State Auditor Rob Sand announced on January 26 that his office will examine the state’s use of COVID-19 “strike teams” involving the Iowa National Guard. A news release noted,

Reports show public record emails in which a metal-working manufacturer owned by major donors to Governor Reynolds received a strike team deployment upon a personal request made to her office, while the same county’s public health department saw its requests for locations with higher needs ignored.

Bleeding Heartland exclusively reported on those emails. In one exchange, an employee of the GMT Corporation in Waverly told Bremer County’s public health administrator, “I requested testing and was told that we would most likely be denied with only one case. Our owners contacted the governor directly and she authorized the testing for us.”

During their six years serving together in the U.S. Senate, Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst have rarely landed on opposite sides of a roll call vote.

It’s already happened twice during the first week of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Governor Kim Reynolds authorized using state resources to conduct COVID-19 tests at a workplace that had only one confirmed case after the company’s owners reached out to her last May.

Iowa National Guard and Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) personnel facilitated coronavirus testing at GMT Corporation, a machine parts manufacturer in Waverly, on May 22, 2020. Fewer than a dozen Iowa businesses received such visits during the two months the state’s “strike team” program was active, when coronavirus testing kits were not widely available.

Summit Ag Investors, the asset management arm of Bruce Rastetter’s Summit Agricultural Group, owns a majority interest in GMT. Emails Bleeding Heartland obtained through a public records request indicated, and GMT’s top executive confirmed, that someone from Summit Ag “contacted the governor directly” after GMT staff learned they “would most likely be denied” testing assistance from the state.

Neither Summit Ag executives nor staff in the governor’s office responded to Bleeding Heartland’s inquiries.

For the first time, a person of color will lead one of Iowa’s major political parties. The Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee on January 23 chose Ross Wilburn to serve as state party chair for the coming election cycle. Wilburn won on the first ballot in a field of four candidates after Brett Copeland withdrew his candidacy during the committee’s meeting.

The two candidates with a strong base of support among the 50-plus State Central Committee members were Wilburn, who received just under 65 percent of the votes, and Jodi Clemens, who received 33 percent. Clemens is a former Iowa House candidate and former staffer on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign as well as Kimberly Graham’s 2020 U.S. Senate campaign. At last year’s state convention, she was elected to represent Iowa on the Democratic National Committee. She will continue in that role.

Wilburn has represented Iowa House district 46, covering part of Ames, since September 2019 and will keep serving in the state legislature. However, in order to focus his full-time efforts on leading the Democratic Party, he will quit his other job as diversity officer and associate director for community economic development at Iowa State University Extension and Outreach.

The Iowa Senate convened for its 2021 session on January 11 with 31 Republicans, eighteen Democrats, and one vacancy in the district formerly represented by Mariannette Miller-Meeks. A record twelve senators are women (seven Democrats and five Republicans), up from eleven women in the chamber last year and double the six who served prior to 2018.

I enclose below details on the majority and minority leadership teams, along with all chairs, vice chairs, and members of standing Iowa Senate committees. Where relevant, I’ve mentioned changes since last year’s legislative session. A few committees have new Republican leaders.

All current state senators are white. The only African American ever to serve in the Iowa Senate was Tom Mann, elected to two terms during the 1980s. No Latino has ever served in the chamber, and Iowa’s only Asian-American senator was Swati Dandekar, who resigned in 2011.

Some non-political trivia: the 50 Iowa senators include two Smiths, a Democrat and a Republican, and two Taylors, a Democrat and a Republican. As for first names, there are three Jeffs, three Zachs, and two men each named Craig, Mark, Dan, Jim, and Tim.

UPDATE: Republican Adrian Dickey won the January 26 special election to represent Senate district 41, giving the GOP a 32-18 majority. After he’s sworn in, I’ll note his committee assignments below.

As Joe Biden’s presidency began on January 20, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst acknowledged the transfer of power “to a new presidential administration, a sacred tradition of our democracy.” Both she and Senator Chuck Grassley promised to work with the Biden administration on behalf of Iowans.

But Ernst and Grassley have yet to denounce Republicans who still claim, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. On the contrary, in communications with Iowans, both senators continue to suggest there are legitimate concerns about election fraud in some states Biden carried.

Two hours after President Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst said in a written statement, “As an eternal optimist, I am hopeful we can work together with President Joe Biden, and the first female Vice President, Kamala Harris, in a bipartisan way to deliver for the American people.”

Later the same day, Ernst was among just ten Republicans to oppose the first Biden cabinet nomination considered on the Senate floor.

