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. 

Andy McKean is a charming country lawyer from Anamosa. He grew up in New York and was drawn to Iowa by his family roots.

He has owned a bed-and-breakfast, called square dances and played in a dance band named the Scotch Grove Pioneers. His tenure in the Iowa Legislature stretched for nearly 30 years, with an additional eight years shoehorned in as a Jones County supervisor.

A few weeks ago, McKean spoke to a group of grassroots community organizers from eastern Iowa who gathered in Monticello to brainstorm. He provided pointers gleaned from his years in public service, politics, campaigning, promising and compromising.

One choice nugget was his go-to strategy in those roles—listening more than talking.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

I had to send Senator Chuck Grassley a quick email to thank him for starting my day with a chuckle. In the latest edition of his email newsletter “The Scoop,” he commended the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that federal district courts do not have the authority to issue universal injunctions blocking the Administration’s Executive Order. Grassley declared the decision “a victory for checks and balances.”

Checks and balances? Since Grassley and his Senate Republican colleagues voluntarily abdicated their Constitutional authority, responsibilities, and prerogatives, we no longer have a functioning constitutional representative democracy. We essentially have a king.

Of course, the biggest show in Washington, D.C. has been the around-the-clock push to pass a budget reconciliation bill. Republicans want to get the One Big, Beautiful Bill (also known as a Big Ugly Mess) to President Donald Trump’s desk for a reality TV style triumphant bill signing on the Fourth of July. The days-long Senate debate ended on July 1 with a dramatic tie-breaking vote by Vice President J.D. Vance. Grassley and Iowa’s junior Senator Joni Ernst voted for the bill, along with all but three of their GOP colleagues.

Congressional Republican leadership have characterized the bill as Trump’s domestic policy agenda. That’s misleading at best. At its core, this legislation is the Senate Republican leadership’s tax cut agenda with enough of Trump’s ideas and MAGA bumper stickers attached to keep his support base on board.

All four Iowans in the U.S. House voted on May 22 to pass a federal budget reconciliation package combining massive tax cuts with deep spending cuts on health care and food assistance.

The early morning vote on the “One Big Beautiful Act” (adopting President Donald Trump’s preferred phrase) followed an all-night debate. House leaders rushed the vote before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) could analyze a manager’s amendment released on the evening of May 21, which made many substantive changes to tax provisions and deepened the planned Medicaid cuts.

House members approved the measure by 215 votes to 214, with two Republicans joining all Democrats to vote no, and one Republican voting “present.” The one-vote margin means U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) each can claim to have cast the deciding vote to cut taxes. They did it without waiting for a nonpartisan analysis of the costs and impacts for their constituents.

This vote will likely become a central theme for Democratic candidates in Iowa’s 2026 Congressional campaigns—and the governor’s race, if Feenstra becomes the GOP nominee. Within hours, Congressional challengers Travis Terrell (IA-01), Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-03), and Jennifer Konfrst (IA-03) blasted the vote in social media posts and fundraising emails. A video of Miller-Meeks running away from Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson as he presses her about Medicaid cuts has gone viral on several social media platforms and will surely be seen in television commercials.

Tens of thousands of Iowans will lose their health insurance, food assistance, or both if the “big, beautiful bill” becomes law. Meanwhile, the package would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and add at least $2.3 trillion to the deficit (or perhaps $3.2 trillion) over the next ten years.

Sue Dinsdale is the executive director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network, a grassroots public interest organization committed to creating social change in Iowa and across the nation. She is also the state lead for Health Care for America NOW.

Republicans in Congress have passed a federal budget resolution that instructs Congressional committees to slash trillions in services for everyday people in order to finance the extension of tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthiest households. Some of the Trump tax cuts enacted in late 2017 expire this year. The top priority for Republicans in Congress is to extend those tax breaks, so the wealthiest 1 percent of households can continue to save on average $60,280 in 2026 alone.

