Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

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

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

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

Linda Schreiber writes commentary on selected legislative issues.

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

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

Iowa lawmakers chose a different path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voters in Iowa Senate district 16 will elect a successor to State Senator Claire Celsi on December 30. The stakes are high: this election will determine whether Republicans regain their 34-16 supermajority in the chamber for the 2026 legislative session. With a two-thirds majority, Republicans could confirm Governor Kim Reynolds’ nominees with no Democratic support.

If West Des Moines City Council member Renee Hardman keeps this seat in the blue column, the Republican majority in the chamber will return to 33-17, meaning Democrats could block some of the governor’s worst appointees. Either way, the winner will serve out the remainder of Celsi’s term.

Hardman is favored over Republican Lucas Loftin in this suburban area. But as we’ve seen this year in Iowa, anything can happen in a low-turnout special election. And it’s hard to think of a date primed for lower turnout than the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and his orbiting panelists relentlessly mocked the weight of a rural middle- and high school band teacher and Democratic candidate for the Iowa legislature in a viral three-minute national broadcast last week.

The barbs aimed at Dunlap City Council member Benjamin Schauer were incessant and cruel, and the piece has generated comments in a range of online forums, including The Daily Caller.

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece called “America Needs Farmers, Just Not Their Politics.” It is probably one of my most read pieces, which somewhat broke containment before I even had a space of my own on Substack. I felt like it was a worthwhile endeavor to check back in, since I wrote that piece before the 2024 election.

We’ve had a year to see how the active rural voting parts of our state, alongside the big agricultural entities like the Iowa Farm Bureau and Iowa Soybean Association, would handle the increased turmoil in a Trump administration.

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 

There’s a scene in the 1974 movie Longest Yard, which I’ve always remembered. The prison warden forces Burt Reynolds, an incarcerated former professional football player, to organize a football team to play the guards.

In the huddle, Reynolds tells the offensive line to let a hated guard through. As the guard blitzes, the line parts and Reynolds hurls a pass into the guard’s groin.

The prisoners huddle, and Reynolds calls the same play: “Let’s do it again.” They do. The guard leaves the game in agony clutching his groin. 

Republican State Representative Skyler Wheeler, who chairs the House Education Committee, is signaling he may call the same play during the next Iowa legislative session that was called this year.

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 

Game of Thrones fans remember the ominous warning, “Winter is coming.” It was about White Walkers and the army of the undead invading. Winter is coming in Iowa too. There aren’t White Walkers and the undead lurking behind Iowa snow drifts, but the annual legislative Winter Dance Party under the Golden Dome will begin soon.

It might not provoke White Walker terror, but Iowa educators feel a chill down their spines thinking about the Iowa legislature convening on January 12. What’s the next attack? How will we cope? Will they increase state funding for schools above the inflation rate?

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.

If I were in charge of the state budget and had just watched $825 million unexpectedly disappear, I suppose I’d try to bluff my way out of this mess, too.

Which is what the Reynolds administration looked like it was doing earlier this month, when the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) said the 2025 fiscal year ended with $300 million less than they’d expected a year ago.

For the current fiscal year, 2026, they’re now anticipating a whopping $525 million less than predicted last October.

I touched on this trend in my last post about Iowa’s long-suffering economy, but after I published, the news from the REC got so much worse.

No wonder the ruling party was putting on a brave face and trying to convince Iowans this was all part of the plan. But they’re not very good poker players. Their tells were all over the place.

I can’t remember when I met Claire Celsi. It was years before she decided to run for the state legislature. Our paths crossed often at Democratic events, and we knew many of the same people in progressive circles. I valued her take on the latest news and her thoughts about blogging, since she had kept an online journal during the 2000s.

Claire was generous with her time as a volunteer for many Democratic candidates, starting with Tom Harkin’s first U.S. Senate race in 1984. She was one of the early organizers of the West Des Moines Democrats, back when that suburb leaned strongly to Republicans. She managed Mike Huston’s Congressional campaign in 2000 and worked hard in 2017 to help Renee Hardman defeat an incumbent to win a West Des Moines city council seat. (Hardman is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Claire in Iowa Senate district 16.)

