Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

Elon Musk isn’t the problem. Donald Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is Republicanism and our broken political system.

Across the country and here in Iowa there have been protests targeting Elon Musk and the company he owns, Tesla. Protesters point out—rightfully, in my view—that Musk echoes fascist tendencies from the 20^th century with his glorification of Nazi imagery, sympathetic speeches to neo-Nazi groups both domestically and abroad, and his gleeful charge into dismantling the federal government. People have written articles and giving interviews exclaiming how much a problem Musk is for the United States. 

The argument goes something like this: “Elon wasn’t elected, yet he wields tremendous power to dismantle the federal government, and we do not like an unelected billionaire doing all of this damage!”

Yeah, that is true. Americans didn’t elect Musk, and one person shouldn’t have that much power to destroy the state. By all accounts, he seems to be a terrible human being who craves attention and respect while treating others poorly and abusively. Turning away from that type of person is morally good.

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

Rarely, if ever, have Iowa’s members of Congress found themselves situated to alter the course of America’s economy. But right now they can, and one of the six in the delegation has already taken a first step to do so.

Last week, President Donald Trump imposed harsh tariffs on every nation in the world that trades with us. He did so by fiat, something he claims empowerment to do without so much as even consulting Congress. The Republican majorities of 53-47 in the Senate and 220-213 in the House have remained almost unanimously acquiescent.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ March 31 visit to Iowa had the appearance and vibe of a high-ranking officer sent to the front line to boost the troops’ morale before the next assault.

Rollins visited all the strategic strongholds of Iowa agriculture: an ethanol plant, a hog farm, a feed processing operation, and a suitably big (Republican-leaning) farm operation just west of Des Moines, handing out plenty of morale-raising attaboys to the soldiers in the trenches.

But even as Rollins addressed the “Ag Leaders Dinner” in Ankeny—assembling some 500 people and Iowa’s agricultural royalty such as Governor Kim Reynolds, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig—Iowa’s economic earth was beginning to shake.

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

It takes courage to stand for the right course of action. It takes more courage to do something about it.

John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage details the actions of eight U.S. Senators throughout history who did the right thing in specific instances, knowing nevertheless the bitter criticism and retaliation they would undergo. Among the eight was U.S. Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, who was among seven Republican senators who voted against convicting President Andrew Johnson in 1868 on his questionable impeachment charge approved by the Republican-controlled U.S. House.

Johnson avoided ejection from the presidency by just one vote. Had any one of the seven brave senators voted the other way, he would have been gone.

Sometimes such courage takes place hidden from the public. Other times, as in the episodes Kennedy describes, it’s very public, even sensational.

If ever a time cried out for such courage, it’s now.

Jeff Fuhrman is an independent international finance director with significant experience in the former Soviet Union.  He resides in Iowa with his husband and their dog, Harambe.

I write today to advocate for a return to good judgment and integrity in U.S. policies toward Ukraine. 

The February 28 meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy devolved into a shouting match. Apparently it was was too much for the Trump administration for Zelenskyy to cite real facts in front of media outlets that might actually broadcast them.

The rhetorical tactics Trump and Vice President JD Vance used in response (including “if all else fails, just talk over them, loudly”) may have worked for some of the audience, but the messaging apparently didn’t land right. The administration sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio out to do more damage control a few hours later.

Dean Lerner served Iowa as an Assistant Attorney General for sixteen years, Chief Deputy Secretary of State for four years, and about ten years as Deputy Director, then Director of the Department of Inspections & Appeals. He then worked for the CMS Director of the Division of Nursing Homes, and the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa. He is a graduate of Grinnell College and Drake University Law School.

Dear Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley:  

Subscribers to your weekly email missives sharing your proffered efforts and accomplishments are left wondering. Senator Ernst titles her newsletter “Joni on the job.” Senator Grassley invented “The Scoop, Your weekly dish from Senator Chuck Grassley.”  

Regarding “Joni on the job,” we Iowans have to admit that you’re making them squeal, but have you considered who’s being made to squeal? Of particular note, but certainly not an isolated concern, your new Secretary of Defense is leaving soldiers on the battlefield and dismissing international conventions you learned to uphold. We’re wondering where “Duty-Honor-Country” fits within your weekly self-aggrandizements.

