The House of Representatives approved a bill yesterday to extend the National Flood Insurance Program through fiscal year 2016. The overwhelming majority (406 votes in favor) included Iowa Democrats Bruce Braley (IA-01), Dave Loebsack (IA-02), and Leonard Boswell (IA-03), as well as Republicans Tom Latham (IA-04) and Steve King (IA-05). After the jump I’ve posted statements from Loebsack and Boswell on this bill. Loebsack’s press release mentions key improvements to the federal flood insurance program and highlights an amendment he proposed, which the House approved by voice vote. A video of Loebsack’s speech to the House introducing that amendment is also after the jump. He has worked extensively on flood-related issues in Congress since the historic 2008 floods devastated population centers in his district.

Boswell’s press release highlighted an amendment he submitted, which was intended to help flood victims in three additional ways. That amendment failed on a 181 to 244 vote just before final passage of the bill. Notably, Latham and King were two of only three House Republicans to vote for Boswell’s amendment. Both will run for re-election in 2012 in districts affected by this summer’s Missouri River flooding.

Federal flood insurance has had bipartisan support in the past, but King’s votes yesterday suggest a change of heart. In July 2010, he was the only Iowan to vote against a similar House bill to extend the National Flood Insurance Program. At that time, King didn’t publicize his opposition, and I didn’t see any statement about yesterday’s House vote on his official website.

Presumably King changed his position because the Missouri River has devastated parts of western Iowa this summer (for details, check the Iowa Homeland Security website). In fact, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack signed an agricultural disaster designation last week for 14 counties in IA-05. King did announce that aid in a press release I’ve posted after the jump. It lists the affected counties and explains the kinds of federal assistance available to farm operators. King is proud of his vote against federal aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina, but when a natural disaster affects his own constituents, “big government” looks a lot more appealing.

In other Congressional news, Iowa’s House delegation split on party lines yesterday over a bill “aimed at repealing a slew of light bulb efficiency standards.” Latham and King joined most Republicans supporting this bill; Braley, Loebsack and Boswell voted no. Although 233 representatives voted for the bill and only 193 against it, the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act failed to pass because it was brought to the floor “under a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority,” Andrew Restuccia reported.

If Barack Obama doesn’t want to be a one-term president, he has a funny way of showing it. I can’t imagine how the president could come out of the debt ceiling negotiations in a worse political position.  

The city of Dubuque continues to build its reputation as Iowa’s most eco-friendly city. Governor Terry Branstad’s administration recently announced the winners of the upcoming Iowa Environmental Excellence awards, and one is going to the Sustainable Dubuque initiative. Granted, Branstad isn’t known to have an eye for “environmental excellence,” but in this case the award is well-deserved. After the jump I’ve posted the press release announcing other winners of this year’s awards. Click here to learn more about what Sustainable Dubuque has accomplished during the past five years. The initiative is one big reason Dubuque has received so much recognition:

*Named most livable small city in the country, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors (2008)

*Honored for “excellence in historic preservation-led strategies,” according to the Economic Development Administration, an agency within the federal Commerce Department (2009).

*Chosen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and Department of Housing and Urban Development for sustainability pilot programs (2009)

*Named All-Star Community by the Iowa League of Cities  (2010)

*Received leadership award from 1000 Friends of Iowa for adopting a Unified Development Code that “promotes best practices in sustainable development and will serve as a model for other cities in Iowa” (2010)

*Honored as third-place finalist and gold-standard community for cities with populations between 20,000 and 75,000, at the International Awards for Livable Communities (2010)

Various business groups and business-oriented media have also cited Dubuque as one of the best places to work, live or raise a family in the country.

Meanwhile, Dubuque’s public transit system (“the Jule”) just won an award from the Federal Transit Administration Region VII and was recognized by the Iowa Department of Transportation as Iowa’s “Most Improved Urban Transit System.” The Jule managed to reduce the cost per ride by 14.5 percent during the past fiscal year while the number of rides taken increased by 10.7 percent. Many Iowans think of public transit only in a large urban context, but there is demand for reliable bus service in many smaller Iowa cities and towns.