Josh Hughes described how Claire was the first “grown up” to take him seriously as a Democratic activist. She enjoyed spending time with people of all ages. Josh took this picture near the Surf Ballroom in August 2018, when he and Olivia Habinck were leaders of the College and Young Democrats of Iowa, and Claire and I carpooled with them to the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding.

John and Terri Hale own the The Hale Group, an Ankeny-based advocacy firm focused on older Iowans terriandjohnhale@gmail.com. Dean Lerner is an attorney and former Director of the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals dean@kelinsonlaw.com.

With the passing of State Senator Claire Celsi, Iowa has lost the elected official who cared the most and worked the hardest to improve quality of care for residents of Iowa’s nursing facilities.

We collaborated extensively with Claire on aging and nursing home issues. She was as her friends and colleagues described her: tenacious, passionate, a truth-teller and a fighter.

This is an image of a reimagined Iowa state flag with rainbow Pride stripes.

Voters in Iowa House district 7 will elect a successor to Republican State Representative Mike Sexton on Tuesday, December 9. Governor Kim Reynolds announced the special election on September 24, five days after Sexton resigned to become the next leader of Iowa’s Rural Development office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the same position former U.S. Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield held during the Biden administration.

Sexton had served in the Iowa House since 2015; he previously served a term in the Iowa Senate, starting in 1999. Most recently he chaired the House Agriculture Committee; House leaders have not yet named his successor in that role. He endorsed Carly Fiorina before the 2016 Iowa caucuses but was an early supporter of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and attended several Trump rallies in Iowa in 2023.

This race will be the fifth special election for an Iowa legislative district in 2025. But Democrats should not expect another upset win here; House district 7 is among the state’s most solidly Republican districts.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer. This column was first published in the Waverly Newspapers.

We recently received the 2025-26 real estate tax statement for our farmland in my “home county.” The 11 percent increase must have felt like a punch to a lot of our neighbors back home at this time of corn and soybean prices below the cost of production. It hits particularly hard for younger farmers struggling to provide for their families, make farm payments, and maintain their machinery.

As a note to my non-farm friends and neighbors, the assessment of Iowa farmland for real estate taxes is entirely different than it is for our homes. Home assessments are based on recent sale prices of comparable homes. Since 1977 Iowa farmland has been assessed based on soil productivity (estimated value of crops produced minus production costs).

That makes a big difference. Based on the Bremer County Assessor’s valuation, our Waverly home is worth about 1.4 times the estimated fair market value of our “home county” farmland. The non-city portion of 2025-26 taxes on our Waverly home are about 4.4 times the taxes on our farmland. In my opinion this accommodation for agriculture, the base of Iowa’s economy, is reasonable and justified.

The Republican supermajority in the Iowa Senate is no more. Catelin Drey became the seventeenth Democrat in the 50-member chamber on September 15.

About half of her Democratic colleagues came to watch Drey take the oath of office, including State Senator Mike Zimmer, who flipped another Republican-held district in January.

Alongside her husband and daughter, Catelin Drey repeats the oath after Iowa Supreme Court Justice Matthew McDermott (photo courtesy of Iowa Senate Democrats)

Kira Barker is a Democratic organizer in Polk County. She posted this reflection on Facebook on September 12, two days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

It was my first year clerking in the Iowa House (January 2023). I was so naive, I remember working on those House races in Ankeny, thinking if we flipped those seats, we would be able to stop private school vouchers. LOL. I had no idea what the legislature was really like or what I was getting into.

During clerk orientation, staff told us we’d have several weeks to settle in before any bills would be up for a vote. In the second week the Iowa Rs passed the voucher bill. I described it as Dems getting our teeth kicked in; after enough kicks your gums get callused. The team in charge really knew how to set the tone.

Throughout the session there are “Day on the Hill” events where organizations bring members to the capitol to meet legislators, lobby, and set up tables in the first-floor rotunda to highlight priorities. This particular day was “Second Amendment Day on the Hill.”

If you didn’t know, guns are allowed in the capitol. I didn’t know that at the time. I learned it that day.