Tony Leys is Rural Editor/Correspondent for KFF Health News, where this story was first published.

Collection agents for the state of Iowa have sent letters seeking millions of dollars from the estates of at least two people with disabilities who died after spending most of their lives in a state institution.

The amounts represent what Medicaid spent covering the residents’ care when they lived at the Glenwood Resource Center, a state-run facility that closed last summer.

The bills are extraordinary examples of a practice called Medicaid estate recovery. Federal law requires states to try to collect money after some types of Medicaid recipients die. The point is to encourage people to use their own resources before relying on the public program. But some states, including Iowa, are particularly aggressive about the collections, national reports show.

State Senator Liz Bennett and State Representative Aime Wichtendahl co-authored this commentary, which first appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Bennett represents Senate district 39 and is District 39 and is the ranking member of the Senate Technology Committee. Wichtendahl represents House district 80 and serves on the House Economic Growth and Technology Committee.

On January 31, 2025, the largest data breach in U.S. history occurred when Elon Musk accessed the United States Treasury systems. The data accessed is, in effect, the nation’s checkbook. Financial transactions detailing the who, what, where, and when of every payment the United States makes, as well as the Social Security numbers of millions of Americans were compromised.

According to reports, then-unnamed affiliates of Musk were also granted access and external hard drives were brought in to capture the data for offsite storage. While these affiliates are now being called employees of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), none of them have gone through the rigorous background checks used to vet other federal employees at this level.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

The Iowa Department of Education may be first in the nation in commemorating a centennial to be ashamed of.

I’m talking about the 100^th anniversary of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which took place from July 10 to July 21, 1925. John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was convicted of violating a state law, the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach human evolution in public schools. He was fined $100 (about $1,800 in today’s dollars), but never had to serve jail time.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Here’s a look at perspectives on Donald Trump’s return to the White House and some thoughts about how to deal with that.

For example, despite the political polarization in Iowa and across the nation, one might argue there can be some contrived agreement with this wording: “Donald Trump’s return to the White House will not be as bad as millions of citizens fear.”

MAGA WELCOMES TRUMP’S RETURN

On the one side we have some two thirds of Republican voters who cheer the return because they believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats.

Many Republicans reject criticism of Trump’s first term in office, from 2017 through 2020, because they were said to be based on fake news or disproved by “alternative facts.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson caused some angst in the House Republican caucus this week when he removed Representative Mike Turner as chair of the Intelligence Committee, supposedly due to “concerns from Mar-a-Lago,” among other considerations. But there were no unpleasant surprises for Iowa’s delegation as committee assignments were finalized for the 119th Congress.

The Iowans rank low in seniority among House Republicans, with Representative Zach Nunn (IA-03) beginning his second term, and Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) each starting their third terms. Nevertheless, all will continue to serve on influential panels.

Senator Chuck Grassley is the longest-serving U.S. senator in Iowa history and among the ten longest-serving members of Congress from any state. He returned this month to two prominent roles as chair of the Judiciary Committee and Senate President pro tempore—the third in line for the presidency after the vice president and U.S. House speaker. Meanwhile, Senator Joni Ernst now chairs a committee for the first time.

A year-end review from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley’s office boasted that the senator’s oversight “touched on 97% of all taxpayer-funded agencies” during 2024. “Nearly every corner of government received Grassley’s thorough inspection – it’s all part of Grassley’s constant efforts to ensure the government is a service to the American people,” the report added.

One area that escaped Grassley’s “thorough inspection” was the collapse of bribery allegations against President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. For months in 2023, Grassley publicized an FBI informant’s explosive claims about the Bidens.

But he’s had nothing to say since Alexander Smirnov, the original source of those allegations, pleaded guilty in December to making up the whole story.

One of President-elect Donald Trump’s top advisers on judicial and legal matters stepped away from a University of Iowa alumni advisory board late last year. Mike Davis has long been an aggressive Trump ally, known for his “combative presence on right-wing media.” Some of his posts on the X/Twitter platform prompted calls in November for the university to remove him from the political science department’s alumni advisory board. But in a statement provided last month, Davis said, “With President Trump’s victory on November 5th, I will not have the necessary bandwidth to serve on this important volunteer board, so I decided on my own to step down.”

