Outside of the procedural vote realm we also found a few notable tweets from some of our favorite Tweepers.

Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley, R-Chariton, spoke on the Senate floor Tuesday urging lawmakers to sign a petition that would allow Senate Joint Resolution 2001, which would begin the process of amending the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to be brought to the Senate floor for a vote despite not being approved by a committee.

A similar move is expected to take place Tuesday morning in the Iowa House.

All 18 Republicans signed on to the petition, but 26 signatures were needed to force a vote. McKinley said one of the chamber’s 32 Democrats also signed the petition — state Sen. Tom Hancock of Epworth.

“While our bi-partisan effort fell short of gaining the 26 votes needed to proceed, the voters this November will have an opportunity to decide if they are content with the continued Democrat obstruction and inaction,” McKinley said in a statement shortly after the effort failed.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, has repeatedly said he will never allow a vote on same-sex marriage.

Below is video of Senate Republicans discussing their petition Tuesday morning.

~ Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey

~ Iowa Rep.Renee Schulte, R-Cedar Rapids

~ Iowa Journalist Chuck Offenburger

~ Linn County Supervisor Brent Oleson

~ U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

~ Former Iowa Sen. Jeff Angelo, R-Creston

Thirty-three percent of those polled said they consider themselves “a supporter of the tea party movement,” with 49 percent of supporters defining themselves as independents, 34 percent Republicans and 17 percent Democrats.

Forty-nine percent of those polled said they do not support the tea party movement.

Iowans are evenly split on whether they are inclined to “keep or replace” incumbents who represent them, with a slight majority favoring to oust incumbents at the state level. Most observers say the 2010 elections will be dominated by anti-incumbent sentiment, but in a state that hasn’t voted out an incumbent governor since the 1960s, the even split does give some slight comfort to Gov. Chet Culver, who has seen his job approval ratings drop steadily since 2008.

At the local level, the poll found 59 percent favored keeping their incumbent in office.

The Register correctly points out that this anti-incumbent mood benefits Republicans, since Democrats control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. But tea party leaders are quick to dismiss the idea that the GOP is entitled to their votes. Ryan Rhodes, chairman of the Iowa Tea Party Patriots and campaign manager for 3rd District Republican Congressional candidate Dave Funk, told The Iowa Independent in December that the movement gained momentum based on frustration with both Democrats and Republicans.

Another point of note is that nearly all those polled who do support the tea party movement live in rural Iowa, small towns or the suburbs, each already considered Republican strongholds. Only 7 percent said they live in a large city. Forty-six percent consider themselves “born-again” Christians.

The GOP’s 2010 success could also hinge on its ability to mend fences after what’s shaping up to be a contentious primary season. A divide between grassroots conservatives and the party’s “establishment” is popping up in races up and down the primary ballot. The most high profile example can be found in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, with supporters of Bob Vander Plaats vowing to sit out the fall campaign if the party nominates four-term former Gov. Terry Branstad. For his part, Vander Plaats has refused to rule out running as an independent if he does lose the primary.

In Iowa House District 8, a former GOP county chair who originally entered the race as an independent has returned to the party to run against a candidate viewed by many as an “establishment” Republican. The winner will try to win a district held by a conservative Democrat for 20 years.

Tom Shaw, a former chair of the Pocahontas County Republican Party, announced last year he was leaving the party to run as an independent, saying the GOP had walked away from its values. Shaw has become a darling of the Tea Party movement and earned the formal endorsement of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Vander Plaats.

Last month he changed his mind and came back to the Republican Party, saying his change of heart stems from the Iowa Family Policy Center (IFPC) and state Rep. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, publicly endorsing Vander Plaats, and in doing so, vowing never to support his chief rival for the party’s nomination, former Gov. Terry Branstad.

Shaw is running against Steve Richards of Algona, who The Des Moines Register called “a more establishment Republican.” Richards is a doctor and an Air Force veteran. He ran for the seat in 2008, losing by only 42 votes to Democratic state Rep. Dolores Mertz, who has held her seat for more than 20 years but has not announced whether she will run again this year.