But tax breaks for the wealthy cost the rest of us. When wealthy people and corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes, revenue is drained out of the budget which means lawmakers will have to cut services.

In this case, Medicaid is on the chopping block. That health insurance program serves more than 80 million people, about one in five Americans. The House-passed proposal includes $880 million in cuts for health care that could very well take coverage from the 678,107 enrolled in Iowa Medicaid.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign has a staffer on the ground again in Iowa. No, the senator from Vermont isn’t getting a head start on the 2028 caucuses.

In an April 3 telephone interview, Evan Burger described his focus and early work as Iowa organizer for Friends of Bernie Sanders.

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

It takes courage to stand for the right course of action. It takes more courage to do something about it.

John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage details the actions of eight U.S. Senators throughout history who did the right thing in specific instances, knowing nevertheless the bitter criticism and retaliation they would undergo. Among the eight was U.S. Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, who was among seven Republican senators who voted against convicting President Andrew Johnson in 1868 on his questionable impeachment charge approved by the Republican-controlled U.S. House.

Johnson avoided ejection from the presidency by just one vote. Had any one of the seven brave senators voted the other way, he would have been gone.

Sometimes such courage takes place hidden from the public. Other times, as in the episodes Kennedy describes, it’s very public, even sensational.

If ever a time cried out for such courage, it’s now.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer. The Waverly Democrat published a version of this commentary on February 6.

Old habits die hard. While many of my neighbors are checking sports scores, I’m checking the U.S. Treasury yield curve. (OK – I do follow the Cyclones closely.) Even though I’m no longer actively managing investments, I’m still interested in the economy. Over time I’ve learned that the bond market is a more focused and rational indicator of current and developing economic conditions than the stock markets.

The Treasury yield curve is simply a graph of the current interest yield on U.S. Treasury debt over a range of maturities from overnight Fed funds to 30-year bonds. The Federal Reserve sets the Fed funds rate. Longer term rates are determined by market supply and demand. Bond market watchers generally focus on the 2-year to 10-year sector of the curve.

“You suck, Joni! That’s just the nicest way I can summarize how we’re all feeling about your reign so far,” says Joshua Smith in the first digital ad promoting his Republican campaign for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat.

The video previews what will be an aggressive campaign by Senator Joni Ernst’s 2026 primary challenger from the right.

They were so close.

After weeks of negotiations, U.S. House and Senate leaders had agreed on a year-end spending bill that would fund the federal government through March 14, extend the 2018 Farm Bill through next September, and provide more than $100 billion in disaster aid. The legislation included numerous other policies, including at least two that had been priorities for Iowa’s members of Congress. The bill would have legalized year-round sales of higher ethanol blends known as E-15 in all states. It also contained new regulations for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which could have saved consumers billions while helping small pharmacies.

All of the Iowans in Congress have talked up E-15 as a path to U.S. energy independence. (In reality, only about 3,400 of some 198,000 gas stations across the country dispense higher ethanol blends.) Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01) and Senator Chuck Grassley have been among the most vocal proponents of PBM reform, calling for action on prescription drug middlemen in draft bills, press releases, news conferences, House and Senate hearings, floor speeches, and taxpayer-funded radio ads.

Little did they know that President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk were about to blow up the deal.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

It’s a startling statistic, but it’s not true.

Joni Ernst has gotten a lot of attention recently for her claim that only 6 percent of federal employees work in person on a full-time basis.

The New York Post ran with it. So did Elon Musk. The Des Moines Register quoted it, too.

It’s not true.

Before I dig into the details, a little background:

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst will be a leading Congressional partner of President-elect Donald Trump’s effort to drastically cut federal spending. On November 22 her office “announced the founding of the Senate DOGE Caucus, which will work hand in hand with the Trump administration’s recently formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to identify and eliminate government waste.”

That “department” is actually a non-governmental advisory body, co-led by Trump’s billionaire buddy Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Staying outside the government allows DOGE to operate without Congressional authorization, and avoid federal rules on transparency and conflicts of interest.