In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Democrat Catelin Drey defeated Republican Christopher Prosch by 4,208 votes to 3,411 (55.2 percent to 44.7 percent) in Iowa Senate district 1, covering much of Sioux City and some rural areas in Woodbury County. Donald Trump carried this district by 11 points in the 2024 presidential election, winning more votes than Kamala Harris in fifteen of the 22 precincts. Yet Drey carried nineteen of the 22 precincts and improved on Harris’ vote share in every precinct.

It was the second Iowa Senate seat Democrats flipped in 2025, and the fourth straight special election in Iowa where the Democratic nominee overperformed by more than 20 points, compared to the November 2024 presidential results. Drey’s win also means Republicans will no longer have a two-thirds supermajority in the Iowa Senate when the legislature convenes in January.

While not every tactic from a special election campaign translates into a higher-turnout midterm environment, Democrats can learn a lot from what Drey and her team did right as they prepare for 2026 races for down-ballot offices. In addition, these lessons could help many progressives running in Iowa’s nonpartisan city and school board elections this November.

Senator-elect Drey and Iowa Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner joined Iowa Starting Line’s Zachary Oren Smith and me on August 27 to discuss how they overcame the odds. You can watch our whole conversation here.

I also sought insight from Julie Stauch, who has worked on many Democratic campaigns and helped guide a successful 2023 special election campaign for Warren County auditor.

Promising to fight for public schools, workers’ rights, safe drinking water, and quality health care, former Democratic State Senator Nate Boulton announced on August 29 that he will run for the Iowa House in 2026. The previous day, longtime Democratic State Representative Rick Olson confirmed he won’t seek another term in Iowa House district 39.

That seat covers part of the east side of Des Moines and Pleasant Hill in eastern Polk County, making up half the Senate district Boulton represented through 2024. Like many similar working-class areas, it was a Democratic stronghold for decades and has shifted toward Republicans during the Trump era.

Boulton, an employment lawyer for many workers and labor unions, served two terms in the Iowa Senate. He initially represented a safe seat for Democrats. Despite sexual harassment allegations that ended his 2018 campaign for governor, he did not face a Democratic primary challenger or a Republican opponent in 2020.

After redistricting removed some heavily Democratic neighborhoods from his territory and added GOP-leaning precincts in eastern Polk County, Boulton lost his 2024 re-election bid by less than 0.2 percent (44 votes out of more than 31,000 ballots cast). Republicans spent more than $750,000 on that Iowa Senate race, and Democrats spent about $500,000.

But Boulton significantly outperformed the Democratic baseline in his Senate district as a whole, and in the precincts where he will run for the state House next year. Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of the 2024 precinct-level results from House district 39, which can be viewed here, show Donald Trump edged out Kamala Harris in the area (49.6 percent to 48.9 percent). In contrast, Boulton received more of the votes cast for state Senate (51.4 percent to 48.3 percent for Republican Mike Pike). He received a higher vote share than Harris in all twelve precincts and more raw votes than his party’s presidential nominee in eight of them.

Larry McBurney is a Democratic member of the Iowa House representing part of Urbandale.

Governor Kim Reynolds’ “Delivering Opportunities for Greater Efficiency” (DOGE) Task Force plans to recommend moving new public employees away from the Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS) and into a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan. It’s being sold as a modern update, but the truth is this change would devastate Iowa’s public workforce. It’s a solution in search of a problem, and it targets one of the few benefits still keeping people in public service.

Let’s be clear about the reality for public employees in Iowa. Public sector wages are already 17.6 percent lower than in the private sector. Even after factoring in benefits, public employees still earn 14.5 percent less than their private counterparts.

Diane Rosenberg is executive director of Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, where this commentary first appeared.

Recently, a friend asked how the Iowa state legislature or governor have impeded the work of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and other agencies in cleaning up air and water borne toxins that may be causing Iowa’s increasing cancer rate.

After eighteen years of working on confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) issues, a whole laundry list of impediments rolled off the tip of my tongue.

Numerous studies link high nitrate levels to a variety of cancers. And this major agricultural state has the second highest rate of cancer in the nation and is one of two states where the number of cases is rising.

