Declaring the two-party system “badly broken,” State Senator David Johnson announced this morning that he will seek re-election as an independent in Iowa Senate district 1 next year. The former Republican won his first state House race in 1998 and was a successful candidate for the state Senate four times, serving for a decade as an assistant leader of the GOP caucus. He left the party in June 2016 to protest the nomination of Donald Trump as president.

In a statement enclosed in full below, Johnson said, “Politics in Des Moines has reached a bitterly partisan tipping point. Principle must come before party.” He added that “constituents of all political stripes have encouraged him to run again,” and that the “storied history of the House and Senate includes legislators who have not been affiliated with major parties.” According to Johnson, the last candidate to win an Iowa Senate race as an independent was William Schmedika in 1923.

Johnson didn’t face an opponent in his last two Senate races, but next year’s campaign is sure to be a hard-fought battle.

Governor Kim Reynolds made a strategic error by not distinguishing herself from her predecessor in any meaningful way, judging by the new Iowa poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom.

Changing course on even one high-profile policy could have demonstrated strong critical thinking and leadership skills. Instead, Reynolds is in effect running for a seventh Terry Branstad term. Unfortunately for her, Iowans are inclined to think it’s “time for someone new” in the governor’s office.

Yet again, Representative Steve King has approvingly quoted a racist European politician.

Yet again, the Iowa Republican establishment is looking the other way.

No matter how closely you were following the horror show that was the Iowa legislature’s 2017 session, chances are you didn’t notice every Republican favor to moneyed interests at the expense of working people, especially public sector employees.

So it was that I learned just this week about a new law that could cost some Iowa educators part of their retirement savings.

Bleeding Heartland welcomes guest posts advocating for candidates in competitive Democratic primaries. Please read these guidelines before writing. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I am Lane Kunzie and a senior at Wayne Community Schools in Corydon. This is my first political blog post and the Democratic primary on June 5, 2018 will be the first election I can vote in. My first vote I am going to cast will be for Andy McGuire.

Despite being the most senior member of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Iowa’s Senator Chuck Grassley is not among the Congressional Republicans who will hash out a final tax bill. The Senate voted on December 6 to go to conference with House members, but Grassley revealed on Twitter this morning that he “was dropped” as a conferee.

Presumably GOP leaders want to distance themselves from Grassley’s recent comment that repealing the estate tax would reward “the people that are investing […] as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Those remarks have received massive nationwide media coverage, mockery, and condemnation.

Some Republicans had hoped the House would quickly send the Senate’s tax bill to President Donald Trump. However, in their unprecedented haste to rewrite massive legislation after an unfavorable report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, key GOP senators introduced errors in the bill approved over the weekend.

Notably, revised language on the corporate alternative minimum tax would increase taxes on many companies, sending business interests into “revolt.” Lily Batchelder, a law professor and former chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee explained that issue in a series of tweets I’ve posted after the jump, along with a chart highlighting the key differences between the tax bills House and Senate Republicans have already passed. Other sloppily-drafted provisions “could be easily gamed” or “could open broad avenues for tax avoidance,” according to tax experts quoted by Politico’s Brian Faler.

Both bills would provide generous tax breaks to wealthy individuals while raising taxes on tens of millions of lower and middle-income households.

House Republican leaders have signaled they will agree to repeal the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, which was part of the Senate bill. By 2025, that provision would reduce the number of people with health insurance coverage by an estimated 13 million nationwide and by 125,600 in Iowa.

Promising to offer voters “a Republican alternative that is truly reflective of Iowa and the values we cherish,” Cyndi Hanson announced on December 5 that she will seek the GOP nomination in the fourth Congressional district.

Adam Kenworthy chairs the Iowa lawyer chapter of the American Constitution Society. -promoted by desmoinesdem

This post was originally supposed to be about Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate’s new FAQ page on the changes to Iowa’s voting law.

However, the Secretary of State’s Office just released a statement regarding its first round of mailings for Voter ID cards, and the more pressing issue is for all of us to be clear about what we need to do in 2018.

Iowa local elections are nominally non-partisan, but Republicans have reason to celebrate attorney Brad Hart’s victory in today’s Cedar Rapids mayoral runoff election. Hart defeated former city council member Monica Vernon by 9,518 votes to 7,995 (54.3 percent to 45.6 percent), according to unofficial results. It’s the third straight win for the GOP in Iowa’s second-largest city. Outgoing Mayor Ron Corbett, a former Republican speaker of the Iowa House, did not seek a third term because he is running for governor.

Approximately 125,600 more Iowans would be uninsured by 2025 if President Donald Trump signs into law a tax bill repealing the individual mandate, according to new estimates from the Center for American Progress. The coverage losses would be highest in the fourth Congressional district, primarily due to far more people becoming unable to purchase more expensive policies on the individual market.

In fact, the Center for American Progress projects that 56,600 residents of IA-04 would become uninsured over the next seven years, more than twice as many people as in any of Iowa’s other three Congressional districts.

Follow me after the jump for Iowa’s statewide and district-level numbers.

Voters in Iowa’s first district favor an unnamed Democrat over two-term Representative Rod Blum by 51 percent to 43 percent, according to a new survey by Public Policy Polling. Respondents in the same survey opposed the tax bill U.S. House Republicans approved last month by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin.

The Not One Penny coalition, formed in August to oppose any tax cuts “for millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations,” commissioned the survey in IA-01 and five other Congressional districts. The group has also launched a new round of television commercials targeting Blum and Representative David Young in Iowa’s third district. Not One Penny previously ran television commercials in August in IA-01, IA-03, and six other Republican-held House districts.

