Iowa lawmaker embraces forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term

Iowa House Republicans advanced an unconstitutional ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy on Wednesday, sending it from the Human Resources Committee to the full House on a 11 to 8 vote. All seven Democrats and one Republican voted no. This legislation replaced their original attempt to ban abortions after just six weeks.

But a question by a Democrat on the committee revealed just how little the measure’s manager understood about the possible ramifications of her legislation — and how little concern she has for the women who face tough choices about whether to terminate a pregnancy even in the most difficult situations.

Iowa GOP abortion bill will grant parents of unmarried women rights to control adult daughters’ bodies

An anti-abortion bill being offered by Republicans in Iowa would effectively ban all abortions and give parents rights over the bodies of unmarried adult daughters.

A state House panel on Wednesday voted to send SF 471 — the so-called “personhood” bill — to the full committee. The bill states that life begins at conception, giving fetuses the same rights as people.

Iowa Republican who wants to politicize university hiring lied about his own degree

When we last saw Iowa state Sen. Mark Chelgren, he was trying to force ideological balance in his state’s higher education system by mandating that a person’s application for a university job be cross-checked with his or her registration on voter rolls, in order to ensure “partisan balance” for the institution’s faculty, staff and administration. But the senator — the brain behind the 2015 proposal to execute undocumented immigrants who try to re-enter the U.S. after deportion for committing a felony — may have beefed up his resume.

Republicans Are Set to Destroy Iowa’s Labor Unions

The ascendance of Donald Trump is often mistaken for a sudden turn in the history of the United States. It isn’t. Trump’s election was only the capstone of an era when reactionaries have seized every level of power in the country. Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has taken eleven Senate seats, 62 House seats, twelve governorships, and nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures. At present, the GOP controls every branch of government in 24 states; in eight more, they merely control both houses of the legislature. It is in these states, far from the depravity of Washington or the fires in Berkeley, that the full extent of conservative ambitions is finally being realized. In Iowa, where we live and work, the successful Republican capture of the state Senate has completed the GOP trifecta, and the consequences, unseen by the larger, distracted nation, have unfolded with astonishing speed.

Iowa’s 60 Million Laying Hens Aren’t Being Monitored by Food-Safety Inspectors

In 2010, 550 million eggs were recalled after thousands of people were sickened with salmonella in an outbreak tied to farms in Iowa, the leading state for laying-hen production. Despite Iowa producing 15 billion eggs annually, amounting to $2 billion in sales, both state and federal food-safety inspections were halted there last year, the Des Moines Register reported on Sunday. The concern was that letting inspectors into laying-hen facilities could help spread the virulent strain of bird flu that has been killing off birds in the tens of millions.

Iowa Lawmakers Approve Bill That Would Let Kids Have Handguns

Children of all ages in Iowa would be able to lay down their toy guns and pick up the real thing under a bill that passed the state House of Representatives.

The measure approved Tuesday by 62-36 vote would allow children 14 or younger to possess “a pistol, revolver or the ammunition” under parental supervision. It now heads for the state Senate.

Iowa Is Getting Sucked Into Scary Vanishing Gullies

Last year, after a record drought in 2012, Iowa experienced the wettest spring in its recorded history. The rains triggered massive runoff from the state's farms into its creeks, streams, and rivers, tainting water with toxic nitrate from fertilizer. Nitrate levels in the state's waterways reached record levels—so high that they emerged as a "real issue for human health," Bob Hirsch, a hydrologist for the US Geological Survey, told the Associated Press.

The event illustrated two problems facing Iowa and the rest of the nation's topsoil-rich grain belt. The first is the challenge of climate change: how to manage farmland in an era when weather lurches from brutal drought to flooding, as it likely will with increasing frequency. The second, related challenge is the largely invisible crisis of Iowa's topsoil, which appears to be eroding at a much higher rate than US Department of Agriculture numbers indicate—and, more importantly, at up to 16 times the natural soil replacement rate.

Iowa Republican Spent $150,000 To Expose Voter Fraud, Instead Found Nothing Significant

Eighteen months and $150,000 later, a rigorous voter fraud investigation commissioned by Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz (R) has failed to produce any statistically significant evidence of voter fraud in Iowa, according to The Des Moines Register.

Since taking office in 2011, Schultz has made safeguarding the ballot box from fraud a top state priority, striking a two-year deal with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation in 2012 that directed $280,000 of federal funds toward voter fraud inquiries. Additionally, a full-time agent was hired and assigned to pursue voter fraud cases.

Kirsten Anderson, Former Iowa Senate GOP Staffer: I Was Fired For Bringing Up Sexual Harassment

Kirsten Anderson served as communications director for the Iowa state Senate GOP caucus until Friday, when she was fired just hours after raising concerns about a pattern of sexual harassment in the workplace, she claimed in an interview with Iowa's WHO TV.

"Friday morning I went into the office and provided documentation that I wanted the workforce environment to change," Anderson told WHO TV, noting that the sexual harassment policy in place at the state Capitol had been drafted around 30 years ago. "Seven hours later I was fired."

In Iowa, Paying Your Debt to Society Isn't Quite Enough

Via Ed Kilgore, we learn today that voter suppression is alive and well in Iowa. On his first day in office after winning the 2010 election, Gov. Terry Branstad reinstituted a long and laborious process that prevents most released felons from voting:

    Henry Straight, who wants to serve on the town council in the tiny western Iowa community of Arthur, is among those whose paperwork wasn't complete. Straight can't vote or hold office because as a teenager in Wisconsin in the 1980s, he was convicted of stealing a pop machine and fleeing while on bond.

Iowa Moves to Keep Its Factory Farms Shielded From View

On Friday, Iowa governor Terry Branstad signed a bill that will make it much more difficult for animal welfare advocates to sneak cameras into Iowa's factory livestock farms. The bill's fate is being watched nationwide, because Iowa's factory farms grow more hogs and keep more egg-laying hens than those of any other state.

The news got me to thinking of my own attempt, years ago, to peer inside an animal factory.

I was on a tour of a rural Iowa county, given by some farmers who were angry that massive hog-raising facilities had been plunked down in their community (I wrote about it here). At one point, we got out of the van so I could gape at two rows of such low-slung buildings, each holding thousands of hogs. A vast manure cesspool separated the two rows.