~ 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

Gubernatorial hopeful Bob Vander Plaats shakes hands will state Rep. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, shortly before speaking at a rally opposing gay marriage (photo by Jason Hancock/Iowa Independent).

The Iowa Family Policy Center’s political action committee, which organized the event, used it as an opportunity to formally endorse Vander Plaats in the GOP primary. But in doing so, the group’s chairman, former state lawmaker Danny Carroll, explicitly ruled out endorsing or assisting the man favored to win the party’s nomination, former Gov. Terry Branstad.

“[Gov. Branstad] has failed to boldly address the values that we embrace,” he said. “And even if he were to win the nomination, the Iowa Family PAC would not support him.”

Branstad has had trouble winning over a suspicious social conservative community since entering the race several months ago. But in recent weeks numerous conservative leaders have made statements that they will not support Branstad if he defeats Vander Plaats.

In a primary that’s already had its ugly moments, a sharp divide is forming in the Republican ranks that could hurt the eventual nominee in the general election. In 2002, GOP candidate Doug Gross squeaked out a victory in a three-way primary, but the nearly two-thirds of Republican voters who didn’t support him never truly came home, and Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack was able to easily win a second term in office.

Carroll said he spent 25 years supporting the Republican machine, “but where has it gotten us?”

“You are not answering to a party,” said Carroll, who nearly became the party’s state chair after the 2008 elections. “You are not answering to a political machine. You are not answering to people who sit in high buildings downtown and tell you what you ought to think and how you ought to vote. You are answering to God almighty.”

Opponents of same-sex marriage rallied outside the state Capitol Tuesday (photo by Jason Hancock/Iowa Independent).

State Rep. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, also spoke at the event. Last week he followed down a similar path as IFPC, using his endorsement of Vander Plaats to pledge that he wouldn’t support Branstad if he is nominated by the GOP.

Tuesday, his focus was on same-sex marriage, specifically demanding lawmakers pass a marriage amendment. If Iowa allows the courts to decide what it means to be married, he said, they will next turn to issues like gun laws, taxes, free speech and property rights.

“Gov. Culver and the legislature will either listen to us now or listen to us in November,” he said.

When it was his turn to speak, Vander Plaats once again promised that on day one of his administration he will sign an executive order stopping same-sex marriage until the public gets to vote on it. It’s a pledge that’s become the centerpiece of his campaign and something he said he expects to be impeached over. And despite constitutional scholars and each of his Republican primary opponents agreeing that such an executive order is not possible, Vander Plaats has stuck to his guns.

“The Supreme Court does not get to amend the Constitution,” he said, to rousing applause.

IFPC President Chuck Hurley vowed that opponents of same-sex marriage will not rest until a constitutional amendment is passed. And even thought most conservatives concede a ban will not be possible in 2010, Hurley said Christians must keep pushing.

“The homosexual activists have been more diligent than the church of Jesus Christ,” Hurley said, later adding: “If we want Godly laws, we need a diligent church.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. (WDCpix)

Although the two Democratic bills share the central goals of controlling health care costs and covering millions of uninsured Americans, they diverge, in key places, over how to go about it. Some of the differences concern the very topics that have been most contentious throughout the debate, including whether to create a public insurance option, what to do with illegal immigrants and how to ensure that federal funds don’t subsidize abortions. The disparities leave Democratic leaders with the unenviable task of merging the proposals while preserving the backing of the fragile coalitions that ushered the bills to passage in November and December. As difficult as it was for Democratic leaders then to unite their party behind the most sweeping health care reforms since the 1960s, the final step may prove the slipperiest yet.

The Money Must Come From Somewhere

Unlike the Republicans’ sweeping health reforms of 2003, which were unfunded, the Democrats have proposed to pay for the cost of their health care overhaul. But the two chambers would do it differently. House leaders are pushing a 5.4 percent payroll tax hike on the nation’s wealthiest people — individuals making more than $500,000 per year and families earning more than $1 million. Senate Democrats have proposed a similar mechanism, hiking Medicare’s payroll tax by 0.5 percent on individuals pulling in more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000. But a larger chunk of funding under the Senate bill would come from an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans — a provision that’s wildly unpopular among a key Democratic constituency: organized labor.

