Best of Bleeding Heartland's original reporting in 2023
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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 at Bleeding Heartland 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. (I don’t cross-post most content from the main site on my Substack.)
I’m grateful to all readers, but especially to tipsters. Please reach out with story ideas that may be worth pursuing in 2024.
STATE GOVERNMENT
Exclusive reports on state government were some of my most labor-intensive projects last year. In April, as the GOP-controlled legislature was about to green-light a huge budget increase for Governor Kim Reynolds’ office, I showed how the governor’s office hides the ball on its own spending.
In December, I reported exclusively that other state agencies spent at least $1 million to supplement the governor’s office budget during the last fiscal year. While other agencies have helped cover salaries for some individuals in the governor’s office, last year the governor’s office also levied new assessments for the “enterprise-wide efforts” of Reynolds’ staff, not tied to any person’s work for a specific agency. In that post, I highlighted oddities and unanswered questions relating to Iowa’s Office for State-Federal Relations.
Also last month, I reported exclusively on unusually large raises the governor gave to some of her senior staffers, beginning two months into the current fiscal year.
Each of those stories involved multiple public records requests, often with delays of weeks or months.
Tangentially related to the governor’s office: I was able to confirm that state funds were not used for Reynolds’ “fair-side chats” with a dozen Republican presidential candidates during the Iowa State Fair.
Since 2020, I’ve periodically reported on how Iowa has used federal funds related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August, I questioned whether two Texas deployments were an allowable use of American Rescue Plan funds.
The state government reorganization bill had more moving parts than I was able to cover thoroughly. But I did write about the implications for the Office of Consumer Advocate and the Iowa Department for the Blind. Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn discussed a provision giving the attorney general power to take over local criminal cases. Pam Mackey Taylor and I wrote about the governor’s plans to consolidate or eliminate many state boards and commissions.
Since early 2021, Bleeding Heartland has followed a problem that didn’t interest any other media: the state’s extremely late reporting on its annual finances. 2023 marked the third year running that Iowa was more than six months late to file its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. In June I learned that the state’s chronic lateness in producing financial reports threatened to disrupt the flow of federal funds to Iowa’s universities.
For the first time in decades, Iowa had a new attorney general last year. I reported in January on Attorney General Brenna Bird’s early steps to shake up the office. I later covered her quiet pursuit of an extreme anti-abortion agenda, and her decision to halt reimbursements of emergency contraception and abortion services for sexual assault victims. In May, Ian Miller wrote about Bird’s free PR using a child identification program.
STATE LEGISLATURE
The seventh year of the Iowa GOP trifecta brought the most sweeping changes to state law since the first trifecta year of 2017. It was impossible to write about every noteworthy bill Iowa lawmakers approved in 2023, so I prioritized detailed coverage in a few areas. One was bills affecting public education, starting with the governor’s “school choice” plan, and the rules change that helped it pass. Another focal point for me was bills discriminating against LGBTQ Iowans, including a ban on gender-affirming care for minors and a school “bathroom bill.”
There were many bills in both categories and quite a bit of overlap, as one education law included forced outing provisions for transgender students and teaching restrictions designed to shut down discussion of LGBTQ topics in grades K-6. The same bill incorporated a baffling provision that removed HPV and the vaccine that prevents HPV from Iowa’s mandatory sex ed curriculum, and a parental rights section that bolstered the case against the ban on gender-affirming care. I suggested three reasons that anti-LGBTQ bills gained more traction in 2023 than in previous years.
Bleeding Heartland strives to provide different angles on some of the biggest legislative stories. In January, that meant profiling the twelve Iowa Republicans who voted against the governor’s school voucher plan. A February post about Iowa’s remarkable medical malpractice debate was one of my favorite analytical pieces from the session.
I also focused on the majority party’s continual slide away from long-established norms. That played out in April as Iowa Senate Republicans advanced blank budget bills from the Appropriations Committee and stopped answering substantive questions about certain legislation during floor debate.
In May, I highlighted six ways the GOP budget for fiscal year 2024 shortchanged Iowans with disabilities, as well as seven bad policies Republican lawmakers slipped into appropriations bills. Several sections of those posts covered news not reported anywhere else.
Good news stories coming out of the statehouse were few and far between, but at least efforts to reinstate the death penalty are not going anywhere, and a bad public lands bill couldn’t get out of an Iowa House committee. The Iowa House approved good bills on open records and frivolous defamation lawsuits, but those stalled in the Senate.
