"Roast and Ride" recap plus other Iowa politics news

June 5 "Capitol Week" is online

Jun 08, 2023

I apologize for the delay in sharing the latest “Capitol Week.” Dennis Hart and I recorded the show as usual on Monday evening, but I was tied up with some other obligations earlier in the week, and digging into Iowa Senate Democrats’ surprise leadership change on Wednesday.

It’s been busy at Bleeding Heartland as well. During the first week of June, I published work by eleven guest authors on a wide range of topics, in addition to my own original reporting on Congressional and state legislative news. A reminder for those who don’t want to miss anything on the main site: I have another free email newsletter, which links to all recent Bleeding Heartland articles and commentaries.

On to the show. You can listen to any past episode of “Capitol Week” on KHOI’s website.

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Here’s what Dennis and I discussed on the June 5 program. We had a lot to catch up on after taking Memorial Day off!

Republican presidential candidates swarmed into the state last week. We talked about the kickoff event for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his case to GOP caucus-goers, and legal questions related to holding that event in a church;
The elephant in the room, former President Donald Trump, was back in Iowa last week for a conservative breakfast group in Urbandale and a Fox News town hall event. Dennis and I remain skeptical that DeSantis or others can overtake him among caucus-goers;
We talked briefly about all eight declared or prospective presidential candidates who appeared at Senator Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” fundraiser and the case they are making to Iowa Republicans. (For those keeping score, that’s DeSantis, former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, talk show host Larry Elder, and business owners Vivek Ramaswamy and Perry Johnson.) If you want to see more, you can watch the full video on C-SPAN;
Chris Christie hasn’t been to Iowa yet, but he is entering the race as an attack dog, with the goal of taking down Trump;
Doug Burgum is also joining the Republican presidential field. I’m embarrassed to say that before seeing this news I could not have placed him as the governor of North Dakota;
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu took himself out of contention as a presidential candidate;
The Iowa Democratic Party’s governing body approved a delegate selection plan that keeps the 2024 Iowa caucuses on the same night as Republicans, but also allows for some participation by mail. I had a Bleeding Heartland post in progress about this, before getting sidetracked by the Iowa Senate Democratic drama. The short version is I think they managed to balance a tricky set of competing concerns: complying with Iowa’s new law, having a more inclusive process for presidential selection, and not upsetting New Hampshire;
A bill to raise the U.S. debt ceiling in exchange for some federal spending cuts sailed through Congress last week. All four of Iowa’s House Republicans and both senators voted for the deal. It was the first time Ernst had voted to raise the debt ceiling under a Democratic president, and only the second time Grassley had done so in his long career;
We didn’t have time to discuss all of Governor Kim Reynolds’ final bill signings from the 2023 legislative session (there were more than five dozen). But we did go over the most significant: the new law limiting State Auditor Rob Sand’s ability to conduct independent audits; a new asset test for Iowans on federal food assistance; sweeping changes to education policy (more on that here), and a law relaxing child labor standards, which conflicts with some aspects of federal law.
Reynolds announced last week that at the request of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, she’s going to send 100 National Guard members to the southern border for the whole month of August, and 30 state troopers for the whole month of September. I wonder whether those plans lay behind a last-minute change to the state budget, which added more than $1 million to the Department of Public Safety’s general fund appropriation.