Kids’ Care

Few federal programs have been as successful as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, which was enacted 12 years ago and now covers roughly 10 million people. Yet House Democrats have proposed to terminate the program at the end of 2013, shifting those kids into either Medicaid or private plans found on a proposed insurance marketplace, dubbed the exchange. The Senate bill, on the other hand, would reauthorize CHIP through 2019 and provide funding for it through 2015.

Many children’s welfare advocates have put their weight squarely behind the Senate approach, fearing that the move to exchange plans will lead to higher out-of-pocket costs for some of the country’s lowest-income families — a barrier discouraging those parents from buying their kids insurance at all, thereby threatening to reduce kids’ coverage in the name of expanding it.

Closing the Doughnut Hole

Democratic leaders in both chambers have vowed to close the coverage gap in Medicare’s prescription drug benefit — known as the doughnut hole — but only the House bill actually does it. The trouble is that the lower chamber would fund that provision by allowing states to haggle directly with drug makers on behalf of their lowest-income seniors — a proposal that Senate leaders and the White House have promised not to support as part of an $80 billion deal cut with the pharmaceutical industry earlier in the year.

That leaves conference negotiators with two choices: Break the deal with Big Pharma or find some other way to fund the elimination of the doughnut hole. A third choice — not to close the coverage gap fully — seems unlikely from a Democratic Party hoping to win over a skeptical senior population in the run-up to the 2010 elections.

Anti-Trust

Democrats have long eyed a repeal of the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by the insurance industry, and the House bill would do just that, overturning a 64-year-old law that allows companies to share cost and coverage information without federal scrutiny. The provision didn’t fly in the Senate, however, due to the opposition of Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), the moderate Democrat whose close ties to the insurance industry include a stint as CEO of the Omaha-based Central National Insurance Group. Although an earlier version of the Senate bill would have eliminated the anti-trust exemption, Senate leaders later bowed to Nelson by plucking that language from the bill.

Abortion Coverage

Concerned that taxpayer dollars would be used to subsidize abortion coverage on the exchange, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) led a group of moderate Democrats in threatening to kill the House bill unless it explicitly prohibited exchange plans from covering abortion. And they won.

The Senate restrictions aren’t quite so severe, allowing women to buy abortion coverage from exchange plans if they write two separate premium checks — one for abortion services and one for all other treatments. Though it was seen as a less stringent form of the Stupak amendment, the Senate language has still alienated many liberals who say it goes too far to restrict women from getting comprehensive care. Stupak, meanwhile, says it doesn’t go far enough. Satisfying both camps will require some delicate wording.

Illegal Immigration

Both the House and Senate bills would prevent illegal immigrants from getting taxpayer subsidies for insurance coverage on the exchange. But the Senate bill is the more restrictive of the two, prohibiting undocumented folks from buying exchange plans even if they pay full price. That provision has angered a number of liberal and Hispanic lawmakers, who have questioned how letting workers buy a product from U.S. companies with U.S. dollars could be a threat to the country’s well-being. The Senate provision, critics point out, would also encourage illegal immigrants to use emergency rooms for primary care services. Still, with the 2010 elections looming, Democrats will be tempted to go with the Senate provision for simple fear of lending campaign ammunition to Republican challengers.

Public Option

It’s been the most prominent of the hot-button issues surrounding health care reform from the start, and observers of the conference negotiations will be watching closely to see what Democrats will finally do with the proposal to create a public insurance option to compete with private companies. The House bill includes such a provision, but Senate leaders were forced to yank a similar proposal when Sens. Nelson and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) threatened to withhold their support. Many liberal lawmakers have said that the public plan is vital to reforming a health care system made more dysfunctional by for-profit insurance companies whose incentive is to deny care rather than pay for it. But with no sign that either Nelson or Lieberman will have a change of heart, negotiators will have little choice but to pluck the House provision for the sake of passing the larger bill.