Shortly after midnight on January 20, the White House announced that President Donald Trump had issued 73 new pardons and 70 commutations.

Two people pardoned with less than twelve hours remaining in Trump’s term have ties to well-known figures in Iowa politics.

Iowa Republicans have enacted most of their legislative agenda with little trouble during the past four years of full control of state government. But a few priorities eluded them, including a constitutional amendment that would pave the way for future abortion bans. Unable to find 51 votes in the state House for that measure last year, the GOP settled for mandating a 24-hour waiting period before all abortions.

The 2020 elections increased the GOP’s majority in the lower chamber from 53-47 to 59-41. Republicans didn’t waste time returning to unfinished business: a new version of the attack on reproductive rights cleared an Iowa House Judiciary subcommittee on January 19.

Three state agencies that play important roles in Iowa’s use of COVID-19 relief funds will have new leadership in the coming weeks.

The turnover underscores the need for lawmakers, state and federal auditors, and the news media to keep a close watch on how Governor Kim Reynolds’ administration spends money Congress approved last year to address the coronavirus pandemic.

Iowa’s delegation split along party lines as the U.S. House voted 232 to 197 on January 13 to impeach President Donald Trump on one count of “incitement to insurrection.”

Ten Republicans, including the third-ranking member of the GOP caucus, joined every Democrat in voting to impeach. I’ve enclosed below the lengthy House Judiciary Committee report supporting impeachment and the full text of the article, which argued that Trump “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government,” “threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government.”

Iowa’s Representative Cindy Axne (IA-03) said in a written statement,

The Iowa legislature’s 2021 session began on January 11 with the usual appeals to work together for the good of Iowans. But potential for bipartisan work on high-profile issues appears limited, as the Republicans who enjoy large majorities in the state House and Senate have quite different priorities from their Democratic counterparts.

At the end of this post, I’ve posted the substantive portions of all opening remarks from legislative leaders, as prepared for delivery. The speakers focused on the following matters:

The Iowa House opened its 2021 session on January 11 with 59 Republicans and 41 Democrats, a big improvement for the GOP from last year’s 53-47 split.

The House members include 69 men and 31 women (21 Democrats and ten Republicans), down from a record 34 women in 2019 and 33 women last year.

Six African Americans (Democrats Ako Abdul-Samad, Ruth Ann Gaines, Ras Smith, Phyllis Thede, and Ross Wilburn, and Republican Eddie Andrews) will serve in the legislature’s lower chamber. Republican Mark Cisneros is the first Latino elected to the Iowa legislature, and Republican Henry Stone is only the second Asian American to serve in the House. The other 92 state representatives are white.

Democrat Liz Bennett is the only out LGBTQ member of the Iowa House. To my knowledge, Abdul-Samad (who is Muslim) is the only lawmaker in either chamber to practice a religion other than Christianity.

I’ve posted details below on the Iowa House majority and minority leadership teams, along with all chairs, vice chairs, and members of standing House committees. Where relevant, I’ve noted changes since last year.

Iowa Republican leaders universally denounced the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters. But not one of them has condemned Trump’s continued lies about a “stolen” victory, nor have any unequivocally said that Joe Biden won a free and fair election.

On the contrary, Iowa’s top Republican officials have acknowledged Biden will be president while validating the fantasy of widespread irregularities or “illegal” votes in key states that delivered Biden’s electoral college win.

U.S. Representative Cindy Axne and other Democrats from Iowa came around late to the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump in 2019. But following the violent attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the sole remaining Democrat in Iowa’s Congressional delegation has determined that there is no time to waste in removing Trump from office permanently.

Axne’s office confirmed on January 8 that she will sign a resolution fellow House Democrats drafted, which charge Trump with abuse of power.

I do not make this decision lightly, but President Trump has the blood of five Americans – including one Capitol Police officer – on his hands. On Sunday, I swore to uphold the Constitution and protect our nation from enemies foreign and domestic. A President who incites an attack on the seat of our government is a threat that cannot be tolerated for even one more day.

Republican Adrian Dickey will face Democrat Mary Stewart in the January 26 special election to represent Iowa Senate district 41. Activists from both parties selected the candidates at nominating conventions on January 7. Dickey prevailed over former State Senator Mark Chelgren, who represented this part of southeast Iowa for two terms before retiring in 2018. Stewart, the most recent Democratic candidate in this district, competed for the nomination with former Wapello County Supervisor Steve Siegel, who ran for the seat in 2014.

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver and House Speaker Pat Grassley declined on January 7 to rule out any partisan amendment to Iowa’s next map of political boundaries.

