Whiplash

They say if you don't like the weather in Iowa, wait five minutes. I figure they say that about a lot of places, but being from Iowa, I think it fits pretty darn well. Some of the time, at least.

Take this week. We had really unseasonable warmth for February the past couple of weeks, culminating this past Wednesday with highs in the upper 70s for eastern Iowa. Those weren't record highs just for February 22nd, but record highs for February as a whole. It was ridiculously nice, like a day in May or early June.

It's Saturday now, and I just scraped a light coating of snow and sleet off my driveway. Everything is white again, and we will stay below freezing all day. Go 80 or so miles north, and they're dealing with close to a foot of snow in some places, with blizzard conditions Friday closing schools and businesses. It was surreal watching television Friday, just two days after walking down the street in shorts, seeing the scroll of schools closed because of the blizzard conditions.

So the weather can definitely give you whiplash around here, no doubt. I think that also fits the bill with what our legislature is up to this session. You see, not surprisingly, Republicans were swept into majorities in the Iowa House and Senate last November, riding that Trumpian wave of anger at "something" and hatred of Hillary. No, it wasn't just a repudiation of incumbents in general; that I could understand, as an anger at how things are going and we the ticked-off voters are going to throw the bums out. No, instead, they returned most of the incumbents, with just enough new GOP faces in there to turn the Senate red.

Iowa generally likes to keep their state government split. If one party has both the House and Senate, we usually like to have a governor of the other party. If the governor and one of the legislative bodies share a party, generally we like to have the other party hold the other house - for the past several years the GOP held the House and the governor's office, so the Democrats had a small majority in the Senate. That seems to hold back the worst urges of one party or the other to do massive changes in a legislative session.

But now its 2017. Similar to DC (thanks a bunch, Trump voters), the Iowa Republicans are in charge everywhere, and there's practically nothing the Democrats can do to stop or slow things down. Not unexpectedly, the GOP is going drunk on their newfound power like a teenager with a fresh driver's license and no curfew. Is that even a good metaphor? Well, "drunk" and "teenager driving" does seem to fit. The Republicans campaigned on rolling back regulations, improving the business climate and jobs, jobs, jobs. That was what they said were their prime goals, if elected. So now that they've caught that car they've been chasing the past couple of decades, what are they doing with it?

Pretty much the first thing out on the table was a plan to rearrange state funding of women's health in order to cut Planned Parenthood out of the picture. Okay, given the GOP absolutely hates PP in general, that's not a big surprise - the thing is, it was federal funds coming to Iowa that were being used to subsidize PP in the first place. The Republicans had to turn down that funding, or send it in another direction, so they could make state rules to prohibit any money going to groups that provide abortions. Again, this isn't a huge surprise to anyone paying attention, and a majority of Republican voters are probably wholly in favor of this, but the contortions the legislators had to go through to rearrange the funding was certainly unseemly.

Next was a bill touted as "tweaking" Chapter 20 of the state code, which governs collective bargaining between the state and public employee unions. Nobody really campaigned on this, and if they did, it was about "tweaks" and "touchups" to the law, which according to some GOP spokespeople really needed improving since it hadn't been touched in 40 years. Better get to work on some of those laws about murder and robbery, guys, it's been a lot longer since they've been "improved." Anyway, the bill wasn't about "tweaking" - it stripped every topic except wages out of the law, and wages can only increase by a limited amount each year. Health insurance? Time off? Other benefits? Sick leave? Nope - now the state can just drop a handbook on the table and say, "Take it or leave it, this is what you're gonna get." In addition, it requires public unions to recertify with a vote of the bargaining unit every year, requiring a majority of the unit to pass (instead of a majority of those voting, which is how every single one of those legislators got their jobs), and ends the automatic withholding of union dues from paychecks, forcing members to pay the union directly. It's a blatantly obvious union-busting bill, very similiar to what was rammed through in Wisconsin a couple of years ago, and also blatantly obviously something financial backers of GOP politicians are working on across the country (the Koch brothers and ALEC, to name a couple).

So nice job of bait and switch, GOP - we'll tell you "tweak" and once you vote for us we'll rip the heart out of public unions. Aren't we great?

Also rolling through the statehouse was deep reductions in education funding, both K-12 and higher education. Iowa's universities and community colleges were told to cut back on spending they've already planned in the current semester, which resulted (at the University of Iowa anyway) in a couple of thousand students losing scholarship funds. (Funnily enough, the GOP speaker of the house angrily called out the university for "playing politics" by cutting scholarships. Hey! You're the one who told them to cut spending! It's gotta come from somewhere!)

The blame for these spending reductions, in public employees, education, and elsewhere, was put on a slowdown in Iowa's economy over the past year or so that meant less in tax revenue. Yes, it's true the economy has slowed ... but one of the big legacies of the Branstad administration over the past few years has been massive tax cuts, especially in property taxes, and tax incentive giveaways to corporations. It's disingenuous, to me, for the Republicans to cry their hands are tied in state spending because of the lower budget expectations, when part of what caused these expectations was big ol' GOP tax cuts.

Oh, but they're not finished! You know what else will roll back regulations and improve the business climate? How about bringing back the death penalty? That's seriously another topic on the table. Or giving Iowa a "stand your ground" self-defense law? Because nobody with a gun should ever have to back away from a dispute - what's the good of having a gun if you can't use it, right? Oh, yeah, and kids younger than 14 should be able to use handguns, and gun licenses should be good for life, and ... plenty of job-enhancing, economy-improving ideas there, right? Right? And I haven't even started on the notion of a Voter ID law, which is also under discussion. It's like a right-wing wish list, and they're running right down it, checking them off merrily as they go.

So, anyway, whiplash. I think even a lot of voters who helped put the GOP in the driver's seat are thinking the party's gone a little nuts with their newfound power - but there's just as many others who are gleefully rubbing their hands together at the notion of getting something over on these "liberal snowflakes." Unfortunately the only way to tell if these legislators will pay or be rewarded for their overreach is what happens in November 2018. And plenty of damage can happen before then.