The two men will share the same stage Friday in Pocahontas.

The forum is also well timed, as it will take place just a few days after The Des Moines Register’s latest Iowa Poll is released. The paper has already begun promoting the poll, scheduled for release Sunday, which it says will be a “measure of Tea Party support in Iowa.“

While speaking to a group of supporters Wednesday, Vander Plaats was asked about the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Vander Plaats said he’s had to address this topic a lot lately.

“When I ran for governor and lieutenant governor before, that question was never asked,” he said. “But now you’re seeing the federal government become more and more intrusive, and that question gets asked all the time [about] state sovereignty.”

Nationally, measures to stop individual mandates on health care have been introduced in more than two-thirds of states, citing the 10th Amendment as the justification. The “state sovereignty” movement is considered an outgrowth of the Tea Party movement that sprung up around issues like federal health-care reform, gun-control laws and greenhouse-gas limits.

The sovereignty rhetoric has led to some interesting reactions from conservatives around the country. A recent Daily Kos-Research 2000 poll found that 23 percent of self-identified Republicans want their states to secede from the union. In the South, it’s 33 percent.

“States more and more today understand the 10^th Amendment,” Vander Plaats said. “But you need governors who are willing to take on the federal government instead of roll over to the federal government.”

Vander Plaats also mentioned a plan to get the federal government out of Medicare and Medicaid.

“Stop taking our Medicaid and Medicare dollars to DC and just leave them here,” he said. “Let us run that program.”

Last August, one of Vander Plaats’ rivals for the GOP nomination, state Rep. Chris Rants of Sioux City, called the idea a “cure that’s worse than the cold,” saying that while President Barack Obama spells trouble for Iowa, “the Vander Plaats plan spells bankruptcy.”

Below is video of Vander Plaats discussing the 10th Amendment and state sovereignty.

The legislation was passed by the U.S. House last year and is currently being considered by the Senate. VoteVets.org, a national advocacy group, will begin airing a television ad Friday in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines that criticizes Grassley’s position on the bill. Their position is that it will help military personnel by cutting the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.com)

The ad, which is also being run in seven other states, features Iowa City veteran Jeff Lindaman saying Grassley is opposed to the bill while accepting campaign donations from oil companies that do business “in countries with ties to terrorism.”

The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, the Iowa Biodiesel Board, and the Iowa Soybean Association Board released a joint statement Friday defending the veteran Republican senator, saying “there has been no bigger supporter of clean energy in the U.S Senate than Chuck Grassley.”

“Chuck Grassley has been in a position to change the energy landscape, and he has maximized every public policy opportunity for clean-producing, home-grown energy,” the groups said. “Without Chuck Grassley, there would be no clean-burning renewable energy industry in Iowa.”

In September, Grassley called cap-and-trade legislation more controversial than health care reform, saying it will ultimately cost American jobs.

The group says it paid $150,000 in Iowa for the ad, which will run through Feb. 21 in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.

After numerous meetings at the Capitol Thursday, Brad Clark, campaign director for One Iowa, told The Iowa Independent that he expects Republican lawmakers in the Iowa House to attempt to bring about a vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage by invoking Rule 60, which allows a majority vote on the floor of the House to pull a bill out of a committee even if the committee has not approved it.

Democratic leadership has repeatedly promised that the legislature would not discuss gay marriage this session. Gay-rights advocates have long believed conservative lawmakers would attempt some procedural move to force a vote on the issue in spite of Democratic opposition.

In the closing days of the 2009 legislative session, Republicans in both the House and Senate made numerous attempts to force a vote on a constitutional ban on gay marriage, including attaching it to a tax proposal and the state’s Health and Human Services budget. Democrats successfully blocked the efforts.

This would mark the first formal attempt to overturn the Court’s ruling of the 2010 legislative session.