During a forum organized by the Iowa Capitol Press Association, both GOP leaders promised to follow the law that has governed Iowa’s redistricting process since 1980. Under that law, the state House and Senate cannot amend the first map of Congressional and legislative boundaries produced by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency, or the second map if the first is rejected.

However, the third map is subject to amendment, sparking fears among many Democrats that Republicans could vote down the first two proposals, then change the nonpartisan third map to a gerrymander. Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls highlighted that “loophole” during the forum and asked the GOP leaders to commit to not amending a third map.

A longtime Republican member of Congress from Iowa has renounced his party following the attempts by elected officials and a violent mob to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I will no longer claim I am a Republican tonight,” Jim Nussle tweeted on January 6, “as I am outraged and devastated by the actions of too many elected Republicans (some I know and served with) and supporters. Today a final line was crossed that I will not excuse. The GOP is NO more and left me and others behind.”

Later that evening, 121 House Republicans–more than half the GOP caucus–voted to reject Arizona’s electoral votes for Joe Biden, as did six GOP senators.

For as long as most Iowans can remember, our state has had at least one long-serving U.S. House representative. But following Dave Loebsack’s retirement and a second straight election in which Iowans voted out two members of Congress, our state’s House contingent now has less seniority than at any time since the 1860s.

The last two Democratic candidates in Iowa Senate district 41 will seek the nomination for a January 26 special election. Steve Siegel and Mary Stewart announced their plans on January 2. Delegates will select the Democratic candidate at a district nominating convention scheduled for January 7.

UPDATE: Republicans selected Adrian Dickey and Democrats selected Mary Stewart at special nominating conventions on January 7. Original post follows.

Voters in a battleground southeast Iowa Senate district will soon choose a successor to Republican State Senator Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed on December 30 that the House will seat Miller-Meeks, who was certified the winner by six votes in Iowa’s second Congressional district. The same day, Miller-Meeks confirmed that she is resigning from the Iowa legislature, effective January 2.

To my knowledge, no candidate has announced plans to run in Senate district 41 early next year. During a December 30 telephone interview, Democrat Mary Stewart said she was considering the race but had no timetable for deciding. Miller-Meeks defeated Stewart in 2018 by 11,460 votes to 10,652 (51.7 percent to 48.1 percent).

Former Republican State Senator Mark Chelgren represented the district for eight years, retiring in 2018. He hadn’t heard about Miller-Meeks’ resignation before speaking to Bleeding Heartland by phone on December 30. Chelgren said he would consider running for the Senate again but wasn’t ready to give a formal statement, since he hadn’t discussed the matter with his family or Republican colleagues.

Though recent voting patterns in the area favor Republicans, turnout for a mid-winter special election is a question mark.

U.S. House members took two important votes on December 28. First, 231 Democrats and 44 Republicans approved a motion to increase direct COVID-19 relief payments for millions of Americans from $600 to $2,000, as President Donald Trump had demanded last week. About an hour later, 322 representatives voted to override Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. Iowa’s three Democratic representatives (Abby Finkenauer, Dave Loebsack, and Cindy Axne) were part of both majority votes.

Outgoing U.S. Representative Steve King was not present for either vote. Since the November election, he has missed most of the House floor action.

They weren’t the most heinous pardons President Donald Trump issued this week. Those went to former military contractors who slaughtered civilians in Iraq.

They weren’t the most corrupt pardons Trump issued this week. Those went to campaign associates who participated in Russian interference in the 2016 election and then covered for Trump during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Nevertheless, two pardons announced on December 23 had an Iowa connection that may interest Bleeding Heartland readers.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest state population estimates confirm what has long been likely: Iowa will maintain four Congressional districts at least until 2030.

The U.S. House and Senate on December 21 approved a $2.3 trillion package to fund the federal government through September 30, 2021 and provide approximately $900 billion in economic stimulus or relief connected to the coronavirus pandemic.

No one in either chamber had time to read the legislation, which was nearly 5,600 pages long, before voting on it. Statements released by Iowans in Congress, which I’ve enclosed below, highlight many of its key provisions. The unemployment and direct payments to families are clearly insufficient to meet the needs of millions of struggling Americans. Senate Republicans blocked aid to state and local governments, many of which are facing budget shortfalls. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to push for a much larger economic stimulus package early next year.

The legislation headed to President Donald Trump’s desk includes some long overdue changes, such as new limits on “surprise billing” by health care providers for emergency care and some out-of-network care.