The Article III Project, which Davis leads as founding president, told Bleeding Heartland that no one from the university asked Davis to resign from the advisory board or take down any of his social media posts.

Communications staff for the University of Iowa declined to comment on the situation. Professor Brian Lai, the interim department chair listed as the point of contact for the alumni advisory board, did not respond to inquiries.

As each new year begins, I enjoy looking back at the posts that resonated most strongly with readers in the year that ended. Some things never change: actions by the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Kim Reynolds—especially attacks on public education—inspired many of Bleeding Heartland’s most-viewed posts from 2024. That’s been true every year since the GOP trifecta began in 2017. U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, who featured prominently in two of last year’s most popular posts, makes another appearance below.

I’ve learned there is no way to predict which pieces will take off. Some of the posts linked below required intensive research and days of writing, while others took only a few hours from start to finish. One was among the longest I wrote last year (more than 5,000 words), while another was among the shortest (fewer than 300 words).

Some authors whose work gained a large following in past years made the list again. But three authors featured below were contributing to Bleeding Heartland for the first time.

This list draws from Fathom Analytics data about total views for 561 posts published from January 1 through December 31, 2024. I wrote 145 of those articles and commentaries; other authors wrote 416. I left out the site’s front page and the “about” page, where many people landed following online searches.

A half-dozen posts barely missed the top 24, by a few hundred views or less:

Bleeding Heartland set yet another record for guest contributions in 2024, with 416 posts involving 146 authors. (The previous record was 358 posts that more than 125 people wrote for this site in 2023.) I don’t know of any state-based political website that provides more quality coverage and commentary by guest contributors.

This year’s guest authors covered a wide range of topics, from public schools to local government, major employers, CO2 pipelines, notable events in Iowa history, and of course wildflowers.

They wrote about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, Governor Kim Reynolds and her administration, Attorney General Brenna Bird, and of course former and future President Donald Trump.

During the legislative session, guest authors highlighted flaws in the governor’s plan to overhaul Area Education Agencies and the report that sought to justify it. They shared their own personal or professional experiences with AEAs. They covered other education proposals and explained why the state’s official school voucher numbers were misleading. They also covered bills that received less attention but could change many Iowans’ lives for better or worse.

During the 2024 campaign and its aftermath, guest authors wrote about presidential polling in Iowa and nationally, profiled candidates, and analyzed the election results from several angles.

Guest authors sounded the alarm about Iowa’s near-total abortion ban, unlawful drug testing at hospitals, and climate change impacts. They suggested ways to protect water and air quality, and flagged transparency problems in state and local government. They reviewed books that would interest many Bleeding Heartland readers.

They reflected on the lives of those who passed away this year, including Iowans Marcia Nichols, Bobby Washington, and Jim Leach, as well as Tim Kraft, who played an important role on some Iowa campaigns.

While many guest authors criticized Republican policies and politicians, some offered advice or constructive criticism to Democrats following the Iowa caucuses and another disappointing general election.

As noted below, some contributions by guest authors were among the most-viewed Bleeding Heartland posts of the year.

A years-long effort to expand the federal judiciary faltered this week when President Joe Biden vetoed the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved Act of 2024. The JUDGES Act would have increased the federal district court bench by about 10 percent over the next twelve years, adding 63 new permanent federal judgeships in thirteen states, along with three temporary judgeships in Oklahoma. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa was slated to receive one of the first eleven positions to be created in 2025.

The veto leaves Iowa’s Northern District with two District Court judges (Chief Judge C.J. Williams and Judge Leonard T. Strand), along with Senior Judge Linda R. Reade and two magistrate judges. That number hasn’t changed since 1990, when the last major expansion of the federal bench allocated a third judgeship to Iowa’s Southern District. The 1990 law also assigned a judge who had previously divided his time between the state’s two districts to the Northern District on a permanent basis.

Biden may not have the last word on this subject, given the Republican Party’s commitment to putting more conservatives on the bench.

They were so close.