“They can attempt to invoke Rule 60 after a bill has been filed for 18 days,” Clark said. House Joint Resolution 2001, which would amend the state’s constitution and define marriage as between one man and one woman, was filed Jan. 12 will reach the 18-day threshold Friday.

Clark said he is optimistic the effort will fail, saying Republicans will have to reach 51 votes in order to bring the bill to the House floor. There are 56 Democrats in the Iowa House and only 44 Republicans, meaning at least seven Democrats would have to support the move for the effort to succeed.

“And in theory, Democrats could just not vote,” Clark said, thus denying the GOP the majority it needs and the symbolic victory of getting Democrats on record as casting a vote on gay marriage.

State Rep. Michael Reasoner, D-Creston, sponsored the legislation banning gay marriage. He did not respond to a request for comment by The Iowa Independent.

Mitt Romney’s PAC is burning through money — the PAC reported a 78 percent overall burn rate as of Dec. 31 — but he has plenty of cash to spare. Romney’s PAC reported $1,125,375 cash on hand as of Dec. 31, beating out both Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC and Tim Pawlenty’s Freedom First PAC in cash available, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

Romney has raised a total of $3,565,311 and spent $2,777,912, since he first formed his PAC months after exiting the presidential race in 2008.

Pawlenty only formed his PAC in October 2009, so his totals were expected to be less robust than the those of Palin and Romney (who recently vied for vice president and president, respectively). Pawlenty’s burn rate was just about 31 percent overall and he reported $884,075 on hand. He raised $1,279,906 and spent $395,831 total through Dec. 31.

Since SarahPAC was first formed in Jan. 2009, the committee has raised $2,132,119, spent $1,203,782 and reported $928,337 on hand as of Dec. 31.

While most of SarahPAC’s money was spent on consulting, fundraising and other typical campaign expenditures, the committee reported spending tens of thousands on photographs, books and trinkets in the last half of the year. SarahPAC spent $13,668 on photos, $63,498 on books, $6,455 on t-shirt design and printing and nearly $3,000 on pens and rubber bracelets in the latter six months of 2009. These and other items contributed to SarahPAC’s overall burn rate of 56 percent.

Julissa Treviño contributed research to this post. ]]> http://iowaindependent.com/26860/romney-pac-has-highest-burn-rate-but-leads-palin-and-pawlenty-in-cash/feed 0 http://iowaindependent.com/26824/payday-lenders-use-loopholes-to-continue-high-interest-loans http://iowaindependent.com/26824/payday-lenders-use-loopholes-to-continue-high-interest-loans#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:01:51 +0000 Mary Kane http://iowaindependent.com/?p=26824 When states from New Mexico to Illinois passed payday reform laws over the past few years, it seemed as if the movement to curb short-term loans with interest rates that sometimes reached 400 percent or more was gaining steam. In Ohio and Arizona, voters even took to the polls to approve the rate caps on payday lenders, regardless of threats that the industry would close its doors if it had to lend money at 36 percent interest or less.

(Source: Wikipedia)

But instead of shutting down, payday lenders in some of the same states that passed reforms continue making payday loans – and sometimes at higher rates than before the laws were enacted, according to public policy experts and consumer advocates who follow the payday industry.

As Iowa lawmakers consider going down a similar path — legislation that gives payday lenders the option of capping rates and fees at 36 percent or capping the number of loans per borrower at six — advocates say the fear of loopholes should not derail tougher payday regulation.

“This legislation would go far in cracking down on many of the predatory practices by these lenders, and should a loophole be found, not all will go to the effort to exploit it,” said Matthew Covington, an organizer for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. “And then the legislature could see the true vicious nature of the worst of them, and act to close any loopholes that may exist.”

Skirting tougher regulation

Despite promises that tougher payday lending laws would kill the industry, most major payday lenders in states that did pass new laws are still are in business, using loopholes in existing small loan laws or circumventing new laws entirely to continue charging triple digit annual interest rates, in some cases as high as nearly 700 percent, advocates contend.  Lenders issue loans in the form of a check, then charge the borrower to cash it. They roll into the loan a $10 credit investigation fee – then never do a credit check. Or they simply change lending licenses and transform themselves into car title companies, or small installment loan firms, while still making payday loans.

