Firstly, thanks to all of you that share and post and like and comment. We’re not your typical fire breathing podcast that’s just out for clicks, so it’s been awesome to see our audience grow with your help.

So much to cover this week, we start out with Kristi Noem being fired (or transferred) out of the Department of Homeland Security Secretary role. We discuss the numerous blunders that led to her dismissal.

Speaking of Trump cabinet members, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was set to appear with Congressman Zach Nunn for a fundraiser on Saturday, March 14th. That event has been postponed, and we discuss the controversy surrounding the announcement.

Gubernatorial candidate Randy Feenstra has announced a statewide $1 million ad buy, as he tries to fend off the field of challengers. We fill in the details.

We move to the Iowa legislature for the back half of the show. Crime bills have been one of the main focusses of the republican led legislature. House Speaker Pat Grassley discussed the motivation behind these bills with the press this week.

To close out, we showcase two bills that are separate but quite similar. One was concerning foster parents’ ability to raise their adoptive children according to their biological sex rather than gender identity, and the other one would prevent local jurisdictions from establishing their own civil rights protections that would differ from the state of Iowa.

Thanks so much for being a part of Iowa Down Ballot, and an extra tip of the cap to those of you who have become paid subscribers. We couldn’t do this great show without you.

AI generate transcript below:

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Dave Price: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballad Podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by Kathy Obradovich and Laura Bellin, two of my colleagues from the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Hello, ladies, how are ya?

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Kathie Obradovich: Hello!

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Laura Belin: Good to see you.

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Dave Price: Good to see you as well.

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Dave Price: First of all, can we start with thanks? I know we sort of do at the end, but can we start with thanks? We got to see the metrics. I don’t want to, like, do brags here.

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Dave Price: That’s just…

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, go ahead.

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Dave Price: super egotistical, but it’s… can we just say it’s very humbling that our producer, Spencer Dirks, sent us the metrics for last week’s downloads. It is fun to see this thing

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Dave Price: spread like it is. We are not, like, shock jocks. They probably don’t even use that word… those words anymore, but, like, that’s not the style of this. We try to just have normal…

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Dave Price: thoughtful conversations about what we see and hear and report on and analyze and all that kind of stuff. We’re not going for clicks and headlines and all that stuff.

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Dave Price: Having said that, it is nice to see that this has been growing, this independent venture, so it’s a very humbling experience, and we very, very appreciate all your feedback from this, and we very much appreciate all of you who are clearly helping to spread the word, because it’s not like we have

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Dave Price: like Iowa down-ballot billboards out on the interstates, and ads on the radio and TV and everywhere else all over the place to let people know about this. So we very much appreciate

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Dave Price: all of you who have helped us grow this little project, it’s been very fun to do this week after week. And of course, because of everything.

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Dave Price: Billboards would be cool.

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Kathie Obradovich: It would be cool. I had my picture on the back of a bus once.

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Dave Price: How’d that feel?

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Laura Belin: Wow!

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, the regis… when I was at the register, they did a big caucus, campaign, and so I… I had my… and they didn’t tell me that they were gonna do it.

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Kathie Obradovich: So I’m driving my car, and I come up behind a bus, and there is my giant face, plastered over the back of this bus. I almost drove off the freaking road. I was just like, oh my god, what is this? So, yeah.

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Dave Price: That’s when you know you’ve made it, when your face is on a bus. It’s you and, like, the accident lawyers. You know, they’re the ones on some of these buses that you see in cities, so congratulations.

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Kathie Obradovich: I hate you.

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Dave Price: Career has hit its apex.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, our nephews were very… were very impressed when they, came to town for the State Fair from Illinois and saw that, so they thought… they thought Aunt Kathy is a big deal.

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Dave Price: You are correct, and Kathy is a big deal.

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Dave Price: A few big deals that we witnessed this week that didn’t necessarily have a direct Iowa impact, but, Christy Noem, the reason I bring up Kristi Noem is I have been sort of fascinated by the reaction

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Dave Price: to what President Donald Trump did to take her off the job. I saw some social media chatter about how she did not get fired.

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Laura Belin: Hmm.

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Dave Price: And I started thinking about that, and I’m like, alright, is this semantics or not?

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Dave Price: She did a couple of committee hearings that clearly were not her finest moments.

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Dave Price: And for all of the performance theater we have seen by some in the Trump administration when they go before Democrats.

