Nancy Dugan lives in Altoona, Iowa. Disclosure: Dugan has filed several objections into the Summit Carbon Iowa Utilities Commission dockets in opposition to the CO2 pipeline. She has neither sought nor received funding for her work.

Late on Friday afternoon, August 23, the Iowa Utilities Commission posted a Motion to Declare the Acquisition of Certain Land Interests Noncompliant by the Bremer County Board of Supervisors. The motion was filed into Summit Carbon Solutions docket number 2024-0001 (SCS Carbon Transport LLC; Petition for Hazardous Liquid Pipeline Permit, POET – Fairbank and Shell Rock, IAL-501, IAT-401).

The motion centers on Summit Carbon’s announcement earlier this month that it had purchased land easement agreements from Navigator Heartland Greenway, LLC. According to the motion, “In 2021, Navigator Heartland Greenway (“Navigator”) proposed to route a similar carbon dioxide pipeline along a similar route in Bremer County.”

Navigator subsequently announced that it had canceled its multistate pipeline project in October 2023. An October 20, 2023, Iowa Capital Dispatch article reported that in response to Navigator’s announcement, Summit Carbon stated that it “welcomes and is well-positioned to add additional plants and communities to our project footprint.”

Bremer County’s motion included three exhibits.

Democrats currently hold just 36 of the 100 Iowa House seats, the party’s smallest contingent in the chamber for more than 55 years. But two and a half months before the November election, the party is already set to pick up one Iowa House seat. Davenport school board president Dan Gosa is the only candidate on the general election ballot in House district 81, covering parts of northwest Davenport in Scott County.

GOP State Representative Luana Stoltenberg won this open seat by eleven votes in 2022, after a controversial series of recounts. She announced in January that she would not seek re-election, and Republicans were unable to recruit anyone to run here. No independent or third-party candidate filed before the August 24 deadline.

The district leans Democratic; according to a map Josh Hughes created in Dave’s Redistricting app, Joe Biden received 53.4 percent of the vote in precincts now part of House district 81, while Donald Trump received 44.5 percent. The latest official figures show the district contains 7,582 registered Democrats, 5,812 Republicans, 9,342 no-party voters, and 173 Libertarians.

I doubt either party has had a more successful convention in my lifetime than last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I envisioned finishing this post on Friday, but it was so hard to choose my favorite moments that I ended up watching many DNC speeches a second time. My two biggest takeaways:

For the first time in many years, the Democratic ticket has better bumper-sticker slogans than Republicans.

• “Mind your own damn business.”
• “We’re not going back.”
• “Do something.”
• “When we fight, we win.”

All of those slogans are calls to action, and they encompass a wide range of aspirations and concerns about a second Donald Trump presidency.

Second big takeaway: The Democratic Party has a deeper bench today than I can remember. So many great speeches didn’t make the cut. Honorable mentions include the remarks by U.S. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxwell Frost, U.S. Senators Raphael Warnock and Cory Booker, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.

I couldn’t have written this kind of piece after last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As longtime GOP strategist Stuart Stevens and Democratic political commentator James Fallows both observed recently, the Trump takeover has produced an enormous talent gap between the two major parties. Republicans have chased away many with experience, skills, and crossover appeal, because only loyalty to Trump matters.

Any top ten list is subjective. I was guided not only by speeches that moved me, but also by those that seemed most effective in accomplishing one or more of the Democratic National Convention’s main objectives: firing up the party base, introducing the ticket to a national audience, and appealing to swing voters.

Kevin Virgil, who gained nearly 40 percent of the vote in the Republican primary to represent Iowa’s fourth Congressional district, has encouraged his supporters to consider splitting their votes: Donald Trump for president and Democrat Ryan Melton for Congress.

Virgil shared one of Melton’s posts on X/Twitter on the evening of August 23, praising the Democrat for opposing “land seizure for CO2 pipelines” and “corporate capture in Iowa and in DC,” while asking “hard questions about Iowa’s sky-high cancer rates.”