Civic leaders have implemented eco-friendly initiatives elsewhere in this state (I’m looking at you, Cedar Falls, Davenport, Des Moines and Iowa City), but Dubuque is setting the bar high and striving to do more. Just last week, the city council voted unanimously to approve a goal of using 90 percent fewer plastic shopping bags in Dubuque by 2017. The city council had considered banning the plastic bags by 2014 but opted for a gradual approach through outreach and education.

This October, Dubuque will host its fourth annual “Growing Sustainable Communities” conference. I hope staff or city council members from many other towns will attend. Conference details are after the jump. Registration is free for the first 100 students to sign up.

Planned Parenthood Voters of Iowa published its scorecard of Iowa legislators and gave its “Champion Award” to two Iowa House Democrats: State Representatives Janet Petersen and Beth Wessel-Kroeschell.

Details from the 2011 legislative update are after the jump. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland President and CEO Jill June described this year as “the worst legislative session for women in my 25 years at Planned Parenthood.”

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers?

Yesterday’s employment report was so awful (1 on a scale of 1 to 10) that a double-dip recession seems more likely than ever. At the Naked Capitalism blog, Edward Harrison reposted a piece from November 2009 on why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and economic adviser Larry Summers would be President Barack Obama’s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It’s worth a read. At the Bonddad blog, New Deal Democrat went over lots of weekly indicators and found more evidence of an economic “stall” than a contraction (so far).

I’m still surprised by some of the bills that didn’t get through the Iowa legislature during this year’s extra-long session. I learned this week that Iowa wasn’t the only state where pro-nuclear legislation faltered. The nuclear industry failed to persuade lawmakers in five other state legislatures to advance favored bills. After the jump I’ve posted a press release from Nuclear Bailout, a project of Physicians for Social Responsibility. The Iowa chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility lobbied hard against the bill written exclusively for the benefit of MidAmerican Energy.

In case you missed it, Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and Minority Leader Paul McKinley reflected on the 2011 session during the July 1 edition of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program. Click the link to read the transcript or watch the video. Both of them expect some progress on property tax reform next year, though they may get a crack at that sooner if Governor Terry Branstad calls a special legislative session later this year.

I’ll post Bleeding Heartland’s final news roundup on what passed and didn’t pass during the 2011 session after Branstad signs or vetoes the bills that reached his desk during the last week of June.

This is an open thread.

UPDATE: Best slip of the tongue I’ve heard this year: while phone-banking for Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, State Senator Brad Zaun says he’s calling on behalf of “Congressman Boswell.” Democrat Leonard Boswell beat Zaun during the 2010 Congressional race in Iowa’s third district.

Conventional wisdom says President Barack Obama would love to run against an “extreme” Republican candidate, such as Representative Michele Bachmann. With unemployment up again and likely to rise further as Obama tries to outdo Republicans on government spending cuts, I’m not convinced that a big campaign war chest will be enough to get the president re-elected.

Watching Bachmann’s solid introductory television commercial and highlights from her recent Iowa tour, I challenge those who write her off as “unelectable,” especially in this economy. Ad video, transcipt, analysis and more Bachmann campaign news are after the jump.

Philip Brasher, the agriculture and food policy reporter recently laid off by the Des Moines Register, launched the FoodWatch blog yesterday to cover “the politics of what we eat, how it’s produced, and why that matters.” His first two posts were about a Senate deal to replace current ethanol subsidies with different biofuels incentives and a “landmark deal” on improving conditions for caged hens, announced by the industry group United Egg Producers and the Humane Society of the United States, a leading animal welfare organization.

Many sustainable food advocates were alarmed when the Des Moines Register let Brasher go and closed its Washington bureau. The FoodWatch blog doesn’t have the Register’s high profile, but at least it keeps Brasher’s reporting accessible to the public for now.

Register publisher Laura Hollingsworth assured Paula Crossfield of the Civil Eats blog that the newspaper’s remaining staff and the Gannett Corporation would be able to “provide comprehensive political and agricultural coverage for our readers in Des Moines and beyond.” What passes for a business section in today’s Des Moines Register includes a Gannett Washington bureau report on the Senate ethanol deal and an Associated Press story about the egg industry’s agreement with the Humane Society. The AP report lacks some of the details and context Brasher provides on his blog.