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Dave Price: she had issues with Republicans, as we saw play out, right? Like, that’s not the way this normally goes. And all the stuff that happened in Minneapolis, she stayed on the job for that. When those two people were killed by ICE agents, they did not get rid of her. But it seems like…

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Dave Price: the… as she’s standing there talking about the $220 million ad campaign that were… that featured her as a star, that was supposed to promote deportations, or whatever it was about, when she’s riding horses and all kinds of other stuff, and had the exchange with Senator Kennedy from Louisiana, and he’s…

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Dave Price: Just baffled when he’s saying, so you’re saying the president approved this?

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Dave Price: Just… he’s like, I just… I can’t… I can’t believe this. I’m not saying you’re lying.

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Laura Belin: Oh, and the exchange with House Democrat Jonah Goose about that, about how the contract may have gone to someone with a connection. So, I mean, there were many angles on that ad campaign that…

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Dave Price: And whatever this…

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Kathie Obradovich: back or blankie, oh, they were in the Senate Judiciary. I mean, they were…

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: scathing. So, yeah, I think that that whole thing…

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, the semantics about whether she was fired, I mean, she’s not on that job anymore. It created a new job for her that never existed, and nobody really knows what it does.

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Kathie Obradovich: whatever, so… so they… they found another job for her, so I… I think you could… you could argue that she’s been, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: transferred, as opposed to fired, perhaps. Yeah, perhaps.

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Dave Price: She’s been removed from her position, for sure.

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Laura Belin: So, a lot of the reporting on the Trump administration reminds me of the old Sovietology, so I got my start in the field of Soviet studies and Russian studies, and a lot of, like, the Kremlin palace intrigue, that’s what you see in quite a bit of the political reporting from White House reporters, so there were rumors that maybe Trump was getting upset with Kristi Noem, and then there were different rumors about why, but when they created that new job, it kind

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Laura Belin: of reminded me about how in the Soviet Union, they would, you know, the person technically wasn’t being fired, right? They were being sent to Siberia to do some…

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Laura Belin: important thing, right?

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Laura Belin: Basically, they’re being sent to Siberia.

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Dave Price: The other moment, I don’t know if it stuck out to you, sorry, we’re going off on a tangent here, but it’s the Sort of Iowa Down Ballad podcast at the beginning here.

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Dave Price: the… the exchange… normally, I… I don’t…

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Dave Price: I guess sometimes I’m torn about this, but a little bit about how much the public really deserves to know about people’s private lives. If they’re having an affair or whatever, is that really… is that really the public’s business? I mean, plenty of people who are not in politics mess around on their spouse, and divorce and all kinds of stuff like that.

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Dave Price: But in this case, I thought maybe it was a little different, because you’re talking about Corey Lewandowski, who is her top

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Dave Price: aide, or whatever the heck his role is, and that whole exchange probably didn’t look that great either, where she refused, you know, and she said it was tabloid-ish and whatever, but she refused to just flat out say no, which would be the answer you need if you’re talking about a subordinate, somebody in theory you supervise.

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Laura Belin: I think it’s a fair question, because they bought an expensive luxury plane that has.

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Dave Price: $70 million. $70 million.

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Laura Belin: Well, I mean, I will just say, people come to me periodically, I don’t know, probably a few times a year, with some tip about somebody in Iowa politics who’s supposedly having an affair with somebody. I don’t pursue any of those tips or investigate any of those tips. I mean, my feeling is that that’s not really a story, unless there’s some kind of public corruption angle, or…

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Laura Belin: you know, like, somebody getting a job or a contract because of a relationship, or if it were, you know, sexual harassment type of situation, but if it’s just, you know, some legislator is supposedly involved with a lobbyist, like, personally, that’s not the kind of story that I go after. But I think that this was very different, because as you say, Corey Lewandowski, the person she was allegedly having an affair with, and she didn’t deny having an affair with, had a senior position and has been signing off

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Laura Belin: on contracts and things and spending in the department. So I do think that that makes it different.

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Dave Price: The thing that I had on my list, the reason I brought up Nome, I originally had on my short list of things to bring up this week was the Pete Hegseth campaign appearance for Congressman Zach Nunn, when we go to war, or whatever semantics we’re gonna use for saying.

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Dave Price: whatever the U.S. is doing with Iran.

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Dave Price: Conflict, war.

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Kathie Obradovich: press style is that we are at war with Iran.