After weeks of negotiations, U.S. House and Senate leaders had agreed on a year-end spending bill that would fund the federal government through March 14, extend the 2018 Farm Bill through next September, and provide more than $100 billion in disaster aid. The legislation included numerous other policies, including at least two that had been priorities for Iowa’s members of Congress. The bill would have legalized year-round sales of higher ethanol blends known as E-15 in all states. It also contained new regulations for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which could have saved consumers billions while helping small pharmacies.

All of the Iowans in Congress have talked up E-15 as a path to U.S. energy independence. (In reality, only about 3,400 of some 198,000 gas stations across the country dispense higher ethanol blends.) Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01) and Senator Chuck Grassley have been among the most vocal proponents of PBM reform, calling for action on prescription drug middlemen in draft bills, press releases, news conferences, House and Senate hearings, floor speeches, and taxpayer-funded radio ads.

Little did they know that President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk were about to blow up the deal.

Iowa’s all-Republican delegation voted the same way on almost every bill that came before both chambers during the 118th Congress, which wrapped up its work in the early hours of December 21. But one of the last bills sent to President Joe Biden, the Social Security Fairness Act, revealed an unusual disagreement among the Iowans serving in the U.S. House and Senate.

When the House approved the bill by 327 votes to 75 in November, U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) were part of the bipartisan majority.

When the Senate passed the bill by 76 votes to 20 shortly after midnight on December 21, Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst were among the 20 Republicans who voted no.

The Iowans’ comments on the Social Security Fairness Act illustrate how differently politicians with similar ideologies can view a complex public policy fix.

“They don’t make them like Jim Leach anymore,” posted the elections analysts at The Downballot after learning Leach had passed away on December 11. They were commenting on his extraordinary warning to the Republican National Committee chairman that he would not caucus with Republicans in the next Congress if the Iowa GOP continued to fund direct mail attacking his 2006 Democratic challenger.

Among Iowans who have served in Congress, Leach was unique in many ways.

Continuing his pattern of selecting unqualified loyalists for prestigious jobs, President-elect Donald Trump announced on November 20 that he will name former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In a written statement, Trump described Whitaker as “a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended. Matt will strengthen relationships with our NATO Allies, and stand firm in the face of threats to Peace and Stability – He will put AMERICA FIRST.”

Whitaker has no foreign policy or diplomatic background. He served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa during George W. Bush’s presidency, and held several roles in the Justice Department during the Trump administration. For several months after the 2018 general election, Whitaker served (unconstitutionally) as acting U.S. attorney general. The New York Times reported in 2020 that during that period, Whitaker blocked a probe of “a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating U.S. sanctions law by funneling billions of dollars of gold and cash to Iran.”

For the first time in six years, Iowa’s junior Senator Joni Ernst will not have a position on the leadership team of U.S. Senate Republicans.

On November 13, members of the GOP caucus chose Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas over Ernst for Senate Republican Conference chair, the third-ranking leadership position. According to Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News, the vote was 35 to 18.

ERNST HAD JOINED LEADERSHIP IN HER FIRST TERM

First elected in 2014, Ernst joined GOP leadership shortly after the 2018 elections, when she competed against Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska for the fifth-ranking leadership position. She moved up to the fourth-ranking role after the 2022 elections.

Cotton was considered the favorite for conference chair going into the November 13 leadership vote, in part because he has a better relationship with President-elect Donald Trump. Cotton was on Trump’s short list for vice president earlier this year and was one of just seven people to get a speaking slot at all of the last three Republican National Conventions. Ernst spoke during prime time at the RNC in 2016 and 2020 but was snubbed this year—possibly because even though she did not endorse a presidential candidate before the Iowa caucuses, she was widely perceived to favor Nikki Haley. Ernst didn’t endorse Trump until March 6—the same day Haley ended her presidential campaign.

Members of Congress averted a federal government shutdown this week, approving a continuing resolution to keep funds flowing after the current fiscal year ends. Large bipartisan majorities in both chambers (341 to 82 in the House, and 78 to 18 in the Senate) voted on September 25 to fund the federal government at current levels through December 20. The bill also contains an extra $231 million in funds for the U.S. Secret Service to step up protection of presidential candidates.