LATE UPDATE: Brasher rejoined Gannett in late August 2011; his articles about food and agriculture appear in several newspapers, including the Des Moines Register.

A new report by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds that about 28 percent of Iowan adults are obese, an increase of 73 percent since 1995. Because the obesity rate has grown even more quickly in many other states, however, Iowa fell from the 13th most obese state in 1995 to the 20th most obese now. In some health categories correlated with obesity, Iowa scored relatively well compared to the rest of the country, but in others Iowa was near the bottom.

Follow me after the jump for key findings and excerpts from F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011.  

Representative Dave Loebsack has closed on a new house in Iowa City, a move that will enable him to run for re-election next year in Iowa’s second Congressional district. The new map of political boundaries put Loebsack’s longtime Linn County home in the first district, represented by fellow Democrat Bruce Braley. Loebsack announced plans to move into IA-02 the first day Iowa’s map was proposed.

Loebsack said he chose Iowa City in order to be close to his son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. Johnson County has the second-largest population in the new IA-02 and is Iowa’s most Democratic-leaning county by far, with more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans. As of July 2011, the county dominated by Iowa City and its suburbs contained 40,177 registered Democrats, 18,275 Republicans and 31,927 no-party voters.

Since winning the 2006 election, Loebsack has represented Iowa’s current IA-02, which has a partisan voting index of D+7. In other words, in last two presidential elections, the current IA-02 voted about seven points more Democratic than the national average. Loebsack won re-election in 2008 by more than a 20-point margin against Mariannette Miller-Meeks, but he was sweating it last fall. Both his campaign and the and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put up negative television commercials against repeat GOP nominee Miller-Meeks (see here, here and here). Loebsack ended up winning by a 51.0 percent to 45.9 percent margin.

The new IA-02 has a partisan voting index of about D+4. According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, the Congressional district contained 503,218 active registered voters as of July 2011: 178,562 registered Democrats, 139,359 Republicans, and 184,692 no-party voters.

Not only does Loebsack’s new district lean slightly less Democratic, the incumbent has never represented its most populous county. Scott County includes the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. As of July 2011, it contained 36,303 registered Democrats, 30,305 Republicans and 46,914 no-party voters. Braley lost Scott County in his narrow 2010 win over Republican Ben Lange in IA-01. Lange said in May that he will not move to IA-02 to challenge Loebsack. He has not ruled out a rematch against Braley in the new IA-01.

On July 6, Republican John Archer announced that he has filed paperwork to run for Congress in IA-02. Archer lives in Bettendorf, one of the Quad Cities, and is senior legal counsel for the John Deere company. He also serves on the Pleasant Valley school board. So far Archer’s campaign website has only buttons for donors and volunteers and a link to the candidate’s Facebook page. After the jump I’ve posted the full text of his campaign announcement.

Last month another Scott County Republican, Dan Dolan of Blue Grass, said he would challenge Loebsack in 2012.

Dolan, who has operated Dan Dolan Homes in Davenport for 20 years, said his decision to run is motivated by frustration with what he describes as “professional politicians.” […] Dolan is upset with the nation’s accumulation of debt and what he sees as an unwillingness by those already in office to do anything about it. […]

Dolan said the recent congressional redistricting in Iowa helped motivate him to consider running for office. He noted that the new district boundaries comprise a large portion of the areas where his company has a presence with housing developments.

According to dandolanhomes.com, Dolan’s company has housing developments in Davenport, Muscatine, Blue Grass, Clinton, LeClaire and Iowa City.

Democratic-leaning Clinton County is the third most-populous in the new IA-02, and Loebsack has not represented that county before either. Braley carried Clinton against Lange in 2010.

UPDATE: Tea party activist Richard Gates announced plans last month to run for the Republican nomination in IA-02. He is a veteran and machinist from Keokuk (Lee County), and also midwest administrator for the conservative group 912 Patriots for Action. Inspired by Glenn Beck, he became active in politics in early 2009. He supports replacing all income and corporate taxes with a consumption tax (the so-called “fair tax” reform). During the last election cycle, Gates endorsed Chris Reed, who finished third out of four candidates in the IA-02 primary.

Lee County leans Democratic, but it has one of the highest unemployment rates in Iowa. Loebsack barely led Miller-Meeks there in 2010.

Good news has been in short supply lately for supporters of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s presidential candidacy. But Gingrich told Seema Mehta of the Los Angeles Times this week that he’s turning things around:

“The fact is a month of media barrage is painful, and it slowed a lot of things down,” [Gingrich] said, before marching in a Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake, Iowa. “Our numbers will not be as good as we would like, and candidly, the consultants left us in debt. But every single week since they left we’ve been cutting down the debt, and we raise more than we spend in a week.”

Way to blame on the media for your own big mouth and lazy approach to campaigning, Newt. If you’re asking people to elect you president, you should at least be able to keep your own organization’s spending in line with its revenues.

Gingrich hasn’t given up on competing in the Iowa caucuses. His new spokesman R.C. Hammond told the Des Moines Register’s Jason Clayworth that the campaign will rely on the kindness of strangers volunteers. One of the most important free laborers will be former Representative Greg Ganske. He was part of the giant Republican “Class of 1994” in the U.S. House, taking down legendary Democrat Neal Smith in what was then Iowa’s fourth district. Ganske stepped up to be Gingrich’s finance chair in Iowa and is giving the candidate some money tips:

Ganske has already advised Gingrich to stop chartering expensive private planes and to instead fly commercial airlines, preferably in coach.  He’s also advised Gingrich to skip the Ames straw poll, a major Republican presidential shindig that will be held Aug. 13th.

“It’s basically who can buy the most buses to transport people in and then throw the biggest party,” Ganske said. “Basically it’s a fundraiser for the party.”

When a campaign is flat broke, the candidate shouldn’t need to be told to stop chartering planes. Then again, Gingrich developed an expensive airplane habit in his years running the American Solutions 527 organization.

Gingrich has no choice but to skip the Ames straw poll because he couldn’t afford to put in a bid for a spot outside the venue.

Last time Ganske made Iowa campaign news, he was hosting a fundraiser for Jim Gibbons, the Congressional candidate who lost badly to State Senator Brad Zaun in the 2010 IA-03 Republican primary, despite support from power-brokers in Iowa and Washington. Ganske’s been out of office for a long time, and rightly or wrongly, many Republicans feel his flaws as a candidate cost the GOP the 2002 U.S. Senate race against Tom Harkin. But beggars can’t be choosers. Gingrich should be thankful that anyone with any clout in Iowa offered to assist his hopeless cause.

The son of one of Linn County’s most influential Republicans during the past three decades will run for the Iowa House as a Democrat in 2012. Daniel Lundby on July 5 launched his campaign in the new Iowa House district 68. This swing district covers most of Marion (a suburb of Cedar Rapids) and some rural areas of Linn County, including the small towns of Ely and Bertram. As of April 2011, the new House district 68 contained 6,834 registered Democrats, 6,290 Republicans and 7,871 no-party voters.

Lundby’s Republican opponent will be Iowa House Local Government Committee Chairman Nick Wagner. He has represented current district 36, covering suburban and rural parts of Linn County, since winning an open-seat race in 2008.

Lundby’s first campaign press release refers repeatedly to his late mother, Mary Lundby. She was co-chair of the Linn County Republican Party before being elected to the Iowa House in 1986. After four terms as a state representative, she won several terms in the Iowa Senate, where she was among the more moderate Republicans. During the final weeks of the 2006 legislative session, she surprised most Iowa politics-watchers by ousting Stew Iverson as Senate Republican leader. She stepped down from the Senate in order to run for Linn County supervisor, but she dropped out of that race for health reasons. She died of cancer in early 2009.