“If you care about our children’s future,” Virgil wrote, “then it’s time to think about voting for a split-ticket with Trump and @melton4iowa.”

At least ten candidates who identify as part of the LGBTQ community are running for the Iowa legislature this year. The previous high water mark was seven LGBTQ candidates in 2022.

The majority of Iowa’s gay, queer, or transgender candidates are Democrats, as has been the case in previous election cycles. This year’s cohort also includes the state’s first openly gay Republican lawmaker and an independent candidate for a House seat.

The candidates profiled below are mostly not highlighting issues of special concern to LGBTQ Iowans. Like others running for the legislature, they are campaigning on topics such as public education, reproductive rights, mental health services, and economic development.

At the same time, several candidates believe LGBTQ representation at the statehouse is particularly important now, in light of the many bills targeting the community that Republicans enacted or attempted to pass in 2023 and 2024.

All voter registration data mentioned below comes from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Figures for the 2020 presidential vote in each legislative district come from maps Josh Hughes created in Dave’s Redistricting App.

Democratic State Senator Liz Bennett is the only out queer member of the Iowa Senate and the second out LGBTQ person ever to serve in the chamber (after Democrat Matt McCoy, who retired from the legislature in 2018). Bennett is not up for re-election this year, having won a four-year term last cycle in Senate district 39, covering part of Cedar Rapids.

A legal challenge to a “giant step backward” for Iowa women ended this week.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the Iowa City-based Emma Goldman Clinic, and Dr. Sarah Traxler, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, on August 15 asked a Polk County District Court to dismiss their lawsuit challenging Iowa’s near-total abortion ban.

The state has been able to enforce the ban (House File 732) since July 29, making most abortions illegal after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected. That often happens around six weeks after the last menstrual period. The Iowa Supreme Court ruling that allowed the 2023 law to go into effect made it almost impossible for plaintiffs to show the statute is unconstitutional.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

When I was a kid growing up in eastern Iowa during the 1970s, the school library opened up the world to me.

I remember rushing through my homework during study hall, so I could get to the library.

Like most students in school, there were classes I loved (history and English) and those I hated (math and science). But despite my misgivings about the curriculum, never did I doubt my love for the school library. To me, it was a refuge for independent thought and exploration, where nobody could exercise control over where my mind wandered.

There, the world beckoned, and I eagerly dove in.

U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01) is among eighteen House Republicans who asked Speaker Mike Johnson last week “to prioritize business and market certainty as you consider efforts that repeal or reform the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Miller-Meeks was the only Iowan in the U.S. House to sign an August 6 letter, first reported by Politico’s E&E News. Like others who signed, Miller-Meeks is on record twice opposing the energy tax credits: first, when she voted against the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, and next, when she voted for repealing many of that law’s provisions as part of a House Republican debt ceiling bill in April 2023. The language on tax credits wasn’t part of last year’s final deal to raise the debt ceiling.

Clean energy investments have skyrocketed in the two years since President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. But as Jamie Dupree reported in the August 8 edition of his Regular Order newsletter, House Republican leaders call incentives for projects including solar, wind, aviation fuel, hydrogen, and electric vehicles “Market Distorting Green Tax Credits.” That has raised concerns the credits could go away if Republicans control both chambers of Congress next year.

The August 6 letter warned,

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

During the “Progressive Era” in American history—two decades or so, from roughly 1896 until 1917—a number of states adopted the “initiative” and “referendum” as part of the way their governments operated. Many of those states were in the American West. Iowa was not among them. What would it be like here if we had taken that step—or if we did so now?

The initiative allows citizens to propose new legislation on the election ballot, and the referendum allows voters to vote those proposals up or down. That combination provides a way to bypass the state legislature which, as we know, doesn’t always enact legislation that is the people’s choice.

