Latest Stories By Lyle Muller

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds had reason to bring up Iowa’s budget surplus when she and her 2022 election opponent, Deidre DeJear, debated this week. After all, she could report accurately, as she did in a late September news release, that the state ended fiscal 2022 under her watch with a $1.91 billion surplus. Reynolds said in […]

Chuck Grassley and Mike Franken tossed several barbs at each other in their lone televised debate for a U.S. Senate seat from Iowa. For example, there was the time Franken took Grassley to task, saying Grassley opposed anything that helped women. “This is a guy who’s made it his career to ban abortion, to support […]

Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Christina Bohannan had been exchanging opposing political viewpoints the evening of Sept. 26 without much of the interrupting that often occurs during heated political campaigns. That is, until Bohannan, the Democratic challenger seeking to oust Republican Miller-Meeks from an Iowa congressional seat Miller-Meeks has held for two years, said: “She voted against letting Medicare negotiate for […]

The Iowa Legislature’s 2022 session dragged into mid-May with a stumbling block: a school voucher bill that Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds proposed to what usually has been the receptive, Republican-led House and Senate. The voucher bill, in the Students First Act, would create 10,000 vouchers — enough for 2% of Iowa’s K-12 students — that parents could use […]

Joe Biden’s April 12 appearance in the small western Iowa town of Menlo, population 345, dropped the president in a state that Donald Trump carried handily in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Rural development is a key need in Iowa, and biofuel production is a big financial deal because Iowa ranks tops in the country […]

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds agreed with President Biden Tuesday night, saying the state of the union is good because of its people. And, that was it. The rest of Reynold’s Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union was a sharp critique of the president’s performance from the White House. “Even before taking the oath […]

Gov. Kim Reynolds was ready to tout achievement when she stood before a joint session of the Iowa House and Senate Tuesday evening, Jan. 11. Such is the nature of the annual Condition of the State address, a ritual in which Iowa’s governors emphasize what they have accomplished but also states the direction they want […]

Conjecture that former President Donald Trump is seeking back the White House job he held for four years continued to generate news— and fact checks — in Iowa on Saturday night, Oct. 9. Trump’s latest visit was a Save America Rally that drew thousands of people to the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, and was […]

A political spat emerged this Iowa legislative session when Democrats in the House objected to a Republican bill aimed at presidential executive orders. The dispute has things you’d expect in politics: policy disagreements, making points about a bigger picture and verbal jabs against the other side. There’s a lot to unpack. The bill started as HF […]

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds took the podium in the House of Representatives chamber at the Iowa Statehouse Tuesday night, Jan. 12, and summed up 2020. “It’s been a year,” she told the joint House-Senate session to kick off her annual Condition of the State address. “And I’ll let you fill in whatever adjective you want. […]

The election results for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District seat in 2020 were so close no one could declare victory right away. Good thing, because the results kept changing until a winner finally was certified. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Ottumwa Republican, held a thin 282-vote lead over Rita Hart, a Wheatland Democrat, after votes were counted on […]