It is hard to believe the Iowa House Republicans failed to have 51 votes for the Education Savings Accounts proposal offered by Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Senate, but it’s true.
For the second straight year, the Iowa House Republicans failed Iowa families. They failed to deliver much-needed school choice and educational freedom. They failed to address the insanity happening inside Iowa schools on a weekly — if not daily — basis.
They failed.
Last year’s failure to pass Education Savings Accounts could be given some benefit of the doubt in that there wasn’t as much knowledge about the craziness being spewed inside Iowa schools.
But this year there was no hiding it. The teachers and administrators don’t care. Pass a law to ban Critical Race Theory? They’ll call it something else. They’ll continue flying their rainbow flags in the classroom. They’ll continue stocking sexually explicit books.
Now they’ll even keep secret the fact that your little boy actually is a little girl when at school. They’ll go out of their way to make sure you don’t find that out.
Everyone knows this stuff is happening. It isn’t a debate. It is reality.
Gov. Reynolds summed it up well on Simon Conway’s show from April 28:
“I don’t want to see one tweet or Facebook post that says I support parents, parents matter. If parents matter, and they support parents and these kids, let’s put the kids first and not the system. Let’s support school choice,” Reynolds said.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…well, the Iowa House needs new leadership. It is that simple. We need representatives who do things in a different way. Instead of “protecting the caucus,” we need leadership that is more interested in representing Iowans.
Forget the caucus, focus on the constituents. If you don’t have the votes, fine, show us. We need leadership that quits telling us stuff and starts showing us stuff. They can say all they want, but the reality is we don’t know what the truth is.
Now, it will be up to House Republicans whether there are changes to leadership. But this should become a topic — and a heavy one — before the primary election. If there is a contested Republican primary, voters should ask if those running are content with leadership that protects the caucus rather than the conservative cause.
Because the reality is, there will come a time where they cannot do both. They have to decide between the caucus and the cause.
Current leadership chooses the caucus every time. Every single time they protect the moderate RINO Republicans while leaving conservative Iowans with crumbs.
And then lecturing the conservative Iowans about how they need to learn to compromise and be happy with what little they get.
But that isn’t how this form of government is supposed to work. These legislators work for us. They should want our approval, we shouldn’t strive for theirs.
Yet somehow we’ve allowed that to get flipped upside down.
The sooner we make this correction, the better.
One of my good friends summed it up well on Facebook today:
“I am so disappointed in the Iowa House. You sent a signal to the opposing side letting them know that they can do whatever they want to our students. You took away transparency. You took away choice. You took away parents’ rights. When conservatives control all three parts of the government and we still can’t get things passed, we have a broken system.”
Well, the obvious thing is we don’t
have conservative control in all three parts of government. We do for the most part in Terrace Hill and the Senate. But it’s clear we do not have conservative control in the Iowa House.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing while expecting a different result. So Iowans can keep voting for the same House Republicans who keep letting them down — and the same House Republicans protecting the House Republicans letting them down — but just know what you’re setting yourself up for.
Eventually, it isn’t the Iowa House that will carry the blame for failing us, it will be ourselves. Because the people in the Iowa House are there because we put them there.
Quit letting them fail us, our kids and our families.