The morning after Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the Cedar Rapids Gazette published a lengthy article about an explosive claim. Republican Party of Iowa state chair Jeff Kaufmann asserted that it was “blatantly antisemitic” for Harris to pass over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Thanks to the Gazette’s content-sharing arrangement with the Lee Newspaper group, the story inspired by a GOP event in Cedar Rapids reached thousands more readers through the Quad-City Times, Sioux City Journal, Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier, and Mason City Globe Gazette.

The piece was an editorial failure on several levels.

Transgender or nonbinary Iowans under age 18 will soon have more help obtaining gender-affirming care out of state. In partnership with the LGBTQ advocacy group One Iowa, the North Carolina-based Campaign for Southern Equality is expanding its Trans Youth Emergency Project to Iowa, the groups announced on August 9. 

Republican lawmakers and Governor Kim Reynolds banned gender-affirming care (such as puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and surgery) for Iowa minors last year. More than two dozen GOP-controlled states have enacted similar laws. The Campaign for Southern Equality estimates that 38 percent of transgender youth nationally and 93 percent of those in the South live in states that ban gender-affirming care.

A news release explained that the Trans Youth Emergency Project provides “1-on-1 custom patient navigation services and supports families of transgender youth with emergency grants of $500, renewable every six months, to help them travel out of state for care.” The project has distributed “more than $500,000 in direct emergency grants to 1,000 families and individuals” in fifteen states since March 2023. After the expansion, grants will be available to families in 25 states.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

A modern political Mason-Dixon line appears to be taking form north of Mason City and south of Albert Lea—somewhere around the Minnesota-Iowa border.

The clash of cultures is no accident. And now, the increasing divide will be exposed (and expanded, mostly likely) under a national spotlight in which Iowa and Minnesota are prime exhibits in what the still-living, but politically-late John Edwards would have called the “Two Americas” conversation.

Few leaders within an afternoon’s drive from each other have such starkly opposing views and agendas on American life and government than Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. If Iowa and Minnesota were the only states in the union, one would surely secede.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

I’ve been waiting for the 2024 election in Venezuela. In my head, I was planning an essay. A turnaround in the fortunes of Venezuela is critical to abating of out-of-control migration in the Western Hemisphere.

Between 2014 and 2023, an estimated 7.7 million left Venezuela as migrants. That’s 20 percent of the country’s population, or about 2,000 per day on average. Of these, 6.5 million have found temporary relocation in Latin America and the Caribbean, mainly Columbia and Peru.

The root causes of this unprecedented flow of migrants and refugees include democratic breakdown, repression, and a lack of basic human rights. These remain unchanged in Venezuela. There is also a deep economic crisis driven by devastating policies and a kleptocracy that has characterized the political landscape during the last 20 years. Nineteen million Venezuelan citizens are experiencing food and medical insecurity. It’s a boiling pot ready to explode.

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.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

During the 40 years I was a newspaper editor/manager, I strived to ensure the staff incorporated context into their articles. Sometimes, in a journalistic shorthand, that was described “the Iowa angle.”

If there was a mass murder in Iowa, I would dip into my stash of clippings and find the list of the worst mass killings in Iowa history. That allowed us to give context to the magnitude of the tragedy.

The same with tornadoes and floods. How does the number of deaths compare with the worst of these nightmares we have experienced in the past?

During the Vietnam war, and later during the Gulf wars, we turned to bound desk calendars where we pasted clippings to track the running tally of deaths of Iowa soldiers. 

So, over this past weekend a friend and I pawed through statistics to provide important Iowa context when Belgium’s mixed relay triathlon team pulled out of the Olympic competition in Paris.

Diane Rosenberg is executive director of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, where this commentary first appeared.

When U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley stopped at Jefferson County Park in June during his 99-county tour, it was the first time in a long while that he invited the general public to a meeting in this county.

Of course, I had to attend to ask him about CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression or EATS Act.

The EATS Act is Big Meat’s next move to gut California Proposition 12, and it’s currently embedded in the House version of the Farm Bill. (Grassley and Senator Joni Ernst were among its original Senate co-sponsors.) California voters approved Prop 12 in 2018 by a 63 percent to 37 percent margin. The measure requires any pork sold in that state to come from sows who were raised in a larger, more humane area where they can more freely move. It prohibits the sale of pork from sows caged in gestation crates or pork from their litters.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

Senator Joni Ernst calls herself the U.S. Senate’s “fiercest advocate” for government accountability.