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Dave Price: Is that alright?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yep, that’s their style. I mean, it…

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Dave Price: I asked Senator Ernst about this this week, and, you know, she’s saying, you know, it’s a war if Congress declares it. She did not feel that Congress needs to declare it.

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Dave Price: the president was within his authority because it’s in the best interest of the United States, and we were at… we were possibly threatened by Iran’s nuclear buildup and all of that, but she did say…

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Dave Price: that it’s… comes down, sort of, to semantics here. There’s not really much difference in whether we’d be at war or not at war. The same stuff, primarily, would be happening. So, whatever you want to call this, I originally had it on my shortlist that I was surprised that they had not canceled

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Dave Price: the Hegsteth appearance here for next Saturday, in light of this, but now Congressman Nunn yesterday had said that this is canceled, so…

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Laura Belin: I mean…

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Laura Belin: I was shocked. So, the first I heard about this event was a post on social media from Zach Nunn’s congressional campaign on March 3rd, so that was Tuesday, and the bombing started on Saturday, early Saturday morning. So, I was shocked that they even announced this event that was scheduled for March 14th.

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Dave Price: They also held it for a while, because this has been set up for a while. Like, truthfully, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t publicly announced yet, because the activists had talked about it at least a week before that.

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Laura Belin: But I… I don’t know, I guess I thought that it was kind of a taboo thing for the Secretary of Defense to be appearing at a blatantly partisan fundraiser anyway. I mean, whether we’re on a war footing or not, I thought that that was just something that Secretaries of defense didn’t really do, but apparently they do now.

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Laura Belin: Anyway, I was surprised that it was announced, given that we were already at war, and multiple people in Zak Nunn’s district had already been killed in a retaliatory Iranian strike, and so I was very shocked that his campaign announced this event.

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Laura Belin: That has now been postponed.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I have a feeling there was a communication breakdown there at some point, so…

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Dave Price: That, that could be. Alright, let’s,

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Dave Price: Maybe one more sort of campaign-y thing, before we get into some legislative news. Congressman Feenster announced about a million-dollar ad buy, statewide ad buy, and… I mean, clearly he has the money in the bank, so he can do that as he looks to…

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Dave Price: try to fend off his Republican challengers in the gubernatorial primary. It…

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Dave Price: I need to play it so that I could prove this, but I believe one of the first words from the narration is about President Trump again. And that has been one of the more striking aspects of this early campaign to me, is how hard Congressman Feenstra is working

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Dave Price: with Republican activists to convince them that he is…

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Dave Price: tight and in step with President Trump.

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Laura Belin: I mean, that’s the goal, but he didn’t endorse Trump before the 2016 or the 2024 caucuses, so I just don’t know if… for the hardcore MAGA part of the base, I don’t know if they’re gonna buy that.

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Laura Belin: I guess we’ll find out.

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Kathie Obradovich: Interesting to me, the timing of this. You know, it’s well before…

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Kathie Obradovich: primary, day, I mean, you could argue that it’s, you know, they somehow have money to burn, and they can be using it now, but it doesn’t strike me that people are super focused on, you know, the people who, yeah, the people who pay close attention are, are engaged in this, but, you know, the people that you’re going to be trying to reach with TBA

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Kathie Obradovich: ads, I don’t think really are engaged yet. So, it just seems like it’s…

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Kathie Obradovich: Possibly too early, to be running at, you know, a huge ad campaign, unless you think you’re in trouble.

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Kathie Obradovich: So, you know, and I think, you know, it looks like, you know, Brad Sherman is announcing new endorsements every day, there’s no real polling, you know, no public polling, so we don’t really know where the race stands. Right. But, you know, it’s actions like that, you know, for me, that make me think, yeah, Randy Feinster has a lot of money, but why is he spending it now if he… unless he’s maybe

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Kathie Obradovich: Thinking he’s in trouble.

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Dave Price: Could be, or maybe a little shock and awe to show that he’s got the cash. I mean, I believe, as we talk, as we record on Friday, Sherman’s the only one, I think.

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Dave Price: who has turned in his signatures with the Secretary of State, right?

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Laura Belin: I have not checked today, but earlier this week, none of them had, so let me just actually look…

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Dave Price: Feenstra goes next week.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, so I’m just looking at the latest…

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Laura Belin: I don’t actually see… well, this might not be the…

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Dave Price: This is live reporting. Let me pull this up, I know.

