Jim Chrisinger is a retired public servant living in Ankeny. He served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, in Iowa and elsewhere. He also holds a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Donald Trump and MAGA are tearing down the rule of law, and most Americans don’t understand this threat or its gravity. The Declaration of Independence grounds our entire system of government:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This system, which America pioneered for the world, depends on everyone being treated equally. No royal, aristocrat, wealthy person, property owner, white person, male, straight person, Christian, or anyone is more equal. We each carry the same weight, and responsibility, in our democracy.

But how does that work? What makes it real? The rule of law.

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

Former President Donald J. Trump thus reacted in dismay last week after a Manhattan jury convicted the former U.S. president and current GOP candidate to reclaim that office on 34 counts of business impropriety, adding …

Sorry; that wasn’t Trump who said that. Or any Trump supporter. Or last week, or last year, or even last decade. It was what University of Southern California law professor Jody David Armour told the Los Angeles Times after four police officers in that city were acquitted of assault against Rodney King in 1992.

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

Most people go through life never stepping foot inside a courtroom. Most people, that is, except for attorneys, judges, journalists, the few of us chosen to be jurors, and an even more select group, those who are accused of crimes.

If I were talking now with my dear parents, may they rest in peace, I would quickly assure them that my many days spent in courtrooms have been in a professional capacity, not as a defendant trying to avoid the slammer.

As a reporter and later as the boss of reporters, I have had an up-close vantage point to watch our court system as it works. I claim no special expertise. But 50 years in a ringside seat on the judiciary have given me perspective worth sharing.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a freelance writer who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

NBC News recently compared where President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump stand on a multitude of issues of importance, ranging from abortion to health care reform, housing, climate change, education, crime, trade, immigration, taxes, foreign policy, student loan debt, and much more.

One issue missing from the NBC News report has become a focal point for the Biden camp: democracy vs. authoritarianism. Will the duly elected president inaugurated on January 20, 2025 keep the U.S. as a democracy, in line with centuries of tradition? Or will that day be the start of a shift toward authoritarian governance or fascism?

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

I always considered knot tying and auditioning as two separate skills with nothing in common. I learned knot tying from an overly-patient Scoutmaster who scowled but never criticized when knots like the sheepshank, square, clover hitch, and bowline were too loose or completely flubbed. 

I also had auditions. I went for a music scholarship in college. I didn’t get it. I tried out for a few plays and scored parts.

Both skills require practice, discipline, and willingness to fail. I never tried both skills at once. After all, that would have left me tied in knots and looking bad during an audition.

But it’s happening now on the political stage.

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.

Attorney General Brenna Bird continues to ignore her critics, doubling down on actions that have drawn criticism. Unfortunately for Iowans, she’s picked a bad model to imitate.

This shoot-yourself-in-the-foot strategy had worked so well for Donald Trump that Bird seems to figure, “Why not give it a try?”

And she’ll likely continue that style, despite the unanimous verdict(s) against Trump in the one trial he has not managed to delay.

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

With the passage of Senate File 2370 (a version of legislation introduced by the governor’s office), Governor Kim Reynolds’ Executive Order No. 10, issued in January 2023, is now Iowa law. It will have a substantial impact on the state’s ability to protect waterways and communities from factory farms.

State agencies across Iowa will be prevented from strengthening rules and regulations, but will have the ability to weaken them. It’s now a race to the bottom that will adversely affect factory farming’s impact on water quality and public health.

The Iowa Senate approved SF 2370 by 32 votes to 14, with all Democrats present opposing the bill.

In the House it passed by 91 votes to 3. It was expected that the GOP caucus would fully support this bill, as they have with most of the Reynolds administration’s priorities.

But nearly all House Democrats voted for SF 2370, too.

Steve King was a teacher in Algona for 23 years and a UniServ Director with the Iowa State Education Association, serving rural school districts, Area Education Agencies, and community colleges in northwest and north central Iowa before retiring in 2012.

I am an Iowan. I was born here. I grew up here. I went to school here. I graduated from Iowa State. I worked here. And I have retired here. Heck, I don’t even like to travel out of state. I love Iowa. Well, maybe not January and February. But most of the rest of the time, count me all in.

But I am not living in the same Iowa. That state has disappeared.

Mitch Henry chairs the Iowa Unity Coalition.

