A surprising special election, lots of legislative news, Ernst speaks for Gabbard
Feb. 3 edition of "KHOI's Capitol Week"
The meeting rooms are busy at the state capitol these days; I attended or watched online roughly three dozen House or Senate subcommittees last week.
and I have made an editorial decision to provide comprehensive coverage of the Iowa legislature’s 2025 legislative session, rather than drilling down on a few bills during each show.Although we didn’t get to everything on my list during our February 3 program, we covered a lot of ground. The audio file is embedded above, or you can find “KHOI’s Capitol Week” on any podcast platform or smart speaker. The full archive (going back to February 2021) is available on KHOI’s website.
Mike Zimmer’s big special election win
We began with last Tuesday’s special election in Iowa Senate district 35. Against all odds, Democrat Mike Zimmer will fill the vacancy created when Governor Kim Reynolds selected former State Senator Chris Cournoyer as the state’s new lieutenant governor.
I covered the campaign and election result in depth last week. Spencer and I hit the main points: why Republicans were expected to hold this seat easily, why Zimmer was a great fit for the district, the strong Democratic GOTV effort, the divided Republican field, and missteps by the GOP nominee Katie Whittington, and the low-turnout special election environment.
This seat will be a tough hold for Democrats in 2026, but I wouldn’t count Zimmer out, especially since he will have an incumbency advantage.
Rest In Peace, Martin Graber
Iowa House members were in shock last Friday as news spread that State Representative Martin Graber had died of a heart attack. He had just been at the statehouse the previous day, voting on the first bills brought to the House floor.
I shared more background on Representative Graber and comments from colleagues at Bleeding Heartland. He kept a low profile and was the opposite of a grandstanding legislator. While Graber mostly voted with his party, he did vote against last year’s overhaul of Area Education Agencies.
The governor will soon set a special election in House district 100, covering most of Lee County. We’ll talk about that on next week’s show.
Casino moratorium passes in scrambled House vote
The House approved the first controversial bill of the 2025 session last Thursday. House File 144 would set a five-year moratorium on all new casino licenses and would establish new criteria for the state Racing and Gaming Commission to use when considering applications after 2030. In effect, the bill would make it impossible for any Linn County casino to get off the ground.
The 68-31 vote for the bill did not fall along party lines in the chamber, where Republicans enjoy a 67-33 majority. Fifteen Democrats voted to block a Cedar Rapids casino, while fourteen Republicans (not all from northeast Iowa) voted against the bill. You can find the roll call here.
The House put this bill on a fast track to get ahead of a February 6 meeting where the Racing and Gaming Commission is scheduled to vote on the latest Linn County casino application. But Senate leaders didn’t rush the bill to the floor. Senate President Amy Sinclair pointed out during last week’s episode of “Iowa Press” that the bill contains a line making the moratorium retroactive to January 1, 2025. She also described the proposal as “a jump ball” in the Senate. That suggested to me that the chamber may wait to see how the commission votes this week.
On Tuesday afternoon, Senate State Government Committee chair Ken Rozenboom announced that he would not advance the casino moratorium bill this year, saying “this bill did not have enough support from Senate Republicans to advance all the way through the Senate process.”
A bit about legislative process
Since I’ve had some reader questions, I wanted to take a minute to describe how the legislative process normally works, and what’s different when a bill is fast-tracked (like the 2017 collective bargaining overhaul, the school voucher bill from 2023, and the abortion ban in a one-day special session in 2023).
I also explained how ordinary people can weigh in on legislation. The subcommittee is usually the only time Iowans can speak publicly for or against a bill. If you want to testify at a subcommittee, you need to keep a close eye on the House and Senate committee schedules. Those change daily, and sometimes you may have less than 24 hours notice about a meeting. The Senate allows people to speak remotely via Zoom, but in the House, you have to be physically present to speak at a subcommittee. (I asked House Speaker Pat Grassley last week whether he might consider changing that policy. The short version of his answer: no.)
Iowans can try to talk with their legislators at the capitol outside of regular meeting times. This Cedar Rapids Gazette article has good suggestions. They can also call or email anytime. It’s important to reference a specific bill number when you are contacting legislators about an issue, and try to personalize your message in some way. If lawmakers receive dozens of emails with identical wording, they will tune it out. Also make sure to mention if you are a constituent. Some legislators mostly ignore messages from people living outside their districts.
Legislative action on higher education
Education is shaping up to be a central theme of the 2025 session. We didn’t have time to discuss all of the education-related bills moving forward, but we touched on some that have already cleared either a subcommittee or full committee in one chamber.
The newly-created House Higher Education Committee has introduced more than a dozen bills. Most are already through subcommittee, including a proposal to create a School of Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa (House Study Bill 52). Former Governor Terry Branstad made a surprise appearance at the subcommittee to advocate for that bill.