Daniel Lundby’s message to Linn County voters will be that today’s Republican Party no longer shares his mother’s values. From yesterday’s campaign press release:

“My mother believed in a common sense approach to solving problems through partisan politics.  I want to bring that common sense back to the Iowa House.  My mother also strongly cared about children in Iowa and wanted them to get the best education possible.  Unfortunately, the needs of our young people now seem less important with the Republicans insisting on zero percent growth for local schools and education cuts to state universities.  None of which my mother would approve of.  Nor would she support cutting programs that protect our natural resources and our environment.  She would definitely not support attempts to deny equal rights to any Iowan.  Being my mother’s son, I want the chance to continue her work for a better Iowa.”

The comment about “equal rights” alludes to the fact that Mary Lundby was one of four Iowa Senate Republicans to vote against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in 2004. That amendment failed by a single vote in the upper chamber. Had it passed, the Varnum v Brien lawsuit challenging Iowa’s Defense of Marriage Act probably would never have been filed.

I’ve posted a detailed map of the new House district 68 after the jump, along with the full text of Lundby’s campaign announcement.

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty started running his presidential campaign’s second television commercial in Iowa today. The 30-second spot describes victories for Pawlenty in battles with public workers and Democrats in Minnesota.

Most of the Republican presidential candidates haven’t launched paid advertising in Iowa yet, but Pawlenty needs to make headway before the Republican Party of Iowa’s straw poll in Ames, now less than six weeks away. His camp also appears to be feeling pressure to halt Representative Michele Bachmann’s momentum in Iowa.

The video, annotated transcript and other news from the Pawlenty campaign are after the jump.  

Hope everyone in the Bleeding Heartland community is enjoying the long holiday weekend. Sounds like the weather across Iowa will be pretty good for the celebrations on July 3 and 4. I love the Windsor Heights parade.

Setting off fireworks at home is illegal in Iowa (rightly so in my opinion), but the law isn’t strictly enforced. Stay safe and remember that firecrackers are one reason July 4 can be a difficult holiday for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is an open thread, so all topics are welcome. A few things caught my eye this week:

As of July 1, Iowa boaters are subject to the same blood-alcohol limits as people driving motor vehicles. A long-overdue bill to that effect finally made it through the legislature this year.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources warned against swimming at six Iowa park beaches because the water contains high levels of fecal bacteria. The no swimming advisories apply to Emerson Bay at West Okoboji Lake, Geode near Danville, Beed’s near Hampton, Backbone near Strawberry Point, Lacey-Keosaqua near Keosaqua, and Springbrook near Guthrie Center. DNR staff have found high readings for bacteria in many other Iowa lakes this summer, so swim at your own risk and try not to swallow any water.

If you find a nice non-feces-contaminated swimming spot, remember that “drowning doesn’t look like drowning,” so it’s important to know the signs that someone is in trouble in the water. Drowning is the second-leading cause of accidental death for children.

I was not happy to learn that organic, “uncured” hot dogs with “no nitrates or nitrites added” do in fact contain nitrates and nitrites, often just as much as in conventional processed meats.

Danny Wilcox Frazier’s photo essay called “Out of Iowa” isn’t new, but I only found it recently. Worth clicking through.

The Iowa House and Senate finally passed a budget and got out of town yesterday with only about eight hours remaining before the end of the fiscal year.

Every legislative session has its own dynamic, and I’ve been thinking about what surprised me most about this year’s maneuvering in the capitol.  

The last day of fiscal year 2011 has arrived, and Iowa lawmakers still have not completed work on next year’s budget. Several pieces have cleared the Iowa House and Senate after backroom deals were reached on some contention issues. Notably, House Republicans and Senate Democrats reached a compromise on preschool and K-12 school funding. However, abortion language is still holding up the health and human services budget bill, covering a huge chunk of Iowa government spending.

More details about this week’s budget deal-making are after the jump. I will update this post throughout the day as news emerges from the Iowa House and Senate. Legislators plan to pass a one-month stopgap budget to keep state government funded while Governor Terry Branstad reviews the budget bills that reach his desk. (The governor has the power to item-veto certain appropriations.) As of this morning, the same abortion dispute blocking the health and human services bill is holding up passage of the stopgap budget.

Democratic and Republican negotiators gave up trying to find a compromise on property tax reform earlier this week. Both the Iowa House and Senate have passed property tax reform legislation, but the approaches differ vastly from one another and from Branstad’s preferred approach. If the governor calls a special legislative later this year, property taxes may come back on the agenda.