“I expect the final bill will be pretty much the Senate bill,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told The Charleston Gazette last week, “simply because we have to get the 60 votes.”

Photo by DawnVGilmorePhotography, Flickr Creative Commons

“I am committed to fully closing it, once and for all,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday. “We will do so in our conference committee with the House, whose bill already closes the gap.”

Left unmentioned, however, was how they plan to pay for that promise without unraveling a friendly deal struck earlier in the year between the pharmaceutical lobby and Democratic leaders in the White House and Senate. Though the House bill does indeed close the coverage gap, known disapprovingly as the “doughnut hole,” lower-chamber leaders chose to offset that provision by allowing states to negotiate drug prices for millions of low-income seniors, which is prohibited under current law. Such negotiations would save the government tens of billions of dollars, but would also undermine the deal with Big Pharma.

The decision to kick the issue to the conference negotiations, rather than taking it up on the Senate floor, could lead to a clash between Democratic leaders in each chamber over whether the government should be empowered to use its bulk-buying advantage to secure lower prices for both the government and the nation’s lowest-income seniors — something House leaders support, but Democrats in the Senate and White House oppose because of the pharmaceutical deal.

Senate Democrat leaders have already shown zero willingness this year to break the agreement with Big Pharma, under which the nation’s largest drug companies have pledged up to $80 billion to subsidize health-care reform over the next decade in return for assurance that Democrats wouldn’t seek further concessions. Fearing the industry’s opposition to the underlying reform bill, Senate Democrats, behind Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., have already shot down several proposals in recent weeks that would have broken the deal — including legislation making it easier for Americans to buy their prescription drugs from abroad, as well as the very provision that the House used to close the doughnut hole.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, joined a bipartisan group that voted in favor of the Senate drug-import bill.

That means that Democrats, if they intend to keep that deal intact, will be forced to find additional money to close the doughnut hole — estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the federal government more than $42 billion over the next decade. That’s no simple task for Democratic leaders who have already struggled to find offsets for legislation tickling $900 billion. So far, they’re giving no clues how they might do it.

“It’s something that we will have to deal with in conference,” Reid spokesman Jim Manley wrote in an email this week.

Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif., a long-time champion of the controversial offset provision, echoed that uncertainty Tuesday. With the Senate bill not yet finalized, she said, it’s too early to begin speculating about conference specifics.

The doughnut hole has been controversial since Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, called Part D, was rammed through Congress by the Republican majority in 2003. Under that benefit, the government pays 75 percent of seniors’ drug costs up to $2,700, when patients must begin paying full price. After those expenses hit $6,154, the government picks up 95 percent of the tab, meaning the doughnut hole is $3,054.

The gap has created serious health concerns. Indeed, in 2007 roughly 3.4 million Medicare beneficiaries reached the doughnut hole, of which about 15 percent stopped taking their prescriptions as a result, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As part of their $80 billion deal, drug makers agreed to cover half the cost of name-brand drugs for seniors stuck in the doughnut hole, beginning in 2010. The House bill builds on that foundation, cutting the doughnut hole by an additional $500 per person in 2010, and incrementally shrinking the gap further until 2019, when it would close altogether.

The controversy is not over the proposal itself, but how it’s funded. House leaders decided to allow states to negotiate prescription prices on behalf of the nearly 9 million seniors who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid — the so-called dual eligibles — as they do for regular Medicaid patients. Such a system allows the states to use the bulk-buying advantage of the large Medicaid pool to negotiate lower costs on prescription drugs.

Prior to enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, dual eligibles also got their drugs through Medicaid. With passage of Part D, however, drug purchasing for duals shifted to Medicare, which was explicitly prohibited from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the government currently pays about 30 percent more for dual eligibles’ drugs under Medicare than it would under Medicaid, according to a 2008 study from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, then chaired by Waxman.

