OTTUMWA — Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley believes Iowa Democrats made tactical errors during the 2009 session that will help his party in the next elections.
Democrats control both chambers of the Iowa General Assembly as well as the governor’s office. Party leaders laid out an ambitious agenda for the 2009 session but fell well short on issues like changes to Iowa’s labor laws and tax code changes. Several of those misses, like the failed move to revoke federal deductibility when paying Iowa taxes, were high-profile whiffs.
McKinley, R-Chariton, credited Iowa residents with rejecting those measures and making it difficult for Democratic leaders to round up support from their members.
“I think the people of Iowa are the ones who dealt the Democrats the defeats,” he said during an interview with the Courier Monday. “It was a very leftist agenda.”
Most observers agree the 2010 session will be at least as difficult for both sides. It’s an election year, and neither side will want to hand the other an easy campaign issue.
But the Iowa Supreme Court may have made it very difficult to avoid a hot button issue. The court’s decision to allow same-sex marriage in Iowa overruled the 1998 Iowa Defense of Marriage act. That left a constitutional amendment as the only option for opponents who want to restrict marriage to one man and one woman.
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Democratic leaders refused to let such an amendment come up for a vote during the past session and have already signaled their intent to do the same next year. McKinley thinks they are banking on voters forgetting the issue before November 2010. He thinks that is unlikely.
“In overwhelming numbers I believe Iowans want a vote,” he said. While that seems unlikely in the next session, McKinley said “an epiphany is always possible.”
McKinley maintained the fundamental criticism he leveled against Democratic leaders, charging they hyped the national recession to push through a questionable spending package. The $890 million in state bonds, higher than that pushed initially by Gov. Chet Culver as a job creation measure, will require decades to pay off.
And, McKinley says, it won’t work. He thinks the spending pushes too many projects, thus running the risk of overwhelming Iowa companies’ ability to keep up. That forces the state to hire out-of-state companies for engineering and other basic work for infrastructure improvements, diluting the impact on Iowa’s economy.
“It’s not a job creator. It’s a work creator,” McKinley said. “Frankly, our revenues have remained relatively decent. It’s a spending problem. They have a massive spending problem.”
What remains unclear is whether any of this year’s events will have a major impact on the 2010 general elections. Political observers generally believe voters focus on immediate concerns over more distant issues.
McKinley thinks voters will remember events like the decision to eject people from the House hearing on federal deductibility, which he calls a tactical error on the part of House Majority Leader Pat Murphy. To that end, he believes Democrats did Republicans a favor by drawing clear distinctions between the two parties.
Matt Milner can be reached at (641) 683-5359 or via e-mail at mwmilner@mchsi.com