Although it was not directly related to the legislature’s work, I extensively covered State Senator Adrian Dickey’s legal entanglements, from his arrest during RAGBRAI (the state later dropped the charge) to the civil lawsuit his daughter and others filed against him in July. Remarkably, instead of trying to settle that lawsuit quietly, Dickey filed a counterclaim in August seeking damages from the plaintiffs.
Iowa Senate Democrats took the unusual step of replacing their caucus leader in June, prompting this reflection on the change and on new Senate Minority Leader Pam Jochum.
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS AND ABORTION ACCESS
As a third-generation supporter of Planned Parenthood in Iowa, I’ve long been committed to covering reproductive rights issues. That involved several in-depth reports during 2023. In June I analyzed the Iowa Supreme Court’s 3-3 split on whether to reinstate the 2018 law banning almost all abortions. That non-decision left a lower court injunction in effect, prompting the special legislative session in July where Republicans approved a nearly identical abortion ban.
Soon after the special session, I wrote about Reynolds turning up the pressure on the Iowa Supreme Court on abortion. That piece looked closely at Reynolds’ overt and implicit messages to the justices and included exclusive reporting about a last-minute cut to the judicial branch budget, at the governor’s insistence.
New state data on the collapse of Iowa’s family planning program inspired a piece about how Iowa Republicans couldn’t have been more wrong about defunding Planned Parenthood in 2017.
Activists in several other states have organized successful petition drives to put abortion rights on the ballot. I explained in November why Iowans can’t force a statewide vote on reproductive rights without legislative action.
In November, I analyzed the Reynolds administration’s proposed administrative rules on the abortion ban. They are very political and have little in common with standard medical practice.
TRANSPARENCY
Journalists typically don’t make news, but last year I was a plaintiff in an open records case that reached the Iowa Supreme Court on interlocutory appeal. Thanks to the magic of alphabetical order, that case (which involved several other plaintiffs) is known as Belin v Reynolds. I wrote about the oral arguments in February and about the unanimous court decision in our favor in April. (The state settled our lawsuit and two other open records cases in June.)
An Iowa Supreme Court decision on a wrongful termination lawsuit in June was also good for open records, in that it gave Iowans who handle public records requests for government bodies more protection from possible retaliation.
Alarm bells went off for me and other transparency advocates when the Iowa Public Information Board considered a new policy, which would allow governments to have some people declared “vexatious requesters.” The designation would apply to individuals who file “excessive and abusive” public records requests, and would allow government bodies to ignore those requests for up to one year. The board hasn’t agreed on a path forward yet.
I continue to seek body cam footage and other records related to Senator Dickey’s arrest during RAGBRAI and hope to have something to report on that front during 2024.
IOWA COURTS AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE
In addition to the posts mentioned above, the Iowa Supreme Court’s work inspired other deep dives in 2023. Clark Kauffman of Iowa Capital Dispatch scooped me on the governor’s unprecedented walk through the justices’ private office area before oral arguments on a big abortion case. But I covered that story in my own way a few hours later.
In April, I covered the LS Power ruling that enjoined one part of a 2020 budget bill, and how the decision affected Republican behavior during Iowa legislative debates. Guest author “Cato and Cujo” carried the ball down the field in July, with an extensive analysis of the court’s legal reasoning and erroneous assumptions about the legislative process. (That piece happens to be the longest post ever published in Bleeding Heartland’s seventeen-year history.)
A unanimous Iowa Supreme Court decision from May was a mixed bag on transgender rights.
I’m committed to covering the longstanding racial disparities in Iowa’s criminal justice system. In September, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative found our state was still among the worst in the country in terms of racial disparities in incarceration.
Following the annual Summit on Justice and Disparities in November, I reported exclusively on new data compiled by the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP, regarding which counties have (or don’t have) racially representative juries. Speaking of which, the co-chair of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP and Des Moines Branch NAACP Legal Redress Committees, Russell Lovell, was honored last year for a half-century of civil rights advocacy.
In December, I reported exclusively on how Iowa has been addressing racial disparities in the juvenile justice system.
Bleeding Heartland published detailed reports on both federal lawsuits challenging the education law known as Senate File 496, as well as the most in-depth report about the U.S. District Court hearing on the plaintiffs’ motions for temporary injunction. I closed out the year with a deep dive on Judge Stephen Locher’s December 29 order blocking enforcement of Iowa’s new book bans and teaching restrictions.