Water quality is in the news this summer. High nitrate levels are affecting drinking water in Central Iowa, a new Polk County water quality report links 80 percent of nitrate pollution to agriculture, and too many beaches are unswimmable just when we need to cool off in this blistering heat.

Given all that, I thought this is a good time to spotlight some of the ways I see our state government failing us.

Voters in Iowa Senate district 1 will elect a successor to Republican State Senator Rocky De Witt on Tuesday, August 26. Governor Kim Reynolds scheduled the special election after De Witt died of cancer last week.

Although Donald Trump comfortably carried Senate district 1 in the 2024 presidential election, this seat should be highly competitive in a low-turnout special election environment.

Following De Witt’s passing, Republicans hold 33 Iowa Senate seats, and Democrats hold 16 seats. The difference between a 34-16 majority and a 33-17 majority may seem inconsequential, but it would matter a great deal when the Senate considers the governor’s nominees during the 2026 legislative session. Flipping the seat would enable Democrats to block some of Reynolds’ most controversial appointments, who need a two-thirds majority vote to be confirmed.

Chuck Isenhart is an investigative reporter, photographer and recovering Iowa state legislator offering research, analysis, education and public affairs advocacy at his Substack newsletter Iowa Public Policy Geek, where this essay first appeared.

Never have I ever had the nightmare, much less a daytime phantasm, that a friend of mine could be the victim of a political assassination in the United States of America.

Never have I ever looked to the sky, as I did on Saturday afternoon, admiring three great blue herons over the Mississippi River, which flows from Minnesota to Iowa, then starkly recognize that the majestic birds are flying in “missing man formation.”

Never have I ever met a public servant quite like Melissa Hortman.

Rekha Basu is a longtime syndicated columnist, editorial writer, reporter, and author of the book, “Finding Your Voice.” She was a staff opinion writer for 30 years at The Des Moines Register, where her work still appears periodically. This post first appeared on her Substack column, Rekha Shouts and Whispers.

As of July 1, a new law signed by Iowa’s first female governor will make it illegal for Des Moines to intentionally recruit, hire, or retain female police officers.

It’s a sad day when Governor Kim Reynolds, a member of an underrepresented group who has benefited from efforts to broaden the mix in power, shuts the door behind her. The very institution of policing will suffer for it and so, besides the women excluded, will those who depend on it to protect us, fairly and equally.

This happens just a year after the Des Moines City Council voted unanimously to pay nearly $2.4 million to four female Des Moines Police Department employees who had suffered discrimination at work. Settled days before it was to go to trial, their lawsuit claimed men in the department were promoted over better qualified women, female employees were subjected to sexual harassment and retaliation for complaining, and harassment was known, tolerated—and in some instances encouraged—by higher ups.

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 

They’re finally gone. It’s over. Mom always said, “Nothing good comes after midnight.” I didn’t get it as a teen. I do now. At 6:31 am on May 15 the legislative party under the Golden Dome died, after lingering on life support for nearly two weeks beyond the scheduled adjournment date.

But it’s not majority party legislators suffering from hangover headaches. The real head throbbing belongs to Iowa public schools.

It can’t be cured with sleep or a home remedy. It impacts 480,665 students in 325 school districts. Here are some of those headaches.

Sean Flaherty lives in Iowa City.

Election integrity in Iowa would take a major step backward if Governor Kim Reynolds signs House File 928, a bill that would eliminate a hand recount option for statewide and federal elections. 

If Reynolds signs HF 928, recounts in Iowa would almost always use the same computer equipment and program used to tabulate election night results. 

In the event of a miscount due to malware or computer error, using the same equipment and software in a recount would render the recount worse than useless. 

Robin Opsahl covers the state legislature and politics for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared. Brooklyn Draisey, Cami Koons, and Clark Kauffman contributed to this report.

Republicans’ supermajorities in both chambers of the Iowa Legislature allowed them to push several high-profile bills to the governor throughout the legislative session – but many of the thousands of bills discussed this session failed to advance.

Lawmakers adjourned for the 2025 legislative session early on May 15 after a night of debate and closed-door caucus meetings and nearly two weeks after the session was scheduled to end. Republicans were able to reach agreements on May 14 to pass several of the policy bills that had failed to advance earlier in the session, including Governor Kim Reynolds’ bills providing paid parental leave for state employees and reducing the state’s unemployment insurance taxes on employers.

