Iowa Republicans self-censor debate, citing Supreme Court ruling

DES MOINES — Lately, Republican state lawmakers are being more selective with their words during debate in the Iowa Legislature, sometimes refusing to answer Democrats’ questions. The change is a reaction to a recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling that referred to legislative floor debate.

Senate Republicans, as a general rule, will no longer answer Democrats’ questions during floor debate, Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver, a Republican from Grimes, told reporters late Monday.

And late last week, while debating gun regulation legislation, Rep. Steve Holt, a Republican from Denison who managed the bill in the Iowa House, told Democrats on multiple occasions that he would not answer questions that posed hypothetical scenarios.

Whitver and Holt both cited an Iowa Supreme Court ruling from March as their reasoning for being tight-lipped during floor debate. The court’s ruling dealt with 2020 legislation that granted incumbent Iowa utility companies a right of first refusal that would have prevented competitive bidding on future projects.

In its ruling, the court noted the proposal did not go through the normal legislative steps, and asserted that legislators did not know what they were voting on because the bill was produced for the first time earlier the same day it was passed.

“In LS Power Mid Continent and Southwest Transmission v State of Iowa, the Iowa Supreme Court indicated it wanted to use floor debate to determine the ambiguous definition of legislative intent. I believe legislative intent is the content of the law passed by a majority of the Iowa Legislature,” Whitver said in his statement. “In light of that decision, Senate Republicans do not expect to engage in spontaneous and speculative discussions of legislative intent during floor debate until that question is resolved.”

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That revelation caused a rift in legislative debate late Monday, resulting in the session spilling into the early hours of Tuesday. Upset with majority Republicans’ decision to stonewall their questions on legislation that would relax some labor regulations for teenagers, Democrats called for multiple caucus meetings that helped extend debate on the bill to roughly seven hours with a vote finally cast at 5 a.m. Tuesday.

Iowa Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls, a Democrat from Coralville, called Senate Republicans’ decision to refuse to answer questions a “really serious breach of tradition in the Iowa Senate” and “a really sad development for the state of our democracy in our state.”

“This is the highest deliberative body in the state of Iowa, and Senate Republicans are refusing to deliberate,” Wahls said. “When you don’t have the ability to actually debate and answer questions, what you are left with is … government behind closed doors, government without oversight, government without accountability. A government that has more corruption, that isn’t delivering for people.”

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Whitver, in his statement, asserted that, “The legislative process remains.”

“It will continue to evaluate proposed policy, collect feedback from Iowans, and develop law to move the state forward,” Whitver said.

Republican House Speaker Pat Grassley, from New Hartford, has not established a policy for all House Republicans, but has had conversations with Republicans who manage bills “about erring on the side of caution” regarding hypotheticals and other questions during debate, Grassley’s spokeswoman said.

In the Iowa Supreme Court ruling on LS Power Mid Continent and Southwest Transmission v the State of Iowa and Iowa Utilities Board, Justice Thomas Waterman, writing on behalf of a unanimous, four-justice decision (three justices recused themselves), criticized Senate Republican lawmakers for the manner in which legislation was passed and noted that the bill’s sponsor, former Iowa Sen. Michael Breitbach, “gave inaccurate responses and expressed ignorance about who backed” the proposal.

The Supreme Court ruled that the utility companies were entitled to an injunction that postponed enforcement of the right of first refusal provision until its constitutionality can be determined.

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