Other posts covered newsworthy lower court rulings. Wally Taylor, the legal chair of the Sierra Club Iowa chapter, explained a Polk County District Court decision from April, which held that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources improperly approved a nutrient management plan for a large cattle feeding operation. I was first to report in November on a Polk County District Court decision, which held that the Iowa legislature “overstepped” when it enacted a 2022 lawallowing police to search garbage outside a home without a warrant.
I have a longstanding interest in judicial selection. To my knowledge, Bleeding Heartland was the only news organization to note that Reynolds passed over former GOP State Representative Dustin Hite for a District Court judgeship in June. I found the decision newsworthy because Hite was a conservative Republican who had opposed the governor’s school voucher proposal, while the judge Reynolds picked was a trial lawyer who had donated to multiple Democratic candidates.
I was also the first to cover the governor’s “extraordinary” intervention in November to reject one candidate for a different District Court vacancy, which stemmed from an error made by the district judicial nominating commission.
I’ll be keeping an eye on potential changes to judicial selection. Last year, Iowa Senate Republicans approved a bill that would increase the governor’s power over the process, but it lacked support in the House Judiciary Committee.
ENVIRONMENT AND LAND USE
New Bleeding Heartland author Nancy Dugan quickly developed a loyal following with her scoops related to the proposed Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. Making skillful use of public records requests and government documents that were already in the public domain, Nancy wrote several exclusives related to the Iowa Utilities Board’s unusual decision to facilitate mediation between Summit Carbon and landowners along the pipeline route. She was first to report that the board hired North Carolina attorney Frank Laney to conduct those mediations. She highlighted some of board’s odd scheduling decisions during the lengthy evidentiary hearing in Fort Dodge.
Nancy also interviewed Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University, a leading expert on ethanol and carbon capture. She covered legal wrangling over county governments’ authority to regulate land use matters, and access certain pipeline safety data. She questioned why Summit Carbon is seeking to sequester carbon instead of monetizing it.
Nancy reported exclusively on a network of LLCs associated with Summit Carbon’s proposed carbon capture facilities, which have applied for permits to use massive amounts of well water. She covered the first legal challenge to a water use permit linked to one of those LLC’s water use permits. I expect more lawsuits to raise similar issues in 2024.
Nancy covered other stories related to water use as well. In November, she broke the news that Summit Agricultural Group operates at least seventeen wells in Kossuth County alone that have not applied for water use permits through the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
In December, she wrote a deep dive about the Clarke County animal feeding operations that continue to rely on the city of Osceola’s depleted water supply, even as city residents face restrictions under a water emergency declaration. This issue goes well beyond Clark County; Nancy learned from an obscure Iowa Department of Natural Resource publication that as of the summer of 2023, “only 149 animal feeding operations held water use permits in Iowa. This means that thousands of these facilities operate with little or no apparent state oversight of their water use.”
CAMPAIGNS AND ELECTIONS
Bleeding Heartland tends to publish less campaign coverage in odd-numbered years. But I reflected on Democratic underperformance in 2022, and the statistics on early voting in that midterm. Macklin Scheldrup wrote a phenomenal two-part series on Iowa ticket-splitting.
2023 brought some notable elections, including a big win for a Democratic candidate in a Warren County special in August. A couple of months later, I wrote a deep dive about the school board elections in November, and about the dark money group that paid for last-minute mailings targeting Des Moines mayoral candidate Josh Mandelbaum.
Since so many national and Iowa media assign reporters to cover presidential candidates, I didn’t frequently cover the Iowa caucus campaign. Instead, I looked for opportunities to add value. That included this report from May on high-profile endorsements for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a report on an early message-testing poll for DeSantis, and an analysis in June on what Governor Reynolds was really saying about Donald Trump’s indictment for allegedly mishandling classified documents.
In July, I was first to report in July on a dark money group’s mailings, which depicted Trump as a champion of LGBTQ equality. I also reviewed pitches from thirteen (!) presidential candidates who appeared at the Iowa GOP’s largest summer fundraiser.
In August, I turned a critical eye toward Vivek Ramaswamy’s ten “truths,” a stable of his stump speeches. An analytical piece the same month suggested that Nikki Haley’s first debate performance and approach to the abortion issue could improve her standing.
In October, I looked closely at the well-funded campaign to discourage Iowa Republicans from supporting Trump, and considered why it had flopped.
Also in October, John Deeth wrote the best analysis I’ve seen of the Iowa Democratic Party’s revamped Iowa caucus plan, featuring a vote by mail with results announced in March.