Earlier in the year, the Republican-controlled chambers moved quickly to pass a bill removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Other measures passed through with less coordination—legislation on eminent domain use in carbon sequestration pipelines only made it to a vote on May 12, following a concerted effort by twelve GOP senators who said they would not support any budget bills until the pipeline bill was brought to the floor.

The Rev. Lizzie Gillman is an Episcopal priest in Des Moines serving St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and the Beloved Community Initiative of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa. She recently sent versions of this message to Republican members of the Iowa House, after the chamber approved House File 856, banning public entities and institutions from diversity, equity, and inclusion activities.

Dear Iowa House Republicans,

Your brilliant and faithful colleague, Representative Rob Johnson, shared a photo of today’s vote on HF856, and I see that you once again voted against Iowa being a diverse, equitable, and inclusive state. With your “green” vote, you joined those who continue to deny the truth that every Iowan, no matter their race, gender, or background, belongs and deserves dignity.

I am a woman who is able to serve as an ordained Episcopal priest because the Black Church – rooted in resilience, liberation, and justice—affirmed the gifts and calls of women long before many white institutions did. A few faithful white men stood in solidarity, helping to open the doors of pulpits and altars that had long been closed to women. The progress that allowed me to stand at the altar and proclaim God’s Word was born not from exclusion, but from courageous inclusion.

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.

You may be experiencing whiplash this spring just trying to track the Iowa legislature’s zigzag movements. It comes from what some might charitably call a lack of consistency on a key theme.

A set of bills from the Republican majority at the capitol illustrates this inconsistency.

“We have to take our message to the voters,” State Representative Brian Meyer told reporters on May 8, soon after his Democratic colleagues elected him to be the chamber’s next minority leader.

State Representative Jennifer Konfrst has led Iowa House Democrats since June 2021 but is stepping down from that role once the legislature adjourns for the year. She announced on May 8 that she’s running for Congress in Iowa’s third district.

Meyer will lead the smallest Democratic contingent in the Iowa House in 55 years (the chamber now has 67 Republicans and 33 Democrats). As he seeks to build back, he intends to highlight economic issues and target seats in mid-sized cities that were once Democratic strongholds. Toward that end, Meyer plans to take a “little more aggressive” approach during floor debates, and showcase a wider range of House Democrats when communicating with the public.

Raising enough money for the 2026 election cycle will likely be his biggest challenge.

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

At least one member of the Iowa House appears to live by the mantra “Do as I say, not as I do” as he demands access to sensitive personal information and commands silence as he trolls for documents.

The audacity of State Representative Charley Thomson’s recent demands to a nonprofit organization should offend all, regardless of where you land on the political spectrum.

Elesha Gayman is a Mom, educator, advocate, Iowan, and American who served in the Iowa House from 2007 through 2010. She has been speaking truth to power since age 14 and writing to change hearts and minds since 2025.

Can you recall a moment in your life when you changed your position on an issue or shifted an opinion you held?

I am not talking about changing your mind on whether to go out to dinner or stay in, but rather a fundamental shift in your beliefs. How did that happen? Was it a massive heart attack or near-death experience that you needed to survive to finally stop smoking or start exercising?

When I challenge myself with these questions, one thing is clear: I am more stubborn than I would like to admit. I don’t make decisions in haste and am very good at sitting on the fence until I get adequate information to formulate a position or opinion. In the Iowa legislature, we often referred to this as “keeping our powder dry.”

Democrat Angel Ramirez will soon be the first Latina to serve in the Iowa legislature, after winning the April 29 special election in House district 78 by a commanding margin.

Ramirez outperformed the partisan lean of the district, defeating Republican Bernie Hayes by 2,742 votes to 721 (79.0 percent to 20.8 percent), according to unofficial results from all precincts. Voters in House district 78 preferred Kamala Harris to Donald Trump by 65.2 percent to 32.7 percent in the 2024 presidential election.