Other higher education bills we mentioned:
House Study Bill 51 would put a 3 percent cap on tuition increases at Regent universities. The Iowa Board of Regents is concerned that number doesn’t take into account future economic conditions or other factors.
House Study Bill 55 would make course syllabi available to the public online.
House Study Bill 63 would establish new general education (“core curriculum”) requirements, and stipulates that any courses in this area “do not distort significant historical events or include any curriculum or other material that teaches identity politics or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States of America or the state of Iowa.” The bill does not define “identity politics.”
Several bills seek to stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion at all public institutions. House Study Bill 53 would prohibit any required course with a DEI component. House Study Bill 61 would ban DEI offices or programs at community colleges.
This week I plan to attend subcommittees on House Study Bill 60, which would cut off access to the Iowa tuition grant for private colleges that have DEI offices, and House Study Bill 56, which would require all Regents university and community college students to complete a U.S. history and civics course. The bill prescribes a lot of mandatory elements to the curriculum, much like a bill House Republicans approved last year in the K-12 context. (The Senate did not advance that bill.)
Democratic State Representative Ross Wilburn spoke to reporters after one of last week’s Higher Education subcommittees. He raised questions about the “true intent” of this new panel. Speaker Grassley had indicated in December that the goal was to conduct a comprehensive review of higher education in the state. But Wilburn noted that eleven of the thirteen bills introduced so far don’t call for any kind of review—rather, they are prescriptive about what colleges and universities can and cannot do.
On a related note, Governor Kim Reynolds recently warned the presidents of the three state universities that they need to end DEI activities or risk losing federal funding.
Legislative action on K-12 education
Public schools were a focus of the legislature in 2023 and 2024, and it looks the same this year. We only had time for a few of these. All advanced on party-line votes, except for the school start date bills.
The “Baby Olivia” bill is back (House Study Bill 34 and Senate Study Bill 1028). It would require public schools to show students a computer-generated or animated fetal development video. The prototype is “Meet Baby Olivia,” which contains many medical inaccuracies. (For more on the inaccuracies, listen to the Cornhole Champions podcast.) House Republicans approved this bill last year, but it didn’t advance in the Senate due to concerns about mandating a specific product. So the current bill requires a video “comparable to the ‘Meet Baby Olivia’ video developed by Live Action.”
Subcommittees in both chambers have advanced bills saying teachers and students can’t be disciplined for using a name or pronouns that correspond to a student’s official record (House File 80 and Senate File 8). It’s yet another effort to target transgender students, and there’s no exemption for students whose parents want their kids to be able to use a different name or pronouns at school.
Proposals to change Iowa’s law on K-12 school start dates are advancing in both chambers (Senate Study Bill 1036 and House Study Bill 31). Districts want the flexibility to start after the Iowa State Fair. Current law—pushed through at the insistence of then Governor Branstad—says the first day of classes can be no earlier than August 23.
House Study Bill 32 would require public schools to display the national motto (“In God We Trust”) and the state motto, and would also “require classrooms to observe two minutes of silence each day preceding the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.” This is a back-door way to establish prayer in school. Imagine trying to keep a group of restless children still for two minutes at the beginning of the school day.
Sadly, I forgot to mention one other subcommittee I attended on Monday: House Study Bill 97 would require classroom instruction and handouts in K-12 schools to use the terms “Gulf of America” and “Mount McKinley” instead of “Gulf of Mexico” and “Denali.”
One policy that’s not moving yet is a bill setting the state funding level for K-12 schools next year. The legislature is supposed to approve a level of State Supplemental Aid within 30 days of the governor presenting her budget, but they’ve often missed that deadline in recent years.
Governor Reynolds is asking for a 2 percent increase in per-pupil state support for K-12 schools. The Senate Education Committee approved a bill that includes the 2 percent the governor requested. House Republicans have not settled on a number, Speaker Grassley told reporters last week.
House and Senate Democrats are asking for a 5 percent increase, which would be about $315 million additional dollars for public schools. Jennifer Konfst said that is roughly equivalent to what the state is likely to spend on school vouchers (officially known as “Education Savings Accounts” for private school tuition) next year.
Other legislative happenings
There are so many bills worth watching, but we only had time to mention a few more.
In the health care area: House File 104 would stipulate that minors cannot consent to vaccines that prevent sexually transmitted infections. This bill is aimed at stopping minors from getting the HPV shot without parental approval. The subcommittee discussion got quite heated, as Republicans ignored all of the public health and medical experts who explained why this is a bad idea.
Senate File 103 started as a non-controversial proposal to require the Iowa Board of Medicine to adopt “the most recent version of the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics.” During the subcommittee discussions Republicans indicated they favor an amendment that would remove the abortion-related provisions in that AMA ethics code.