UPDATE: The last budget bills passed during the afternoon on June 30. The House approved the 30-day stopgap budget, 87 to 7. State representatives who voted no were Democrats Vicki Lensing, Mary Mascher, Mary Wolfe, Cindy Winckler and Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, and Republicans Tom Shaw and Kim Pearson.

The Health and Human Services budget conference committee report passed the Iowa House by a 61 to 33 vote. Most Republicans present voted yes, and most Democrats present voted no. Eight Democrats voted yes: Dennis Cohoon, Curt Hanson, Dan Muhlbauer, Brian Quirk, Andrew Wenthe, Chris Hall, Helen Miller, and Lisa Heddens. Four Republicans voted no: Kim Pearson, Glen Massie, Tom Shaw, and Jason Schultz. In other words, Republicans had the votes to pass the health and human services budget without any support from House Democrats.

The Iowa Senate approved the health and human services budget by a 27 to 18 vote. I don’t know yet who crossed party lines but will update once the Senate Journal containing roll call votes has been published.

After the jump I’ve added more details on the compromise Medicaid abortion coverage language. According to State Senator Jack Hatch, there will be “no change” to the circumstances in which Iowa women can receive Medicaid coverage for abortion costs.

Scroll to the end of this post for closing statements from House and Senate leaders of both political parties. Everyone sounds relieved to see the end of the third-longest session in Iowa legislature history.

About 61 percent of Iowa registered voters, including overwhelming majorities of Democratic and no-party voters, support same-sex marriage rights, according to a new survey conducted by graduate students at Drake University. The same survey indicated that 62.5 percent of Iowa voters oppose a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. Those are the highest levels of support for marriage equality I’ve seen in any Iowa polling. I am skeptical that an opinion poll conducted in a more traditional way would find similar numbers.

More results from the online survey and details about its methodology are after the jump.

The Cedar Rapids City Council has rescinded a project labor agreement approved last December for the $75 million downtown Convention Complex project. Governor Terry Branstad’s administration said it would withhold $15 million in I-JOBS state funding for the convention project, because Cedar Rapids had violated his executive order against project labor agreements (full text of order here). Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett and other city officials maintained that the governor’s executive order did not apply to project labor agreements signed before Branstad took office.

The dispute seemed likely to be settled in court after the governor rejected two compromise offers from Corbett. However, the convention center is a crucial part of Cedar Rapids’ downtown revitalization plans, and construction could not go forward without the $15 million in I-JOBS money. So Corbett negotiated a different solution:

In turn, the city has agreed to rescind the project’s project labor agreement – the governor opposes such agreements on public projects – between the city and the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Building and Construction Trades Council.

Meanwhile, the city is promising the trades council that the city will use a project labor agreement on the $21-million renovation of the city-owned Five Seasons Hotel next to the Convention Complex and the new $10-million parking ramp across First Avenue East from the hotel and Convention Complex. Neither project involves state funds.

“Everybody gets a little, everybody gives a little,” said Corbett, a former speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives. “We have an agreement with all the parties, and that’s how compromise is supposed to work. … Ultimately, the taxpayer wins because they aren’t involved in a costly legal dispute.” […]

The City Council voted last night to formally rescind the existing agreement with the trades council and to develop a new project labor agreement with the council on the hotel and ramp projects.

According to Rick Smith of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, federal litigation is pending over the Branstad administration’s decision to set aside project labor agreements on state-funded projects in Coralville and Marshalltown. The Central Iowa Building and Construction Trades Council and the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Building and Construction Trades Council jointly filed that lawsuit.

UPDATE: I agree with Todd Dorman:

I’m a little disappointed that we’ll probably never get an definitive answer on whether Branstad’s order, as it applies in local projects like this one, oversteps his executive authority. The order as written is remarkably broad and sweeping and seems to extend the governor’s power far beyond the executive branch he controls. It reads a lot like legisaltion, and that, as the term implies, is usually the job of the Legislature.