Since the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) changed how it counts and reports COVID-19 deaths on December 7, fatality numbers on the official website coronavirus.iowa.gov have become more accurate in several respects. The state’s dashboard no longer routinely lowballs how many Iowans have died in the pandemic. Instead, the IDPH numbers track closely with weekly figures published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

We now know that COVID-19 deaths accelerated in Iowa this fall even more rapidly than was previously apparent. Through the end of November alone, at least 3,308 Iowans had died in the pandemic. That number was more than 600 higher than the state website indicated before the IDPH began implementing the new counting method.

Two drawbacks have accompanied this important policy change. First, there is a greater lag time between when an Iowan dies and when that fatality tends to appear on the dashboard. In addition, updates to the state website have become more erratic, with IDPH staff adding few or no deaths on some days, and more than 100 deaths on others.

Now more than ever, media organizations that report COVID-19 statistics daily must put those numbers in context. Anyone following news on the pandemic needs to understand that changing totals from one day to the next on the IDPH website do not reflect how many Iowans died of COVID-19 during the previous 24 hours.

That said, the more accurate counting method is bringing the horrifying scale of the pandemic into focus.

Iowa’s new Infectious Disease Advisory Council will continue to meet behind closed doors, Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) interim Director Kelly Garcia confirmed on December 16. Garcia established the council earlier this month, naming 25 “external and internal subject matter experts” to help the agency develop guidelines for allocating limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics.

Iowans are unable to observe council members as they consider how to balance the needs of disparate groups at high risk from the novel coronavirus. Ryan Foley reported for the Associated Press on December 16 that the council “has met twice this month without giving prior notice to the public, publishing an agenda or allowing the public to participate as required by the Iowa Open Meetings Act.”

The IDPH maintains that Iowa Code Chapter 21 does not apply to an advisory council created by a state agency. But not every expert on the law concurs.

Carl Olsen recounts the latest legal steps in his effort to reconcile state and federal drug laws. -promoted by Laura Belin

On November 10, just a week after the election, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) denied our petition for a new federal regulation exempting state medical cannabis programs to be added as 21 C.F.R.

DEA explained that denying the exemption was necessary because it would create an exemption:

Democratic legislators, environmental organizations, and consumer advocates warned in 2018 that a bill backed by Iowa’s major utilities would destroy our state’s decades-long tradition of being a “national leader in energy efficiency.” But Republican members of the Iowa House and Senate didn’t listen, and Governor Kim Reynolds ignored calls to veto Senate File 2311.

That law is the main reason Iowa dropped sharply in a new review of state policies on energy efficiency.

Following another devastating election up and down the ballot, Iowa Democrats have begun to speculate about the next political cycle. Governor Kim Reynolds will be up for re-election, and Iowa’s other U.S. Senate seat will be on the ballot.

State Auditor Rob Sand hasn’t ruled out running for governor, Senate, or re-election in 2022, he told viewers of an “ask me anything” Facebook session on December 10. “Any of those three would be possibilities.”

For the second year running, January will bring big changes to Iowa’s media scene.

Jason Clayworth and Linh Ta will write the Axios Des Moines newsletter, set to launch during the first quarter of 2021. Clayworth is a longtime Des Moines Register reporter who has mostly done investigative work in recent years. Ta covered several beats for the Register before joining the Iowa Capital Dispatch reporting team in early 2020.

At televised news conferences, Governor Kim Reynolds often expresses appreciation for Iowans “doing the right thing” and helping our state get through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her gratitude apparently doesn’t extend to some 19,000 state employees, many of whom worked longer hours than ever this year, under extraordinary stress. The governor’s offer to nurses, university staff, corrections officers, and others represented by AFSCME Council 61: no raise for the two years beginning on July 1, 2021.

Most of the Republicans who will represent Iowa in Congress next year are on record saying Joe Biden will be president of the United States.

But none have stated publicly that Biden legitimately won every state that cast its electoral votes for him on December 14.

With President Donald Trump and many of his supporters spreading false allegations of election fraud every day, it’s critically important for Republicans to state unambiguously that Biden won both the national popular vote and more votes than Trump in states that account for 306 electoral votes. Few prominent Iowa Republicans are up to that task.

Seventh in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2020 state and federal elections.

Hawaii became the 50th state to certify its 2020 election results this week. The Cook Political Report’s national popular vote tracker shows Joe Biden received 81,282,376 votes (51.3 percent) to 74,222,576 votes for Donald Trump (46.9 percent).

With the books closed on the popular vote for president, we can fill in some details on a reality that came into focus last month: Iowa no longer has any Democratic-leaning U.S. House districts.