As the campaign for Iowa’s third U.S. House district gains momentum, Lanon Baccam emerges as a beacon of hope for progress and a brighter future.

With a proven track record of dedication to public service, Lanon Baccam embodies the values and principles that will lead our nation forward. Lanon is a veteran who served eight years in the U.S. Army and Iowa National Guard and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2004. He has never forgotten his fellow veterans and has dedicated his life to helping them. 

Throughout his career, Lanon Baccam has shown an unwavering commitment to addressing the pressing issues facing our communities. Following his military service, Lanon served in the U.S. Department of Agriculture under former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack. There, he worked to support veterans, expand pathways to jobs in the agriculture industry, and promote training and entrepreneurship opportunities for veterans transitioning to careers in agriculture.

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

In some parts of Iowa, road signs greet visitors with our new state slogan: “Iowa, Freedom to Flourish.”

Some Republican lawmakers obviously don’t get the concept.

U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson and State Representative Taylor Collins have all been wringing their hands recently over trips that some students and staff from Muscatine High School took to China.

China apparently paid the costs, according to a recent article in the right-wing British newspaper, the Daily Mail, and that has triggered the Iowa Republicans. Now, there’s talk of stopping these visits.

Bernie Scolaro is a retired school counselor, a past president of the Sioux City Education Association, and former Sioux City school board member.

It’s a cloudy day as I sit outside. I am intently reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which I quickly put down as our new neighbor walks by and waves to me. He’s wearing a red MAGA hat with a red, white and blue t-shirt. I would say it is for Memorial Day, but the attire is a common theme in the neighborhood. American and Trump flags both align the houses up and down the street like it’s getting ready for a parade or a Trump rally. But the election is over, and the news reports said it was the widest margin of victory for a presidential candidate in U.S. history.

The year is 2029.

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

Here is a tidbit from my years as a newspaper reporter and editor:

I never voted in a primary election, never attended the Iowa caucuses, never stuck a candidate’s sign in my yard, never had a bumper sticker on my car, never signed a petition, never donated to a campaign.

When Sue and I married, she got something more in the deal than my sparkling personality. She knew she could not have any yard signs, because people driving past our home would not know which part of the yard was for her opinions and which was for mine. To eliminate any confusion, there were no yard signs. Period.

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

Imagine, for a moment, you have fallen on hard times. You’ve lost your job, you’re being evicted or foreclosed, and you have nowhere to go. However, your parents, who built a rich, prosperous life out of their meager immigrant beginnings, invite you to stay with them, for as long as you like. And you breathe a welcome sigh of relief—you’re not going to have to sleep on the street!

But little by little, you discover some excruciating and unsettling facts about the people who are beckoning you home.

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.

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

Where does your primary loyalty lie: as a citizen of America, or as a citizen of Iowa?

Probably seems like a meaningless question. But around the nation, more and more states these days are enacting laws in opposition to those of the federal government, placing the loyalty question front and center. And a growing number of U.S. residents are declaring a preference to honor their state laws above those of the United States.

ORIGINS OF THE SUPREMACY CLAUSE

In terms of settled law, there’s no real dispute: federal law outranks state law. The U.S. Constitution leaves no doubt. Article VI, Clause 2 (the “Supremacy Clause”), reads as follows:

Rev. Cathy F. Young of Waterloo is a retired pastor in the Presbyterian Church. The following is an abbreviated version of a sermon about Christian Nationalism.

My father, who served as a Naval officer in the South Pacific, shared fascinating World War II stories with me. With ensuing history classes I became troubled by America’s slow response to Hitler’s atrocities in Europe and incredulous that Christians in Germany blindly followed their deranged dictator.

While pursuing a Master of Divinity degree at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, I took a course titled Christianity and the Holocaust. I learned that Hitler’s strategy to build loyalty and support within German churches was masterful. He encouraged kids in his German youth organizations to get their families to attend Sunday worship with them. Church attendance skyrocketed; pastors were thrilled. Eventually, Germany’s government rule and religion became one.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

Starting in 2016, Netflix streamed Stranger Things, a horror, science fiction series set in a small Indiana town with tweens and teens as main characters. In its four seasons, the audience travels to the “Upside Down,” an alternate universe where bizarre replaces normal.

It’s fun fiction.

But in real life, we have veered into the “Political Upside Down.”

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

You don’t often hear anyone extol the benefits of the COVID-19 pandemic. But I did a few weeks ago—when I stood before the Storm Lake Kiwanis club and talked about government transparency in Iowa.

