When Iowa’s 2022 legislative session commences Monday, there will be a notable absence on the floor of the state Senate: reporters.
Republican leaders in the state Senate told journalists last week they will no longer be allowed to work on the chamber floor, a change that breaks with a more than 140-year tradition in the Iowa Capitol. The move raised concerns among free press and freedom of information advocates who said it is a blow to transparency and open government that makes it harder for the public to understand, let alone scrutinize, elected officials.
The new rule denies reporters access to the press benches near senators’ desks, a proximity current and former statehouse reporters told The Washington Post is crucial for the most accurate and nuanced coverage. The position allows reporters to see and hear everything clearly on the Senate floor and to get real-time answers and clarifications during debates.
Beginning this session, reporters will be seated in a public upper-level gallery.
“When you take journalists and restrict their access and then you couple that with changes that have occurred in the past couple of years with procedures in Iowa, it makes it that much harder for the public to know what’s going on,” said Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a government transparency watchdog.
In an email to statehouse reporters obtained by The Washington Post, Senate Republican spokesperson Caleb Hunter said the new rule arose from the “evolving nature and definition of ‘media.' ”
“As nontraditional media outlets proliferate, it creates an increasingly difficult scenario for the Senate, as a governmental entity, to define the criteria of a media outlet,” the email said. Hunter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
To critics of the new rule, including members of the Iowa Capitol Press Association and Democrats in the state Senate, the change is little more than a thinly veiled retaliation against news outlets for unflattering coverage of the Republican-controlled legislature. Longtime statehouse reporters also called the justification specious and said there are no instances of nontraditional media causing disruptions.
“Keeping reporters out doesn’t make reporters more accurate or fair. [Senators] would be better off letting those folks in and getting to know them,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor in chief of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, who also serves as vice president of the Iowa Capitol Press Association (ICPA). She called the move “discouraging” and unprovoked.
Obradovich noted that the Iowa House, the judiciary and the governor’s office have all managed to define criteria for media outlets and said the Iowa Senate will have to eventually, whenever it next holds news conferences that require credentialing.
Unlike the Washington press corps covering Congress and the White House, the media space at the Iowa Capitol is allocated by the party that has control of the Iowa House and Iowa Senate; both chambers of the statehouse and the governor’s office are currently controlled by Republicans.
The change in access comes as government accountability and media watchdogs raise the alarm about the effects of dwindling statehouse coverage across the United States as larger swaths of the country become local news deserts.
Understand that authoritarians only want you to know about laws after they are passed, and that Republican state legislatures are hurtling towards regime status at these statehouse levels.
When I say "please, please get involved in local politics like county commissions, city councils and school boards where you live" I mean it, because literal white supremacist domestic terrorists are more than happy to do so.
On the morning she met her opponent for coffee, Sarah Cole walked in with a front-runner’s confidence.
To Cole, the school board seat in this rural red district about an hour outside Seattle was all but hers. Educators and community leaders had endorsed her. She had name recognition from years in the Parent Teacher Association. And, besides, she was running against Ashley Sova, a home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement.
“I kind of thought I had it in the bag,” Cole recalled.
Their coffee date that October day, as recounted by both women, was an exercise in gritted-teeth civility. Cole asked about the Three Percent logo tattooed on Sova’s neck in red, white and blue bullets. Sova tried to corner Cole on critical race theory. At the end, they took a photo and promised to work together no matter who was elected, each privately expecting Cole to win.
In December, however, it was Sova who was sworn in, the second Three Percenter on the five-person Eatonville School Board. Three Percenter ideology, part of the self-styled militia movement, promotes conspiratorial views about government overreach and imagines “patriotic” Americans revolting against perceived violations of the Constitution.
Presented as “defending liberty,” extremism analysts say, those far-right views are spreading in conservative places like Eatonville, where the school board race spiraled into a fight over mask mandates and how race is taught in school. Cole lost by more than 200 votes.
“The race was basically sabotaged by the national narrative,” Cole said. She sounded incredulous that parents felt best represented by a Three Percenter whose kids aren’t even in public school: “I don’t even know how to explain it except to say, in the face of the facts, they still chose to run with fears.”
What happened in Eatonville, according to extremism trackers, is bigger than a small-town upset. In recent years, far-right groups have been moving away from national organizing to focus on building grass-roots support, harnessing conservative outrage to influence school boards and other local offices. That effort was stepped up after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol left much of the militant right under federal scrutiny and in operational disarray.
Eatonville is among several rural, conservative parts of the West where members of self-styled militias are making inroads through what researchers call a mix of opportunism and intimidation. Once-fringe views about government “tyranny” now match the mainstream conservative discourse on vaccine and mask mandates, softening the public image of movements linked to political violence.
“If you’re going to make a change, you don’t do it by storming the Capitol. You make change by using the process that you’ve been given and starting at the bottom,” said Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of the Eatonville School Board.
Two years ago, watchdog groups warned that Marshall’s election represented the dangerous creep of anti-government extremism. Today, the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats. Sova, an officer with the group, was among four female members who ran in local races this cycle. Three won.
The fascists like Steve Bannon are organizing and are winning at the local level as Ezra Klein points out.
The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.
“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”
An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”
Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”
America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.
But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.
“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.
If we give up these local offices to the terrorists and anti-democracy authoritarians, they will be taken and used against everyone who isn't them.
And this is why GOP authoritarians don't want local and state legislation covered until it's far too late.
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