In recent days, Ernst shared her spending cut proposals with Ramaswamy and traveled to Florida to meet with Trump, Musk, and others in the incoming administration.

Going all in on DOGE is a risky strategy.

We often hear that Iowans like to re-elect their incumbents. But when it comes to members of the U.S. House, Iowa’s office-holders have less job security than many of their peers.

Across the country, voters have re-elected more than 90 percent of U.S. House incumbents in most elections over the past five decades. Here in Iowa, where our four districts are not gerrymandered, challengers defeated two sitting members of Congress in 2018, two in 2020 (one in the primary, one in the general election), and one in 2022.

Incumbents still enjoy inherent advantages in a Congressional campaign: higher name recognition, larger contributions from political action committees, more opportunities to generate news coverage, and an official budget that can fund outreach to constituents. But not all House members use the available tools the same way.

This post, the first in a series, will explore how Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks has used her office to boost her re-election chances in Iowa’s first Congressional district.

Notably, Miller-Meeks has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on messages to constituents, with much of the spending going through her top campaign vendor. She has also built up goodwill by being one of the chamber’s most frequent floor speakers, and has used the earmark process to help fund projects in her district.

Members of Congress averted a federal government shutdown this week, approving a continuing resolution to keep funds flowing after the current fiscal year ends. Large bipartisan majorities in both chambers (341 to 82 in the House, and 78 to 18 in the Senate) voted on September 25 to fund the federal government at current levels through December 20. The bill also contains an extra $231 million in funds for the U.S. Secret Service to step up protection of presidential candidates.

All but one member of Iowa’s Congressional delegation supported the spending measure. Representative Randy Feenstra (IA-04) has not publicly explained why he was among the 82 House Republicans who voted against the last opportunity to prevent a shutdown.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com. He and Laura Belin are also among the contributors to the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative podcast, Iowa Down Ballot. On the latest episode, they discussed the first and third Congressional district campaigns, a state audit on nursing home inspections, and more.

For much of this week, I’ve been waiting for U.S. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa to complain about former President Donald Trump’s latest campaign promise, which would pile hundreds of billions of dollars onto the already bulging national debt.

I searched news reports and her X/Twitter account. But so far: Zip.

You’d think she’d say something, right? I mean, Ernst is famous for caring about budget discipline. Isn’t she?

Jody Puffett will appear on the general election ballot in Iowa’s second Congressional district, alongside two-term Republican U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson and Democratic challenger Sarah Corkery. While Hinson is not generally viewed as a vulnerable incumbent, Puffett’s candidacy could make the IA-02 race more interesting.

Since launching her campaign in early June, Puffett said in an August 28 statement, her “small but mighty grassroots team” surpassed the number of signatures needed to qualify as a U.S. House candidate (at least 1,726, including at least 47 signatures from at least eleven of the district’s 22 counties).

Puffett is the only independent candidate running for Congress in Iowa this year, and could end up being the only alternative to Democrats and Republicans in any of the four U.S. House races. Libertarians filed in the first, third, and fourth districts, but Republicans on the State Objection Panel knocked them off the ballot on August 28. It’s unclear whether the Libertarians will successfully appeal that decision in court.

JODY PUFFETT’S KEY ISSUES AND EXPERIENCE

Puffett has spent the summer “attending county fairs, community events, and going door-to-door to businesses across the district engaging with constituents.” She is trying to reach voters who are disenchanted with both Republicans and Democrats, and is highlighting the following priorities, according to her campaign:

The appropriations bill President Joe Biden signed into law on March 9 includes $74.36 million in federal funding for designated projects in Iowa, Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of a 605-page earmarks list reveals. Another $8 million earmark for Dubuque Flood Mitigation Gates and Pumps was part of the Homeland Security bill Biden signed on March 23, completing work on funding the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30.

All four Republicans who represent Iowa in the U.S. House—Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—were among the 339 members who approved the “minibus” spending package on March 6. Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn voted for the second minibus on March 22; Feenstra voted against that package with no public explanation.

Hinson is the only Iowan now serving on the House Appropriations Committee. Her projects will receive a combined $27.54 million; she had requested $37.06 million. Projects submitted by Miller-Meeks will receive about $28.38 million in earmarked funding; she had requested $40.15 million. Earmarks for projects Nunn submitted will total $26.22 million; he had asked for $41.25 million.

The 36 counties in IA-04 will receive none of the earmarked funding, because for the third straight year, Feenstra declined to submit any earmark requests.

U.S. Representative Zach Nunn met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, members of the Ukrainian parliament, and intelligence officials in Kyiv on February 9 as a member of a bipartisan U.S. House delegation.

At this writing, Nunn has not posted about the trip on his social media feeds or announced it in a news release, but he appears in pictures others shared from the visit, and is second from the left in the photo above.

Four of the five members of Congress on this delegation serve on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. A committee news release mentioned that Nunn “sits on the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions and currently serves as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.”

Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the Intelligence committee, said at a news conference in Kyiv, “We came today so that we could voice to President Zelenskyy and others that we were seeing that the United States stands in full support of Ukraine.”

Before Iowa politics kicks into high gear with a new legislative session and the caucuses, I want to highlight the investigative reporting, in-depth analysis, and accountability journalism published first or exclusively on this site last year.

Some newspapers, websites, and newsletters put their best original work behind a paywall for subscribers, or limit access to a set number of free articles a month. I’m committed to keeping all Bleeding Heartland content available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. That includes nearly 500 articles and commentaries from 2023 alone, and thousands more posts in archives going back to 2007.

To receive links to everything recently published here via email, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter. I also have a free Substack, which is part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Subscribers receive occasional cross-posts from Bleeding Heartland, as well as audio files and recaps for every episode of KHOI Radio’s “Capitol Week,” a 30-minute show about Iowa politics co-hosted by Dennis Hart and me.

I’m grateful to all readers, but especially to tipsters. Please reach out with story ideas that may be worth pursuing in 2024.

Photo of basketball court in Hillsboro, Oregon is by M.O. Stevens, available via Wikimedia Commons

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 

No Apple phones, No Madden 24 NFL, and there was not a Tik or a Tok to be found. It was just a fenced concrete slab and two slightly bent backboards with chain nets. There wasn’t free throw line or half court markings. It was strictly BYOB, bring your own basketball. 

The ball sometimes flew over the fence and landed in Bear Crick. We took turns wading in or finding a big enough stick to retrieve the errant ball. Sometimes the lights blazed long after we’d been called to supper, but since we lived a block away, I’d be sent down to switch them off.

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

For many years, an Iowa State University political science professor and I met several times a year for coffee and conversation.

During our coffee klatches, I probed my friend’s thinking on world affairs, on government issues, and on politics in Iowa and across the United States. I suspect he tried to use these get-togethers to give me a something of a graduate-level seminar in American government, absent any lectures. 

Educators these days are frequently accused of trying to indoctrinate their students with a particular point of view. But what I came to realize during those sessions at the Stomping Grounds coffee shop in Ames was fundamental to excellence in teaching: The professor did not tell me what to think. He tried to get me to think more clearly and to analyze with more sophistication and depth. He helped me spot weaknesses in my own opinions and develop a better understanding of factors that may lead other people to see things differently than I did.

After retiring, my friend sold his acreage and left Iowa for a more scenic place to live. Our caffeine intake has declined, but we still stay in touch via email. Last week, the professor’s Stomping Grounds “student” field-tested the professor’s method of posing challenging questions to get people to re-examine their own opinions and see why some people have a different view than other people. 

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

Congress kicked the can down the road again. But that was better than the alternative.

