Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has informed 56 Republican state legislators that his office has neither “jurisdiction over transfers of fetal tissue” nor the “authority to investigate or demand information about the transfer of fetal tissue.” In a letter dated today, Miller noted that “Iowa does not have any state laws governing the transfer of fetal tissue,” which means that only offices of U.S. Attorneys are able to enforce federal laws in this area.

Last month, the GOP lawmakers asked Miller’s office “to investigate current and planned abortion operations within Iowa to ensure compliance with the law.” Their letter set out ten detailed questions regarding the disposal, donation, or possible sale of body parts following abortions. Miller directed the legislators to contact U.S. attorneys’ offices in Iowa if they “have reliable information that federal laws relating to fetal tissue are being violated.”

I enclose below the August 24 letter from Iowa House and Senate Republicans, today’s written response from Miller, and a two-page letter Planned Parenthood of the Heartland provided to the Attorney General’s Office regarding the lawmakers’ query. Planned Parenthood’s response noted that the organization “does not now, and has not in the past, participated in” any fetal tissue donation programs but adheres to “rigorous standards of care” and “compliance with all applicable laws and regulations” in every area of its work, including abortion services.

Many Iowa Republicans will be furious, not only because Miller will not act on their unfounded suspicions, but also because the Attorney General’s Office responded to their query in what appears to be a textbook late-afternoon, pre-holiday-weekend news dump.

Also worth noting: Iowa House Speaker-select Linda Upmeyer and incoming House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow did not sign the August 24 letter to Miller, but House Speaker Pro-Tem Matt Windschitl, incoming Majority Whip Joel Fry, and Assistant Majority Leaders Zach Nunn, Jarad Klein, and Walt Rogers did. Iowa Senate Minority Leader Bill Dix did not sign the letter, but Minority Whip Jack Whitver and Assistant Minority Leaders Rick Bertrand, Randy Fenestra, Charles Schneider, and David Johnson did.

The newly-appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, said yesterday,

“I will be the first to admit that my unusual background requires a lot of help, a lot of coaching,” Harreld told reporters after the Iowa Board of Regents voted unanimously to give him the job. “And I’m going to turn to a whole lot of people that were highly critical and really tough on me the other day and ask them if they would be great mentors and teachers (to me). And I suspect and hope all of them will.”

Others are better-equipped to help Harreld adapt to a leadership role at a research university, a setting where he has never worked, aside from some adjunct teaching.

But having spent some time in academic culture, I offer Harreld this suggestion: stop passing yourself off as the sole author of published works to which others contributed.

I used to loathe the end of January. Around that time, anxiety-ridden managers would start suggesting that I help organize the Black History Month activities for February. Bless their hearts. They either genuinely felt our staff needed to be more conscious of the contributions African Americans made to society, or somewhere in their manager handbook, this was mentioned in the cultural sensitivity part.

Growing up, I was always slated to read the “I Have A Dream,” speech in class or chosen to explain how the Underground Railroad operated without physical tracks. Back in 1st grade, when our progressive music teacher wanted us to learn about soulful pop music, she wrote a play and cast me as Michael Jackrabbit, the moonwalking bunny with a culturally ambiguous face.

All of this was a version of tokenism that I had become accustomed to before I even knew tokenism was a thing. Tokenism is race and gender agnostic. No one is safe. Consider the exemplary woman who has broken into the good ‘ole boys club of corporate America, or the lone gay man at a job  brimming with tough guys and their laughable displays of machismo, or in my case, the prototypical black face in nearly every social group to which I’ve belonged. Anyone can become a victim of tokenism, but it will always befall the Only One in the Room, a phrase that I’ve borrowed from a recent NPR article. The article, “On Wyatt Cenac, Key & Peele, And Being The Only One In the Room,” describes situations wherein there is only one minority in a group, otherwise known as the last 20 years of my life. Life is hard for the token, and it’s hard for the Only One. When you are both at once, it feels like playing a game of chess while balancing on a high wire.

