The Week — Scrambling nannies, a call for peace in our time and Branstad’s crafty head-fake

A DANGEROUS CROWD

Members of Iowa's grand General Assembly are facing a Billy Joel dilemma. Judging by some bills we've seen so far, our senators and reps would rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.

The sinners are much more fun.

A bill that would raise the interstate speed limit to 75 is turning heads and whipping lashes. Sure, cars on I-380 might need numbers, pit crews and roll cages, but why not?

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Commission voted 13-1 to slice the criminal penalty for possessing a small amount of marijuana. Another Senate bill would stop local officials from barring 19-and 20-year-olds from the strong allure of taverns. Here's looking at you, Iowa City.

The House is making sure the legal definition of beer includes buzzier pale ales. Not thrilling enough? How about some decriminalized raw milk?

A Senate committee is poised to approve a bill overturning a ban on fireworks sales that has been in place since the Roosevelt administration. Why should Missouri have all the fun, and get all the money?

Lobbyists representing various sectors of the imposing monolith known as the 'nanny state” must be losing their minds. So much danger, so little time to warn us. The way things are going they may only be able to ban something called powdered alcohol this year. Kids, death, yadda.

Powdered alcohol, I gather, is supposed to be more portable, if not entirely potable, or enjoyable. Hasn't anyone ever heard of a flask?

Take comfort, nannies. Legislative skittishness and the clock are on your side. It's still very early, when duds seem like live rounds. Some of these risky bills may soon die young.

NO MORE WAR!

It is with great sadness, but also unshakable resolve, that I now, on this fateful, historic day, declare war on 'declaring war.”

I will fight it in the news releases. I will fight it in the news conferences. I will fight it on the Twitter. And I will never surrender.

This is why we fight. From Iowa Senate Republicans:

Senate Democrats declared war on Iowa property taxpayers and our rural communities during yesterday's education debate on supplemental state aid for schools.

Senator Tony Bisignano (D-Des Moines) said he would sponsor a bill that would raise Iowans' property taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars. Minutes later, Senator Joe Bolkcom (D-Iowa City) said he would end initiatives for job creators who have employed thousands of hardworking Iowans.

And minutes later, a hyperbolic news release was emailed.

Just a few weeks ago it was Republican Gov. Terry Branstad who insisted that Des Moines Water Works officials had 'declared war in rural Iowa” by announcing their intent to file a lawsuit against three rural counties over nitrate pollution in the Raccoon River.

You may recall Democrats accusing Republicans of declaring a 'War on Science” and the simultaneous 'War on Women.”

It's true that policy debates can be hell, but hardly war. State senators who want a 4 percent increase in school funding did not lob mortars at the senators who back 1.25 percent. No rockets glared. No bombs burst. Some folks in the gallery yawned, I bet.

Medic! We've got a very bad paper cut here! Damn these amendments!

Bisignano lamented the massive commercial property tax cut approved in 2013, and its promise to replace lost local revenues with state dollars, is now sucking up all available bucks for other stuff, like schools. Bolkcom has pointed out many times how some of the same Statehouse types who plead poverty on stuff like education always find enough bucks to back incentives for big business.

Republicans disagree, which is understandable.

But these are policy positions, not infantry positions. Entrenched, perhaps, but no barbed wire and bayonets. Insisting a war was declared is sort of a war on smart.

Look, I'm not saying these aren't important disputes, or that there's no place for passionate disagreement. But casting policy differences in terms of 'War!” feeds the persistent, and frankly tiresome, notion in our current daggers-drawn political era that total victory and unconditional surrender actually are possible. Compromise is treachery. Defeat means the end of America!

It's quite a fantasy. Someday, one side will win climate change, health care, or whatever the issue, while the other will bow down, turn in its voter registration cards, resign its offices, board rockets and leave earth to colonize and plague some other world with its horrible ideas that are so wrong for America. Flags will flutter, trumpets will blow and peace and prosperity finally will arrive, forever. The end.

Nope. We're all stuck here. Shortage of rockets, for starters.

Trying to work things out, the best we can, is basically our only option, even it makes for a damn boring news release. The 'war” declared over school funding will, eventually, be settled at some percentage in the middle.

It could get rancorous, contentious, even. But it will be bloodless, barring paper cuts.

WITH SIX YOU GET EYEROLLS

Gov. Terry Branstad has told the Washington Post's Robert Costa that he's unlikely to run for a seventh term as governor. He's grooming Lt. Kim Reynolds to be his replacement once regime change comes.

Very shrewd, governor. Couple this with his bad cold episode a few weeks ago, and it adds up to a pretty crafty head-fake. I'm not buying it. Not for a second.

Just think back to what it was like in the awful ‘aughts, between Branstad leaving office in 1999 and regaining his rightful throne in 2011. Most of us were living in squalid refugee camps, left to feed our families on hobo chili and ketchup packets. There were no fertilizer plants, no public-private economic development authority, no biennial budgeting and no 200,000 new jobs, give or take a hundred thousand here or there. The great Republican Party was on the verge of being taken over by a scolding Dutchman.

Returning to those days is a very scary prospect. I can't believe Branstad would chance it, Reynolds or no Reynolds. Tom Harkin retired thinking his heir was a shoo-in, and look what happened.

Get ready, Iowa. TB `18: 'Is this Heaven? No, it's Seven!”