The Iowa Senate reconvened on January 12 with a different look: a new majority leader (Mike Klimesh) and a changed balance of power: 33 Republicans and seventeen Democrats, down from a 34-16 GOP majority for most of the 2025 session.

Seven senators (four Republicans, three Democrats) were elected to the chamber for the first time in 2024, and three more won their seats in special elections during 2025.

Fourteen senators are women (eight Democrats and six Republicans)—that’s one more woman than last year, since Democrat Catelin Drey won the race to succeed the late Rocky De Witt in Senate district 1, and Renee Hardman won the race to succeed the late Claire Celsi in Senate district 16. The high point for women’s representation in the Iowa Senate was in 2023 and 2024, when the chamber had 35 men and fifteen women.

Hardman is the first Black woman to serve in the Iowa Senate and only the third African American ever elected to the chamber. Democrat Izaah Knox is also Black. The other 48 senators are white. No Latino has ever served in the chamber, and Iowa’s only Asian-American senator was Swati Dandekar, who resigned in 2011.

In 2023, Democrat Janice Weiner became the first Jewish person to serve in the Iowa Senate since Ralph Rosenberg left the legislature after 1994. She became the first Jewish person to lead an Iowa legislative caucus when her peers elected her minority leader in November 2024.

Democrat Liz Bennett is the only out LGBTQ member of the Iowa Senate.

I enclose below details on the majority and minority leadership teams, along with all chairs, vice chairs, and members of Iowa Senate committees. Where relevant, I’ve mentioned changes since last year’s legislative session. Although there hasn’t been as much turnover as the Iowa House saw during the interim, Klimesh did make quite a few changes in the committees compared to last year. He took all committee assignments away from one Republican (Doug Campbell) and took certain positions away from Kevin Alons, Mark Lofgren, Sandy Salmon, and Dave Sires.

Some non-political trivia: the 50 Iowa senators include four men named Mike (three Republicans and a Democrat), two Toms (a Democrat and a Republican), a Dave and a David (both Republicans), and two men each named Jeff, Mark, and Dan (all Republicans).

Normally, big changes in the Iowa legislature happen the year after a general election. But there has been much more turnover than usual in the Iowa House since last spring. With two Republicans running for Congress and another resigning from the legislature to take a Trump administration job, a chain reaction leaves ten House committees with a different leader for the 2026 session.

The overall balance of power remains the same: 67 Republicans and 33 Democrats in the chamber. Each party has some new faces in the leadership team, however. All of those details are listed below, along with committee assignments and background on all committee chairs and ranking members. As needed, I’ve noted changes since last year’s session.

Nineteen House members (fourteen Republicans and five Democrats) are serving their first term in the legislature—three more than in 2025, due to special elections that happened last March, April, and December.

The number of women serving in the chamber crept up from 27 at the beginning of 2025 to 29 as of January 2026, since Democrat Angel Ramirez succeeded Sami Scheetz in House district 78 and Republican Wendy Larson was elected to replace Mike Sexton in House district 7. The ratio of 71 men and 29 women is the same as during the 2024 session.

Six African Americans (Democrats Jerome Amos, Jr., Ruth Ann Gaines, Rob Johnson, Mary Madison, and Ross Wilburn, and Republican Eddie Andrews) serve in the legislature’s lower chamber. Gaines chairs the Iowa Legislative Black Caucus.

Republican Mark Cisneros became the first Latino elected to the Iowa legislature in 2020, and Democrat Adam Zabner became the second Latino to serve in the chamber in 2023, and Ramirez the chamber’s first Latina member in 2025.

Republican Henry Stone became the second Asian American ever to serve in the House after the 2020 election. Democrat Megan Srinivas was first elected in 2022. The other representatives are white.

Three House members identify as part of the LGBTQ community: Democrats Elinor Levin and Aime Wichtendahl, and Republican Austin Harris. As for religious diversity, Levin and Zabner are Jewish. Srinivas is Hindu. The chamber has had no Muslim members since Ako Abdul-Samad retired in 2024.

Some non-political trivia: the 100 Iowa House members include two with the surname Meyer (a Democrat and a Republican), two Johnsons (a Democrat and a Republican), and a Thompson and a Thomson (both Republicans).

As for popular first names, there are four men named David (one goes by Dave), three named Thomas or Tom, three Roberts (two Bobs and a Bobby), a Jon and a John, a Josh and a Joshua, a Mike and a Michael, and two men each named Jeff, Dan, Brian, Steven, Chad, Austin, and Mark. There are also two Elizabeths (one goes by Beth) and two women each named Jennifer, Heather, Megan, and Shannon. As recently as 2020, four women named Mary served in the Iowa House, but now there is only one.