By a unanimous vote, the Iowa Board of Regents today named J. Bruce Harreld as the next president of the University of Iowa. Of the four finalists for the job, only Harreld had never worked in academic administration. Up to now, his experience at universities has been limited to some adjunct teaching.

I’m going on record now: this experiment will not end well.

Another Throwback Thursday post is coming later today, but I’ve been meaning to catch Bleeding Heartland readers up on Anesa Kajtazovic. She served two terms in the Iowa House, having stepped in following legal troubles for the previous Democratic incumbent in a Waterloo-based district. Kajtazovic did not seek re-election to the state legislature in 2014. Instead, she ran for Congress in Iowa’s first district, finishing fourth in the Democratic primary.

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported in June that Kajtazovic had become executive director of the Family & Children’s Council of Black Hawk County, a non-profit “focused on child and sex abuse prevention, parenting education and other programming.” At this writing, the council’s website is down, but this note on the organization’s Facebook page summarizes various parenting classes, children’s programs, and family services offered in the Cedar Valley area. A few weeks ago, Holly Hudson reported for the Courier on Kajtazovic’s work for the Family & Children’s Council. I’ve posted excerpts after the jump, but I encourage you to click through to read the whole piece.

Our culture tends to glamorize success in the business world, rather than the non-profit sector. But I can hardly think of a more valuable way for Kajtazovic to dedicate her time and energy. The Family & Children’s Council is working on many of the most pressing issues related to children’s physical safety and long-term health. Vehicle accidents are a leading cause of death and serious injury; the council helps provide car seats to needy families and runs training sessions on how to use them properly. The council’s staff “visit well over 600 families [of newborns] a year in the hospitals,” according to Kajtazovic. That kind of outreach to parents of newborns has been shown to reduce child abuse. Social workers may also spot early risk factors for postpartum depression, helping women find resources if needed. Other staff or volunteers reach thousands of children in area schools with programs like “Take Charge of Your Body,” a curriculum aimed at preventing sexual abuse. Ideally, parents would teach their children about good touch/bad touch and similar rules. But since those conversations are not happening in many households, what a child learns at school about saying no, getting away, and telling an adult could be life-changing.

I don’t often feature vines for Iowa wildflower Wednesday, because I can rarely identify them. This vine is so abundant near the Windsor Heights bike trail that I was motivated to learn more. At first I thought it was Moonseed (Menispermum canadense), but the flowers didn’t match, and the vines are blooming now, rather than in late spring/early summer like moonseed.

Naturalist and photographer Leland Searles confirmed that this vine is Bur cucumber (Sicyos angulatus), “central Iowa’s only native cucurbit.” Sometimes called Star cucumber or one-seed burr cucumber, this species is native to most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. The vine “produces both staminate (male) and pistillate (female) flowers on the same plant.” I enclose below pictures of both kinds of flowers, blooming on vines large and small.

This post is also a mid-week open thread: all topics welcome.

Two months after the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional a proposed state ban on using telemedicine for abortions, the Iowa Board of Medicine and Governor Terry Branstad are at last ready to accept the court ruling as the final word on the subject.  

Governor Terry Branstad didn’t run for re-election last year on a plan to let private insurance companies manage health care for some 560,000 Iowans on Medicaid. He didn’t work with key state legislators to draw up his administration’s “Medicaid Modernization” plans. The governor’s draft budget, submitted in January, projected some $51 million in savings on Medicaid for the 2016 fiscal year. But key lawmakers like the chair of the Iowa Senate Health and Human Resources Appropriations subcommittee didn’t learn that four private companies would be selected to handle almost all Medicaid services until the Iowa Department of Human Services made its request for proposals public in February.

Recent accusations of bias and conflicts of interest, as well as allegedly inaccurate scoring of insurers’ proposals, have raised many questions about how the Iowa DHS selected the four companies now negotiating contracts to manage Medicaid for one-sixth of Iowans. Reports of campaign contributions by lobbyists and political action committees representing firms that sought Iowa’s Medicaid business prompted one watchdog to decry “pay to play” politics.

Those news stories point to a conclusion that isn’t getting enough attention: various insurance companies and their paid representatives knew what was coming down the pike long before the Branstad administration disclosed its plans to privatize Medicaid.

Three days have passed since presidential candidate Martin O’Malley blasted the Democratic National Committee’s “cynical move to delay and limit our own Party debates” during a speech to members and leaders at the DNC’s summer meeting. I enclose below the full text of O’Malley’s remarks, as prepared. The first section presses his case against the “unprecedented,” “rigged process” for allowing only six presidential candidate debates. O’Malley noted that just four debates are scheduled before the early caucuses and primaries, and “the New Hampshire debate is cynically wedged into the high point of the holiday shopping season so as few people watch it as possible.” For those who haven’t had a chance to see O’Malley campaign yet, the other sections of his remarks are adapted from his standard stump speech.

I have yet to hear any good argument for limiting presidential debates. You won’t find any response to O’Malley on the DNC’s official website. While the governor’s comments about debates were the big news from the summer meeting, dominating most media coverage of the event, the DNC’s Twitter feed picked this bland quote to highlight: “‘Whether or not we make the American Dream true again for all American families is up to us.’ -@MartinOMalley #dems15”

At the Iowa State Fair, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz couldn’t be distracted from her laundry list of talking points to respond to hecklers demanding more debates. Nor could she be bothered to engage with O’Malley’s substantive case last Friday. CNN reported that Wasserman Schultz “spent most of the speech looking down at a table just feet from the governor,” rarely clapping. Asked about O’Malley’s claim that it might be illegal for the national party to prohibit candidates from debating in non-sanctioned forums, the DNC leader told CNN, “I am quite confident that the process we have established is directly compliant with our rules and completely legal, whatever that means.” But why is she so set on those rules?

Conventional wisdom says the DNC intervened in the process to put a thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton. Although long-shot candidates arguably have more to gain from debates than the front-runner, I reject the premise that the DNC’s asinine policy helps Clinton. She and all Democrats would benefit from a large national audience watching five (or perhaps six) candidates intelligently discuss issues that matter to people’s lives. More important, Democratic voters should have more than a handful of chances to see our candidates side by side.

Selzer & Co’s new survey of Iowa Republicans for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News gives GOP strategists plenty to worry about.

The top three “outsider” candidates (Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz) are the first choice for 49 percent of respondents. The top three “establishment” candidates (Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio) are the first choice for only 20 percent.

The survey also indicates that several candidates considered heavyweight contenders are yesterday’s news for likely GOP caucus-goers. The 2008 caucus winner Mike Huckabee is sitting at 4 percent, tied with Rand Paul, who had been expected to inherit much of his father’s support from the last election campaign. The 2012 winner Rick Santorum is at 1 percent.

The Des Moines Register’s Jennifer Jacobs wrote up the key findings here, with input from Jason Noble. My first thoughts about the numbers are after the jump.

Hillary Clinton has a real fight on her hands in Iowa, according to the latest poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News. Among 404 likely Democratic caucus-goers surveyed between August 23 and 26, Clinton is the first choice of 37 percent, followed by Bernie Sanders (30 percent), Joe Biden (14 percent), “not sure” (8 percent), “uncommitted” (6 percent), Martin O’Malley (3 percent), Jim Webb (2 percent), and Lincoln Chafee (1 percent. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

When respondents did not have the option of selecting Biden, Clinton was the first choice of 43 percent of respondents, while 35 percent picked Sanders.

The Selzer poll will worry the front-runner’s campaign, especially since two surveys of New Hampshire Democrats have now shown Sanders leading Clinton in the first primary state. Notably, Selzer found Sanders way ahead among caucus-goers under age 45 (50 percent to 27 percent), among first-time caucus-goers (43 percent to 31 percent), and among independents likely to participate in the Democratic caucuses (a 21-point lead, but I don’t see the numbers in the write-up by Jennifer Jacobs). Caucus-goers who are “feeling the Bern” are not driven by “anyone but Hillary” sentiment. Some 96 percent of respondents backing Sanders are doing so “mostly because [they] support him and his ideas”; just 2 percent said Sanders is their first choice mostly because they do not support Clinton.

