Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The process by which Iowa selects its judges needs to be changed to lessen the influence of the Iowa Bar Association, an organization that is “so out of touch with the average people in this state,” said Doug Gross, a Des Moines attorney and longtime adviser to Republican Gov.-elect Terry Branstad.
“They’re elitists,” Gross said of the Bar Association in an interview with WHO-AM’s Jan Mickelson. “They’re intellectual snobs and elitists, and they don’t understand that what makes our government an intrinsically genius form of government is that it rebalances itself with the will of the people.”
The Iowa Bar Association, which is a professional group of lawyers, supported the retention of the three Supreme Court justices who were removed from the bench by voters due to the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. The president of the American Bar Association recently penned a guest column for The Des Moines Register calling the vote to oust the judges a form of intimidation against the judicial branch. The effort to oust the judges was led by a handful of out-of-state anti-gay organizations that spent nearly $1 million on the campaign.
Gross said he believes in Iowa’s judicial selection process, the Missouri Plan, which consists of a nominating commission compromised of 15 individuals: seven members nominated by the state legal bar, seven selected by the governor subject to Senate confirmation, with the last spot filled by the most senior Supreme Court justice who is not the chief justice.
“It’s critically important to our civility in our society,” Gross said of the Missouri Plan. “I believe in merit selection of judges. But the problem is the Bar is controlling that process, and they don’t get what happened [with the judicial retention election].”
The process is dominated by Democrats, Gross said.
“When Bob Ray and Terry Branstad were governor, they appointed Republicans for their half,” he said. “As a result, it was relatively balanced. What’s happened since Vilsack and Culver have been governor is they’ve appointed all Democrats, so that judicial nominating convention is stocked with Democrats. As a result, we’ve seen continuous activity on behalf of the courts that reflects those philosophies and not the philosophies of the people they are supposed to serve.”
Branstad appointed one of the three justices who were ousted Nov. 2 — Chief Justice Marsha Ternus. And shortly after the court’s unanimous 2009 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, Branstad offered tepid support for the justices, although he didn’t agree with their ruling. By the time he hit the campaign trail, however, Branstad’s tune had changed, and while he refused to take sides on the judicial retention question, he repeatedly said he’d like to change the method by which judges are chosen, telling the Cedar Rapids Gazette he wants party and gender balance on the nominating commission.
Gross said the Bar’s dominance of the process, and the fact that it formally endorses “marriage by two people of the same sex,” caused him to resign his membership from the organization.
“They don’t represent me,” he said.
Over the last two years, Gross has become a polarizing figure in Republican politics, so much so that the man who who previously served as Branstad’s chief of staff and was the GOP nominee for governor in 2002 was hardly visible in Branstad’s public campaign for governor. In the fall of 2008, Gross began calling for his party to be more inclusive or risk becoming a permanent minority party. During a 2008 interview with Christian radio host Steve Deace, Gross said the party needed to broaden its appeal if it ever wanted to be in power and advance its agenda again.
“Social conservatives are a minority group within a minority party,” Gross told Deace. “If we aren’t broad enough the interests of social conservatives will never be in governance.”
The Republican Party, both nationally and in Iowa, has become perceived as the party of excessive bigotry, Gross said at the time, “whether that be bigotry associated with immigrants or gay rights. We are not that party and we should not be that party. It turns people off. We can be a party of tolerance and respect other people’s views and still further our values.”
Gross didn’t go nearly that far during his interview with Mickelson, saying all he was trying to convey at the time to his fellow Republicans was that the economy was the issue of most prominence going into 2010.
“So we need to make certain we don’t forget about [economic issues,]” he said. “But at the same time you don’t throw away social conservatives. They’re part of our coalition that allows us to be in the majority.”
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