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Less than a year after a program to study the impact of a guaranteed income in Iowa was launched in the Des Moines area, Iowa House Republicans approved a bill to prevent city or county governments from starting or supporting any basic income program in the future.
HF 2319 passed the House on Monday on a vote of 55-43. Seven Republicans joined all the chamber’s Democrats in opposing it.
Since taking control of both chambers of the Iowa Legislature in 2017, Republicans have repeatedly passed discriminatory legislation targeting transgender Iowans with the full support of Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has signed those bills and other anti-LGBTQ legislation into law. But even when pushing through those bills almost exclusively on party-line votes, Republicans still understood […]
An Iowa House subcommittee advanced a bill Wednesday that would require high school teachers to hold class discussion comparing political ideologies “that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that were essential to the founding of the United States.” House File 12 specifically mentions communism and totalitarianism. Iowa Rep. Steven Holt, a Republican from […]
On Friday, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate held a ceremony to mark Public Measure 1 becoming the latest amendment to the state constitution. The new amendment requires courts to use “strict scrutiny,” the most stringent form of judicial review, when considering existing or future regulation regarding guns. It’s a higher level of scrutiny than […]
Both the setting of the meeting, a hotel conference room in Des Moines on a Saturday morning, and the average age of attendees, over 50, were standard for Iowa politics. The subject matter, however, wasn’t. “This is probably the first public event since at least the 1970s in Iowa for anybody to have a serious […]
More than a year after an Iowa Poll showed 54 percent of Iowans favor legalizing marijuana for recreational use and 78 percent want to see the state’s Medical Cannabidiol Program expanded, Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Republicans who control the Iowa Legislature show no sign of doing either. Earlier this month, Iowa Capital Dispatch reported […]
It is now illegal for schools in Iowa to require students or staff to wear face masks, even though the CDC recommends mask use in schools, because of a bill signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds on Thursday morning. HF 847 also strips cities and counties of their authority to create mask mandates that […]
The Iowa House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of a bill intended to prohibit so-called “vaccine passports” on Monday. The bill was introduced on Friday, two weeks after Gov. Kim Reynolds called for such legislation. “I strongly oppose vaccine passports and I believe that we must take a stand as a state against them, which […]
On Friday afternoon, as the Easter holiday weekend was beginning, Gov. Kim Reynolds’ office sent out a news release stating that the governor had signed into a law a bill eliminating the requirement for a person to be licensed to buy or carry a gun. The bill, HF 756, was passed by the Iowa House, […]
After more than four and a half hours of floor discussion on Tuesday night, the Iowa House of Representatives voted along party lines to approve a bill that imposes restrictions on diversity training offered by any state or local government agency and prohibits any instruction in public schools or universities on certain “divisive concepts” related […]
A bill that would restrict discussion of “divisive concepts” related to racism and sexism in Iowa schools and universities was passed by an Iowa House subcommittee on Monday. Both of the Republicans on the subcommittee voted for it, and the lone Democrat opposed it. HSB 258 would require that the instructor of any mandatory diversity […]
An effort by Republicans in the state legislature to eliminate tenure at Iowa’s three public universities advanced this week, as the House Education Committee passed a bill to end tenure at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, and a Senate subcommittee approved the Senate version of that bill. […]
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