“In Ohio, New Mexico, Illinois and Virginia, every major payday lender is violating the intent of the law,” said Uriah King, senior policy associate with the Center for Responsible Lending. “I’ve been involved in public policy issues for a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“It is kind of astonishing. The more I look into it, the more brazen the practices are. Payday lenders, as a trade association, have consistently circumvented the intent of legislative efforts to address their practices.”

Payday lenders strongly refute that contention. Steven Schlein, a spokesman for the Community Financial Services Association of America, a payday lending trade group, said it’s simply untrue that payday lenders are circumventing the law in Ohio, or in any other state. “That argument is untenable,” he said. “It just shows you that our critics are really just anti-business.”

The dispute over Ohio’s payday lending practices began after voters upheld a 28 percent interest rate cap on payday loans in November of 2008, and many payday lenders began operating under several small loan laws already on the books.  The legislature approved the cap in the spring of 2008, and payday lenders fought back with the voter referendum, but failed.

The small loan laws, which have been in existence for decades, are intended to govern installment loans, not single-payment, two-week payday loans. Payday lending opponents say the lenders are exploiting those laws to avoid the 28 percent rate cap. Lenders contend they are legitimately licensed by the state to make the small loans.

Some 800 of the Ohio’s 1,600 payday lending stores have shut down since rates were capped – and the rest are “trying to make a go of it” by adhering to the small loan laws, said Ted Saunders, CEO of CheckSmart Financial Co., a national payday lender with more than 200 stores in 10 states. “We’re lending money for far less than we did when all this started,” he said. “This is not business as usual. The activists just want to put us out of business entirely.”

Those activists are pushing the Ohio legislature to move once again, to close the loopholes in the loan laws by placing them all under the 28 percent cap. More than 1,000 payday lenders already have gotten licenses to make short-term loans under the old small loan laws, which allow for high origination fees and other charges, according to a report by the Housing Research & Advocacy Center in Cleveland.

Under those laws, for a 14-day loan of $100, lenders can charge an origination fee of $15, interest charges of $1.10, and a  $10 credit investigation fee, for a total amount of $126.10, or a 680 percent annual interest rate.

Disregarding the spirit of the law

David Rothstein, a researcher with Policy Matters Ohio, an advocacy group that pushed for payday lending limits, said testers for his group found that lenders sometimes told borrowers certain loan amounts, such as $400, were not allowed. But they could borrow $505. Loans over $500, according to the small loan laws, allow lenders to double origination fees to $30. Lenders also often issued the check for the loan from an out of state bank, but said borrowers could cash it immediately if they did so at their store – for another fee, often 3 to 6 percent of the loan total. Testers contended employees at some of the stores laughed as they explained the procedures, saying they were only trying to get around the new law.

In other cases, lenders directed borrowers to go get payday loans online, where rates can be higher.

“The General Assembly, in a bipartisan manner, passed a strong law on these loans and the governor signed it,” Rothstein said. “Then, the industry took it directly to the voters, who reaffirmed support for the law by some 60 percent despite the millions of dollars spent by the industry to overturn the law. This is a slap in the face. They are absolutely disregarding the spirit of the law that was passed.”

Saunders, however, said consumer advocacy groups promised that low-cost payday lending alternatives would pop up once the law was passed – but that hasn’t happened. Instead, there’s been an increasing demand for payday lending services by strapped consumers.

“Should we be further eliminating access to credit in a bad economy?” Saunders asked. “We exist because we’re still the least expensive option for a lot of people.”

People hit by high overdraft fees from banks or faced with late charges on multiple bills sometimes decide that taking out a payday loan can be a cheaper alternative, he said.

