength for those rare occasions when our nation’s vital interests are truly at stake.”
This year’s Libertarian candidates for U.S. House in Iowa have also criticized our country’s involvement in foreign wars.
CONGRESS HAS “LARGELY ABDICATED” ITS RESPONSIBILITIES
Campaign finance reform is “another topic that both parties in Congress have an interest in ignoring,” Laehn told me. Congress has “largely abdicated” its responsibility to pass laws that would implement the rights contained in the Bill of Rights. He sees it as “bogus” that the U.S. Supreme Court “is the final authority on the contours of our rights.”
He noted that Congress has the authority to take away the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to hear certain kinds of cases. They haven’t exercised that power since the Civil War. (Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck just published an analysis of “how far Congress can go to keep appeals away from the Supreme Court” under the U.S. Constitution’s Exceptions Clause.)
Putting those concepts together, Laehn said, Congress “could pass meaningful campaign finance reform—prohibit super-PACs, prohibit corporate spending in elections—and say as part of this law that the Supreme Court’s not allowed to hear it.” The Congress could have protected its past campaign finance reforms from judicial review, “but they don’t. Because they all actually want it to fail,” with the Supreme Court taking the blame.
My impression was that Libertarians generally support unlimited campaign contributions and spending to influence elections. When asked about that point, Laehn said he agrees that “real people” should not be limited in that way. But he sees corporate personhood as a fiction, and he doesn’t think corporations should have the same rights as living human beings.
Laehn also mentioned eminent domain as an issue Democratic and Republican politicians ignore. On his website, he promises to “work to pass legislation prohibiting private companies from harnessing the coercive power of the state to seize property for commercial gain, ending eminent domain abuse in our nation.”
SUPPORTING “A LABORATORY OF THE STATES”
I’m not aware of any Democrat actively exploring a 2026 Senate campaign in Iowa, but presumably someone will step up to run against Ernst. I wondered how Laehn would contrast his views with what we could expect from a Democratic candidate for the same office.
He has a “very expansive conception” of the policy-making sphere that should be reserved for the states. He considers Roe v. Wade a “bad decision” and probably “the worst-reasoned decision since Dred Scott.” Regardless of where someone stands on whether abortion should be legal, Roe “was always bad law” in Laehn’s view.
There are two distinct questions: what should the abortion policy be, and who has the authority to make that policy? “And I think under the Constitution, there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s an issue that was and is reserved for the states.” He assumes that would differentiate him from a Democratic candidate, and probably also from Republicans who support a national abortion ban. He would oppose any federal law setting a nationwide policy on abortion, he said, adding,
People in Louisiana and people in New York are not going to agree on this issue within our lifetimes, or within the lifetimes of our children. And I think reasonable minds can disagree. But each side’s trying to use the national government to impose its values on the other side.
Laehn is more comfortable with diversity of policies in “a laboratory of the states.”
How does he feel generally about using federal power to influence state policies? To cite one of many examples, the federal government put restrictions on transportation funding during the 1980s to encourage states to raise the drinking age. Laehn is “totally opposed” to that approach: “Offering money with strings attached is an end around the Constitution.”
Other issues highlighted on Laehn’s campaign website include “decriminalizing marijuana to benefit taxpayers,” “securing borders with humane immigration policies,” and “fighting against national debt.”
APPEALING TO THOSE WHO VOTE “AGAINST THE OTHER SIDE”
Libertarians did not field a candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa in 2022. The party’s nominee Charles Aldrich received 41,794 votes (about 2.7 percent) in the 2016 Senate race. Stewart received 36,961 votes (about 2.2 percent) as the Libertarian candidate in the 2020 Senate race.
Given that Donald Trump is expected to carry Iowa this November with little trouble, does that mean Iowans are happy with the idea of an imperial presidency?
Laehn acknowledged that the Republican nominee will likely win Iowa, but he doesn’t believe his support “is as deep as the polling data shows.” He hears many people describe Trump as the lesser of two evils. Only a small percentage of Iowa voters participated in the Iowa caucuses, where Trump won decisively, he noted.
Laehn alluded to the concept of “negative partisanship.” Research has shown that increasingly, Americans align with a party not because they support that party’s ideas, but because they dislike the other party.
The Libertarian thinks a plurality, if not a majority, of Iowans would be open to a third-party option. About a third of Iowa’s electorate are independents, and many “disaffected” Democrats or Republicans are mainly voting “against the other side,” he said.
Asked what data points might influence his decision, Laehn said the most important criterion is whether people are receptive to his campaign.
That said, results for Libertarians in Iowa this year “will play a significant role strategically” on his ability to move forward. If the party’s presidential nominee Chase Oliver doesn’t receive at least 2 percent of the vote in November, the Libertarian Party will lose major-party status in Iowa. That would be “a very different landscape” for Laehn’s campaign.
That doesn’t mean he couldn’t run for Senate in 2026, but it would put more obstacles in his path. Without a major party being able to nominate him at a convention, Laehn—or any U.S. Senate candidate aside from the Democratic and Republican nominees—would need to collect at least 3,500 signatures across Iowa, including at least 100 signatures from at least nineteen counties.
Laehn believes he could gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, but it would “affect our game plan” and how they use their resources.
“THE GREATEST THREAT TO LIBERTY IS THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER”
Near the end of our interview, Laehn brought up a perspective that became clear in his mind when he taught constitutional law and American government, before attending law school. “The animating idea behind our constitution was the fragmentation of power. The greatest threat to liberty is the concentration of power and arbitrary, unchecked power. So you divide power, and you counter-balance it.” As each political actor tries to accrue power, other actors try to counter-act that, so “the system remains in equilibrium.”
But political parties in the U.S. “historically have violated that animating spirit of the Constitution, because they try to bridge the separation of powers, collapse federal and state governments, so that members of the same party in each branch, or at each level of government are now working together.”
In Laehn’s view, that’s why we see the concentration of power in Washington, DC, especially in the White House. The same process is happening in Des Moines. Although Iowa’s constitution establishes the Office of Attorney General as part of the judicial branch, in recent years, the legislature and the governor have been working “hand in hand” with the attorney general. “That really goes against the spirit of the constitution, where they’re supposed to be checking one another and looking out for the public interest, rather than colluding.”
Laehn was an outspoken critic of last year’s state government reorganization, which transferred “significant power from the legislature to the governor” and gave the attorney general the authority “to take over a local criminal prosecution without an invitation from the local county attorney.”
Bleeding Heartland has previously covered the failure of the legislature’s Government Oversight Committees to hold the Reynolds administration accountable. The Iowa Senate oversight committee hasn’t held a substantive meeting for years. The Iowa House panel has occasionally shined a light on local government misdeeds but hasn’t explored any failures within state government since before Kim Reynolds became governor.