Governor Kim Reynolds would have joined the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit seeking to throw out the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, she announced on December 10. The same day, Reynolds rejected Attorney General Tom Miller’s request to sign on in support of the defendants in that case.

Reynolds said in a campaign statement, “As I have said all along, President Trump, his campaign, and supporters have every right to pursue lawful, legal action in the courts. The American people deserve a fair and transparent election.”

Meanwhile, Reynolds and other prominent Iowa Republicans continue to denounce Rita Hart for appealing the second Congressional district result to the U.S. House–a step federal law allows.

Outgoing U.S. Representative Steve King was one of 23 Republican members of Congress who sought unsuccessfully this week to have the U.S. Supreme Court throw out Pennsylvania’s presidential election.

King and fellow House Republicans signed an amicus curiae brief supporting U.S. Representative Mike Kelly’s effort to block certification of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results. Kelly argued that “the state legislature’s provision of no-excuse absentee voting violated both the Pennsylvania and U.S. Constitutions.”

Iowa has long had no-excuse voting by mail, and to my knowledge, King has never suggested that system is unconstitutional. Neither King nor his Congressional staff responded to Bleeding Heartland’s inquiry about the apparent inconsistency. In the past month, King has amplified false claims of election fraud on his social media feeds.

Governor Kim Reynolds’ office would have had a large shortfall for the fiscal year that ended June 30 without a transfer of federal funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, state financial reports show.

Documents Bleeding Heartland obtained through public records requests indicate that in mid-September, the state’s accounting system showed $448,448.86 was needed to balance the fiscal year 2020 appropriation for the governor’s office. Reynolds’ chief of staff Sara Craig Gongol invoiced the Iowa Department of Homeland Security for exactly that amount in CARES Act funds shortly before the books closed on fiscal year 2020.

That invoice and an accompanying document on “COVID-19 Personnel Costs” were revised to incorporate language from U.S. Treasury guidance on allowable Coronavirus Relief Fund expenditures.

For many years, during several administrations, Iowa governors have maintained a larger office than the general fund appropriation would otherwise allow by having separate state agencies support some employees’ salaries. But it has not been typical to use hundreds of thousands of federal dollars to balance the books. Without the CARES Act funding, Reynolds’ office would have been deeply in the red during the last fiscal year, even after four state agencies chipped in a total of $357,652 to cover part of four staffers’ compensation.

Everyone knew Iowa’s State Canvassing Board wouldn’t have the final word on the 2020 election in the second Congressional district when it certified a six-vote win for Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks on November 30. Most politics watchers expected Democratic candidate Rita Hart to file for an election contest.

Instead, the Hart campaign announced on December 2 that it will bypass Iowa’s process and appeal directly to the Democratic-controlled U.S. House.

This won’t end well.

All 24 counties in Iowa’s second Congressional district have recounted their votes, but the race between Democrat Rita Hart and Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks is far from over.

Trackers including Pat Rynard of Iowa Starting Line and Tom Barton of the Quad-City Times reached the same conclusion: once all counties submit their new numbers to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, Miller-Meeks will have a six-vote lead out of more than 394,000 ballots cast. Rynard posted vote changes in each county since election day here. The two candidates’ vote share is identical to the one-hundredth of a percent (49.91 percent).

The Miller-Meeks campaign’s lawyer Alan Ostergren declared victory after Clinton County’s recount board finished its work on November 28. The Republican candidate said in a written statement, “While this race is extraordinarily close, I am proud to have won this contest and look forward to being certified as the winner by the state’s Executive Council on Monday.”

Three Republicans (Governor Kim Reynolds, Secretary of State Paul Pate, and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig) and two Democrats (State Treasurer Michael Fitzgerald and State Auditor Rob Sand) serve on the Executive Council. Assuming that body certifies the result, an election contest is extremely likely.

UPDATE: State officials changed their methodology for counting COVID-19 deaths in early December 2020. Original post follows.

The state’s official website on the coronavirus pandemic regularly understates the number of Iowans who have died of COVID-19, Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of U.S. Centers for Disease Control data indicates.

The Iowa Department of Public Health submitted information to the CDC indicating that 2,099 Iowans had died from COVID-19 through the week ending November 7. The latest figures published on coronavirus.iowa.gov show 2,206 total deaths, but account for only 1,920 deaths through November 7.

Sara Anne Willette, who maintains the Iowa COVID-19 Tracker website, has noticed the same discrepancy. It may explain why IDPH communications staff never answered Bleeding Heartland’s many inquiries about how the state counts coronavirus fatalities.