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Laura Belin: I’ve been checking the candidate list every day here, and I didn’t check it, I didn’t remember to check it this morning.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I don’t know, shock and awe. We all reported how much money was raised, right?

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Laura Belin: Okay, so it is… the only candidate, yeah, the only candidate for governor who’s filed is Brad Sherman. There are quite a few candidates who haven’t filed. I mean.

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Laura Belin: I guess the county conventions are coming up this month, and that’s where people are going to elect the district and state convention delegates, and so if you’re Randy Feenster and you think you’re in trouble, maybe you want to make… get some favorable impressions out there before some of these county conventions meet and elect. If you think that no one’s going to get 35% in the primary, and that you might need to duke it out at the state convention.

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Laura Belin: and then maybe that would be a reason with… for… to run a big ad buy right now. I agree with Kathy, though, it seems too early.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, and again, the people that you’re trying to reach is a pretty small… you know, if it’s convention goers, that’s a pretty small universe. You’ve got a sledgehammer to, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: I don’t know what would be an appropriate tool to use for something small. What you need is a little tiny screwdriver, not a sledgehammer.

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Dave Price: Okay, enough, enough campaign stuff. Let’s get to the Iowa legislature. A few things we wanna, we wanna zone in on a little bit, and one thing that, Speaker Pat Grassley talked about before the session started was this tough on crime.

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Dave Price: package that they were going to look to. And this has really been a Republican theme nationally, right? That we heard in the 2024 campaigns. The stats didn’t really back up

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Dave Price: The realities of crime, I have wondered with no…

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Dave Price: research to back this up. I have wondered if…

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Dave Price: crime is heavier on people’s minds because of cell phones, ring cameras, everything, where we have video of virtually everything, like the smash and grab things, that I know they’d be terrible if you were in a jewelry store that got robbed or something by a bunch of… bunch of criminals or something, but…

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Dave Price: Primarily, crime’s been going down, right? And it… especially violent crime.

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Dave Price: But it is very much top of mind for, it seems like, some in the Republican side, and so the Republicans on the House made it a priority this session so far.

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Kathie Obradovich: People’s perception of crime and the economy don’t necessarily track with reality all the time, it seems like.

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Laura Belin: Well, during the Iowa House debate, the floor manager of one of the bills, the so-called three strikes bill that would increase sentences considerably for some repeat offenders, Representative Stephen Holt talked about how… to rebut the point that we were going to be incarcerating far too many people, he pointed out that Iowa and Arkansas have roughly the same population, but then, you know, Arkansas is incarcerating

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Laura Belin: more than twice as many people as Iowa, so he was kind of making that sound like.

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Laura Belin: like, we aren’t overdoing it, but looking at the state violent crime rates, I mean, all of the Deep South states have significantly higher crime rates than most of the states in the North, but Arkansas has a very high violent crime rate, like, more than twice as high as Iowans, and the homicide rate is considerably higher. So, I don’t know that we necessarily need to model our approach to crime fighting to Arkansas, because they…

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Laura Belin: They do have much higher rates of… especially the homicide, which is supposedly what these bills are going to address.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, you know, Iowa rolled back some of its, sort of, three… I don’t know if Iowa had a three strikes law in the past, but, there were laws like that, where it, you know, jacked up mandatory minimum sentences took away judges’ discretion.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, really, kind of, after the 90s, mid-2000s, they rolled back some of that and looked at sentencing reform, and there was a goal.

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Kathie Obradovich: to try to, A, get nonviolent offenders out of the prisons, if, you know, sooner, if possible, to reverse some of the, really kind of,

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Kathie Obradovich: Out of line,

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Kathie Obradovich: drug sentences, like crack cocaine being, you know, sentences for crack cocaine being so much higher than for other forms of cocaine, which primarily affected Black Iowans. So… so those kinds of reforms now, it seems like we’re turning the page and going the other direction.

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Kathie Obradovich: Cynically, and I, you know, I’ve… and based on nothing, but I, I worry that.

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Kathie Obradovich: This type of…

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Kathie Obradovich: This type of sentencing, you know, you’re… you’re… the other thing they’re doing is, you know, making sure that more people stay in jail and can’t get bail.

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Kathie Obradovich: So that, you know, between those two things, it makes me wonder if we’re… we’re headed for a prison building spree, and and that potentially, which Iowa does not have, but other states do, private prison building. So it worries… it worries me that this trend of legislation, while I’m not saying that that’s the

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Kathie Obradovich: the reason or the cause that this could open the door toward private prison, building and privatization of prisons in Iowa.