Iowa’s all-Republican Congressional delegation votes in unison on almost every resolution or bill. But last week, U.S. Representatives Zach Nunn (IA-03) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01) each parted ways with most of their GOP colleagues on high-profile measures.

Nunn and Miller-Meeks are among the country’s most vulnerable U.S. House incumbents. They have largely supported President Donald Trump’s agenda and remained loyal to House GOP leaders. But in recent weeks, they have taken different paths on an issue likely to be at the center of their 2026 re-election campaigns.

And while Nunn publicly explained why he supported a Democratic bill on health insurance subsidies, Miller-Meeks drew no attention to her votes to override Trump’s vetoes of two uncontroversial bills.

Nunn’s political strategy is easier to understand than Miller-Meeks’. But it may be just as risky.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

It was Christmas Eve. The gifts were laid beneath the Christmas tree at the home of Merlin and Nelda Powers in Urbandale.

But the family’s holiday celebration ended abruptly that day in 1968 when the Powers’ 10-year-old daughter Pamela disappeared from the YMCA in downtown Des Moines while the family attended her brother’s wrestling meet.

Two days passed before the family received the horrible answer to their “where is Pamela” question. Police located the girl’s body in a roadside ditch just off Interstate Highway 80 near Mitchellville.

John and Terri Hale own the The Hale Group, an Ankeny-based advocacy firm focused on older Iowans. Reach them at terriandjohnhale@gmail.com

Frustrated. Angry. Scared.

That’s how many older Iowans and Iowans with disabilities feel about the economic realities of their lives.

They are struggling to pay the bills. They’re frustrated about the rising cost of living. And they’re worried about the future.

We’ve heard from them at recent forums in the Quad Cities, Des Moines, and Ankeny, in conversations with friends and acquaintances, and in social media messages.

They’ve given us an earful. The key takeaways:

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack.

A few days ago a team effort by U.S. military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel seized Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and took them into American custody. The move has overwhelmed the news cycle across America, and much of the world as well.

The couple, now arraigned and in federal detention in Brooklyn, New York, will be tried in federal court on charges involving narcoterrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation, high-powered weapons possession, bribery, and fomenting kidnappings and murders.

There’s way too much involved here to unpack fully in a column like this one. The challenge is to drill down to the incident’s essential significance: Why did it happen? What important events led up to it? And what is it likely to mean for the people of Venezuela and their resources?

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. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

ICE is a domestic terror organization.

Conservatives have been fear mongering about immigrants, gangs, and shadowy organizations that are supposedly trying to destroy the American populace. They have claimed criminal gangs from other countries have taken over apartment complexes in Colorado, run drugs in motorboats from the coast of Venezuela up to the U.S., and accused immigrants of voting illegally in multiple elections. 

None of those claims were backed by evidence or consistency. But one thing we know for sure is that these supposed criminal gangs aren’t doing to U.S. citizens what our own federal government is doing.

Murdering them in broad daylight in cold blood.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a contributing columnist to 246 newspapers and 48 social media platforms in 45 states, who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party. 

Maria Farmer reported her sexual assault by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to the New York Police Department and the FBI on August 29, 1996. Ms. Farmer contacted the FBI as advised by the police. On September 3, 1996, the FBI identified the case as “child pornography,” since naked or semi-naked hard copy pictures existed.

Files including Farmer’s 1996 complaint were not required to be made public until late 2025. President Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19. The law required that all files be released by December 19. But under the leadership of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to release 100 percent of the files.

Normally I would publish this post on the last Wednesday of the calendar year. But thanks to Governor Kim Reynolds, I was tied up on New Year’s Eve writing about the December 30 election results in Iowa Senate district 16.

I enclose below a photo from each of Bleeding Heartland’s 26 posts about wildflowers last year. This series has become a favorite for many readers since 2012.

As in 2022, 2023, and 2024, guest authors and photographers carried much of the load. In alphabetical order: Emily Bredthauer, Katie Byerly, Lora Conrad, James Enright, Jeff Ewoldt, Jo Hain, Beth Lynch, Bruce Morrison, Diane Porter, Leland Searles, Kenny Slocum, Patrick Swanson, and Melissa Wubben. Special thanks to James, Jo, and Melissa, who contributed to Bleeding Heartland for the first time (but I hope not the last!) in 2025.

This series will return sometime during April or May of 2026. Please reach out to me if you have photographs to share, especially of native plants I haven’t featured yet, or any plant that hasn’t been featured in the past eight years. The full archive of more than 300 posts featuring more than 250 species is available here. I have also compiled links to several dozen posts that covered many plants found in one area, rather than focusing on a single kind of wildflower.