All but one member of Iowa’s Congressional delegation supported the spending measure. Representative Randy Feenstra (IA-04) has not publicly explained why he was among the 82 House Republicans who voted against the last opportunity to prevent a shutdown.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

The anguish and angst visited upon us this election year is faithful to the old saying “Politics makes strange bedfellows.’” That take is adapted from a line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—”Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

Inspired by this season of anguish and angst, this post offers dots connecting George Orwell, Bob Feller, Donald Trump, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, and Joseph Welch. You’re familiar with most of our cast. And you may recall that Welch is the attorney who grew up in Primghar, Iowa and attended Grinnell College. He gained national fame as the U.S. Army’s attorney 70 years ago, when he got fed up and asked Senator Joseph McCarthy on live television, “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

Cinematically-minded Iowans of middle age or older recall two films set in Iowa in the 1980s. The best remembered and most beloved was the Kevin Costner’s ode to baseball sentimentality, Field of Dreams.

The other was Country starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, a hard-edged look at the farm crisis that gripped the Midwest during the decade. Country personalized the worst agricultural downturn since the Great Depression, costing Iowa more than one-quarter of its farm ownerships and reducing farm land values by 70 percent.

The opening scenes of the 21^st century version of Country already are running. Corn and soybean prices have fallen almost 40 percent. Iowa farmers are enduring a drop in income of more than 25 percent since 2002. The effect isn’t limited to the countryside; the closing of Tyson Foods processing plant at Perry as well as a sequence of layoffs at Deere & Co., Firestone, and other implement plants have cost almost 2,000 Iowa manufacturing workers their jobs.

Longtime agricultural banker Terry Hotchkiss, chairman of the American Bankers Association agricultural and rural bankers committee, said farm lenders “feel like they are looking over a cliff with regards to the agricultural economy.”

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.

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

For the past couple of years, Republicans often accused President Joe Biden of dodging the media—refusing to sit for extended interviews, declining to be questioned in regular White House press conferences, depriving the public of the opportunity to see how he thinks on his feet and articulates his views.

Critics accused Biden and his staff of avoiding unscripted events because they knew he was not mentally agile enough to keep up with the demands pointed questions bring. The president’s supporters brushed aside those assertions—although Biden’s performance during the recent debate against Donald Trump confirmed their worst anxieties.

I am not here to re-plow that political ground. Instead, I wonder why other political leaders much younger than the 81-year-old president are so reluctant to stand in front of their constituents, and journalists, and answer questions on a variety of topics.

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.

The president of the Congressional Leadership Fund (the main super-PAC aligned with U.S. House Republicans) congratulated U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks on her “resounding victory” in the June 4 primary to represent Iowa’s first district.

U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra hailed the “clear message” from fourth district voters, saying he was “humbled by the strong support for our campaign.”

They can spin, but they can’t hide.

Pulling 55 to 60 percent of the vote against an underfunded, first-time candidate is anything but a “resounding” or “strong” performance for a member of Congress.

Jim Chrisinger is a retired public servant living in Ankeny. He served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, in Iowa and elsewhere. 

Character once counted in Iowa Republican politics. We could take pride in Governor Bob Ray, U.S. Representative Jim Leach, and the early U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley. They led with integrity. They willingly crossed the aisle to achieve bipartisan goals. They served as role models for our children, standing up for democracy, truth, and accountability. Our state enjoyed a reputation in public administration circles as a “good government” jurisdiction.

Donald Trump has upended all this. He is the antithesis of character. He’s the skunk at the church picnic. He lies incessantly, bullies, commits fraud and adultery, sexually assaults women, mocks wounded veterans, and cheats contractors. He’s a racist. He puts his attempt to overthrow a free and fair election at the center of his campaign. Donald Trump is everything we don’t want our children to be.

In this historic moment, Iowa’s representatives in Washington—Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst, Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, and Randy Feenstra—are failing the character test.

The appropriations bill President Joe Biden signed into law on March 9 includes $74.36 million in federal funding for designated projects in Iowa, Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of a 605-page earmarks list reveals. Another $8 million earmark for Dubuque Flood Mitigation Gates and Pumps was part of the Homeland Security bill Biden signed on March 23, completing work on funding the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30.