I did not wade into the debate over masks, social distancing or vaccinations. It was a polite audience, but I was not silly enough to needlessly venture onto that thin ice.

What I said about the pandemic was this: State and local governments embraced, even if grudgingly, the benefits of live-streaming their board meetings during the pandemic so the public could watch from wherever they were.

“What I saw in that courtroom today is a travesty,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird told reporters in New York City on May 13. She was speaking outside the courthouse where former President Donald Trump is being tried for allegedly “falsifying business records to conceal hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.”

The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) organized the trip and paid for Bird’s travel to Manhattan, a spokesperson for Bird’s campaign told reporters after the attorney general declined to answer that question directly.

Ed Tibbetts highlighted Bird’s disrespect for the legal system when she declared the case “a scam and a sham.” Dave Busiek ridiculed Bird’s hypocrisy after she denounced the prosecution’s witness Michael Cohen (“a perjurer, disbarred, convicted of lying”) “without any apparent sense of irony that she’s appearing on behalf of Donald Trump, who lies as easily and frequently as the rest of us breathe.”

It’s also worth noting that Trump loyalists like Bird and RAGA have no room to point fingers about political prosecutions or “election interference.”

Ed Wasserman is a 52-year resident of Iowa and a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at The University of Iowa. The views expressed in his piece are his own and do not in any way reflect those of his employer.

Observers often puzzle over the chummy connection between former President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. What links these two leaders to one another? Largely ignored among several possibilities is their common political philosophy.

In a column for the New York Times in February, Carlos Lozada sharply criticized Donald Trump’s ostensible lack of political philosophy: “The difficulty with Trumpism is Trump himself, who renders any coherent ism impossible.” His assessment echoes the widespread belief that Trump is utterly unschooled in geopolitical history or philosophy. Although few would disagree with Trump’s scholarly naïveté, I fear his political acumen may have been seriously underestimated.

Tommy Hexter is running as a Democrat for Iowa House District 53, representing Poweshiek and most of Tama County. He is currently Rural Organizer and Educator with the Iowa Farmers Union, a commissioner of the Poweshiek County Soil and Water Conservation District, and the director of a local food business called Grinnell FarmToTable that sources products from 35 local farmers.

Sour cream is just one of several tastes being left in Iowans’ mouths as Daisy Brand, a company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, plans to build a new plant with state and local support in Boone County. 

Recent announcements from the City of Boone, Iowa Economic Development Authority, Governor Kim Reynolds’ office, and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig all emphasize the positive economic impact associated with the start-up of a new Daisy dairy processing plant in Boone.

John Clayton grew up on a farm in Poweshiek County, which he now farms. During his childhood, going to Meskwaki Pow-Wows in neighboring Tama County was the highlight of each summer. He is a 2024 candidate for Poweshiek County supervisor.

Minnesota officially adopted a new state flag on May 11, replacing the previous design, which had long been criticized for its depiction of a Native American on horseback with a spear and a white pioneer farming with a gun. The flag’s imagery was viewed by many as a symbol of Indigenous defeat and displacement, which was considered offensive by the state’s Dakota and Ojibwe tribes.

Poweshiek County in Iowa uses a caricature of a Native American as its icon. The Poweshiek County Board of Supervisors acknowledged in a public open meeting held on May 6 that the county’s icon caricature isn’t of Chief Poweshiek. 

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

A segment of America has always been intrigued by anti-hero characters, fictional and real. Think Tony Soprano, Dirty Harry, Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid. We might not want them as neighbors, but there’s a secret fascination with their antics. They give a wink, a smirk, and a middle finger to society while being outrageous and often breaking the law.

Enter Donald J. Trump.

Sami Scheetz represents Iowa House district 78, covering part of Cedar Rapids.

As a State Representative, my job is to serve the needs of all Iowans and to ensure that our state’s tax policies benefit everyone—not just the wealthy. That’s why I’ve proposed legislation with my fellow Democrats to reduce the state sales tax by one cent.

Higher sales taxes largely impact lower-income families and Iowans on fixed incomes. When there’s less money to go around, tough decisions have to be made: do you purchase school supplies for your kids or personal hygiene care for yourself? That kind of pressure on Iowa families is unsustainable, and it’s wrong. Unfortunately, in Governor Kim Reynolds’ Iowa, it’s by design.