For those looking for wildflower pictures year round, or seeking help with plant ID, check out the Facebook groups Flora of Iowa or Iowa wildflower enthusiasts. If you’d like a book to take with you on nature outings, Lora Conrad reviewed some of the best wildflower guides last year. A book featuring plants native to our part of the country is probably more reliable than the plant ID app on your phone.

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 

The digital clock silently clicks 3:01 a.m. Her eyes flash open. She’s a teacher and she knows 3:01 isn’t awake time especially when 27 pairs of third grade eyes will be staring at her in a few hours. Her mind reviews every lesson rewriting in her mind. Then she begins to worry about her career choice. Will it get easier? How do I balance family with school?

She hopes her school can hire more teachers, reduce paperwork, meetings, and maybe agree to a raise above insurance increase. But money is tight. She needs more time to prepare so her teaching bag isn’t filled to the brim at home. She prays she’ll be allowed to be creative because that’s the joy of teaching. She’s exhausted by interference. 

Her last thought before drifting off to a dreamy sun-soaked beach is a hope Iowa legislators will stop punching down on her profession.

Linda Schreiber writes commentary on selected legislative issues.

For more than four decades, Iowa’s Bottle Bill stood as a national model: simple, effective, and popular. It reduced litter, boosted recycling, and put responsibility where it belonged—on producers and consumers. The 2022 update weakened those goals while reducing public accountability.

In 2019, Iowa State University professor Dr. Dermot Hayes recommended adjusting the five-cent deposit enacted in 1979 for inflation, roughly 17 cents at the time. A survey showed 88 percent of Iowans supported the Bottle Bill. Advocates, including the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club, urged lawmakers to strengthen the program, improve redemption access, and preserve public benefits.

Iowa lawmakers chose a different path.

Xavier Carrigan is a Democratic candidate in Iowa’s third Congressional district.

For many Americans, foreign policy feels distant. Something that happens elsewhere, debated by experts and pundits, far removed from daily life.

But what the United States has done in Venezuela, and what it is now demanding in the aftermath, should concern anyone who believes power ought to have limits.

By launching a military strike in Caracas and forcibly removing Venezuela’s head of state, the U.S. crossed more than a geopolitical line. It established a precedent. One that says sovereignty is conditional, international law is negotiable, and accountability depends less on principle than on alignment.

2025 was another strong year for Bleeding Heartland’s guest authors. This website published 369 pieces written or co-authored by 154 individuals—a record number of contributors. The total number of guest posts published didn’t match the record-setting pace of 2024, but it edged out 2023 for second place.

As usual, last year’s guest authors covered a wide range of topics, from public schools to local and state government, major employers, CO2 pipelines, farm subsidies, the cancer rate, foreign policy, notable events in U.S. history or Iowa history, and of course wildflowers.

They wrote about Iowa’s statewide elected officials, members of Congress, and national figures including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Guest authors highlighted bills pending in the Iowa legislature, from well-known attacks on transgender Iowans and public schools to proposals that received less attention but could change many Iowans’ lives for the worse.

They reviewed books that would interest many Bleeding Heartland readers.

They reflected on the lives and legacy of former Republican State Representative Dave Heaton and Democratic State Senator Claire Celsi, who both passed away last year.

While many guest authors criticized Republican policies and politicians, some offered advice or constructive criticism to Democratic candidates or activists, and shared differing views on the future of the Iowa caucuses.

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

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

Days removed from the winter solstice, when Iowa’s nights are the longest, we have another example of the absence of sunshine in Iowa government. And this example shows why the state legislature has much to do about openness and accountability when it convenes on January 12.

A recent court decision with ties to the collapse in May 2023 of an apartment building in Davenport highlights the urgent need for legislative action. The case involves more than the public’s right to know, considering that three people died in the collapse and rescue workers needed to amputate a survivor’s leg to free her from the rubble.

Dr. Emily Boevers is a Readlyn farm kid, mother of three, and physician practicing in Iowa. This essay first appeared in the Waverly Democrat.

Property “ownership” is surprisingly complicated. Since feudal times when all land belonged to kings, to global wars that claimed land by force and displaced native populations, to modern concepts about private deeds, covenants and easements—property rights are nuanced. The law bundles the privileges of land ownership as a right to exclude others from a space, to protect or to exploit property for one’s own benefit, to pass it on to heirs and to not have it unlawfully taken or damaged. Enforcement of the rights that come with land title are an honored, but dynamic, legal tradition.

