The “Governor Kim Reynolds Legacy Tour” kicks off in Cedar Rapids on Thursday at the Hotel at Kirkwood Center. The 90-minute event starts at 6 p.m. “Hors D’oeuvres will be served,” according to the Iowa Republican Party’s ticket page for the event.
“Do not miss your chance to show Governor Reynolds our appreciation for her tremendous leadership and service!” the ticket page says.
It’s not uncommon for a retiring politician to hold farewell events to meet and thank constituents, but the stops on Reynolds’ Legacy Tour are not free and open to the public. The tour is a fundraiser for the Iowa Republican Party. Individual tickets for the Thursday event are $50 per individual. More expensive tickets that will earn the purchaser recognition as an event sponsor are also available, and those willing to pay an even higher price can buy ticket packages at the “Host Committee” level.
Following Cedar Rapids, the Legacy Tour is scheduled to make stops in Davenport (April 30), Dubuque (May 14), Clear Lake (June 19), Des Moines (July 10) and Sioux Center (Sept. 10).
After Gov. Reynolds announced in April 2025 that she would not seek reelection, I examined the legacy she leaves in Little Village shortly after.
Kim Reynolds is a historic figure, there’s no question about that.
She ascended from the lieutenant governor’s seat to the state’s highest office on May 24, 2017, after Gov. Terry Branstad left to join the Trump administration. Already the first woman governor of Iowa (and 39th nationwide), she became the first woman to be elected governor by Iowans over a year later.
That’s enough to secure her place in Iowa history books, without even considering any of her actions as governor, such as creating one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, restructuring state government to concentrate more power in the governor’s hands, introducing a voucher system that redirects money from public schools to private schools, championing tax changes that are reducing state revenues, and her administration’s minimal efforts to mitigate COVID-19 spread that led to preventable deaths, among other things.
But being the 39th woman to serve as governor of a state isn’t enough to rate a mention in more general U.S. history texts. There is a reason her name will likely appear in those future history books.
“What will secure Reynolds a noteworthy place in U.S. history books,” I argued last May, “is the fact she’s the first governor to cut a state’s civil rights act in order to strip legal protections from some of her citizens.”
SF 418, which Reynolds signed into law on Feb. 28 [2025], eliminated gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, erasing protections for trans and nonbinary Iowans that had been in place for almost 20 years. But the bill will do more than end civil rights protection for a vulnerable minority when it goes into effect July 1 — it also makes fundamental changes to state law, ending any official recognition of trans and nonbinary people as trans and nonbinary people.
That bill also prohibits state and local agencies from making accommodations for trans and nonbinary people, and does so using language that echoes the grim history of legal racial segregation in the U.S.
“The term ‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’ or ‘identical,’” the bill, and now Iowa Code, states. “Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”
Last year’s bill was the most extreme of a series of bills undermining the rights of LGBTQ Iowans — and trans Iowans in particular — that Reynolds has pushed for and signed since 2022. None of the bills were in response to reported problems in the state.
The Cedar Rapids kickoff of the Governor Kim Reynolds Legacy Tour is happening the same week Reynolds signed into law another bill targeting the civil rights of trans and nonbinary people. It’s a companion piece to last year’s history-making rollback of civil rights protections.
More than a dozen Iowa cities, as well as Johnson County, had ordinances in place that protected people from discrimination based on gender identity, and none of them rescinded those ordinances after Reynolds changed the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
At the beginning of this year’s legislative session, the governor’s office introduced a bill, eventually numbered HF 2541 in the Iowa House, to invalidate those local ordinances and prevent any future such ordinances from being adopted. Under the governor’s bill, no local government could offer protections for civil rights beyond those already approved by the state legislature.
The bill passed a House subcommittee and committee with only Republican support. But it didn’t go to the House floor for a final vote, because Rep. Steven Holt, a Republican from Dennison and one of leading supporters of anti-trans bills in the legislature, used a legislative maneuver to ensure the Senate would be able to quickly approve the ban on local civil rights protections.
Holt took the language limiting civil rights protections from the governor’s bill and inserted it as an amendment into a bill the Senate had already approved. That meant the newly amended bill would go directly to the Senate floor for a final vote, without the public input of a subcommittee hearing or possible extended discussion by lawmakers at the committee-level. The amended bill was passed by the Senate, with only Republican support, on Monday. Gov. Reynolds signed it into law on Tuesday.
In Iowa, new laws typically don’t take effect until July 1 of the year they are passed. But a provision in the bill made the law go into effect as soon as Reynolds signed it, because the changes it makes are “deemed of immediate importance.”
The bill was the only second one Reynolds has signed this year. Normally, the governor’s office sends out a news release when she signs a bill, as it did when she signed her first bill from this year’s legislative session into law on Feb. 26.
The governor’s office did not send out a news release on Tuesday about Reynolds signing a bill to preempt the authority of local governments when it comes to protecting civil rights.