Last Saturday, September 30, the absolute deadline before failure to act would have “shut the government down,” the U.S. House and then the Senate finally approved a continuing resolution (CR) to keep federal spending going for another 47 days at current rates. September 30 is the last day of the federal fiscal year.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to do lots and lots of backroom dealing to keep the government open—and on October 3, those deals cost him the speaker’s gavel. For many days, he had tried to persuade enough members of his own party to bring home a CR without Democratic help.

Every member of Congress from Iowa voted on September 30 for a last-ditch effort to keep the federal government open until November 17. The continuing resolution will maintain fiscal year 2023 spending levels for the first 47 days of the 2024 federal fiscal year, plus $16 billion in disaster relief funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is the amount the Biden administration requested. In addition, the bill includes “an extension of a federal flood insurance program and reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration.”

U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) were among the 126 House Republicans who joined 209 Democrats to approve the measure. (Ninety Republicans and one Democrat voted no.) House leaders brought the funding measure to the floor under a suspension of the rules, which meant it needed a two-thirds majority rather than the usual 50 percent plus one to pass.

Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst were part of the 88-9 majority in the upper chamber that voted to send the bill to President Joe Biden just in time to avert a shutdown as the new fiscal year begins on October 1.

House members considered several other federal budget bills this week and dozens of related amendments—far too many to summarize in one article. As I watched how the Iowa delegation approached the most important votes, a few things stood out to me.

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. 

Whenever Dad saw someone struggling to get something done, he’d say, “That guy’s working with a short-handled shovel.”

U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s shovel handle is short, and he let a tiny group of his own party saw it off so he could become speaker.

Now, the U.S. is facing a shutdown because McCarthy doesn’t have enough votes in his own party to keep the federal government open beyond September 30, and his party will toss him out if he reaches across the aisle to compromise for Democratic votes.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. Joaquin Sapien reported for ProPublica on September 7 about the Navy’s spending on littoral combat ships, which “broke down across the globe” and are being decommissioned.

Iowa is about as far removed from an ocean as you can get. But this state figures in recent news reports about the U.S. Navy—and not in a puff-up-our-chest-with-pride way.

One of the reports was a New York Times examination of the Navy’s largest ship-building budget in history, $32 billion this year alone, and the tug-of-war that pot of money has created inside the seagoing service. 

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

These are unhappy days for U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra (IA-04) and his fellow Republican Congresspeople from Iowa (there are no other kind).

Feenstra & co. have essentially one job: to get a Farm Bill passed every five years. The Farm Bill isn’t a radically new thing; Congress has passed them since 1933. The current Farm Bill expires on September 30. On that very day, by a cruel confluence, so do current federal appropriations, which sets up another one of those wearing government shutdown crises.

Anne Schechinger is Senior Analyst of Economics for the Environmental Working Group. This report first appeared on the EWG’s website. 

Overview

• Crop insurance companies and agents received almost $33.3 billion from taxpayers and farmers over the last 10 years. 
• Ten of these companies are owned by publicly traded corporations with enormous net worths and massive executive salaries.
• Lowering program delivery payments to companies and agents and other subsidies could save over $1 billion a year, while maintaining a safety net for farmers.

The federal Crop Insurance Program is known for paying billions of dollars every year to farmers when they experience reductions in crop yield or revenue. But the Department of Agriculture program also sends billions of dollars annually – much of it taxpayer-funded – to a small number of crop insurance companies that service the policies. Many of these companies are owned by extremely wealthy, publicly traded global corporations. The program also gives billions of dollars annually to crop insurance agents – a cost that has soared in recent years.

The United States avoided a doomsday scenario for the economy this week, when both chambers of Congress approved a deal to prevent a default on the country’s debts in exchange for future spending cuts. Iowa’s entire Congressional delegation supported the legislation, marking the first time in decades that every member of the U.S. House and Senate from this state had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling.

The vote was also noteworthy for Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, who were part of the 63-36 majority that sent the bill to President Joe Biden. Bleeding Heartland’s review of 45 years of Congressional records showed Grassley had backed a debt ceiling bill under a Democratic president only once, and Ernst had never done so.

Iowa’s four U.S. House members avoided public comment for days after President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a deal to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025, in exchange for some federal budget cuts and other policy changes.

But they all fell in line on May 31. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) voted with GOP leadership and the majority of their caucus for the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.

Three of Iowa’s four U.S. House Republicans submitted the maximum number of fifteen earmark requests for federal funding in fiscal year 2024, which begins on October 1.

U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), and Zach Nunn (IA-03) were among the numerous House Republicans who asked for “Community Project Funding,” which Congress directs in several dozen areas of the federal budget. Iowa Capital Dispatch reported on May 14, “The sum of Nunn’s requests is the highest, at $41.25 million. Miller-Meeks is second with $40.15 million, while Hinson requested $37.06 million.”

For the third straight year, Representative Randy Feenstra (IA-04) declined to submit any earmark requests. As Bleeding Heartland previously discussed, Feenstra’s staff has said the Republicans “believes it is time for Congress to restore fiscal stability and balance our budget.” But earmarked projects come out of funds the federal government will spend regardless. So when a member makes no requests, that person’s district loses its chance to receive a share of money that has already been allocated for earmarks.

Thanks to transparency rules established in 2021, the funding requests submitted by Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn are available online. Once the 2024 budget has been finalized, Bleeding Heartland will report on which projects received funding for the coming fiscal year.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch article by Ashley Murray and Ariana Figueroa highlighted an apparent contradiction: many House Republicans who have demanded steep cuts across the federal budget have asked for millions of dollars to support projects in their own districts. That has long been the case with earmarks: one person’s valuable community investment can be portrayed as wasteful pork in someone else’s district.

All four Iowans in the U.S. House voted on April 26 for a plan to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion for the coming year, in exchange for “aggressive caps on federal spending” over the next decade.

The House approved the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 by 217 votes to 215, meaning House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had no votes to spare.

The speaker secured passage of his bill by making concessions on biofuels subsidies on the eve of the vote. McCarthy had previously indicated he was not open to altering the bill, but a group of Republicans from the Midwest—including Iowa’s Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—insisted on changes.

Kay Pence is vice president of the Iowa Alliance for Retired Americans.

Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is like running up your credit card and punishing yourself by refusing to pay the bill.  It ruins your credit score and costs more in the long run. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending, it authorizes borrowing to pay bills already incurred. Paying bills are obligations not negotiations.

MAGA Republicans want to use the debt ceiling fight to force cuts in future unnamed programs. What they want to cut isn’t exactly secret; we have seen and rejected, most of their proposals before.

Political reactions to a president’s State of the Union address are as ritualized as the speech itself. Elected officials typically have nothing but praise when the president belongs to their own party, while finding much to criticize about a leader from the other party.

If President Joe Biden’s remarks to this year’s joint session of Congress are remembered for anything, it will probably be the segment where he turned Republican heckling to his advantage, promising to defend Medicare and Social Security from cuts.

In their public statements about the speech, Iowa’s all-Republican delegation criticized what Biden didn’t say about some of their priorities. It’s clear those standards apply only to Democratic presidents.

Iowa’s four U.S. House members received good news on January 11, when the House Republican Steering Committee agreed on assignments to the chamber’s most influential committees.

UPDATE: All four Iowans received coveted committee assignments on January 11, which are discussed here. Original post follows.

The U.S. House spent most of last week mired in the longest-running attempt to elect a speaker since before the Civil War. Iowa’s four Republicans stood behind their caucus leader Kevin McCarthy from the first ballot on January 3 to the fifteenth ballot after midnight on January 7.

Iowa’s House delegation lacks any long-serving members; three are beginning their second terms, and Representative Zach Nunn was elected for the first time in 2022.

As House members receive committee assignments later this month, where the Iowans land could signal how much influence they have with GOP leadership.