All four Republicans who represent Iowa in the U.S. House—Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—were among the 339 members who approved the “minibus” spending package on March 6. Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn voted for the second minibus on March 22; Feenstra voted against that package with no public explanation.

Hinson is the only Iowan now serving on the House Appropriations Committee. Her projects will receive a combined $27.54 million; she had requested $37.06 million. Projects submitted by Miller-Meeks will receive about $28.38 million in earmarked funding; she had requested $40.15 million. Earmarks for projects Nunn submitted will total $26.22 million; he had asked for $41.25 million.

The 36 counties in IA-04 will receive none of the earmarked funding, because for the third straight year, Feenstra declined to submit any earmark requests.

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

Twenty-three years ago, in the months just before 9/11, the National Issues Forums asked me to work on a “discussion guide” on the topic of immigration. The assignment required me to ask people in Iowa how they felt about immigration and what, if anything, should be done.

My small team and I found the issue was “hot” among Iowans, especially among working-class people—particularly former packing house workers who had lost their jobs and saw their wages cut by a sleight-of-hand when plants changed ownership and de-unionized the workforce. The void, some said, was filled by migrants.

We found some business people welcomed new arrivals as needed for jobs that were unfilled by the local, native population. Descendants of Iowans who originally came to the U.S. to receive a homestead were open to immigration, especially from European countries—much less so of peoples from Latin American or Asian countries. The guide was meant to offer a policy alternative for ordinary Americans to consider in weighing the costs and consequences of the nation’s immigration policies.

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

Congress finally got it together.

Overruling a few outspoken far-right Republican members, on April 20 the U.S. House belatedly approved crucial aid for nations and peoples that desperately need it.
 The wide vote margins reflected bipartisan support for all three measures. Here are the numbers:

From left: Margaret Chase Smith, Lowell Weicker, Liz Cheney

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

In an odd—even terrifying—way to respond to threats to our democracy, The Republican/MAGA Party will offer Donald Trump as its presidential nominee in 2024, the golden anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Nixon left office in disgrace on August 9, 1974, in the wake of Watergate disclosures that would likely have led to his impeachment and removal.

The Republican Party will formally endorse Trump as its presidential candidate at its national convention in Milwaukee in July—despite Trump’s disgraceful behavior before, during, and after his one term as president. He won the electoral college in 2016 while trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by more than 2.8 million popular votes. Trump lost both the electoral college and the popular vote to Joe Biden in 2020—by more than 7 million votes this time—yet he continues to spread his Big Lie about the supposedly rigged election.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley is well known for lamenting the lack of history on the History Channel. This week he has engaged in revisionist history about his role in spreading false allegations against President Joe Biden.

The senator spent months publicizing claims that the president and his son Hunter Biden took bribes from a Ukrainian businessman, even though FBI officials had warned Grassley and other Republican politicians the bribery had not been verified.

Now Grassley is trying to reshape the narrative, casting himself as the hero who helped expose the source of the false claims as a liar. He continues to push back against accusations that he has been a conduit for Russian disinformation.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley has yet to comment publicly on a new document asserting that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

The revelation came in a detention memo federal prosecutors filed on February 20, hoping to convince a court to keep former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov incarcerated pending trial. Smirnov was arrested last week and charged with lying to FBI agents about an alleged bribery scheme involving Hunter Biden and his father, when Joe Biden was vice president. The FBI memorialized those claims in an FD-1023 document, which Grassley released and hyped last year as evidence of Biden family corruption. Prosecutors now say Smirnov fabricated the allegations.

The detention memo details Smirnov’s “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with “officials affiliated with Russian intelligence,” and asserts he was planning to to meet with Russian operatives during an upcoming trip abroad. The defendant reported some of those contacts to his FBI handler before being arrested and divulged other relevant information in a custodial interview on February 14.

Grassley’s communications staff did not respond to Bleeding Heartland’s inquiries this week about Smirnov’s reported contacts with Russian intelligence. The senator has regularly posted on social media as he tours northern Iowa, but has not acknowledged news related to the false bribery claims. His office has issued ten news releases about various other topics since February 20.

U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley did his best last year to promote what he called “very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme.”

On February 15, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging that informant, Alexander Smirnov, with two felonies: making a false statement to a government agent, and creating a false and fictitious record. Last July, Grassley released that document (an FBI FD-1023 form) to bolster claims President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, had accepted bribes worth $5 million. Federal prosecutors determined the events Smirnov first reported to his handler in June 2020 “were fabrications.”

At this writing, Grassley’s office has not sent out a news release about the criminal charges returned by a federal grand jury in California. But in a statement provided to Bleeding Heartland, staff claimed the indictment “confirms several points Senator Grassley has made repeatedly.”

The spin was not convincing.

U.S. Representative Zach Nunn met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, members of the Ukrainian parliament, and intelligence officials in Kyiv on February 9 as a member of a bipartisan U.S. House delegation.

At this writing, Nunn has not posted about the trip on his social media feeds or announced it in a news release, but he appears in pictures others shared from the visit, and is second from the left in the photo above.

Four of the five members of Congress on this delegation serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A committee news release mentioned that Nunn “sits on the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions and currently serves as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.”

Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the Intelligence committee, said at a news conference in Kyiv, “We came today so that we could voice to President Zelenskyy and others that we were seeing that the United States stands in full support of Ukraine.”

Before Iowa politics kicks into high gear with a new legislative session and the caucuses, I want to highlight the investigative reporting, in-depth analysis, and accountability journalism published first or exclusively on this site last year.

Some newspapers, websites, and newsletters put their best original work behind a paywall for subscribers, or limit access to a set number of free articles a month. I’m committed to keeping all Bleeding Heartland content available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. That includes nearly 500 articles and commentaries from 2023 alone, and thousands more posts in archives going back to 2007.

To receive links to everything recently published here via email, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter. I also have a free Substack, which is part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Subscribers receive occasional cross-posts from Bleeding Heartland, as well as audio files and recaps for every episode of KHOI Radio’s “Capitol Week,” a 30-minute show about Iowa politics co-hosted by Dennis Hart and me.

I’m grateful to all readers, but especially to tipsters. Please reach out with story ideas that may be worth pursuing in 2024.

Iowa’s Republican legislators, Governor Kim Reynolds, and Senator Chuck Grassley inspired the majority of Bleeding Heartland’s most-read posts during the year that just ended. But putting this list together was trickier than my previous efforts to highlight the site’s articles or commentaries that resonated most with readers.

For fifteen years, I primarily used Google Analytics to track site traffic. Google changed some things this year, prompting me to switch to Fathom Analytics (an “alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data”) in July. As far as I could tell during the few days when those services overlapped, they reached similar counts for user visits, page views, and other metrics. But the numbers didn’t completely line up, which means the Google Analytics data I have for posts published during the first half of the year may not be the same numbers Fathom would have produced.

Further complicating this enterprise, I cross-post some of my original reporting and commentary on a free email newsletter, launched on Substack in the summer of 2022 as part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Some of those posts generated thousands of views that would not be tabulated as visits to Bleeding Heartland. I didn’t include Substack statistics while writing this piece; if I had, it would have changed the order of some posts listed below.

UPDATE: Attorney General Brenna Bird filed notice of appeal to the Eighth Circuit on January 12. Original post follows.

The state of Iowa cannot enforce key parts of a new law that sought to ban books depicting sex acts from schools and prohibit instruction “relating to gender identity and sexual orientation” from kindergarten through sixth grade.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction on December 29, putting what he called “staggeringly broad” provisions on hold while two federal lawsuits challenging Senate File 496 proceed. The judge found the book bans “unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny,” and the teaching restrictions “void for vagueness under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

However, the state may continue to enforce a provision requiring school administrators to inform parents or guardians if a student seeks an “accommodation that is intended to affirm the student’s gender identity.” Judge Locher found the LGBTQ students who are plaintiffs in one case lack standing to challenge that provision, since “they are all already ‘out’ to their families and therefore not affected in a concrete way” by it.

Governor Kim Reynolds and Attorney General Brenna Bird quickly criticized the court’s decision. But neither engaged with the legal issues at hand.