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

Some of my social media friends wonder why I’m so focused and adamant in my advocacy for democracy and the rule of law. Why can’t you just post cute memes, memories, and family events like we do? I come by it honestly.

For three years my wife, Liz, and I lived in communist Czechoslovakia where I served as a U.S. diplomat. We experienced a country with no democracy and no rule of law. We saw the impact of communism on lives, society, and government. Then we witnessed the country’s liberation in the (thankfully bloodless) Velvet Revolution in the fall of 1989.

Liz likes to quote Václav Havel, the dissident playwright turned president of newly-democratic Czechoslovakia. He called communism the slow and insidious murder of the human spirit. He was right.

Republicans yell “communism” anytime a government does something they don’t like. Do they even know what communism is? FYI, “communism” is the Leninist political system overlaying the Marxist economic system of socialism during the Soviet era.

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

The events of the past six months in Israel and Gaza have me wishing it were possible to have just one more lunch with a friend who died four years ago.

My friend was Jewish. In today’s vocabulary, he would be called an ardent Zionist. He had little patience for people who disparaged Israel.

But he also was a proponent of dialogue and diplomacy. He never hesitated to call me for lunch after The Des Moines Register’s opinion pages published something he disliked. Our lunchtime conversations and debates were models of civility, even though our discussions often challenged each of us to defend and reconsider our views.

That is why I wish we could have one more lunch to talk about the massacre of 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals by Hamas terrorists last October 7. I long to discuss Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, the home of those terrorists who were responsible for October’s bloody attacks.

Emily Webb, Kacey Davis, Kavi Chawla, and Shaimaa Aly, who are elected health care leaders in Polk County, co-signed this post.

As health care leaders within our community, we are endorsing Melissa Vine for U.S. Congress in Iowa’s third district. Melissa’s platform directly addresses critical issues affecting all Iowans, and time is of the essence in supporting her.

Melissa is committed to ensuring a livable income for all Iowans, and reforming systems that harm Iowa families. These changes are urgently needed to address the challenges faced by our most vulnerable populations.

Pat O’Donnell is a resident of Sioux Center and spent 37 years serving in Iowa public schools as a teacher, principal and superintendent. He may be reached at patnancy@zoho.com.

The first year of private-school vouchers is ending for Iowa students from preschool to 12^th grades. The vouchers, created under the Students First Act, provide public money for “education savings accounts,” which parents can use to pay their children’s tuition to an accredited Iowa private school.

“Allowing parents to choose the education that’s best for their children levels the playing field and creates equal opportunities for Iowa’s students,” Governor Kim Reynolds said, describing the voucher program’s goal.

But does the program meet that goal? To answer that, it’s useful to examine the experiences of states with similar systems.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a freelance writer who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

This voter guide compares the major-party presumptive presidential nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, on seventeen topics.

A nationwide poll by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in early April focused on adults’ perspective as to how Biden and Trump’s respective presidencies have hurt America. The two issues of greatest concern for Biden’s presidency were the cost of living and immigration. Nearly half of respondents said Trump’s presidency did harm on five fronts: voting rights, election security, relations with foreign countries, abortion laws, and climate change.

The choice facing voters in 2024—and issues of concern—could hardly be more different.

The Iowa Supreme Court has ruled that a lower court should further consider whether the State Auditor’s office improperly withheld or unreasonably delayed providing records to a conservative public interest law firm.

The April 26 decision in Kirkwood v Sand is the third recent case indicating that Iowa’s high court is serious about ensuring government bodies comply with Iowa Code Chapter 22, the state’s open records law. Like the April 2023 ruling in Belin v Reynolds, the decision was unanimous.

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.

Bill Bumgarner is a retired former health care executive from northwest Iowa who worked in hospital management for 41 years, predominantly in the state of Iowa.

The recently concluded legislative session has shown again that the state of Iowa is firmly entrenched in red state antipathy. 

Republican elected officials continued to casually pursue and advance legislation that strips away at Iowa’s once proud history of engagement, moderation, and inclusion.

The last few legislative sessions have produced attacks on public education, threatened a women’s right to make her own health care decisions, eroded the civil rights of certain citizens, advanced book bans and now—recklessly—introduced guns into Iowa schools.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com  

Dear Administrators and School Boards,

It’s been a tough winter. Public schools endured repeated assaults from a governor focused on consolidating power and a legislature refusing to provide a hint of check and balance on her power grab.