Indeed, it was Waxman, now chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, who inserted the dual-eligible provision into the House bill.

Some upper chamber lawmakers have tried to do the same. During debate over health reform in the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., proposed a similar amendment. The proposal would have no effect on the drug coverage of dual eligibles, but simply shift which federal program would pick up the tab. Nelson said it would save the government $106 billion over the next decade.

The Finance Committee killed it, 13 to 10.

“We have to find some other time, some other way [to close the doughnut hole],” Baucus said after voting against the measure. “The White House did reach an agreement.”

Mike Lillis covers Congress for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

Each red dot on this map represents the residence of a patient at Mount Pleasant Mental Health Institute. Patient and family travel was one of the aspects considered by ISU economists as they researched the economic impact of the state's four facilities. (Source: ISU Department of Economics)

“Closing Mount Pleasant yields a localized loss of 196.3 total jobs and $8.97 million in labor income,” wrote David Swenson and Liesl Eathington, part of Iowa State University’s Department of Economics and co-authors of a study on the economic impacts of the state’s four mental health institutes.

Since the legislature mandated that a plan for closing one of the facilities must also include a clear vision of how existing services and beds could be maintain, Swenson and Eathington estimate that the receiving facility would gain 97.5 jobs and $5.607 million in labor income.

Closing of the facility in Mount Pleasant, according to the study, would lead to:

• A reduction of local government general revenues by $1.24 million, and a need for a $1.15 million local spending reduction
• A reduction in resident home valuations of $6.17 million
• A decline in area retail sales of $1.41 million
• A 214 person overall population decline due to job loss
• A decline in state government receipts by $1.62 million, and an expected $1.59 million decrease in area state funded services
• A reduction in the average annual travel of patient families

Since the Iowa Department of Human Services has submitted its plan to the state legislature and has recommended closure of the Mount Pleasant facility, the information pulled from the Swenson-Eathington study for this report is specific to that region. It is, however, worth noting that there were significant economic impacts associated with closure of any of the four state-run institutes, and that in most scenarios considered by the economists, closing Mount Pleasant provided the least economic woe for the state.

As tough as the upper-chamber debate promises to be, many of the thorniest conflicts will likely be re-contested when Democratic leaders in both chambers meet, probably in January, to iron out the differences between their bills. The legislative disparities revolve around such high-profile topics as the public option and coverage of abortion, but also include lesser-noticed issues, like whether to honor a White House deal with the pharmaceutical industry and how to approach the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Senate Republicans are also eyeing many of these hot-button issues, with hopes of using them to divide the Democrats in order to kill the larger bill. But with the considerable House-versus-Senate discrepancies awaiting conference negotiators, fending off opposition from Senate Republicans in the meantime could prove to be the least of the Democrats’ troubles as they attempt to pass the most consequential health-care reforms in generations.

Who Pays?

Chief among the differences between the Democrats’ bills is how each chamber has proposed to pay the considerable cost of covering tens-of-millions of uninsured Americans. The House pays the freight largely with a 5.4 percent tax on the nation’s highest earners — individuals making more than $500,000 per year, and families pulling in more than $1 million.

The Senate, on the other hand, has proposed an excise tax on the highest-cost insurance plans — those exceeding $8,500 for individual coverage and $23,000 for families. The Senate bill would also apply a 0.5 percent Medicare payroll tax to individuals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000.

Liberals and labor unions have supported the House approach, arguing that an unprecedented tax on insurance plans would erode decades of work to secure comprehensive, employer-sponsored health-care coverage for workers. Conservatives, meanwhile, are warning that higher taxes on the wealthy will only exacerbate the nation’s economic troubles in the middle of an employment crisis.

Coverage vs. Care

Both the House and Senate bills rely heavily on a Medicaid expansion to cover the country’s poorest uninsured residents. The House would extend eligibility to 150 percent of the federal poverty level (net income), while Senate eligibility would expand to 133 percent of poverty (gross income).

