SEN. SALMON: Looking Ahead to the 2025 Session

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Greetings for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you! I am busy preparing for Christmas as all our family will be home for a week and we will have 20 in the house! That is 12 grandchildren ages 12 down to 3! I always enjoy having them come and always enjoy when they go home! The grandchildren are praying for snow so we’ll see…..

I have also been busy as have many others in the legislature preparing for the next legislative session which will begin Jan. 13^th and last until the first week in May. This will be my 3^rd year in the Iowa Senate.

I will be on mostly the same committees as before: Veteran Affairs as Vice-
Chair, Education, Health and Human Services, and State Government. New for me will be the Appropriations Committee.

Senate leaders are still Majority Leader Jack Whitver and Senate President Amy Sinclair. Everyone else is new. Majority Whip is Sen. Mike Klimesh and Speaker Pro Tem is Sen. Ken Rozenboom. Assistant leaders are Sen. Lynn Evans, Sen. Tim Kraayenbrink, Sen. Adrian Dickey, and Sen. Carrie Koelker.

My Legislative Priorities

Budget: We expect to pass a conservative budget that puts taxpayers first as we have done for the past decade. The 3.8% tax cut as well as previous tax cuts are having their expected initial effect, a dip in the state’s revenue. However, the legislature has set aside enough money to be able to keep the state’s priorities of education, health care, and public safety funded. We are expecting that the state’s revenues will recover and eventually increase as historically they have done when tax cuts are enacted. That has been the effect when money goes back into taxpayer’s pockets.

Taxes:  We will be working on our multi-year effort on property tax reform for next session. Our goals are leaving more money in Iowans’ pockets, creating an economic environment favorable for growth, and making Iowa more economically competitive with other states. This is an ongoing effort.

Economy:

• We want to take a fresh look at energy sources, with a particular emphasis on encouraging the development of nuclear energy.
• It is hoped to find resolution on the grain indemnity fund issue we wrestled with last year.
• We are wanting to take up an issue we have heard about, which is subcontractors are not getting paid.
• After years of pushing on reform of regulations governing the activity of pharmacy benefit managers, I am hopeful we can get something significant done that will make a difference for our rural pharmacies.
• After 4 years of the Biden administration, we are looking to reinstate work requirements as qualifications to be on Medicaid.
• The issue of a moratorium on constructing more casinos could come before us this session.

Education: 

• We need to monitor the review of school core content standards passed last session to ensure that strong, effective, workable, and age-appropriate standards are implemented in the future. They need to be free of left-leaning indoctrination and instead promote American heritage, legacy, and citizenship.
• Better enforcement still needs to be implemented for those schools that persist in violating the prohibition on teaching and promoting CRT.
• We also need to monitor Regent university action following the new law passed last session prohibiting DEI programs and likely will need stronger enforcement there.
• We need to allow and encourage school districts to engage the services of chaplains to help address student spiritual health and mental health which are linked together, just as the military, police and fire departments, and prisons, etc. do.
• We also need to change sex ed. from opt-out to opt-in, which would encourage parents to take a closer look at what is being taught in that class as some classes have infringed on parents’ right to teach their children their values regarding sexuality, morality, and sexual identity in line with their faith.
• The governor is interested in dealing with the issue of cell phones in schools, so I am anticipating that. Cell phone usage by teens has been show to have a damaging effect on their mental health, especially for girls.

Pro-Life: 

• We will be working on a bill to make abortion drugs controlled substances, that are subject to the laws regulating other drugs which are controlled substances.
• We will also be advocating for a bill to require schools in grades 7-12 to be taught prenatal development using a high-definition video showing every stage of human development from conception to birth. The goal is to instill a sense of wonder and respect for human life in our youth.
• I have been concerned about President Trump adopting a weaker stance on the pro-life issue during the campaign but I have read recently where his choice for the HHS Dept. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has told senators he plans to restore the pro-life policies Trump had in place in his first term. Additionally, his Dept. of Government Efficiency heads, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are speaking about ending the federal funding of abortion providers. That is all good news and time will tell how this plays out.

Religious Liberty:  We want to pass conscience protections for health care providers, mental health counselors, and adoptive and foster care parents to ensure they can carry out their job duties in accordance with their faith. We have seen in some states health care providers being forced to participate in abortions or sex destructive treatments and mental health counselors being denied the freedom to counsel their clients according to client goals of changing their sexual orientation or dealing with sexual identity confusion and wanting to embrace the sex they were created to be. Also, in some places adoptive and foster care parents are being forced to affirm a belief in LGBT ideology, which violates their religious faith. We want to ensure these issues do not surface in Iowa.

Bills Protecting Life, Liberty and Property:    

• Next session I will continue to push for protection of private property rights against eminent domain abuse by private companies engaged in private use projects, not public use as the Constitution requires. This issue is particularly egregious in the case of Summit and the CO2 pipeline, as I have written about here a number of times.
• We need to protect minors from exposure to pornography online (an issue the governor says she wants to make a priority), from sexually explicit materials in our public libraries, and from exposure to obscene performances committed in public.
• We have yet to put in place protections for women and children in bathrooms in public places and in prisons, as we have already done in schools.
• Our mental health counselors need training to help sexually confused and emotionally distressed youth de-transition from the “pull” to “change” their sex, which really amounts to destroying their sex.
• More still needs to be done on the issue of medical freedom, specifically prohibiting discrimination by doctors against those who refuse EUA products and requiring schools to inform parents about exemptions from vaccinations. President Trump’s pick of RFK, Jr. to lead the HHS Dept. bodes well for the issue of medical freedom on the federal level.
• Continued work needs to be done on the issue of human trafficking as it is alive and well in Iowa, though hidden and sometimes in plain sight.
• There will be another effort to pass a “hands-free” driving bill, which means only limited usage of a cell phone is allowed when driving.

Election Integrity:  Last year we passed no bill! That should not have happened. Next session I hope we can pass a bill that will include measures to shore up Iowa’s election laws:  Verification of U.S. citizenship for registering voters, use of credit card databases to maintain our voter rolls, requiring voter ID number on the absentee ballot envelope, making voting machines optional, eliminating ballot drop boxes, prohibiting ranked choice voting, better securing the same day registration process, etc. There are a number of additional things we can do to make the best election system better!

Government Overreach: 

• Leftover from COVID: There still needs to be reform to our disaster emergency law to include greater protections for the rights of citizens, families, businesses, and churches during a public health disaster emergency.
• Also leftover from COVID: We need to protect the long-held prescribing and dispensing authority of our doctors and pharmacists from unnecessary and harmful overreach by state regulating agencies.
• We need to prohibit discrimination by banks based on ESG scores of customers.

Conclusion

I plan to work hard to get these good policies across the finish line.

One thing that we learned from the past 4 years of the Biden administration:  We have always said the minimum a citizen needs to do is get educated and informed and vote. That is no longer the case. Citizens can no longer vote and then go on their merry way and be concerned only with their families, their kids’ and grandkids’ activities and games, where they will go on vacation, what party next weekend, etc. That is what has got us to where we have been for 4 years.

Much more is required now to avoid the disaster we experienced under President Biden. On top of being informed and voting, citizens must get involved in the political process: helping campaigns, canvassing, donating time and money, putting up signs, etc. It requires an entire paradigm shift. Families must make room in their schedules and budgets to elect good government. There is no other option for survival of our rights and freedoms and our constitutional republic as we have known it.

Author: Sandy Salmon