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Dave Price: I had wondered through this, and I might be way, way, way off point here, but…

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Dave Price: to your point, so if they’re looking about… if they’re looking at locking up more violent offenders, if that generically is… is kind of the game… the… the game plan here, to go back to what you were talking about a couple years ago, Kathy, where they were looking to try to transition out more non-violent offenders.

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Dave Price: Get them rehabilitated, get them trained with job skills, get them out contributing in the workforce and such.

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Dave Price: If you’re… if you’re no longer interested in that side of things, and the idea is to lock up and keep people locked up longer at a time where primarily legislators are looking for money-saving ways here, as the revenue’s been going down, that would be a tough…

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Dave Price: That would be a tough thing to manage if you’re looking that all of a sudden we’ve got to build a prison or two or three.

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Kathie Obradovich: Exactly, which is why privatization would be the attractive way to go.

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Laura Belin: I was very struck by, during the Iowa House floor debate, again, Representative Holt, the floor manager of this bill.

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Laura Belin: was severely criticizing the Department of Corrections for the fiscal note, so the Legislative Services Agency, which is a nonpartisan analysis.

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Laura Belin: they produce a fiscal note on bills that are expected to have a significant impact on the budget, and the fiscal note on this three strikes bill was pretty considerable, and they’re projecting that by 2031, the fiscal impact due to incarcerating more people and for longer periods would be about $165 million. And, I mean…

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Laura Belin: he almost accused them of falsely and purposefully inflating the cost to try to make it like a poison pill. I mean, he said it wasn’t believable at all, and so… but several of the Democrats raised that point, that where’s the money gonna come from, where our prisons are already over capacity? So, I’m curious to see whether the Senate is going to take this up, because it does seem that it would be quite expensive.

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Kathie Obradovich: His argument was things like, you know, what about the cost to the victims?

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Kathie Obradovich: And some of those costs do fall on the taxpayers, but not necessarily the same sort of cost as the cost of incarceration. And, you know, so he was making a philosophical argument as opposed to a fiscal argument there, I think. And, you know, he also said, well, what about the deterrent effect?

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Kathie Obradovich: And I was a little surprised, I think it was because he was in closing arguments at that point, but no Democrats

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, raise the… the issue that, longer prison sentences haven’t really shown to be deterrence to violent crime. So, so, you know, he’s arguing that, you know, we’ll, you know, people will just think twice, especially if you’ve got three, you know, if you’ve got two strikes, you’re not going to commit that third.

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Kathie Obradovich: felony. Well… That’s not… that’s not really what the data has shown in the past.

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Laura Belin: I think a couple of the Democrats did mention, though, that what deters… first of all, a lot of these repeat offenders, I think it was Representative Jurdy, who works in law enforcement, that the repeat offenders, many times, they have a substance abuse issue, or they have a mental health issue, and that… I think he did mention that longer sentences, that hasn’t been shown to deter crime at all, that addressing some of the root causes, and also just the fear of getting caught.

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Laura Belin: That is different from the fear of whatever your prison sentence is if you do get charged and convicted.

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Kathie Obradovich: The other part of this argument, or this debate, too, was kind of the disregard of the minority impact statements.

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Kathie Obradovich: Which, were put into law, and it, you know, as was mentioned on the floor by unanimous votes of the, Iowa House and Senate, you know, and minority impact statements, you know, look at criminal justice,

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Kathie Obradovich: legislation and, you know, with the effort to determine, you know, whether this will have an outsized impact on, for example, Black Iowans, etc. So…

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, I think that those minority impact statements, it’s looking to me like those are probably on the way out. They’re not really being considered anymore.

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Kathie Obradovich: And that, you know, again, the argument was, well, you know, whoever is committing these crimes should be the ones that are, you know, thrown in jail for longer, but…

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Kathie Obradovich: More… the reason for minority impact statements, it tends to take into account

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Kathie Obradovich: the level of enforcement on certain groups, so that, you know, the idea that, you know, Black Americans are more likely to be arrested for crimes that are being committed by white people at the same rate, essentially.

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Laura Belin: Yes.