Too bad she doesn’t appear to care about the country’s biggest tax cheats.

Over the past couple years, the Iowa senator has been fixated on the Internal Revenue Service. But rather than help the IRS try to recover the hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes each year, Ernst and her fellow Republicans are doing the opposite. They want to choke off the funding that is helping the IRS to rein in these abuses and give you better service.

Three weeks ago, the IRS announced that, with the additional funding provided by the White House and Democrats in Congress, it had collected more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes from millionaires over the past year.

U.S. women have had phenomenal success at the Olympic Games in Paris. Simone Biles has won more Olympic medals than any other American gymnast. Katie Ledecky has won more Olympic medals than any other American woman in any sport. Lee Keifer became a three-time gold medalist in fencing and competed against Lauren Scruggs in “the first All-American final in the individual foil in Olympic history.” U.S. women also won their “first-ever team fencing gold in women’s foil” and their first medal in rugby.

At this writing, more than two dozen women competing for the U.S. have won medals in events ranging from cycling to diving, shooting, and canoeing. Laura Kraut became “the oldest American woman to win an Olympic medal since 1904” as part of a team equestrian event. More medals are likely coming in swimming and gymnastics, and the track and field events are just getting started.

Instead of celebrating the successes of American women in France, Iowa Republicans joined the stampede of conservatives who used a boxing match between an Algerian and an Italian to push their anti-trans agenda.

Libertarian candidates have qualified for the general election ballot in three of Iowa’s four U.S. House districts.

A state party convention in early June nominated Nicholas Gluba in the first Congressional district, Marco Battaglia in the third, and Charles Aldrich in the fourth.

All three candidates spoke to Bleeding Heartland about their goals and priorities at the state capitol on July 29. That was the first day federal candidates who did not compete in a major-party primary could submit nominating papers to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office for the November 5 election.

“Lead us not into temptation,” State Auditor Rob Sand told some 450 Iowa Democrats on July 27. He tries to say those words every day, he explained, because the phrase has “been an important part of my life, and an important part of my faith, like it has for many other people.”

Sand’s remarks drew heavily on the language of faith to press the case against Republican policies.

The auditor is not on the ballot this November but is widely viewed as a possible candidate for governor in 2026. So while Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was the main attraction at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty and Justice Celebration in Des Moines, Sand’s six-minute speech was also notable as a preview of his next campaign—either for governor or for a third term in his current position.

Top Iowa Republicans complained this week that Democratic voters were “disenfranchised” by President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside as his party’s nominee.

Days earlier, they had celebrated the nomination of Donald Trump, who tried to nullify millions of Americans’ votes after losing the 2020 presidential election.

“Running as a Democrat in Rural Iowa just got so much more hopeful,” Iowa House candidate Tommy Hexter posted on X/Twitter on July 22, shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris secured enough support from delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. “I am so grateful to Joe Biden for capping off his service to our Country by passing the torch to someone who can truly energize voters here in the Heartland.”

Many Iowa Democrats shared Hexter’s sense of relief and excitement after Biden announced he would stand down as the party’s candidate.

Iowa’s no longer the swing state it was for every presidential election from 1992 through 2012. Few doubt that Donald Trump will have little trouble winning Iowa’s six electoral votes.

Even so, the Harris campaign could help Democrats competing for other offices.

“It’s time to put Donald J. Trump back in the White House and restore the future of our country for hardworking Americans!” U.S. Senator Joni Ernst posted on social media on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

Iowa’s junior senator kept busy in Milwaukee, participating in several panel discussions or events arranged by conservative groups, and praising Trump in podcast or television interviews. She appeared at some Iowa GOP functions (though she wasn’t one of our state’s RNC delegates) and honored Trump’s campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita.

But Ernst’s status has diminished since the last time her party nominated Trump for the presidency. She was among a small group of politicians passed over as RNC speakers this year, after giving prime-time addresses at both the 2016 and 2020 conventions.

A rift with team Trump could jeopardize Ernst’s hope to move up another notch in Senate leadership after the November election. It could also inspire a MAGA challenger to run in the GOP primary when the senator seeks a third term in 2026.

UPDATE: On July 22, the Iowa Supreme Court referred the case back to District Court. The same day, Judge Jeffrey Farrell issued an order dissolving the temporary injunction and allowing the law to be “fully enforced,” effective 8:00 AM on Monday, July 29. Original post follows.

Three weeks after the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state should be able to enforce a near-total abortion ban, the law is still on hold.

Polk County District Court Judge Jeffrey Farrell said during a July 19 virtual conference that the Iowa Supreme Court had not yet issued an order transferring the case back to District Court. That needs to happen before the judge can dissolve a temporary injunction blocking enforcement of the ban (House File 732).

Under Iowa’s rules of civil procedure, the high court cannot transfer a case to lower court within the first 21 days after a Supreme Court ruling (that period ends on July 19), or “while a properly filed petition for rehearing” is pending. The plaintiffs in this case—Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the Emma Goldman Clinic, and Dr. Sarah Traxler—filed a petition for rehearing on July 11. They provided three reasons the Iowa Supreme Court majority should have left the injunction in place while litigation proceeds.

It’s not clear when the Supreme Court will accept or reject the petition for rehearing. The court rarely grants such requests and rarely makes significant changes to decisions already published.

Jared Strong is senior reporter for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared. Under a state law that took effect July 1, the Iowa Utilities Board was renamed the Iowa Utilities Commission.

Legislators, counties, conservation groups, and landowners have asked state regulators to reconsider their permit approval for an expansive carbon dioxide pipeline system in Iowa.

A total of eight motions were filed with the Iowa Utilities Commission in the past week before a procedural deadline on July 15, and they are likely precursors to lawsuits in state court.

Wally Taylor is the Legal Chair of the Sierra Club Iowa chapter.

In late June, six conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices overruled the Chevron doctrine in a case called Loper Bright v. Raimondo. The 40-year-old Chevron precedent had required courts to give deference to an administrative agency’s interpretation of the laws it administers and enforces.

This may sound like an issue only a lawyer would care about. But it has major implications for how government functions.

Iowans Tamara Scott and Brad Sherman are among some 20 Republicans who signed an unofficial “minority report” on the abortion plank of the Republican National Committee’s platform.

Scott has represented Iowa as RNC committeewoman since 2012 and is the Iowa state director of Concerned Women for America. Sherman is a pastor and first-term member of the Iowa House. He voted for the near-total abortion ban Republican lawmakers approved in July 2023 (which will soon be enforced) and has co-sponsored even more extreme bills to prohibit abortion.

Loyalists to former President Donald Trump wrote the RNC’s new platform and rammed the draft through the National Republican Platform Committee using a closed process, with no subcommittee meetings, little time to review or debate the document, and no votes on proposed amendments. The abortion plank now reads:

What should have been an ordinary presidential campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania turned into a horrifying scene on July 13. A man shot at Donald Trump from a nearby rooftop, killing one person and wounding several others, including the former president.

Iowa political leaders reacted quickly to the assassination attempt, and their comments reflected several distinct themes.

Declaring that “This election is bigger than any one person” and “the stakes are just too high,” first Congressional district nominee Christina Bohannan on July 11 called for President Joe Biden “to withdraw from this campaign and pass the torch to a new generation of leadership.”

The same day, the Democratic nominee in Iowa’s second Congressional district, Sarah Corkery, said the president should “pass the baton” to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bohannan and Corkery were the first Iowa Democratic candidates to publicly endorse replacing the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. It’s a risky move that could appeal to independents who overwhelmingly disapprove of Biden’s job performance, but could also alienate the party faithful the challengers need to volunteer for and donate to their campaigns.