Based on those kinds of arguments, the debate in Ohio now has shifted from how to best enforce the new law to arguing again over the merits of payday lending. Payday lenders are contending that curbing payday lending in a recession hurts low-income borrowers, and results in job losses. Lawmakers have yet to move on the latest bill to end the loopholes. King, of the Center for Responsible Lending, said that while payday reform advocates have fought in the past to make sure new laws were followed, Ohio marks the first time where the payday lending debate seems to have started over entirely.

“I haven’t seen that elsewhere,” he said. “Ohio is something new. I think there is some degree of frustration as to why we are redeliberating every aspect of this issue. It’s made a tough issue even tougher.”

The industry fights back

Ohio isn’t alone in dealing with pushback from payday lenders, even after laws are passed.

In Virginia, payday lenders responded to laws passed last year to limit their fees by reinventing themselves as car title lenders, while still essentially making payday loans, said Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America. Car title loans are high-rate loans usually secured by the borrower’s car.

State officials ordered payday lenders in December to stop making car title loans to borrowers who already had a car title loan outstanding, and to start filing liens on borrowers’ vehicles, as is the usual practice with car title loans.

In New Mexico, the state attorney general sued two small installment lenders, contending they used a legal loophole to continue charging extremely high rates on short term loans – in some cases, more than 1,000 percent. In both New Mexico and Illinois, the payday lending lobby supported reform laws, but then began using the small loan laws once the new limits took effect, CRL’s King said.

For other states, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Oregon, state lawmakers or the attorney general had to go back and tighten laws or ramp up enforcement after initial payday reform legislation failed to rein in high fees. In Arkansas, an effort to end payday lending would up involving the state Supreme Court and an aggressive campaign by the attorney general.

In Ohio, Saunders said payday lenders will be gone entirely if lawmakers move to limit their use of the small loan laws. The additional fees allowed by those laws, he said, are “the cost of doing business,” and companies like his can’t realistically operate without them. His solution is to launch a state wide financial literacy campaign, in which CheckSmart will provide an expert to train nonprofit groups and churches and provide them with a variety of resources to help consumers with budgeting and saving issues. The campaign won’t involve marketing payday loans or pushing any products. Saunders said he took on the idea after several lawmakers during the 2008 debate told him his firm needed to have a higher community profile. Providing financial literacy help, he said, will highlight CheckSmart’s good corporate citizenship.

“In 2010, financial literacy is a big part of what we’ll do going forward,” he said. “It’s not a conflict of interest. We’re going to be giving good, sound financial advice for free. I have nothing to hide. Look, no amount of financial literacy would solve every person’s financial shortfalls. If consumers were being served by other sectors, we wouldn’t be here. This is a way of saying, “We’re the good guys.’”

While consumer advocates may not see it that way, attempts in Ohio to limit charges on short-term loans also have been hampered by confusion over who should take the lead — the governor, lawmakers, the attorney general, or state agencies, Rothstein said. As that fight goes on, the question of how much people in financial peril should have to pay for a short-term loan remains as unresolved as ever, in Ohio and in many other states.

Iowa CCI’s Covington said when legislation passed in 2007 toughening restrictions on car title loans, many of those businesses began doing payday loans instead.

“Here in Iowa, we’ll have to look at lenders maybe going to offer lines of open ended credit, but I don’t know how much of an issue that will be, given that they will no longer have a personal check to hang over one’s head,” he said.

The bill, which has 34 co-sponsors in the Iowa House, is currently in a Commerce subcommittee made up of Democratic state Reps. Andrew Wenthe of Hawkeye, , Bob Kressig of Cedar Falls and Michael Reasoner of Creston, and Republican state Reps. Thomas Sands of Wappello and Erik Helland of Grimes. A coalition of group’s is pushing for passage, including the Iowa Catholic Conference, the Child and Family Policy Center and the Attorney General’s office.

“From what I know and have seen, this is the most momentum this issue has had in many years and a great coalition pushing for its passage,” Covington said. ” I am optimistic, but know we’ve got to keep pushing”