We’re recording on a chaotic Friday afternoon as the Iowa legislature pushes past its scheduled adjournment date with no clear end in sight. The big unresolved question is property taxes — no deal yet, and we’re skeptical lawmakers can go home without getting something done. We also break down Governor Reynolds’ surprise water quality announcement, which dropped Friday morning instead of the property tax deal many expected. The plan totals $300-plus million over 12 years, but we dig into how much of that is actually new money (about $18.5 million) versus shifted funds — and why the lack of a public committee process is raising eyebrows heading into an election year.

We also talk through Zach Lahn’s decision to skip the Iowa PBS gubernatorial debate, challenging Randy Feenstra to a series of one-on-one debates instead. We all agree it was a serious strategic mistake — the debate questions were practically tailor-made for him, and Adam Steen walked away with the spotlight. Finally, we touch on legislation that would allow the state budget to automatically roll over if a governor refuses to sign — a significant shift in the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.

Thanks to all of you that help us grow our audience by sharing. It means everything to us. We’re especially grateful to our paid subscribers. We recently reduced our monthly subscription if you’d like to join!

AI generated transcript below:

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Dave Price: Welcome, everybody, to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by Kathie Obradovich and Laura Belin on this mid-Friday afternoon. Holy, holy, holy, do we have a lot of stuff going on.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yes.

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Laura Belin: Too much.

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Dave Price: For real. It has been a bit since I’ve stood under the Golden Dome.

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Dave Price: and had people lay out so many different scenarios about how this weekend will go, and again, we’re talking on mid-Friday afternoon, which is, for those of you watching this podcast, Laura is tucked into a room

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Dave Price: that she found that was temporarily empty, so the drama of this next half hour could be whether security goes in there and drags her out of this private room, because this is like the governor’s secret room you’re in, right? Right?

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Laura Belin: Not the governor’s, no. It is a different room. The Republicans are caucusing downstairs, so I think I’m safe for now.

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Dave Price: Alright, so for the non-junkies out there, although probably a lot of people who listen to this really know what’s going on, but, like, it is non-stop caucus, so for those

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Dave Price: for those of you good folk who only pay, you know, kind of casual attention to all this stuff, the caucuses, it’s where the Republicans have their private meeting, the Democrats have their private meeting, they do their strategy, they do their yelling and screaming and talking and…

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Dave Price: plotting out with each other. They’re really the meetings we in the media really wish we could get in.

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Dave Price: Because those would be far more interesting than debates, am I right?

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Laura Belin: Correct.

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Kathie Obradovich: Except a few… I’m not… you’re gonna send me down a rabbit hole, but if.

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Dave Price: abuse.

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Kathie Obradovich: ago, Democrats invited the media into their caucuses, and I quickly, quickly determined that I really didn’t want to be there after all. When was that, Kathy? Because it was all performative. I mean.

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Dave Price: I just put on the show.

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Kathie Obradovich: for us, which we then got to see again on the floor, so it really wasn’t worth it.

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Dave Price: In this case, though, I think… I think there have been spirited, discussions in the… especially in the House Republican caucus about whether they would go along with the, Senate Republican idea and some Democrats to raise the gas tax.

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Dave Price: Regardless of whether that’s part of the overall piece of the property tax discussion, or if it’s a separate thing. But, it seems as if that has been a spirited

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Dave Price: discussion this week, but I don’t know what you both have heard, but… and again, I have to keep saying we’re talking Friday afternoon. And it’s already…

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Dave Price: weird and unusual that both chambers are there on a Friday, doing stuff, and the plan is, as we record this, that they’re probably… both chambers going to be there this weekend.

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Dave Price: As soon as I say these words, they might be outdated as soon as they get out of my lips, but maybe they both try to power through and work overnight Saturday so they can adjourn on Sunday?

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Dave Price: Or maybe the house powers through a bunch of stuff except for property taxes, and they go home.

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Dave Price: for… however long, until a deal is made and the Senate comes back next week? What are you hearing?

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Laura Belin: I don’t know, I brought a change of clothes and a toothbrush, just in case we’d be working all night tonight and finishing up tomorrow, but the debate list for Saturday, which is extremely weird to even have a debate list for Saturday, it doesn’t have property taxes on it, so I don’t know if they plan…

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Dave Price: No deal, I don’t think.

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Laura Belin: Finish all the budget stuff?

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Laura Belin: for this weekend, and then send everyone home, and then have leadership hash out a property tax thing. I do not know what they’re planning.

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Dave Price: Kathy, you’re a wise woman.

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Kathie Obradovich: seen the… has anybody seen the standings, Bill? Because…

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Kathie Obradovich: I have no idea.

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Kathie Obradovich: that’s the harbinger, typically. It’s one of the last bills, and the fact that they, you know, it hasn’t even, at least as far as I’ve seen, I’ve been in pseudo-rabies world this afternoon, so that’s how crazy things are going on here. But, the… the last I checked, I hadn’t seen the standings bill yet, and they’re not going home without that.

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Dave Price: I’m still skeptical, maybe I’m gonna be wrong, but… I just…

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Dave Price: I’m skeptical that… because one… one legislator told me a scenario where

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Dave Price: They work this weekend, they get everything done, property taxes, and then they’re like, you know, we tried, we’re not gonna do it, and maybe they…

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Dave Price: Appropriate some money in whichever way they do it.

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Dave Price: Whether it’s its own thing, so that the communities can use that, this shared service money, to help them explore options to kind of work together and save money like that, so that could at least potentially reduce some demand on property taxes, or they hire that Texas company

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Dave Price: With the money that the house already has access to, but that was, like, a hundred and something million, right? So that was a big old chunk of money.

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Laura Belin: 4 million.

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Dave Price: Yeah.

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Dave Price: But it’s… it just feels like there’s… if there’s no deal on property taxes, it’d be hard… I don’t know how they go home without a.

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Laura Belin: They cannot go home. I think that if… that in that.

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Dave Price: Like, home home for good.

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Laura Belin: they send everybody home, and leadership continues to work for a few weeks, because that happened in… I think it was 2021 or 2022. They had a few weeks where basically no one was around, and then they came back and finished things up around May… it was right before Memorial Day, so…

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Laura Belin: I can’t imagine that they would adjourn for the year without doing something on property taxes. They’ve been promising it so much.

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Dave Price: And would the governor allow that? Would she call him back in special session? Like, it seems like she wants a deal.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, yeah, I… Don’t know, but I can’t imagine that.

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Kathie Obradovich: The other thing, and I may be getting ahead of ourselves here, that tells me that nobody’s really that ready to go home, was the introduction of a major water quality plan by the governor this morning, 10 days after the legislature was supposed to adjourn. I mean, you know, that…

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Kathie Obradovich: Yes, supposedly there’s an agreement with the legislature, but it’s still going to take some time, I think, to… I mean, we were talking about two budget bills that would have to be amended with this new plan.

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Kathie Obradovich: So I, you know, I was a little shocked, this morning. I figured the governor was going to announce a deal on property taxes this morning, and instead she comes out with this

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Kathie Obradovich: Fairly weighty water quality plan, in terms of, you know, money that has to be added to the budget.

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Dave Price: And I had heard earlier in the week that Secretary Mike Naig had been meeting privately with Republican legislators to try to build momentum and work out the specifics on what ended up becoming this bill, but it just seemed like, gosh, this is really late in the session to try to do that.

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Dave Price: But, they must have figured it out.

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Laura Belin: I confirmed today with the major environmental organizations that none of them were consulted on any of this before this big, supposed water quality investment plan was drafted, and I would love to see the internal polling for Mike Naig’s campaign for Secretary of Agriculture, because all of a sudden, as you say, after the legislature should have been done already.

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Laura Belin: We see this huge water quality initiative when the Democratic candidate, Chris Jones, has been campaigning, and he’s made clean water the centerpiece of his campaign. He’s literally said, if you think our water is clean enough, vote for the other guy, and if you think our water is too polluted, vote for me. And so, all of a sudden, we see this huge plan. And why didn’t we see it earlier in the year? Why didn’t this bill go through subcommittee and have full committee discussion?

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Laura Belin: on it, so I’m just fascinated by how all of this came together at the last minute.

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Dave Price: Now, and I do believe, and I should have said this up front, that they have been working on something for a while. It’s my understanding the pieces maybe didn’t…

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Dave Price: come together until late to get this all put together, but I believe there has been an effort throughout the legislative session by NAIG to get something on this, and I appreciate what you’re saying about Chris Jones, because he’s made it a big deal. And even on the Republican gubernatorial side.

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Dave Price: Zach Lane, who skipped the debate, which we can talk about in a bit, but, I mean, he’s talked about water and the environment and all of that as well, so it does seem like it maybe has a little greater prominence right now.

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Laura Belin: A bill like this should have gone through the committee process to get public input on it. It shouldn’t be dropped at the end and added as an amendment to budget bills.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I mean, the discussion…

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Kathie Obradovich: it seems odd that the discussion has not been more public. If it has been going on, which I don’t doubt. I mean, obviously, this isn’t a new issue, and it is getting greater prominence, one, because of the nitrate spike last year that caused the lawn watering ban with Central Iowa Water Works, and they are including $25 million of one-time money to expand

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Kathie Obradovich: Their nitrite… nitrate treatment.

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Kathie Obradovich: capacity at Central Iowa Water Works, so,

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Kathie Obradovich: So, you know, I do think that this is something that has probably been on the radar for a while, but I am surprised that, you know, whenever water quality would come up, and, you know, there’s also been a lot of discussions about Iowa’s fast-rising cancer rates, and, you know, what, you know, to what extent… because there hasn’t really been a lot of testing to what extent water quality fits into that.

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Kathie Obradovich: Looked at other types of cancers.

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Kathie Obradovich: But I do think that they’re, you know, aware of it, and certainly have to be aware that the public is increasingly aware of health risks and concerns about water quality. But it seems to me like they could have

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, made this more of a public discussion, you know? My name?

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Laura Belin: presented to the legislature the Iowa Farm Act, which was this huge, wide-ranging bill with all these things on ag. There was nothing in it about any of this stuff.

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Laura Belin: In March, there was a pretty big spike in nitrate levels, and Chris Jones wrote about this on his newsletter, The Swine Republic, that normally, just the way these cycles go, March is usually a lower time for nitrate, so it was extremely concerning to people to see these high levels, even in March, and normally when the Central Iowa Water Works System wouldn’t even be… have to be functioning at that time of year.

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Laura Belin: to me, it looks like this has been done. I mean, maybe they spent several weeks on it, but I don’t think this is something that they’ve been planning since all of the problems last year, because otherwise, Naig could have introduced it earlier in the session when he introduced his other… the other things on his wish list.

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Dave Price: One thing that I was wondering, listening to all of this, and then looking at the handout afterwards, you know, they started doing numbers, which, as the TV guy, that’s, like, the last thing you want. There’s nothing worse in a television story than a gazillion numbers to throw at people while they’re cooking dinner, you know?

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Dave Price: And I was trying to follow, alright, what’s the new money out of this? Because you’re talking about a bunch of stuff, and my notes aren’t in front of me, but it’s 300-plus million over 12 years, I think are the top-line numbers they’re talking about.

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Dave Price: And we talked to different staff members after the news conference Friday morning, and it sounds like it’s about $18.5 million of new money.

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Dave Price: And the rest of it is shifted money.

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Dave Price: And that was the one thing I was wondering, if they have been working on this, at least from a bigger picture level for a while.

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Dave Price: was…

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Dave Price: were they trying to figure out what would fund this thing? And, you know, at the end of the day, are you gonna commit new money to this? And so the way they’re doing it is largely just…

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Dave Price: They’re alleging that money was sitting here and not being used over here, and they’re gonna move that here, move this here, move this here, move this here. And I wonder if that at all was part of the… the, sort of last-minute feel of this, that this is the way they’ve found, to do something?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, although it’s not uncommon, you know, for ideas to come out ahead of the funding mechanism. I mean, they could have been talking about the plan without knowing exactly how they were going to fund it, for the entire legislative session. Again, you know, I think

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, as, well, I mean, Austin Bates responded, a Democrat from Des Moines responded that a drop in the bucket is better than a dry bucket. You know, I think that, you know, they should get credit for, understanding that this is an important issue.

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Kathie Obradovich: For people, and that, you know, half a million dollars for water quality monitoring, for example, which,

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Kathie Obradovich: it replaces the $600,000 that they were no longer going to do through University of Iowa. Now they’ve got a half million dollars going through DNR, you know, for example, and so at least they’re going to be doing water quality monitoring.

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Kathie Obradovich: So.

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Laura Belin: I wasn’t able to ask a question during the press conference because I didn’t get called on, but my question was about this water monitoring. So there are two different… there’s the DNRs, ambient water quality monitoring, which is getting an extra half a million dollars.

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Laura Belin: But Senator Rosenboom did tell me after the press conference that the agreement on the Ag and Natural Resources budget, they are allocating $300,000 from the state to fund that other, the University of Iowa-based water sensor network that needs $600,000 a year. And he claimed that there are other actors, I think Johnson County may be one, Polk County may be one, the Isaac

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Laura Belin: Walton League, maybe trying to raise some money, that they’ll cobble together matching funds, so that would be $600,000 to keep that sensor network going. That’s the real-time monitoring.

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Dave Price: That’s true.

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Laura Belin: of nitrates all over the state, 60 or 70, whatever points that they’re monitoring. And I asked Chris Jones about that this afternoon, and he said that, really, we shouldn’t even need this… the taxpayers shouldn’t even need to fund that, because that program was always funded through the Groundwater Protection Fund, which is basically like the tax on fertilizer. And a few years ago, the Republican lawmakers diverted that money away from the

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Laura Belin: University of Iowa, but all they would have to do is just redirect that, and they wouldn’t have to use any general fund money for the water sensors. They could just use the fertilizer tax money. But when I asked him about what his reaction was to this plan rolled out this morning, he said that, first of all, all of the burden is going to be on the taxpayers. They are not asking any big ag… none of the chemical companies or farmers or nobody involved with creating the

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Laura Belin: has to spend anything. It’s just the whole taxpayers of Iowa, and he said he likened it to putting more band-aids and diapers, doing the same thing we’ve been doing for 50 years, which hasn’t improved the water quality, so he was not impressed with the plan.

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Dave Price: Does make you wonder if we’re gonna see water quality just kind of rise up

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Dave Price: In prominence in people’s mind, not just in pockets of people, but kind of a broader…

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Dave Price: segment of our voting population as we start looking in November.

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Laura Belin: Well, yeah, it’s certainly going to be more salient than it has been in previous election cycles, I think.

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Kathie Obradovich: And I don’t think they would be doing this if they didn’t think voters cared about it, so… I mean, it strikes me as being almost like a panic, move, here. End of the legislative session, you know, right before going out into primary election season, so…

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Dave Price: Any… any other additional thoughts? I want to get to the governor’s debate before we run out of time, from Tuesday night, and we’ll also have the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition that happens Friday evening, so we can’t really talk about that too much, but what is unique about it, other than Ted Cruz coming back to Iowa.

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Dave Price: as the replacement after Mark Wayne Mullen was the original, headliner, and then

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Dave Price: Of course, he had to go replace Kristi Noem, for the Trump administration, but this might be the only time where all five Republicans running for governor will be in the same place

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Dave Price: sort of at the same time before the June 2nd primary. They will be in front of this crowd, which is supposed to be more than 1,000 people, one at a time, as they are up there with the Republican Party of Chair Jeff Kaufman. So it’s not a debate. I don’t even know if forum’s the right, really, thing to call it, probably not. It’s just sort of…

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Dave Price: It’s kind of like five conversations back-to-back to back to back to back, whatever, that Kauffman’s going to lead. So it’s at least an interesting dynamic where, for these 1,200 people in the room, they can kind of, if they want to sample a little bit, these five, it could

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Dave Price: Might be a unique situation, because we might not see another one of them.

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Dave Price: Okay, so, the debate. So we had a debate… oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cut off. Did anybody else have anything else on legislature? We’re all in.

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Laura Belin: No, I know, I’m just gonna have to catch up. I hope the Faith and Freedom thing will be on C-SPAN so I can watch it later, because I’m not gonna be able to get there tonight.

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Dave Price: Fair enough. Okay, so Tuesday night, Iowa PBS has a debate. Three of the 5 showed up.

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Dave Price: I’m putting together my TV story to preview the thing before I head on over there, then I get an alert that Zach Lane’s gonna have a news conference over at the Statehouse at 2 o’clock. Of course, the first thing, as a selfish journalist, you’re like, son of a… you know, I’ve already got… I’m already on deadline, now I can’t ignore it, right?

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Dave Price: I feel like I gotta run up there and get it, so it jacks up the day. But anyway, so Zach Lane does a news conference to explain that he is not going to be at the debate, he’s not going to debate unless Randy Spienstra starts showing up.

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Dave Price: He challenges Feenstra to do a series of statewide debates, four different areas of the state, but if Feenstra doesn’t agree to do that, then he says he’s going to Rob Sand, the Democrats’ candidate for governor, and he’s going to challenge him to do one-on-one debates.

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Dave Price: So what that means is that for an hour that night, the other three candidates, Eddie Andrews, Brad Sherman, and Adam Steen, they get the stage to themselves, and Zach Lane’s name is not mentioned in those 60 minutes.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I… so last week, I predicted that Zach Lane would change his mind and show up.

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Dave Price: I thought so, too.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, because it’s insanity. I think it’s political malpractice not to show up, when you’re in the position that Zach Lane is in trying to make the case to Republican primary voters that you’re the best alternative to Randy Feenstra. And instead, you know, instead of being an alternative to Randy Feenstra, you join him in not being

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Kathie Obradovich: on the stage. I mean, that just doesn’t make sense to me. And also, it would have been a great opportunity for Zach Lane to get his views and, you know, try to find ways to stand out in the field. So I just thought.

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Kathie Obradovich: There was no way he would miss it. And yeah, okay, so he has the news conference, he gets in the stories, you know, he gets some quotes in the stories that everybody wrote about the debate, but that,

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Kathie Obradovich: to me, I guess, was, just a big mistake.

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Laura Belin: It was a huge mistake. I mean, I thought it was a mistake last week, but then after listening to the debate, the questions were perfectly teed up for Zach Lane. They asked about water quality, they asked about cancer, they asked about data centers, where he could have touted his plan to have five times the property tax on new data centers, and

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Laura Belin: I just think it was a huge gift to Adam Steen for Zach Lane not to be there. And there was a… specifically, there was a question about whether these herbicide and pesticide manufacturers should have immunity, which is something Zach Lane highlights. Adam Steen dodged the question, he kind of danced around. If Zach Lane had been there, he could have said, he didn’t answer the question, and let me tell you that when I’m governor, I’ll never sign, you know, whatever it is.

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Laura Belin: these big companies, they’re… they’ve lied about how their chemicals are hurting people, and we shouldn’t be giving any of these companies immunity, and he just wasn’t there, so he didn’t get an opportunity. So it was really a huge mistake. I don’t know why. I mean, for him to say the debates are a farce because Randy Feenstra’s not there, well, it doesn’t… it only helps Feenstra if the rest of the field remains splintered and there’s no consolidation

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Laura Belin: alternative, so I just didn’t understand it at all.

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Dave Price: Clearly, that was their campaign strategy, you know, going into this, but I was wondering…

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Dave Price: Like, I assume… I don’t know if Lane watched the debate, I assume he did.

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Dave Price: I assume at least somebody from his campaign did, and I was wondering, like, what were they thinking watching this for the 60 minutes, right? Because, like, you know, when you’re at home watching certain things, you know, like… like when we watch Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune. That’s still on TV, right? You know, you blurt out, and you’re like, how can you not know that answer?

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Dave Price: Like, during a debate, I mean, it’s sort of the same thing, right? Sometimes it seems so obvious, and you’re like, dude, what are you doing? Answer the question, or he didn’t answer that one, or she didn’t do this, you know, whatever. I was wondering what Lane and his people were thinking. Like, were they sitting there going, we made the right call.

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Dave Price: Because we can all talk about, like, with Feenstra, right? Like, for the sake of the educated voter population, clearly, we are… we would all be better served if all candidates are up there on a stage answering questions, right?

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Dave Price: We can also, because we’ve done this a long time, you can also then make up a list of reasons why

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Dave Price: it likely makes sense for Randy Feenstra not to debate, because of if he’s the true frontrunner, and if…

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Dave Price: he has polling that shows him far above the rest, he doesn’t feel like there’s any true benefit, so it’s more… it’s more risk than reward, right? But for Lane, it was such a risky choice to do that, and I just could not get over, like, what are they thinking watching this? And then, how do you pivot back

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Dave Price: So, for the other debate invites that have been out there, like mine… then…

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Dave Price: like, is he gonna pass on all those? Or, you know, how do you, like, pivot back in and be like, just kidding, I’m in?

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Dave Price: I don’t know, because, I mean, you get a one-day little burst of stories, but… I don’t know.

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Laura Belin: Well, and I don’t know how many Republican primary voters watch the Iowa PBS debate. Yeah.

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Laura Belin: Let’s say there are 200,000 GOP primary voters, or really, the turnout could even be more than 200,000. But if he were at the debate, his campaign could be pulling clips of videos to be sharing all over social media.

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Laura Belin: And they could milk that for days. It wouldn’t be just… it would just be a one-day story in the major news media, but his campaign could pull out a lot of material that they.

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Dave Price: It could be.

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Laura Belin: from that. And instead, Steen’s campaign was able to do that, because he was on stage sounding very confident, and talking up himself as the alternative to Randy Feenstra, so…

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Laura Belin: I don’t know. I mean, I hope we do see more debates. I think, ironically, Randy Feenster had the best excuse for not being at this one, because as it turned out, they were taking important votes in Congress this week. They weren’t originally supposed to, and that’s not why he declined the invitation, because he’s declined invitations to multi-candidate events where he’s literally just a few miles down the road. But in this case, you know.

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Dave Price: it worked out.

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Laura Belin: He’s gotta be really happy that he’s gonna go to the Faith and Freedom crowd and say, like, hey, we just passed a farm bill this week. He actually has an accomplishment he can talk about.

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Dave Price: Somebody explained this to me years ago, this was long before we had social media influencers, but it talked about that, well, you know, we go crazy in the media about debates, and who does it, and who shows up, who doesn’t do it, although most times in the past, people used to do it. But we do our stories, and the question’s always, you know, who won, who lost, who helped, whatever. But I was told years and years ago that one of the bigger benefits

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Dave Price: from doing a debate, unless you completely

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Dave Price: crap the bed. You know, just… you’re just absolutely horrible, you know, like Rick Perry’s moments when he couldn’t think of the three, federal agencies that he was going to, get rid of.

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Dave Price: That one of the better parts of this is that

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Dave Price: even if you yourself don’t invest the time, somebody in your extended circle might, and so if they’re like, hey, did you see what Kathy O said last night during the debate? She’s a freaking genius, I’ve never thought about that before. And then it’s like the ripple, right? When you drop a… like, drop a pebble into the… into the lake, and you get all the stuff around it? Like, that’s how stuff…

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Dave Price: This was before social media got crazy, so to your point, Laura, it’s, like, even more important now, probably, if your campaign’s able to pull a snippet, whether it’s one of those, we got them moments, or just something really good, you just blast that thing out for weeks and weeks and weeks, and Lane will not have that vehicle

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Dave Price: To do that, unless they can really get the bang some other way.

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Kathie Obradovich: You also have to look beyond the primary, right? I mean, yeah, so the Iowa PBS viewers may not all be Republican primary voters, but I would bet that if they’re watching Iowa Press, they’re voters, at least in the general election.

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Dave Price: For sure.

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Kathie Obradovich: And so, you know, especially when you’re a lesser-known candidate, free media is free media.

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Kathie Obradovich: You just don’t… you don’t turn it down unless, you know, you’re really thinking that it is going to hurt you in some way. And, you know, at this point, most of these candidates don’t have anything to lose.

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Dave Price: Exactly. Alright, the clock is hurting me because I have to go run and go do something, so… but I… I didn’t, we had in our notes beforehand, so I don’t want to forget this topic, and that’s the legislation that would…

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Dave Price: If a legislature and governor do not agree on a budget.

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Dave Price: Eventually, at the end of the session, then you basically just…

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Dave Price: use in the new fiscal year your current budget. This came up… we talked about this weeks ago. Senator Clemish, the Senate Majority Leader, had talked about this is not anything to do with Governor Rob Sand. This is, this came about because of the shutdown we just saw in DC, and we don’t want any of that stuff.

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Dave Price: What’s the implication from this?

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, they could, you know, they may come in handy this year if they don’t get around.

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Kathie Obradovich: But, you know, what they did, they had that… they had this other bill that limited the gubernatorial powers during, for example, a pandemic, that you can’t shut down, church services, and you can’t tell people not to gather in their homes, and, you know, all of these things that, you know, Republicans ended up not liking, that, frankly.

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Kathie Obradovich: Governor Kim Reynolds did some of this during the COVID-19 pandemic, shut down businesses, etc. And…

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Dave Price: President.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, and so…

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Kathie Obradovich: So what they did was they took this other bill, this budget resolution bill that had not been advancing and amended it on. So now we’ve got this package of, you know, sort of gubernatorial power,

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Kathie Obradovich: I guess diminishing their power, taking away some powers.

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Kathie Obradovich: And, the other thing they did with this budget resolution, which made it even more unfavorable for a governor, is to say that if the legislature… this only would then apply if the legislature had passed a budget, and the governor doesn’t sign it.

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Kathie Obradovich: So now, the veto power that the governor has to veto a budget and bring the legislature essentially back into session

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Kathie Obradovich: to avoid a shutdown has now been, you know, where the majority party doesn’t even have to bother to try to override a veto of a budget bill. They’ll just say, yes, you know, we’ll go with last year’s numbers and we’ll see you next year, you know? So that… I think they made that bill even worse for a governor.

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Laura Belin: And they… well, part of the reason why they ran this amendment during the floor debate is, and we talked about this weeks ago when this bill came up. Last year, we had all this drama in the Iowa Senate around eminent domain, because about a dozen Republican senators said, we won’t vote for any budget bills unless you bring up this House

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Laura Belin: eminent domain bill to the Senate floor. And so, I think the reason why this Senate budget bill had not been advancing is that you had Republican senators who didn’t want to give up their leverage to hold the budget hostage. So, the way it reads now, they can’t adjourn without passing a budget, right? They still have to pass a budget, and that means that holdouts in the Republican caucus and the majority party could still say.

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Laura Belin: hey, we demand a vote on something else before we’ll pass any budget bills, but as you say, it completely violates the separation of powers, or the checks and balances that we’re used to, to say, like, well, we’re gonna pass our budget, and then the governor, you can either sign it or not sign it, but it doesn’t matter. Like, we’re not negotiating with you. And so, it is a pretty serious shift in the balance. I don’t know, have you talked to

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Laura Belin: House Republicans about whether they’ll accept the Senate amendment, because I haven’t.

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Dave Price: I have.

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Laura Belin: I’ve never heard whether they will.

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Dave Price: I haven’t, and we may get plenty of downtime this weekend to chat, depending on how this all shakes out. Thank you all, good to talk to you. I have a feeling we may talk this weekend at time or 12.

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Laura Belin: Yep. I have some chocolate reserves to help.

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Dave Price: Oh my gosh.

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Laura Belin: Stay awake in the middle of the night, so…

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Dave Price: Always a good thing. Thanks for joining us this week, everybody. Man, I’m not sure we’ve recorded a show where we had so much up in the air before, but next week’s show, we’ll really have a lot to talk about. We’ll see if the legislature’s done, and who knows what else we’ll have to talk about. Thanks for all of you for joining us each week. Thanks for all of you who are contributing financially to pay the bills for this thing, and we appreciate all of you for sharing this with friends and family.

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Dave Price: to help us grow week after week. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you next week.

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