I thought hard about what would need to happen for Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan to beat U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the 2024 rematch in the first Congressional district. Later, I flagged surprising numbers from the two candidates’ campaign finance reports, and covered Miller-Meeks’ GOP primary challenger David Pautsch. Two Democrats are seeking the nomination in Iowa’s fourth Congressional district; I profiled Ryan Melton and Jay Brown in August.
Dan Guild looked into one important question related to the presidential race and battle for Congress: are Republicans gaining among Black voters?
Bleeding Heartland’s Iowa legislative coverage will ramp up in 2024 as more challengers announce. Last year, I noted that two Democrats are running for an open Iowa House seat in Urbandale, flagged what should be a fascinating Republican primary for a House seat in Warren County, and previewed what may be the hottest Iowa Senate race, between Republican incumbent Brad Zaun and challenger Matt Blake in the northwest suburbs of Des Moines.
THE IOWANS IN CONGRESS
I produced less Congressional reporting than I’d planned last year, but in addition to periodically reporting on newsworthy votes and the new delegation’s committee assignments, I wrote some deep dives about those who represent our state in Washington. I went through copies of the Congressional Record going back to the 1970s for a piece on how Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst have approached raising the debt ceiling under different presidents.
I broke down the 45 earmarks requested by three of Iowa’s U.S. House members: Miller-Meeks in IA-01, Ashley Hinson in IA-02, and Zach Nunn in IA-03. (Representative Randy Feenstra refuses to ask for any earmarks that could benefit his constituents in IA-04.)
Rick Morain reported in May on Grassley’s work related to inspectors general at federal agencies, and found much to praise. Bleeding Heartland user Strong Island Hawk examined Grassley’s recent oversight activities in July, and found them wanting.
In October I covered four takeaways from the Iowans’ votes to keep the federal government funded, and wrote about the four distinct strategies Iowa’s U.S. House members employed while navigating the speaker election fiasco.
WILDFLOWERS
I haven’t included the wildflowers series in previous year-end compilations of this site’s original reporting, but the two dozen Bleeding Heartland posts about native plants in 2023 included many perspectives readers could not find anywhere else. Kara Grady wrote about Iowa’s disappearing orchids, and possible explanations for the rapid decline.
Kenny Slocum‘s essay about wild lupine explored a little-known problem with some prairie restoration projects: seed mixes often include the “wrong” species for the area.
Bleeding Heartland user PrairieFan highlighted a form of conventional agricultural pollution that is rarely acknowledged: chemical drift, which can be devastating for some native plants.
Bruce Morrison shared knowledge and research about monarch butterfly migrations, while Kara Grady explained how to create a “monarch waystation” in a small garden plot.
Katie Byerly’s three-year quest to find one of the rarest Iowa wildflowers provided readers with a close-up view of Northern Monkshood, a plant few of us will ever see “in real life.”
OTHER ORIGINAL REPORTING OR ANALYSIS
Few news media cover antitrust or monopoly issues. In December, Scott Syroka flagged a Canadian company’s bid to acquire the Waterloo-based short line railroad Iowa Northern Railway, and explained why the sale would be problematic. Two weeks later, Scott’s post about Koch Industries trying to buy a southeast Iowa fertilizer plant generated enormous reader interest, and ended up being the fourth most-viewed Bleeding Heartland article from 2023.
Randy Richardson dug into the five entities that filed applications to open eight new charter schools in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, and reviewed how Iowa’s new “school choice” program is already affecting larger school districts.
I didn’t have much time for media criticism last year, but I did cover some disheartening news (Lee Newspapers in Iowa cut back on print editions) as well as one encouraging development on the journalism landscape (Dana James launching the Black Iowa Newspaper).
Final note: As mentioned at the top, keeping Bleeding Heartland’s articles and commentaries available to all is a core value for me. So there will never be subscriber-only content here. However, I do accept contributions to cover reporting costs and the website’s operating expenses, which have increased over the past two years.
To avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest, I don’t accept funds from Iowa elected officials, candidates, or paid staff and consultants on Iowa campaigns. If you don’t fall into any of those groups and are able to support this work financially, you can contribute directly with a credit card, or through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo, or Substack, or by mailing a check made out to Bleeding Heartland, LLC (contact me for the address). Donations to Bleeding Heartland are not tax-deductible.
Full roster of Iowa Writers Collaborative columnists, in alphabetical order:
Laura, thank you so much for your in depth reporting on such key issues. The work you do has to be exhausting at times but it is such important work. Thank you.
Such an impressive body of work! Thank you!