It’s the third special Iowa legislative election of 2025, and Democrats greatly improved on the Harris benchmark in all three races. According to a spreadsheet compiled by “elections nerd” Ethan C7, Democrats have outperformed in most of this year’s special elections around the country, with Ramirez, Iowa Senate district 35 candidate Mike Zimmer, and Iowa House district 100 candidate Nannette Griffin putting up the largest swings compared to the 2024 presidential results in their areas.

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 

Many of us have experienced planning committees where loud, “big idea” people dominate. They’re the ones who believe all their ideas are gold and they’re not shy about sharing their genius. They have 50 ideas an hour, and 49 of those should be trashed.

I understand the rules for brainstorming. “There are no bad ideas.” But many of those ideas should die a natural death. They should rest peacefully buried in a closet with other bad ideas written on those big sheets of brainstorming paper.

But sometimes that doesn’t work.

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.

As an Iowan, a Jew, and a rabbi who has served the Quad Cities Jewish community for nearly 40 years, I was beside myself when I read Dr. Thomas Lecaque’s guest column in Iowa Starting Line about the school chaplain bill moving through the Iowa legislature. Having made its way through the House and the Senate Education Committee, it is now eligible for floor debate in the Senate.

House File 884 is an offense of the highest degree to every non-Christian faith community in our state. It empowers school districts to hire chaplains “to provide support, services, and programs as assigned by the board of directors of the school district.”

If that sounds innocuous, think again, for the Senate Education Committee has already rejected an amendment that would restrict school chaplains from proselytizing students. So much for religious neutrality in our schools!

Dr. Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at the Grand View University.

I teach at a Lutheran school in Iowa. We have a chapel on campus. Every faculty meeting and event, every major school event, starts with our campus pastor offering a prayer. There are boats hanging in the church and also in the room in the administrative building that was the first chapel on campus, because we’re a Danish Lutheran school, and both of those traditions run deep.

I say this not because you need to know about me, or about my university, but because chaplains on campus, chaplains in schools, religion and the university, is not a thing I have a problem with. We’re a private Lutheran school, and people who come here know that when they apply and enroll, and they’ve made a choice to be here, in this environment, with everything that entails.

The key word there, of course, is private. If your kids go to a Catholic school, for example, you cannot pretend to be surprised and alarmed when Catholicism is in the classroom too. But if you send your kids to public school, like most Iowans, you have a reasonable expectation that the establishment clause, the separation of church and state, will keep specific religious ideas and doctrine out of the school. In this context, Iowa House File 884, the school chaplains bill, immediately rings alarm bells.

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 

During my 27 years representing teachers, I encountered a variety of teacher assistance plans. The intended purpose was to provide more detail than just having an evaluator sit in a classroom for 30 minutes and then check the “Needs Improvement” box on the evaluation form.

But those plans varied wildly in quality and intent. Some evaluators recognized legitimate teaching deficiencies and tried to provide constructive assistance. The most beneficial plans were drafted with participation from the teacher being evaluated. That provided mutual ownership; the advice was shaped with the teacher instead of imposed on the teacher.

Those were rare.

The field is set for the April 29 special election in Iowa House district 78. Democrats nominated Angel Ramirez at an April 12 nominating convention. Linn County Republicans chair Bernie Hayes won the GOP nomination at an April 14 convention.

Ramirez won on the first ballot in a four-way Democratic field. She is the co-founder and executive director of Our Future, a nonprofit fellowship for young leaders, and a Youth Peace Project Facilitator with the Kids First Law Center.

If elected, she would be the first Latina to serve in the Iowa legislature. She’s also “a proud first-generation college graduate from Coe College,” according to her campaign website. She told Iowa News Now after the convention, “it’s not the time for the status quo” and Democrats need to stand for “a progressive vision,” to help the working class, health care system, public education, LGBTQ neighbors.

Sometimes debate on a low-profile bill reveals a lot about how the Iowa legislature operates.

So it was on April 9, when the Iowa Senate took up House File 363, “an Act relating to the final disposition of remains.”

The bill was one of ten non-controversial measures (often called “non-cons”) that senators approved that day. But don’t be fooled by the 47-0 vote for final passage. The debate on this bill showed the Republican majority’s intensely partisan approach to legislating.