Top ten posts from 2023 and first "Capitol Week" of 2024
Happy new year to all
Time flies when you’re having fun! College students Drew Miller and Chris Woods launched Bleeding Heartland seventeen years ago this week. I joined the roster of front-page authors on the site in the spring of 2007 and have been the primary author there since 2008.
On New Year’s Day, I published my compilation of the 23 most-read Bleeding Heartland posts of 2023, with some backstory about each one. This Substack newsletter is only about 18 months old, and I don’t post nearly as often here as I publish on the main site (which ran nearly 500 articles or commentaries last year). But I thought it would be fun to do a quick countdown of my most-viewed Substack posts from 2023. Here you go:
10. Iowa board review committee's "public input" was a farce
Dennis Hart and I have co-hosting “Capitol Week” for almost three years. We enjoy doing the show together and hope it will soon be available on podcasting platforms. Meanwhile, please spread the word to anyone you know who may enjoy a 30-minute weekly dose of Iowa political news.
Here’s the audio from our New Year’s Day show, which we recorded live on Monday evening. The full “Capitol Week” archive going back to February 2021 is available on KHOI Radio’s website.
Topics we covered this week:
We spent several minutes on the blockbuster federal court order published Friday afternoon, which blocked Iowa from enforcing the school book bans and teaching restrictions that were part of a wide-ranging education law, Senate File 496. I wrote about this in more detail at Bleeding Heartland. He found plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment claims. Nothing in the order was surprising, given the tenor of U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher’s questions to attorneys during the December 22 hearing;
While many have referred to the teaching restrictions as “don’t say gay or trans,” because they were designed to shut down discussion of LGBTQ topics in grades K-6, Judge Locher found that description inaccurate, given the plain text of the law: “It is actually a ‘don’t say anything’ bill”;
Judge Locher did not issue a preliminary injunction against one part of Senate File 496. He determined that LGBTQ students who are plaintiffs in one case don’t have standing to challenge the forced outing provision, because they are all out to their own parents;
I still have not heard back from the governor’s office or the Iowa Attorney General’s office on whether the state plans to appeal the order to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. I do not see many promising angles for the state on appeal, because the judge’s order was well-reasoned and focused squarely on the text of the law;
Since people often want to know who appointed judges who hear big cases, I gave a little background: Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst recommended Locher for the judgeship in 2022, and enthusiastically supported his confirmation after President Joe Biden appointed him;
Moving to presidential campaign news, Dennis and I agree that the U.S. Supreme Court will need to step in to decide whether state officials can remove Donald Trump from the primary ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment;
Trump’s social media posts on Christmas Day were bizarre, to say the least. One of them expressed the hope that his political enemies will “ROT IN HELL”;
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley flubbed a question about the Civil War at a town hall in New Hampshire last week. She and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will appear in back-to-back CNN town halls in Des Moines this Thursday;
There’s been some reporting on Haley acquiring a large field operation thanks to her endorsement from the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity Action. But honestly, you can’t conjure up effective GOTV in a few weeks using mostly paid canvassers;
Attention-seeking candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is closing in on a double “full Grassley” and did a push-up challenge at a campaign event last week. We’ll be talking more about Ramaswamy on next week’s show because he just picked up former U.S. Representative Steve King’s endorsement on January 2;
Trump is leading the field by a mile, despite holding only 17 events in Iowa during 2023; Ramaswamy and Ryan Binkley (among others) have held more than 100 events each. The Des Moines Register reported on how many events each candidate has held, and where. We talked about the overrated benefits of the “full Grassley”;
The number of abortions went up in Iowa by about 8 percent during 2022. The Des Moines Register’s Michaela Ramm reported on the numbers, but here’s the big picture: total abortions in Iowa peaked in the mid-2000s, there was a steady and significant drop from 2008 to 2018, and abortions have been on an upward trend since 2018;
In a classic pre-holiday weekend news dump, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services announced on the Friday afternoon before Christmas that Iowa won’t participate in a federal program to provide $40 per month per child over the summer to families who qualify for free or reduced price school lunches. Dennis and I didn’t cover this during last week’s show because it was the only one all year we pre-recorded (so as not to do a live broadcast on Christmas night);
Governor Kim Reynolds is holding a virtual budget hearing on Wednesday, January 3; I plan to attend but it’s not clear whether reporters will have any opportunity to ask questions about the budgets for specific agencies;
The Iowa legislature’s 2024 session begins next Monday, January 8. We talked about the priorities top Republican legislators and the governor have outlined, including more tax cuts, behind-the-counter birth control, a cull of state boards and commissions, and possible changes to the Area Education Agencies (which serve disabled children);
We briefly touched on Democratic lawmakers’ priorities, but they don’t have the numbers to advance legislation in either the Iowa House or Senate.
Thanks so much for reading or listening!
Full roster of Iowa Writers Collaborative columnists, in alphabetical order: