Pray for divided government

Iowa can’t stand another four years of zealotry

2025 was arduous and is good to have behind us. The fever might have broken.

Trump was raving mad on TV last week, almost spitting into the camera. This just days after saying that he doesn’t want Somalis living here because they are garbage. It was astonishing to hear even this president say he would bring the full force of the federal government against its citizens.

It’s all Joe Biden’s fault, he snarled.

He is tanking. People are laughing him off. Marjorie Taylor Green taunts him, a special sort of hell on Earth.

Republicans are bound to lose control of the House and might even blow the Senate over rising health care costs alone, not to mention beef.

Iowa should flip at least one congressional seat and perhaps even a Senate race.

It could barely have been worse last spring as Republicans controlling Iowa government stripped trans people of their civil rights, banned diversity programs and earned a 93% approval rating from the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC). Pretty scary.

Plus, they piled up a $1 billion state budget deficit, which is not the Iowa way.

This will allow us to return to divided government and our good sense.

State Auditor Rob Sand is having a field day. He is issuing report cards — Iowa gets an F on the economy for being in last place and education for falling from the top to somewhere around mediocre. He has ads running about how Iowans like pie and saving government money. Sand is defining himself as the Boy Scout while the Republicans are moaning about Randy Feenstra not showing up. Sand talks just enough about private-school vouchers draining public education to keep the base awake with a determined measure of hope. Fair enough. When we are eliminating entire classes of people from having civil rights — Somali or trans — I can settle for divided government with a CEO who is not pure. Sand has a lot of money, like the Republicans, that comes with strings attached.

A man of frustrated rage, Chris Jones, is set to announce in a couple weeks that he will run for Secretary of Agriculture against Republican incumbent Mike Naig. Jones will force Democrats to talk about clean water. Naig says Jones hates farmers. Iowans know BS when they smell it. Clean water is not optional anymore. The secretary of agriculture has no authority except to shut down crooked grain dealers. Jones can do no harm except to point out that we poison ourselves by our own volition. Having Jones carping down the hallway and around the Rotunda actually would help Gov. Sand with the corporate lobby. “See what I have to deal with every day down here, fellas? Cut me some slack!”

Sand will not strip people of their rights and shame them. He will not allow public education to be parceled out. Universities could breathe again. He will attempt to block our worst excesses.

The last 10 years have been a bad trip for Iowa. The pain coincides with Donald Trump winning the nomination and Kim Reynolds’s tenure as governor. It is not an accident. Iowa became a hothouse for reactionaries like Attorney General Brenna Bird, who is now forced to spend money defending herself against Nate Willems, whom heretofore nobody had heard of.

Sand expects to deal with a Republican House and Senate.

Good on Iowa. No more book bans. No more gay shaming. No more hating on immigrants. We will take that in a heartbeat. With Chris Jones hacking on it as a good Dutch uncle should.

Odds are (74%, according to electionbettingodds.com) that Trump has already lost the US House. People still believe Republicans will hold the Senate, but that bet is shifting as Trump implodes into a hot mess of resentment.

This is Trump’s economy, where daycare can cost as much as your monthly house mortgage in Cedar Rapids. Rep. Ashley Hinson voted to strip health insurance subsidies for the working class. She could actually lose that US Senate race if she is not careful. Feenstra voted with her on eliminating the subsidies. “We’re saying, ‘No, we can’t do that,’” the Hull Republican told KIWA Radio.

People hate health insurance premiums and coverage.

All Trump can do is blow up boats and bloviate. He’s no help.

The Democratic House will put a check on Trump.

Gov. Sand will put a leash on the radicals trying to keep gays in the closet and women in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

It won’t cure us but it will stop the bleeding.

The people have had a belly-full of Trump, and of scary religious freaks telling us restrained Iowans that we are lousy sinners reading dirty books and having sex in the girls locker room.

Enough!

Trump is making a lame effort to buy the Iowa vote with an ag welfare bailout. It’s too little, too late. It points to how corporate raiders have sucked Iowa dry. Tired of getting chumped? Vote for divided government, not for weird and greedy.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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