Meanwhile, the End Citizens United political action committee confirmed yesterday that Blum is among the “Big Money 20” Congressional Republicans it will target in 2018.

Independent State Senator David Johnson has asked Secretary of the Iowa Senate Charlie Smithson, the chamber’s chief parliamentarian, to instruct Republican leaders to grant him full committee assignments during the upcoming legislative session. Johnson argued that current rules and 95-year-old precedent support giving his 60,000 constituents “their rightful place at the committee table as well as the Senate floor.”

Johnson faces long odds, because while Smithson is a non-partisan official, he serves at the pleasure of Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix. And Dix has every incentive to keep his former Republican colleague from fully participating in legislative business.

How large an estate could a working person build by investing rather than spending “every darn penny they have” on “booze or women or movies”? Jon Muller ran some numbers. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Senator Chuck Grassley commented on what he sees as the motivation behind opposition to eliminating the estate tax, as reported by the Des Moines Register.

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies…”

As someone who resembles his remarks, I decided to run some numbers. Consider the following assumptions:

A northern Iowa radio station has fired two employees for making “insensitive, thoughtless and degrading” comments about high school basketball players with Latino-sounding names. In a statement published this morning, KIOW-FM Radio in Forest City (Winnebago County) condemned the “deplorable” remarks by announcer Orin Harris and an unidentified woman before a recent boys basketball game between Forest City and Eagle Grove (Wright County). UPDATE: KIMT reported that the woman was board operator Holly Jane Kusserow-Smidt.

Eagle Grove resident Betty Jo Willard posted what she rightly called the “absolutely appalling!!” clip on Facebook on December 3. The banter illustrates how President Donald Trump has emboldened bigots across the country to express racist views.

U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst joined all but one of their Republican colleagues to approve a $1.5 trillion tax cut and health care policy overhaul late last night. Whereas Ernst had told Iowans, “I look forward to carefully reviewing tax reform legislation in the Senate,” the final vote “came after Senate Republicans frantically rewrote the multi-trillion dollar legislation behind closed doors to win over several final holdouts,” Politico reported.

Secretary of the Iowa Senate Charlie Smithson has sometimes encouraged senators to “tell your clerk to wear something different” if a female clerk’s short skirt or top was attracting attention from older male lawmakers, he told an audience earlier this year.

Smithson’s handling of concerns about clerks’ attire raises further questions about whether he was the right person to investigate alleged sexual harassment within the Senate Republican caucus.

Responding to Iowans who have contacted their offices about tax policy, U.S. Senate Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst have misrepresented how the latest Republican bill would affect lower and middle-income taxpayers.

Everyone could have guessed Alec Baldwin would get Iowa Democrats laughing with jokes at President Donald Trump’s expense.

But who would have predicted the serious part of the actor’s speech would evoke an even stronger response from the crowd?

Follow me after the jump for audio and highlights from Baldwin’s remarks and those of the seven Democratic candidates for governor, along with Stefanie Running‘s photographs from a memorable evening in Des Moines.

Less than two weeks ago, Iowa Senate Majority Leader Bill Dix led journalists to believe there was no written report from the internal investigation of sexual harassment in the Senate GOP caucus.

Senate leaders arranged to have a redacted version of that report (addressed to Dix’s attention and dated August 15) published the day after Thanksgiving, when few Iowans would be paying attention to political news.

No wonder the original plan was to keep these findings secret: they reveal ongoing problems in the workplace as well as inherent flaws of an in-house investigation.

Gubernatorial candidate John Norris announced a statewide steering committee yesterday with more than 90 “current and former state legislators, public officials, party activists and officers, farmers, educators, students, labor leaders and business owners.”

State Representatives Marti Anderson and Jo Oldson became the first two Iowa House Democrats to back Norris, joined by former State Representatives Brian Quirk, Andrew Wenthe, Mark Kuhn, Deo Koenigs, and Roger Thomas, and former State Senators Daryl Beall, Bill Hutchins, and Lowell Junkins (who was the 1986 Democratic nominee for governor).

Other notable endorsers include Brad Anderson, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign in Iowa and was the 2014 Democratic nominee for secretary of state, former Iowa Democratic Party executive director Norm Sterzenbach, and Marcia Nichols, the longtime political director for the public employee union AFSCME. Candidates won’t release their fundraising reports until January, but I doubt these three would publicly back Norris unless they were confident that he would have the resources to compete on a statewide level before the primary. Anderson, Sterzenbach, and Nichols were part of State Representative Todd Prichard’s leadership team earlier this year. Prichard left the governor’s race in August and endorsed Fred Hubbell yesterday.

I’ve posted below the full Norris steering committee list, along with a November 20 e-mail blast from Brad Anderson and a Facebook post by Marti Anderson.

Bleeding Heartland readers may recognize the names of other Norris endorsers, such as Jess Vilsack (the former governor’s son), former Vilsack aide Dusky Terry, 2016 Iowa House candidate Heather Matson, and Kevin Techau, who was U.S. attorney for Iowa’s Northern District from 2014 until this March. Dave Swenson and Matt Russell have been occasional guest authors at this site. Emilene Leone is one of the newly-engaged Scott County activists profiled in this post. Bill Sueppel represented Muscatine Mayor Diana Broderson during her impeachment hearings and later in her civil lawsuit, resolved last month in her favor.

Any comments about the governor’s race are welcome in this thread. Bleeding Heartland previously posted audio and transcripts of stump speeches by all seven contenders and a comprehensive list of current or former state lawmakers who have endorsed a gubernatorial candidate.