I flagged a couple of bills in the criminal justice area. County attorneys are pushing a bill that would create a new crime of “assault by criminal groping” (separate from simple assault), that would involve “intentional physical contact with an intimate body part of another person without the intent to commit sexual abuse.” Intimate body part is defined as “Clothed or unclothed inner thigh, groin, buttock, or breast.” A House subcommittee opted not to advance the bill (House Study Bill 12). A Senate subcommittee advanced Senate Study Bill 1004 but suggested it may need amendment.
A House subcommittee tabled a poorly thought out bill (House File 17) that would have allowed surgical castration as a punishment for raping children. (Iowa already allows chemical castration of some sex offenders.) No one spoke in favor of the bill during the hearing, and a lobbyist for the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault expressed concern the bill could lead to pressure on children not to report relatives or family friends who assault them.
Subcommittees in both chambers have advanced a legislative priority of Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, which would limit criminal defendants’ ability to obtain potentially exculpatory evidence through defense subpoenas (House Study Bill 20 and Senate Study Bill 1055). We talked about this issue on last week’s show.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a Senate subcommittee take up and unanimously approve Senate File 47, an anti-SLAPP bill. Retired Drake University law professor David Walker and a lobbyist for the Iowa Newspaper Association explained at the subcommittee why this legislation is needed. The House has previously approved bills seeking to protect Iowans from frivolous lawsuits targeting them over the exercise of their First Amendment rights. But those bills have always died in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A couple of bills related to government transparency (both proposed by the Iowa Public Information Board) advanced from House subcommittees last week. House Study Bill 76 would require government bodies to acknowledge receipt of public records requests, provide contact information for the person who will be handling the request, provide an estimate of the time and cost involved in compiling the records, and explain any delay. I didn’t mention this during the show, but those provisions were drawn from the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Belin v Reynolds, an open records lawsuit against the governor’s office. (I was one of the plaintiffs.)
House Study Bill 75 would improve the notice requirements for public meetings. Those would have to be posted in a “prominent and conspicuous place” visible at all times to the public, and on any internet site maintained by the government body. Amendments to any public meeting agenda would need to be clearly marked.
Speculation about a new attack on transgender Iowans
Rumors have circulated for a couple of weeks that the governor and Republican lawmakers may fast-track a bill to remove civil rights protections for transgender Iowans. Such bills have been introduced for years, but they’ve never gotten beyond the subcommittee stage.
Normally I wouldn’t mention this kind of speculation on the show before a bill is published. But over the weekend, I listened to the “TFL Capitol Connection” podcast produced by the social conservative group The FAMiLY Leader. Near the end, after an appeal for listeners to sign up to receive action alerts, lobbyist Chuck Hurley said, "It's very likely that we will need you to take action soon. I'll just put it that way. We've got a couple of things that are going to pop here in the next few days."
That made me wonder whether bill removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act may be introduced any day now. I’ll be watching this closely.
News about the Iowans in Congress
We had a few minutes to talk about news from the Iowa delegation. Senator Joni Ernst spoke in favor of one of President Donald Trump’s most embattled nominees last week. You can watch a video of Ernst’s testimony in support of Tulsi Gabbard here. She emphasized their common backgrounds as women combat veterans.
Ernst had already indicated her support for Gabbard in early December. She didn’t need to take a public position on the nominee for Director of National Intelligence, since she doesn’t serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. I suspect that after Ernst faced so much criticism over her indecision on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, she was anxious to show that she’s a team player on Gabbard.
The Article III Project, led by Iowans Mike Davis and Mark Lucas, has been pressuring wavering senators to confirm all of Trump’s cabinet picks.
Iowa’s senators have voted to confirm all of Trump’s nominees so far, and we listed those confirmed since last week’s show.
Senator Chuck Grassley seemed to signal last week that he’s on board with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary. He said in a news release that he had “secured” Kennedy’s support on key agricultural issues.
Last Tuesday, Grassley and Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to Trump seeking “the lawfully-required substantive rationale behind his recent decision to dismiss” inspectors general from many federal agencies.
Both Ernst and U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson defended Trump’s (plainly illegal) decision to freeze federal spending on various authorized programs. You can read more of their comments in articles by KMA Radio and the Des Moines Register.
Thank you for reading or listening!
We had less than a minute to quickly flag school enrollment numbers that show strong growth in private school attended since Iowa enacted the school voucher plan in 2023. Randy Richardson covered those figures in more detail at Bleeding Heartland.
I imagine the "key agricultural issues" are not banning pesticides so all we will be getting are the unhealthy ideas
I'm trying to find the status of HF-10. It is in reference to replacing School Nurses with Athletic Trainers. It looks like it's dead, but I would like to know for sure. Can you help?