The more significant difference, though, revolves around Medicaid reimbursement, which is so low in some states that many doctors and dentists now refuse to see Medicaid patients. The House bill recognizes the problem, bumping up Medicaid payments for primary care services to 100 percent of Medicare rates by 2012. Despite an effort to get similar language into the Senate legislation, a controversial funding proposal kept the provision out of the final bill.

The reimbursement increase doesn’t come cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the provision would cost $28.7 billion over the next five years and $57 billion over the next 10.

Abortion

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) lit a firestorm earlier in the month when he amended the House bill to prohibit abortion coverage under subsidized exchange plans. The Senate bill would also ban federal funding of abortions, but would allow women receiving exchange-plan subsidies to segregate their premiums and co-payments in order to access abortion services. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has already said that he’ll offer the Stupak provision on the floor, though supporters will have the difficult task of rallying 60 votes to pass the measure.

Indeed, the Stupak provision is poised to cause more havoc in the House than the Senate, with some House liberals vowing to oppose the larger bill if the language survives the conference negotiations, while Stupak and other anti-abortion Democrats are hinging their support on the provision remaining intact. Satisfying both camps for the sake of the bill’s passage will likely require some delicate wording from Democratic leaders.

Illegal Immigrants

Both chambers propose to screen exchange-plan applicants to ensure that illegal immigrants don’t receive the federal subsidies available to those living below 400 percent of poverty. The Senate bill, however, goes a giant step further, proposing to exclude illegals from purchasing even unsubsidized insurance coverage on the exchange. That provision has riled a number of lawmakers and immigration advocates, who are wondering how allowing folks to buy insurance coverage from private companies with U.S. dollars could harm the country, fiscally or otherwise.

“It makes no sense for anybody,” said Jonathan Blazer, public policy attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. “Nobody’s willing to defend it on policy grounds.”

If the Senate language emerges from the conference negotiations, it will likely lead to a showdown with House members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who early in the debate had threatened to vote against the House bill if it excluded illegal aliens from unsubsidized exchange coverage.

CHIP

Though largely unmentioned throughout the health reform debate, the House bill would terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program at the end of 2013, shifting those kids into Medicaid or private plans on the exchange. House leaders — who had championed CHIP for the past 12 years — say their proposal will expand coverage by getting kids and parents under the same plan.

But some children’s health-care advocates have raised alarms over that strategy, arguing that the private plans will likely be more expensive, thereby discouraging low-income parents from getting their kids any coverage at all. And Sen. Jay Rockefeller agrees. The West Virginia Democrat — who successfully amended the Senate bill to reauthorize CHIP through 2019 — is vowing to fight to keep the program intact.

“Health care reform should improve the coverage children have,” he said, “not take their coverage away.”

Rockefeller, though, has been a lonely voice in support of preserving CHIP, leaving the ultimate fate of his amendment in question.

The Big Deal with Big Pharma

In June, Democratic leaders in the White House and Senate caused a stir when they announced a deal with the pharmaceutical lobby. Under that bargain, the drug companies promised $80 billion over the next decade to close Medicare’s drug-coverage gap (partially) if the lawmakers agreed to oppose efforts to empower states to negotiate drug prices for residents enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. The Senate bill keeps that agreement intact, with Finance Committee members shooting down an amendment allowing such price haggling for the sake of closing Medicare’s donut hole altogether.

House Democrats, on the other hand, have said all along that they weren’t a part of the discussions with the drug makers, and they don’t feel bound to any deal they never agreed to. As evidence, the House bill allows states to negotiate drug prices on behalf of their lowest-income seniors — a provision the CBO estimates would save more than $42 billion over the next decade.

