Category: Iowa Legislature

Iowa State Representative Lisa Heddens of Ames is simply looking to achieve “equality” in Iowa’s laws on men and women’s health procedures with a new amendment she proposed to Republicans’ 20-week abortion ban. Heddens is encouraging her colleagues to pass her “Men’s Right to Know Act,” which would allow doctors to refuse prescribing erectile dysfunction drugs on moral grounds, require rectal exams for men seeking such medication, and impose an $100 fine on every “masturbatory emission.” It’s all in response to a series of Republican bills this session designed to vastly restrict women’s healthcare options, abortion rights and funding for Planned […]

A very bizarre moment occurred during last night’s committee hearing over Iowa House Republicans’ 20-week abortion ban. Republican Representative Shannon Lundgren, during an exchange with Democratic Representative John Forbes, suggested that a woman who suffered a miscarriage would need to carry that fetus to term. Forbes posed the question to Lundgren in relation to his daughter, who is in her 21st week of pregnancy. He said that while everything is going well with the pregnancy, he worried what would happen if she were to miscarriage, whether this new legislation would force her to continue on with the fetus until her own […]

Throughout this year’s Iowa legislative session, Republicans have introduced and passed a myriad of bills restricting workers’ rights and protections, as well as finding new ways to cut Iowans’ wages. This week the focus is on Republicans’ workers compensation proposal, which would gut most of the ways Iowans can get reimbursed for legitimate injuries sustained at the workplace. But this time the Republicans may have gone too far, and rumors of division in their ranks have percolated up at the Statehouse. The workers compensation bill was expected to be brought up in the House as early as late last week, but the […]

The Iowa House passed the Republican omnibus gun bill yesterday, but not before many Democratic legislators made impassioned pleas to vote it down. The most striking moment came when first-term Representative Ras Smith showed his colleagues how he could easily be seen as a “threat” under the new law, donning a grey hoodie and headphones. The 29-year-old Smith hails from Waterloo, where racial tensions continue to be a problem. “While I agree that we are created equal, I do not agree that all Iowans are treated equal, or protected equally,” Smith said Tuesday afternoon. “While as a young man playing […]

Secretary of State Paul Pate’s “election integrity” bill is scheduled to come to a vote in the Iowa House tonight, though a long-running discussion on the gun omnibus bill may push it into tomorrow. Either way, passage is coming soon for the wide-ranging election legislation that adds voter ID requirements, signature verification, shortens the timeframe for absentee ballot requests, and adds electronic poll books and a new election auditing system. At a public hearing last night, many Iowans pointed out the disconnect between Paul Pate’s focus on nearly nonexistent fraud when 5,842 votes went uncounted in Dallas County in 2016. Matt […]

Hundreds of worried Central Iowa residents flooded the Iowa Statehouse Monday morning for a public hearing on the Republican bill to dismantle Des Moines Water Works. Opponents to House File 848 outnumbered supporters 177 to 8 on the speakers list beforehand. Dozens of Des Moines-area residents, local elected officials and water board members – both from Central Iowa and around the state – blasted the legislation as dangerous and as a retaliation for the Des Moines Water Work’s federal lawsuit against polluting Northwest Iowa counties. “Iowa has serious water pollution problems and there is widespread consensus that agricultural pollution is a significant […]