The poll is horrendous news for O’Malley, who has worked his heart out campaigning in Iowa. Since 2013, he has visited the state fifteen times, spending all or part of 29 days here. Every time I’ve seen O’Malley in person, his stump speech has been well-received, but Sanders seized the progressive/liberal niche early. I don’t see a path for O’Malley to become viable in most of the state’s precincts. While he has been filling small and medium-sized venues, Sanders has been drawing ridiculously large crowds all over the state, most recently at the Des Moines Register’s Iowa State Fair soapbox. At events where there is no externally-imposed time limit, Sanders keeps the crowd’s attention for over an hour, not counting time he spends answering questions.

I will update this post as the Register publishes more data from the new survey. A separate post will cover the latest Selzer poll findings on Republican presidential candidates in Iowa.

The Pella Electric Cooperative has told the Iowa Utilities Board it will no longer seek to charge some customers using solar panels a much higher “facilities fee,” Karen Uhlenhuth reported today for Midwest Energy News. The rural electric cooperative had informed members in June that customers installing new solar panels after August 15 would be charged a monthly fee of $85, which is $57.50 higher than what most of the Pella Electric customers pay. Those who had already installed solar systems would be exempt from the higher fee for five years, but would have to start paying it in 2020.

The cooperative’s action provoked an outcry from renewable energy advocates as well as from the handful of Pella Electric customers who would have been immediately affected. Uhlenhuth noted that the non-profit Environmental Law & Policy Center intervened with the Iowa Utilities Board, saying “a fee levied only on customers with distributed generation facilities ran counter to two provisions in Iowa law.” The Office of Consumer Advocate (part of the Iowa Attorney General’s office) asked the cooperative to provide data supporting a much higher monthly fee for solar users. The cooperative had refused to release its “cost of service” study last month.

To all appearances, the coop backed down once leaders realized they were on shaky legal ground, much like Alliant Energy reversed its position on net metering for some solar projects, shortly after critics had intervened with the utilities board. Uhlenhuth quoted a statement released by the Pella cooperative, which sounds like an unconvincing attempt to save face. The coop’s chief executive officer John Smith claimed it is “incorrect” to depict the higher facilities fee as “discriminatory.” He is sticking to his story that charging solar users more was merely an effort to be “fair” to other customers. While not admitting that the cooperative was wrong, the statement said it is withdrawing the proposal “until such time that we can better educate our members and the community as to the fair and equitable recovery of fixed costs.”

A press release from the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which I enclose in full below, notes that the Pella cooperative already benefits from solar panels installed by its customers, because it “buys excess solar energy at a rock bottom price” of 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour and “sells it at a premium” price of 10.1 cents per kWh. (I’m an active supporter of the ELPC, but I have no role in drafting their public statements or legal strategy.)

Jennifer Konfrst announced this morning that she will challenge four-term GOP incumbent Chris Hagenow in Iowa House district 43. The swing district covers Windsor Heights, Clive, and part of West Des Moines. A detailed map is after the jump, along with Konfrst’s press release and official bio. Her campaign is on the web here as well as on Facebook and Twitter.

As the newly-elected House majority leader, Hagenow will have virtually unlimited financial resources backing his re-election bid. On the other hand, this part of the Des Moines suburbs, solidly Republican for decades, has been trending toward Democrats for some time. President Barack Obama won 50.6 percent of the vote in 2012 in the HD-43 precincts, while Mitt Romney won 48.3 percent. Although Joni Ernst carried the district in the 2014 U.S. Senate race, she beat Bruce Braley by only 2 percent in HD-43–a lot less than her winning margin statewide. The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office indicate that 6,682 active registered Democrats, 7,493 Republicans, and 5,897 no-party voters live in the district.

Hagenow won his first election to the House in 2008 by 93 votes against then Windsor Heights Mayor Jerry Sullivan. After being re-elected comfortably in the 2010 midterm, Hagenow got a scare in the last presidential year. Despite paying for push-polls and negative tv ads against a challenger who was massively outspent, the incumbent defeated Susan Judkins by only 23 votes in 2012.

Judkins now serves on the Clive City Council. Last week she confirmed to Bleeding Heartland that she will not run for the Iowa House in 2016.

Konfrst may face a competitive primary anyway, because Jon Neiderbach is seriously considering a campaign against Hagenow. He was the Democratic nominee for state auditor in 2014. I think highly of both Konfrst and Neiderbach. The Iowa Democratic establishment sometimes hyperventilates about contested primaries, but assuming the candidates fight fair, I see little downside to two people pounding the pavement to get out the vote in my home district before next June’s primary.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.

Bonus political trivia: To my knowledge, HD-43 is one of just two Iowa House seats where voters registered with each major party currently outnumber independents. The other is Democratic State Representative John Forbes’ territory in House district 40 (part of Urbandale).

Yesterday was Women’s Equality Day, marking the anniversary of American women gaining the right to vote in 1920 under the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Iowa nearly adopted a state-level woman-suffrage amendment on two occasions before that time. Inspired to learn more about those close calls, this week I read part of Louise Noun’s 1969 book Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa. The short version of what I learned is after the jump.

Spoiler alert: Republicans in the Bleeding Heartland community may enjoy this post more than Democrats.  

Dave Swenson

We have been sold a bill of goods for much too long: local and state economic developers and their willing political enablers have convinced many of us that their earnest economic development efforts are responsible for the state’s economic vibrancy in recent years.  It is a canard that serves them, some in the business community, and various political fortunes well, but for the rest of us, their collective economic and political incompetence creates unjustifiable distortions in exactly who pays and who does not pay for public services.

Officially, Rick Perry’s presidential campaign wished Sam Clovis well after news broke that Clovis was stepping down as the former Texas governor’s Iowa campaign chair.

Unofficially, Perry supporters made sure a large audience would learn that Donald Trump’s biggest new Iowa fan is a raging hypocrite. Jennifer Jacobs has the story in today’s Des Moines Register.

A recent day trip to the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City drove home that I haven’t visited enough restored prairies this summer. So many native plants are blooming along the walking paths near the visitor’s center there. Cup plants are past their peak, but several kinds of goldenrods are coming on strong, and sawtooth sunflowers and stiff goldenrods are starting to bloom.

Hay fever sufferers, be warned: more and more giant ragweed plants are budding along central Iowa bike trails. Those are responsible for many of the seasonal allergies commonly blamed on goldenrods.

This week’s featured plant is native to much of the U.S. and Canada. It thrives in a wide range of habitats: “open to partially shaded areas in floodplain forests, swamps, thickets, moist black soil prairies, low areas along rivers and ponds, seeps and fens, marshes, and drainage ditches.” It also “grows easily in a home garden with average to moist soil.” I took these photographs of Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in a butterfly garden next to a local school.

This post is also a mid-week open thread: all topics welcome.

In the span of a few weeks, four Republicans who were heavily involved in shaping this year’s state budget have made sure they won’t be at the negotiating table during the Iowa legislature’s 2016 session. First, Matt Hinch quit as Governor Terry Branstad’s chief of staff. The weekly Business Record reported yesterday that Hinch “joined the Des Moines office of government affairs and lobbying group Cornerstone Government Affairs as a vice president.”

Days after the Branstad administration announced Hinch’s departure, Kraig Paulsen resigned as Iowa House speaker. He plans to be a back-bencher next year and will not seek re-election to the Iowa House in 2016. It’s not yet clear whether he will remain an attorney for the Cedar Rapids-based trucking firm CRST International, or whether he will seek a different private-sector job.

Last Friday, Branstad’s office announced that Jake Ketzner was leaving as the governor’s legislative liaison. I’ve enclosed the full statement on the staff changes after the jump. Yesterday, the marketing and lobbying firm LS2group revealed that Ketzner will be their newest vice president, specializing in “campaign management, government affairs, and public affairs.”

Finally, House Appropriations Committee Chair Chuck Soderberg told journalists yesterday that he will resign to take a leadership role in the Iowa Association of Electric Cooperatives, a powerful interest group.

I can’t blame these Republicans for not wanting to spin their wheels at the Capitol during next year’s legislative session. Election years are not conducive to bipartisan deal-making in the best of times. Last month, possibly influenced by Hinch and Ketzner, Branstad poisoned the well with vetoes that erased most of the House GOP’s budget concessions to Senate Democrats. Although Paulsen insisted he had negotiated in good faith, he and his top lieutenant Linda Upmeyer (the incoming House speaker) didn’t lift a finger to override the governor’s vetoes.

Newly-elected House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow told a conservative audience in Urbandale today, “I’m not as skeptical about next year as maybe some are. I think there’s a lot of good things that we can get done [in the legislature],” Rod Boshart reported.

That makes one of us. Seeing Hinch, Paulsen, Ketzner, and Soderberg vote with their feet reinforces my belief that next year’s legislative session will mostly be a waste of many people’s time and energy.

P.S.- Some grade A political framing was on display in the governor’s press release enclosed below: “During the 2015 session, Ketzner worked across party lines to secure bipartisan support for historic infrastructure investment that an economic development study called a prerequisite for economic development in Iowa.” In other words, he helped persuade lawmakers to increase the gasoline tax. Ketzner’s official bio at LS2goup likewise speaks of his work “across party lines to secure bipartisan support for significant transportation and broadband infrastructure investments.”

The Branstad administration has justified its “Medicaid Modernization Initiative” with optimistic projections about more “efficient, coordinated and high quality healthcare” and greater “accountability in health care coordination,” delivered at a savings to taxpayers.

Jason Clayworth shared a less encouraging perspective in the August 21 Des Moines Register: all four private insurance companies now negotiating contracts to manage Medicaid in Iowa have “faced serious charges of fraud or mismanagement” related to serving Medicaid recipients in other states. Some of those violations led to “hundreds of millions of dollars in fines” against the insurers.  

Bret Hayworth reported for the Sioux City Journal today that State Representative Chuck Soderberg will soon resign in order to become general manager for the Iowa Association of Electric Cooperatives in Des Moines. He has worked for the Northwest Iowa Power Cooperative in Le Mars for more than 35 years.

First elected to the statehouse in 2004, Soderberg chaired the House Commerce Committee for two years beginning in 2011 and has led the powerful Appropriations Committee since January 2013. No doubt quite a few members of the Iowa House GOP caucus would love to take on that role next year. Given the atmosphere of distrust that Governor Terry Branstad exacerbated by blowing apart this year’s spending compromises, I expect little constructive work to happen during the 2016 legislative session. But passing a budget is one thing lawmakers can’t leave town without doing, so the next person to do Soderberg’s job will exert considerable influence.

Surely Speaker Linda Upmeyer will give the Appropriations chair to someone with more experience than current vice chair Ken Rizer, who is in the middle of his first legislative term.

Soderberg’s retirement also opens up Iowa House district 5, covering all of Plymouth County and some rural areas of Woodbury County. I enclose a detailed map after the jump. This seat isn’t realistically within reach for Democrats; Mitt Romney carried 65.9 percent of the presidential vote here in 2012, and Joni Ernst won 71.2 percent of the 2014 votes for U.S. Senate. The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office show that House district 5 contains 3,820 active registered Democrats, 8,988 Republicans, and 6,659 no-party voters.

A safe legislative seat will be tempting for many ambitious Republicans in Plymouth or Woodbury County. The GOP district nominating convention, likely to happen sometime in September, should be highly competitive.

This thread is for any speculation about Soderberg’s successor on the House Appropriations Committee or as the lawmaker representing House district 5.