Today, limited options exist to legally seize, use or redistribute property owned by another. Zoning laws are one example of limitations on property use. Voluntary easements grant another the opportunity to use one’s property for limited purposes. Eminent domain allows the non-consensual taking of private land so long as landowners are justly compensated and public good is served.

It is likely through enforcement of eminent domain that the carbon-capture pipeline will ultimately wind its way through Iowa. In June 2024 the Iowa Utilities Board (since renamed the Iowa Utilities Commission) determined that the project qualified as “public use.” The board members concluded that the pipeline’s potential public benefits outweighed private and public costs. Therefore, landowners who do not sign voluntary easements for Summit Carbon Solutions’ pipeline could still be subject to non-consensual use.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack, in two parts.

The American writer James Agee, together with photographer Walker Evans, in 1941 released Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book documenting the lives of impoverished Southern sharecroppers during the Depression.

The title is an apt referent for the subjects of this column: men and women whom I admire for what they have done for other human beings, this year and/or in past years. They aren’t all necessarily famous, but they deserve to be. Others certainly earn my admiration as well, but putting together my year-end list, it’s hard for me not include ten of them up front.

The envelopes please, in no particular order:

West Des Moines City Council member Renee Hardman won big in the December 30 special election to represent Iowa Senate district 16. Unofficial results show the Democrat defeated Republican Lucas Loftin by 7,341 votes to 2,930 (71.4 percent to 28.5 percent), a margin of about 43 points in a district Kamala Harris carried by about 17 points in 2024.

Hardman will make history as the first Black woman to serve in the Iowa Senate. Her win also means Democrats will hold seventeen of the 50 Iowa Senate seats during the 2026 legislative session, depriving Republicans of the two-thirds supermajority needed to confirm Governor Kim Reynolds’ nominees without any Democratic support.

In an emotional speech to supporters after results were in, Hardman acknowledged the late State Senator Claire Celsi, a personal friend who had managed her first city council race in 2017. “Claire led with courage, she loved this community fiercely. […] We will continue the work she cared about so deeply. We will honor her legacy, and we won’t give up the fight for a better Iowa.” The victory party was at Tavern II, a West Des Moines restaurant where Celsi regularly held her own campaign events.

The outcome was not a surprise, given the partisan lean of Senate district 16 and a massive ground game that gave Democrats a substantial lead in early votes banked.

Still, we can learn a few lessons from the lopsided special election result.

Jenny Turner is a speech language pathologist who lives in West Des Moines. She is the board president of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and a member of the Fighting Oligarchy leadership team. This column first appeared in the Marshalltown Times-Republican.

I became a widow at age 38 when my son was 7. Solo parenting is hard, but thanks to the Affordable Care Act I’ve been able to work part-time from home in a way that makes our lives work pretty well.

In January, my health insurance premiums will jump 79 percent, from $191 to $342 per month.

For a lot of single mothers, that difference is their grocery budget for the month. This price hike is because of Republican inaction. Our representatives in Congress—Zach Nunn (IA-03), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—have known these increases were coming for months, but chose to do nothing to prevent them.

David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magzine. A version of the following column appeared first in the Des Moines Register.

Wendy Wintersteen is retiring after eight years as the first female president of Iowa State University.

As a native of Ames and a graduate of Iowa State, I should be proud. But I’m not. In retrospect, I probably I expected too much from her.

Before Wintersteen took over the top job at ISU, she was dean of ISU’s highly regarded College of Agriculture. She was, I might add, the first Iowa State president with an agricultural background since 1926 when Raymond Pearson left to become president of the University of Maryland. 

Wayne Ford is the executive director of Wayne Ford Equity Impact Institute and co-Director of the Brown and Black Forums of America. He is a former member of the Iowa legislature (1997 through 2010) and the founder and former executive director of Urban Dreams.

I. Iowa’s educational DNA: Civic purpose before ideology

Iowa’s public university system was not built to advance a single ideology, party, or doctrine. It was built to serve the public good. From its early commitment to the Union during the Civil War—when Iowa sent one of the highest per-capita numbers of soldiers to fight for the North—to its later embrace of land-grant education, Iowa has historically understood education as a civic responsibility rather than a political instrument. That tradition placed learning, inquiry, and social mobility at the center of public life.

Iowa’s universities have contributed nationally in ways that transcend partisan categories. Iowa State University became a center of early computing innovation that helped lay groundwork for the modern digital economy. The ACT college entrance exam—long a national standard—was founded in Iowa as a neutral tool to measure academic readiness, not political alignment. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa gained international recognition by elevating creative excellence across backgrounds and viewpoints, shaping generations of writers without imposing ideological litmus tests.

These achievements were grounded in intellectual openness, not enforced consensus.