Traditionally, members of Congress who publicly oppose their party’s leader are punished. But McCarthy’s team made so many concessions in search of votes for speaker that several Republican holdouts could be rewarded with prime committee assignments—arguably at the expense of those who were loyal to McCarthy throughout.

The omnibus budget bill Congress just approved will fund dozens of infrastructure projects or services in Iowa during the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2023.

But none of those earmarks (totaling tens of millions of dollars) will benefit communities or facilities in the fourth Congressional district. That’s because for the second year in a row, U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra declined to ask for specific projects to be included in the federal budget.

U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson is at it again.

In January 2022, the Republican made news in Iowa and nationally when she took credit for “game-changing” projects in her district, despite having voted against the infrastructure bill that made them possible.

Hinson is closing out the year by bashing the “wasteful spending” in an omnibus budget bill, while boasting about her success in “securing investments for Iowa” through the same legislation.

The U.S. Senate completed its work for the year on December 22, when senators approved an omnibus bill to fund the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30, 2023.

The bill allocates $1.7 trillion in federal government spending ($858 billion for the military, and $772 billion in non-defense spending). The Washington Post broke down the funding by appropriations area.

The legislation also provides $44.9 billion more in aid to Ukraine, and $40.6 billion for disaster aid. It changes some Medicaid rules, which will preserve coverage for many new mothers and children. It also includes some policies not related to federal spending, such as reforms to the Electoral Count Act, workplace protections for pregnant or breastfeeding employees, and a ban on installing TikTok on government-owned devices.

Eighteen Republicans joined the whole Democratic caucus to pass the omnibus bill. Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst were among the 29 Republicans who opposed the bill on final passage (roll call). But they supported some amendments added to the bill on December 22, as well as several GOP proposals that failed to pass.

This column by Rick Morain first appeared in the Jefferson Herald.

U.S. Senate Democrats passed their omnibus Inflation Reduction Act on August 7 by 51 votes to 50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. They did so under so-called “reconciliation” rules, which require only a simple majority to pass bills related to appropriations, rather than the usual filibuster-blocking 60-vote margin.

The bill then went to the House, where Democrats approved it on a party-line 220 to 207 vote on August 12. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill this week.

The measure contains a number of provisions dear to the hearts of Democrats and many moderates: empowering Medicare to negotiate prices for several key drugs, capping Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 a year, climate control incentives, extension of federal health care subsidies, a 15 percent minimum tax for most corporations whose profits exceed $1 billion a year, and other long-sought goodies.

By raising more money than the act will spend over a 10-year period, it will also enable the government to pay down some of the national debt by several hundred billion dollars. That hasn’t happened for the past 25 years.

A section of the act that particularly irritates Congressional Republicans – and many of their well-heeled donors – increases the funding of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by $80 billion over the next 10 years. A little more than half of that increase will go to hire thousands of new agents to audit tax returns.

President Joe Biden has signed into law a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, which funds the federal government through September 30. The president’s action on March 15 ends a cycle of short-term continuing spending resolutions that kept the government operating on spending levels approved during Donald Trump’s administration.

The enormous package combines twelve appropriations bills covering portions of the federal government, as well as an additional $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine and several unrelated pieces of legislation. One of those reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act through 2027, a task that had remained unfinished for years. Congress last reauthorized the 1994 legislation addressing violence against women in 2013, and that authorization expired in 2019.

Iowa’s Senator Joni Ernst was a key negotiator of the final deal on the Violence Against Women Act and celebrated its passage this week.

The federal government will stay open until at least February 18, after the U.S. House and Senate passed a continuing funding resolution on December 2. Only one House Republican crossed party lines to support the resolution, which mostly maintains spending levels agreed during the Trump administration. Iowa’s Representatives Ashley Hinson (IA-01), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-02), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) opposed the bill.

In the upper chamber, nineteen GOP senators joined Democrats to send the legislation to President Joe Biden. Notably, Iowa Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst voted against the bill, even though they had supported resolutions setting federal spending at these levels while Donald Trump was president.