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Dave Price: How about we close out with two pieces of legislation in the House that aren’t the same bill, but seem to be a little related here, and that’s… the one was about

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Dave Price: foster parents’ ability to raise their adoptive children according to their biological sex rather than gender identity, and the other one would prevent local jurisdictions from establishing their own civil rights protections that would differ from the state of Iowa. So, thematically, maybe… maybe they’re

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Dave Price: Kind of similar.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so on the, the child… basically, the definition of child abuse was changed in the one bill

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Kathie Obradovich: to say that, parents, you know, who are raising their child and making decisions raising their child, according to that child’s, sexes assigned at birth, are not committing child abuse. A bigger concern about the value… it wasn’t just parents, not just foster parents, it was all parents, but a bigger concern about that, was that some of the language was seen

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Kathie Obradovich: To open the door to potentially conversion therapy, which, you know, basically all of the medical,

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Kathie Obradovich: psychological, medical associations, etc. have, you know, found that this is not effective and can be abusive, where you take someone, a child or someone else, and essentially attempt to persuade them that they, you know, are not, you know, that their gender identity is the same as, you know, what they were assigned at birth.

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Kathie Obradovich: So, the concern about conversion therapy, you know, went through that first bill.

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Kathie Obradovich: This… and then the civil rights issue, you have, since Iowa took, gender identity out of the Civil Rights Code, the state civil rights code last year, you’ve had a number of communities that I think that, it was said that on, on the floor that there were 14 communities that had added,

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Kathie Obradovich: Kept… either kept it in their local civil rights, codes or added it in, and this legislation is preempting that and saying you cannot have stricter, you know, stricter or more expansive civil rights, protections in your city or county code than the states.

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Laura Belin: So, Dave is right, though, that there is also a foster care bill, but it just hasn’t gotten to the floor yet, but it was in subcommittee on Thursday that I… I went to Thursday morning, so the foster care bill is styled as a bill to remedy

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Laura Belin: what proponents claim is religious discrimination, to say that you can’t be excluded from being a foster parent because of your deeply held religious beliefs related to gender and sexual orientation. So, the idea being that families who want to be foster parents, but if they don’t acknowledge, you know, if they don’t believe in LGBTQ people or kids, that they don’t have to

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Laura Belin: acknowledge that when they’re raising the kids. So I went to that subcommittee, and the only people speaking in favor of that bill were the Family Leader, which is a Christian, evangelical Christian conservative organization, and then the Iowa Catholic Conference, and then a whole host of people speaking against it. But Kathy’s right that the bill that was debated on the floor earlier in the week was more broadly about parents, and that you can’t say they’re committing child abuse if all they’re doing is trying to raise a child according

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Laura Belin: to their sex assigned at birth, but several of the speakers, several of the Democrats who spoke during the floor debate described really, frankly, horrific emotional abuse and other kinds of abuse that would be allowed under that law if the parents were… could say, well, we’re, you know, all we’re trying to do is make sure that, you know, he’s acting like a boy and not a girl.

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Dave Price: These were both, you know, so we just talked about a few of these things. As we wrap up here, I was…

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Dave Price: I was… Thinking about how the week has gone, and the clear…

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Dave Price: difference in what the House Republicans have done with legislation and full debate during the week with what the Senate’s doing.

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Dave Price: And I was trying to figure out… and I didn’t ask, I wasn’t there for Speaker Grassley’s avail. Laura, I know you were. I had to run off to something else at the same time.

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Dave Price: But I was curious if there was a reason for that, if there was a reason for kind of the rush to push a bunch of this through, because they’ve got through quite a… I know they pulled a few things that they didn’t end up bringing up. Clearly, the Senate had a much more moderate schedule, and has so far, and are we just going to end up with a really lopsided pile where the House does a bunch of stuff, the Senate doesn’t?

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Dave Price: And they… You know, combine on a few things and get on out of there whenever that is, or…

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Kathie Obradovich: No.

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Dave Price: There’s something else at play here.

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Kathie Obradovich: it’s not unusual, that the House, you know, they’ve got double the lawmakers there. They do move a lot more bills, typically, than the Senate does.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, you know, even though both parties, both chambers are controlled by Republicans, there definitely has been tension between the House and Senate over certain bills. I mean, we saw it, I think we’ve seen it the last few years with the eminent domain stuff that the House has done. I think that we will… we are seeing it… we saw it last year, where a lot of the bills being turned out by the higher education

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Kathie Obradovich: Education Committee in the House, which doesn’t even exist in the Senate. They just… there’s just an Education Committee in the Senate, but a lot of those bills didn’t make it through.