Essentially, the legislature approved a state grant program in a a bill signed by a governor, in this case the Big Lug [Chet Culver]. Then, Branstad takes office and issues an order that in turn modifies the terms of that legislation, and for that matter, any legislation that hands out state dollars for a local projects, without any legislative input or approval. Enforcing his order amounts to the deappropriation of millions of dollars simply by executive edict.

I’m not sure why any lawmakers, regardless of party, would be OK with that sort of precedent. Republicans who think it’s swell now won’t feel that way when a Democratic governor takes Branstad’s precedent and runs.

The Branstad administration’s disregard for local authority is one of the most under-reported stories of the year. I’m not talking only about this executive order, but also about Branstad’s preferred property tax reform plan and zero growth for K-12 budgets, both of which would leave local officials with fewer options.

President Barack Obama visited the Alcoa Davenport Works on Tuesday to tout his economic policies. One of the largest employers in the Quad Cities area, the Alcoa plant “returned to its pre-recession employment numbers and is hiring more workers this summer,” thanks to a new supply agreement with the European firm Airbus. Obama said the economic crisis that began before he took office “demanded that we make some tough decisions — decisions that we now know have pulled our economy back from the brink and put us on a better path.” In particular, he mentioned federal aid for worker training and a federal program designed to connect engineering universities with manufacturers. The president also praised Alcoa managers for adapting to market conditions, changing an outmoded sheet metal product to a product now in high demand.

It’s fantastic that Alcoa Davenport Works is back to pre-recession employment, and the jobless rate in the Quad Cities is about 6.6 percent, well below the national average. But in most of the United States, unemployment and underemployment are still at historically high levels. The Department of Labor’s jobs report for May was “very disappointing,” prompting the Calculated Risk blog to note, “This is a better pace of payroll job creation than last year, but the economy still has 6.95 million fewer payroll jobs than at the beginning of the 2007 recession. At this pace (157 thousand jobs per month), it will take almost 4 years just to get back to the pre-recession level, or sometime in late 2014 or early 2015!”

I don’t see how photo ops will convince American voters that Obama has helped put the economy on the right track. When bringing down the unemployment rate should be the administration’s top priority, Obama has bought into austerity politics instead. Probably sometime within the next month, he will agree to another major drag on the economy (big federal spending cuts) as a price for getting Congress to raise the debt ceiling. Conservative commentator David Frum argued persuasively here that “Obama is his own worst enemy”:

With unemployment at 10% and interest rates at 1%, the president got persuaded that it was debt and interest that trumped growth and jobs as Public Issue #1.

[…] Back in 2008, Obama made two big promises: a tax cut for everybody earning less than $250,000 and an Afghan surge. […] In the very different circumstances of 2009, both promises rapidly showed themselves to be counter-productive. The “tax cut” promise caused Obama to direct almost one-third of his big stimulus into an individual tax rebate that no economist would have regarded as effective, for reasons explained by Milton Friedman more than 40 years ago. […] He proceeded with both, leading to the two biggest problems of his presidency: a stimulus that added hugely to the national debt while under-delivering on jobs and an expanded Afghanistan war that must end in a reversion to the same disappointing status quo that prevailed before the Afghan surge. Obama probably anticipated both results. And yet he staggered forward anyway. As ready as Obama is to surrender to uncongenial political pressures, he is strangely inattentive to negative real-world results.

Share any thoughts about Obama’s Iowa visit or economic policy in this thread. After the jump I’ve posted statements released by Democratic Representatives Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack. The Quad Cities area has been part of the first Congressional district (Braley’s territory), but under Iowa’s new map Scott County will be in the second district, where Loebsack is running for re-election in 2012.

Advocates for more sustainable food and agriculture policies are alarmed by cutbacks Des Moines Register management announced last week. Closing the newspaper’s Washington bureau and laying off agriculture correspondent Philip Brasher will leave the public less informed about decision-making in the capital, with implications far beyond the Register’s circulation area in Iowa.

U.S. House members lack consensus on the three-month-old military intervention in Libya, and so do Iowa’s five representatives to that body, judging from two votes taken on June 24. Details on the failed attempts to either authorize or defund our mission in Libya are after the jump.