The Public Option

At the heart of the debate over health-care reform this year has been the public option — a strategy, popular among liberals and consumer advocates, to create a public, non-profit insurance plan to compete with private companies. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) surprised many political observers last month when he proposed to create such state-based plans in the bill he weaved together from the different proposals passed by the Finance and health committees. Reid’s bill would empower the plans’ administrators to haggle directly with doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers over reimbursement rates, but it would also leave states the option not to participate.

The House bill is similar, but creates a national insurance option rather than numerous state-based plans. Additionally, the House bill doesn’t include the state opt-out language.

Unlike the other topics mentioned here, the toughest fight over the public option seems destined to occur on the Senate floor, rather than in conference. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has repeatedly vowed to filibuster any bill that includes a public plan, whether it’s opt-out, opt-in, trigger-based, or any other configuration. Meanwhile, some upper-chamber liberals — including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Roland Burris (D-Ill.) — are hinging their vote for the health reform package on the inclusion of a strong public option.

“This legislation cannot simply be a huge subsidy to private insurance companies that will get millions of new customers and be able to raise their rates as high as they want,” Sanders said in a statement last week. “I strongly suspect that there are number of senators, including myself, who would not support final passage without a strong public option.”

All of this, of course, could change. Although the House passed its health-care reform bill earlier in the month, the Senate proposal is just hitting the chamber floor today. The upper-chamber is expected to debate the measure through most of December, with hundreds of amendments likely to be offered from both sides of the aisle.

Democratic leaders hope to pass the bill out of the Senate before the holiday recess, pushing the conference negotiations to sometime in January. That 2010 is an election year won’t make those discussions any smoother.

Mike Lillis covers congress for The Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (File photo via Minnesota Governor's Office)

Before his trip to Iowa, Pawlenty had taken heat for endorsing the Conservative Party candidate over the Republican in Tuesday’s U.S. House district in New York. He then called moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine “more liberal than most Republicans would like.”

Pawlenty seemed to be addressing that controversy, saying debate over things like the party platform are good, but once that’s complete Republicans must unite to “start the American comeback.”

Pawlenty then struck a chord for party unity, saying that there should be vigorous primary campaigns, but then everyone should get back on the same team in order to elect Republicans.

“We’re going to have our debates about what the platform will look like,” he said. “We’re going to have our primaries and caucuses. We’re going to go through that process, and it should be hard fought. But when those decisions are made, as a team we have to come around and support each other.”

This marks the second major Republican Party of Iowa fundraiser where a potential 2012 presidential candidate has made it a point to discuss creating an inclusive party. In June, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told a crowd of GOP activists and elected officials that the only way back into the majority was to resist demands for ideological purity.

For most of his speech, Pawlenty struck a populist tone attacking federal bailouts for Wall Street companies and Detroit automakers. And on the night that U.S. House lawmakers approved health care reform legislation, Pawlenty repeatedly hit the Democratic reform efforts, saying they are proof that Democrats no longer care about working families.

“They have a party now, our competitors, that have embraced big government, big unions and big bailouts,” he said. “And they want to have the people believe that they work for the common person. The working person.”

During his successful presidential campaign, Barack Obama regularly asked if the crowd was “fired up and ready to go,” Pawlenty said

“Are you fired up and ready to fight back?” Pawlenty said. “Are you willing to be involved?”

He said Obama broke his campaign promise to seek bipartisan health care reform, instead deciding to push for a liberal bill, ignore Republican voices and continue the “dangerous leftward tilt” the president has pursued for the country.

“In his victory speech in Iowa after the caucuses, President Obama promised — he used the word promise — he was going to bring Republicans and Democrats together to pass needed health care reform,” Pawlenty said. “Now I ask you, are you sick and tired of Democrats trying to ram down this liberal monstrosity down our throat which is their health care reform plan?”

But the Republican Party can’t simply be critics, Pawlenty said. Republicans must also offer solutions, and he pointed to his record as governor of Minnesota as proof that GOP ideas work. Minnesota is a very liberal state, Pawlenty said, and he was still able to cut spending and taxes.

“If we can do it there, we can do it anywhere,” he said.