Clark Kauffman is deputy editor at Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared.

The state of Iowa says it will not necessarily disclose to the public the rationale for disciplinary charges against licensed professionals such as physicians, nurses, therapists, and nursing home administrators.

The determining factor appears to be whether the state’s licensing boards choose to include the allegations within the text of a final order in a disciplinary case. If a board opts to omit those allegations from the final order, the public may never know what gave rise to the charges.

The result is that Iowa’s licensing boards are now, in some cases, keeping secret the alleged misconduct that is tied to charges of professional incompetence, ethical violations, patient abuse and even criminal convictions.

UPDATE: A special district nominating convention selected Doug Campbell as the GOP candidate on August 19. Original post follows.

State Senator Waylon Brown announced on July 8 that he is resigning his Iowa Senate seat, effective July 10. Brown chairs the Iowa Senate Commerce Committee and has served as majority whip (the fourth-ranking position for Senate Republicans) since the 2023 legislative session. He was first elected to the legislature in 2016.

In a written statement, Brown touted various policy accomplishments but did not explain why he is stepping down. He said, “I look forward to my next chapter,” without indicating whether he has a new job lined up that would be incompatible with serving in the legislature. Bleeding Heartland’s efforts to reach Brown by phone and email were not successful. His campaign Facebook page was taken down the afternoon of July 8; no new content had been posted there since an appeal to voters on the day of the June 4 primary.

Although Iowa legislators occasionally resign during an election year—sometimes to accept a new job—it’s unusual for an incumbent to spend heavily on a tough primary campaign, then step down weeks after winning.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer. The Waverly newspaper group previously published a version of this commentary.

Based on the standard measures I learned to watch over 30 years as a trust officer, the U.S. economy is in good condition. We have completed seven straight quarters of real GDP growth. Corporate profits after taxes in the first quarter or 2024 were 6.4 percent higher than a year earlier. Monthly job growth remains strong, and unemployment has been 4 percent or lower every month since January 2022. 

In this economic environment, investment markets are favorable. Stock market indices are at or near record levels. Long-term bond yields have returned to rational levels, and certificate of deposit interest rates are the highest in years. My wife’s and my personal finances are also in good condition.

“If the government controls our reproductive rights, we are not free,” the ACLU of Iowa posted on social media July 4. The sobering message was a reminder that on this Independence Day, the hard work is just beginning.

Iowans who can get pregnant will soon be less free than at any time since I was three years old.

There is no simple path to restoring reproductive freedom in Iowa. Unlike many other state constitutions, our founding document provides no way for citizens to force a statewide vote on whether abortion should be legal.

Even so, Iowans can take concrete steps to help those who will have no legal option to terminate a pregnancy here, once the state is able to enforce a near-total abortion ban (sometime after July 19).

Dan Guild is a lawyer and project manager who lives in New Hampshire. In addition to writing for Bleeding Heartland, he has written for CNN and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, most recently here. He also contributed to the Washington Post’s 2020 primary simulations. Follow him on Twitter @dcg1114.

Before the June 27 debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I wrote about the history of presidential debates. I observed in that piece,

“A good performance tonight may allow Biden to close the gap below. A bad one and this gap may become permanent, creating enormous turnout problems among key elements of the Democratic base.”

A week later, the question isn’t whether Biden’s performance was a bad one—the question is whether it was fatal for his campaign. At a minimum, Biden missed an opportunity to close the enthusiasm gap that exists between Democrats and Republicans. At worst, he has ended his chances at winning, and imperiled Democrats down the ballot from U.S. Senate to state legislatures.

In some ways, the data creates a paradox. The shift from the last debate was not large in historical terms. However, the impact on the race is enormous, because the race was so close, and Biden trailed in many key states before the debate.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

Through the years, Iowa Supreme Court justices typically avoid harsh or overzealous language in their decisions.

That is why two separate dissenting opinions jumped out on June 28, when the court issued its long-anticipated decision on the legislature’s latest attempt to ban nearly all abortions in Iowa.