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Kathie Obradovich: In the Senate, and so I… I think it’s not unusual. It’ll… when we get toward funnel, the second funnel, I think we’ll be able to see…

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, just how lopsided it really is. I mean, it’s…

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Dave Price: Which is soon, right? Are we 2 weeks from that?

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Laura Belin: I believe.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yes.

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Laura Belin: I… so I did ask Sen… Speaker Grassley, and by the way, the Bleeding Heartland YouTube channel, I’ve been trying to post every week the… my videos of the media availabilities of the House Speaker and the Democratic House and Senate leaders. So I did ask why this focus on transgender Iowans, and I asked the Speaker to specifically react to what State Representative Amy Wichtenahl, who’s the only

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Laura Belin: trans member of the legislature. She said that the message from this legislature is that transgender people are not welcome in Iowa. And I asked why there had been such a focus with so many bills about such a small population. And he said that his caucus, that they thought it was important to address some of these issues. They felt it was important. He described it as an end run, that cities

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Laura Belin: shouldn’t be able to do an end run around the state’s civil rights law. I think other people would see it differently, that there’s no reason why the state couldn’t have a floor for civil rights protections that local governments go beyond. But as for specifically whether, how his reaction to the statement that our transgender people welcome in Iowa, he said that there’s a reason why

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Laura Belin: people say Iowa Nice, which I think would, you know, most people in the LGBTQ community would not be feeling the Iowa Nice vibes after the last 5 years of one bill after another passing. But I don’t know whether the Senate is going to take up these… this latest round of anti-trans bills or not.

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Dave Price: I think, I was watching that exchange that you had with the speaker, and…

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Dave Price: His… his answer to that sort of shows how… kind of his measured responses to things.

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Dave Price: And even when he’s talking about these more cultural kind of issues.

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Dave Price: And to his credit, he stands up there every week and… and takes our questions, which we appreciate, too.

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Laura Belin: Absolutely. Yeah, we rarely get immediate availability. I mean, we’ve had a couple this year from the Senate Majority Leader, but we do, almost every week, we get a chance to ask questions of the House Speaker.

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Kathie Obradovich: He can’t… there’s only so far he can get out ahead of his caucus and predict, you know, what bills are gonna pass and not, if he… if they haven’t counted the votes, so…

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Kathie Obradovich: And, you know, complicating that, and we’ve seen this with some legislation that has come up… have come up after being delayed, perhaps, there have been a lot of absences. You know, people are… there are a number of lawmakers who are sick.

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Kathie Obradovich: There are lawmakers who, you know, for whatever reason, you know, haven’t been there, and so they’re… in addition to, you know, having trouble

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Kathie Obradovich: pretend, you know, potentially knowing which bills are going for just because they haven’t counted. They may not know until they know, you know, count noses and see who’s actually there that day.

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Dave Price: Alright, let’s put a bow on it for this week. We had a long…

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Dave Price: Long journey to start, sorry, thanks for indulging me on the… the Christie Noem thing was just too much.

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Laura Belin: It is fascinating.

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Dave Price: That was a fascinating one, for sure. That is… that’s like a documentary, just waiting to be told, that whole… that whole situation, and we’ll find out… I think, supposedly this weekend, we’re supposed to learn about her new job.

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Dave Price: Whatever that was.

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Laura Belin: I think they’ll still be investigating some of what happened with some of those contracts at DHS, though.

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Dave Price: Yeah, I think that’s… I think that’s safe to say. Thank you both. Good to see you both, and have a great weekend.

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Laura Belin: Thank you, you too.

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Dave Price: Thanks to our producer, Spencer Dirks, and as I started this week’s conversation, thank you to all of you, no matter if you’re watching us, listening.

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Dave Price: Reading the transcript, however it is you consume this conversation every week, we very much appreciate you, and if you would please, please consider becoming a subscriber to keep this sucker going, and also, if you can forward this and tell all your friends and family and coworkers, people at church, all those kind of things.

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Dave Price: We would appreciate that very much until we get the Kathy O appearance on the buses all across the state of Iowa again. That’s when we know. Maybe that’s the next fundraiser we do, Kathy. Get Kathy on a bus again.

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Kathie Obradovich: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That was horrifying.

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Dave Price: I’m sure the people loved it.

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Dave Price: We’ll work on that. We’ll see if we have progress for that next week. All right, thank you, everybody. We’ll talk to you next week.

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