The public-school family is hurting.

Allen Bonini retired in January 2021 after nearly 45 years as an environmental professional, serving in various technical, managerial and leadership positions in water quality, recycling and solid waste across the states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. Most recently, he served fifteen and a half years as the supervisor of the Watershed Improvement Section at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. In retirement he continues to advocate for responsible public policy and actions to improve and protect water quality in Iowa.

Even if 100 percent of urban Iowa eliminated all of its pollution runoff, Iowa would not even come close to solving its water quality problems. In fact, if this improbable scenario were even possible, it would solve, at most, 10 to 15 percent of Iowa’s water quality problems. The real, fundamental, root problem impacting Iowa’s water quality is industrial agriculture. Yes, I said industrial agriculture.

Notice I didn’t say “conventional” agriculture. Today’s Iowa agriculture is anything but “conventional.” It is a product of the industrialization of an activity that used to be carried out by 85 percent or more of Americans not much more than 100 years ago when most people lived on farms and raised food for their own consumption and for their neighbors in surrounding communities. That is true conventional agriculture.

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive, where this essay first appeared.

Earlier this year, State Representative Josh Turek wrote an excellent Des Moines Register guest column on why “Iowa is not a good place to be disabled.” He cited long waiting lists for in-home and community-based care, severe restrictions on Medicaid eligibility, legislative efforts to dismantle services for special education provided by our Area Education Agencies, and more. Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Iowa also lags in providing community services.

The authors of this post are Dani Replogle, a staff attorney with the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch, and Michael Schmidt, a staff attorney with the Iowa Environmental Council.

Safe, clean drinking water is a basic human right. In Iowa, that right is under serious threat as nitrate-laden pollution piles up, and state cancer levels rise unchecked. It’s time for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to step in. We filed a petition last week demanding just that.

Iowans have industrial agriculture to blame for worsening water quality. Over the past twenty years, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have steadily replaced family-scale operations statewide. Today, Iowa is home to far more of these enormous polluting operations than any other state. As Big Ag moved in, they consolidated control in Des Moines, permeating state government to tilt the scales in favor of industry.

Ralph Rosenberg served in the Iowa legislature from 1981 through 1994 and was director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission from 2003 through 2010.

The Iowa legislature turned its back on our state’s proud civil rights legacy with last week’s passage of Senate File 2385, which neuters the effectiveness of the civil and human rights agencies and eliminates specific commissions dedicated to marginalized populations.

This combination undercuts Iowa values of respect and protecting the dignity of all Iowans. The bill compounds the removal of legal authority to proactively act on civil and human rights violations, by broadcasting a national message about how the Iowa government devalues diversity in religion, race, ethnic background, gender, or national identity. (Other pending Republican legislation reinforces this message, by calling for K-12 schools to teach history from a Western Civilization perspective, or limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion programming on college campuses.)

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional. This year, Passover began on the evening of April 22.

We’re well into the Passover festival, when Jews recall our exodus from slavery and bondage in Egypt on our way to establishing a Jewish nation. We’re also well into the ongoing ritual of college students protesting the existence of that nation, and authorities responding with censure and arrests.

Media representatives—sorry, but I can’t refer to all of them as journalists—have portrayed this conflict the way they usually portray it: in binary terms, as in either you’re pro-Israel (and therefore pro-Jew) or against Israel (and therefore antisemitic).

State Senator Dan Dawson floor manages a proposed constitutional amendment on April 10.

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

Tax bills in the Iowa legislature have always been approved or disapproved by simple majorities. If most legislators want to raise taxes, or lower them, they do it the usual way: take a vote, up or down, and whichever side gets the most votes wins. That’s how democracy works.

But this year, Republican legislators voted to change that.

First the Iowa House in late March, and then the Iowa Senate earlier this month, approved House Joint Resolution 2006, a proposed amendment to the Iowa Constitution that would require a two-thirds majority in each house of the legislature to raise state income taxes.

Des Moines City Hall, photographed by James Steakley in 2009. Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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

The Iowa legislature took an important step last week in voting to toughen penalties for state and local officials who violate a key government transparency tool, Iowa’s open meetings law.

Unfortunately, lawmakers’ actions may not be enough to reverse the love for secrecy that too many government boards and councils demonstrate. The latest example comes from Des Moines.