“Nothing promotes life like a forced hysterectomy preventing a woman from ever becoming pregnant again because she could not terminate a doomed pregnancy under the medical emergency exception,” wrote Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan Christensen near the end of her dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v Reynolds VI.

In that case, four Iowa Supreme Court justices ruled on June 28 that the state can enforce a near-total abortion ban (House File 732) while litigation proceeds in lower court. Reversing a Polk County District Court ruling, the majority determined the plaintiffs were not likely to succeed in showing the ban violates pregnant Iowans’ due process rights. The majority also declared that abortion restrictions are subject to “rational basis” review, which will make it far easier for the government to defend the law against the plaintiffs’ other constitutional claims.

Writing in dissent, the chief justice illuminated the suffering that will follow from this “giant step backward” for Iowa women. An equally remarkable opinion by Justice Edward Mansfield—the author of the 2022 decision that overturned Iowa’s abortion rights precedent—warned that the majority’s new approach to abortion cases “disserves the people of Iowa and their constitution.”

Dan Guild is a lawyer and project manager who lives in New Hampshire. In addition to writing for Bleeding Heartland, he has written for CNN and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, most recently here. He also contributed to the Washington Post’s 2020 primary simulations. Follow him on Twitter @dcg1114.

This post updates a piece I wrote in 2020.

At this moment the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is close; you could argue it is the closest in U.S. history. To say it is unique is to state the obvious. This is the first presidential campaign in the modern era where both candidates have held the office of president. It is unique in another way too: many Americans did not want this race.

As the data below shows, incumbents typically do poorly in the first debate. If that trend holds this year, it bodes ill for Biden—but this time may be very different.

Republicans currently enjoy large majorities of 64-36 in the Iowa House and 34-16 in the Iowa Senate. But seven Democrats got a boost last week from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which works to elect Democrats to state legislatures around the country.

Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst joined the DLCC’s board of directors in January—a signal that the group is not giving up on Iowa, despite the losses over the past decade. Although Democrats are not in a position to regain control of the House or Senate this year, making up ground in every cycle matters—especially in the House, where GOP leaders struggled to find 51 votes for some of this year’s controversial bills.

The DLCC’s seven “spotlight” candidates in Iowa include a mix of incumbents and challengers. They are running in different types of communities, from suburbs trending blue to onetime Democratic strongholds that turned red during the Trump era. They share a commitment “to combat Republican extremism” in the legislature. Attention from a national group should help them raise money and recruit volunteers looking to make a difference in a competitive election.

Key facts about the featured candidates and their districts are enclosed below. Bleeding Heartland will profile these races in more depth as the campaigns develop. All voter registration totals come from the Iowa Secretary of State’s website. Voting history for 2020 comes from the maps Josh Hughes created in Dave’s Redistricting App for Iowa’s current state House and Senate districts.

Erin Farquhar is the mother of Abram Miller, who relies on consumable hemp products to control seizures.

This year, the Iowa legislature approved and Governor Kim Reynolds signed House File 2605, placing new regulations on Iowa’s CBD, or consumable hemp, industry. Proponents described the law as an effort to limit the amount of THC in the intoxicating products being sold in our state to protect kids, but that is not what the bill does.  

Unfortunately, HF 2605 was written in a way that has very far-reaching consequences. It does the opposite of what the bill proponents said by banning access to nonintoxicating consumable hemp products used for medical purposes and maintaining access to intoxicating products, like THC infused drinks, used largely recreationally.  

The bill even makes it illegal for me to provide my son the consumable hemp medication he has used for the past nine years to remain seizure-free.   

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com

I’ve said it before, Governor Kim Reynolds is a smart politician. She won’t tell you the truth, but she’s a smart politician.

I’ve been thinking of this lately because of news stories about a federal judge dismissing a lawsuit that challenged the Iowa governor’s decision to cut off additional pandemic-related unemployment benefits three years ago. (Plaintiffs are appealing that decision.)