Iowa's ruling party creates its own reality

In the process, it disavows what its leaders once declared historic

The Iowa Legislature. (Photo: Screengrab of Iowa PBS broadcast.)

Six years ago, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law requiring that law enforcement officers undergo prevention of bias training.

George Floyd had just been killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. Demonstrators around the country, including in Iowa, were demanding change.

Republicans in Des Moines reacted and, with Democrats, passed the new law. Reynolds said, “we are just getting started.”

I don’t think anybody at the time thought that “just getting started” meant revoking the annual training requirement. But that’s what Reynolds and Republicans in the state Legislature did last month.

The Des Moines Register reported on this chain of events earlier this week and how the state’s ruling party is trying to rationalize this embarrassing turnabout.

Call me cynical, but I don’t think this is too hard to understand.

In the summer of 2020, Republican lawmakers were up for re-election. Reynolds would follow in two years. The electorate was aflame and unpredictable. Even in deep-red Iowa, Republicans in the Legislature needed an insurance policy of sorts.

Thus, the new law and its prevention of bias training requirements. The law also placed limits on the use of chokeholds, increased the power of the state attorney general to prosecute offenses and sought to prevent the hiring of officers who quit or were fired due to misconduct.

It turned out Iowa Republicans did well in Statehouse elections in 2020 and Reynolds won big in 2022.

I don’t know that the reform law played a big part in these elections, but the point is, Republicans weren’t taking any chances.

Now times have changed. Prevention of bias training requirements are no longer useful. What is useful to Republican leaders is living by the fiction that they can get rid of racial discrimination simply by declaring it doesn’t exist. Which is why as part of the same piece of legislation that discards the training requirement, Republicans also eliminated affirmative action goals and requirements on state agencies.

State Rep. Skyler Wheeler, a Republican from Hull, even cited the words of John Roberts, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, who once famously said the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. But, of course, you don’t change society by judicial or legislative decree. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor once said, you can’t just “wish away” the racial inequality, discrimination and bias that has embedded itself in our society for generations.

Even Republicans in the Legislature understand this concept. And in their own way, they embrace it.

In 2019, they passed a law to protect “free speech” rights at college campuses to counter what they perceived to be a liberal bias. But recognizing they had to go further to achieve their goals, lawmakers created the conservative Center for Intellectual Freedom. And now, in their own version of affirmative action, they are forcing University of Iowa students to attend the center’s classes to try to even the scales.

Apparently, the way to stop bias on campus is not to stop being biased on campus.

As for the police training requirements, some of Iowa’s rightwing politicians have no difficulty jettisoning them.

Wheeler said the bias training mandate of 2020 was “an emotional response.” But there is nothing emotional about covering your political bases, which is what Republican leaders were doing then. Today, their priorities have changed. Preventing racial bias is out. Pretending it doesn’t exist is in.

Fortunately, some Iowa police departments, who apparently have succumbed to the “emotion” Wheeler so disparages, told the Register they planned to continue their anti-bias training. This is a good thing. I hope other departments follow suit. We could all stand to learn more about what we might not readily recognize in ourselves. This is true whether we are police officers or not.

Don’t be surprised, though, if rightwing politicians in the Legislature try to ban bias training during the next legislative session. Wheeler claims implicit bias is “junk science.”

State Rep. Steve Holt, a Republican from Denison, had his own explanation for the switch. He said that anti-bias programs are often divisive and antithetical to a colorblind society.

Like Wheeler, Holt, too, understands that pretending we live in a world that doesn’t exist is in vogue.

I’m not so sure about Reynolds, though. She’s leaving office and doesn’t have to worry about re-election this year. In 2020, she said the police reform law would “go down as one of this Legislature’s finest hours.” The Register reported that she didn’t comment when the revocation bill was passed or when she signed it into law.

I can understand why the governor might want to keep this reversal on the down low. It’s hard to rationalize such an about-face when just six years ago she was contemplating the glory of history’s judgment.

For many Iowa Republicans who are facing the voters this year there is a different calculation at work. They believe the judgment of history, to say nothing of principle, is a game for suckers. What matters most is winning elections and keeping their hold on power.

This means turning their backs on what they once supported, what they once believed was historic.

It also means pretending they can create a colorblind society simply by saying it is so.

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