The federal government could learn from his experience in Minnesota. Instead of allowing the national deficit to continue to grow, government should begin to live within its means, Pawlenty said.

“The only thing growing faster than the national debt is [MSNBC host] Chris Matthews’ man-crush on Barack Obama,” he said.

This marks Pawlenty’s first trip to Iowa since he campaigned for Arizona Sen. John McCain last year, and many are speculating that the trip is another indication of his interest in seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. He has already said he will not seek a third term as governor and last month he formed a political action committee called Freedom First, a typical first move for presidential aspirants.

Susan Frey, vice chair of the board, told Radio Iowa’s O.Kay Henderson that the decision won’t be rushed.

“We have received copious amounts of information and each board member will receive all of that information and they will go through it,” she says. “We take this very, very seriously and it will be something that we spend a lot of time on and analyze thoroughly in order to make a good decision.”

In April, a Polk County judge ordered the Board of Pharmacy to at least consider whether marijuana has any acceptable medical uses. In July, the board decided to hold hearings on the issue and offer a recommendation to the legislature. Four hearings were held.

A state Senate subcommittee held a hearing in March on a bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Bolkcom of Iowa City that would have created the Medical Marijuana Act, allowing the possession and use of marijuana for therapeutic purposes. The bill, Senate File 293, never made it out of subcommittee.

Today Joseph Sarachek, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee for the beleaguered Agriprocessors meatpacking plant, filed a supplemental motion requesting the court reconvene the auction to consider the sale of the plant to SHF Industries, Inc. The actual sale of the plant, although recommended by Sarachek, must be approved by both the bankruptcy court and federal prosecutors.

SHF Industries, incorporated in Iowa, is owned by Hershey Friedman, a Canadian businessman, and two additional partners. Prior to presenting an offer for the plant, SHF first approached two key debt-holders and was able to hammer out an agreement to purchase their interests, according to documents filed with the court. Earlier court proceedings listed the major debt interests at over $20 million, Sarachek told the Associated Press that the actual buyout was “significantly less.”

With the two key debt holders placated, however, it is much more likely that a bid for the plant will be successful.

Agriprocessors, the site of a massive immigration raid on May 12, 2008, never fully recovered when 389 workers were bussed out of town by more than 800 Immigration and Customs Enforcment agents. Federal prosecutors, once finished with the immigrant workers, began picking their way up the plant’s management team. The arrest of Sholom Rubashkin, a son of company founder A. Aaron Rubashkin, led to the Chapter 11 filing and the temporary closing of the plant.

SHF, according to court documents, is offering an “as is, where is” sum of $8.5 million in addition to what has already been invested in existing debt. SHF is also willing to allow the existing trustee continued access to records.

“The condition to closing is the entry of an order by the bankruptcy court authorizing the sale of the assests to SHF, free and clear of all claims, liens and other encumbrances. … SHF is not acquiring, nor assuming, any debts or obligations of the debtor or the estate.”

Finally, SHF, according to the motion filed by Sarachek, is willing to provide the court with an affadavit, “sworn under the penalty of perjury,” that establishes any connections or affiliations the company has either with existing creditors or other parties of intest in the case, including members of the Rubashkin family or any of the multiple corporations the family has created.

The sale needs the approval of federal prosecutors not only due to continued criminal investigations and charges against former plant operators, but because the sale, as described in court documents, would also include certain company trademarks — items the federal government have already marked for forfeiture.

More details regarding the offer should be forthcoming when Sarachek files an asset purchase agreement with the court prior to a continuance of the bankruptcy sale.

Vander Plaats argues it is within Culver’s power to issue an executive order putting the ruling on hold. He unveiled a draft executive order at a Statehouse news conference Thursday and urged Culver to sign it to.

“In our opinion, it is constitutionally irresponsible for the governor not to issue this executive order. This is his role,” Vander Plaats said.

The governor’s office has made clear that in their view (and in pretty much everyone else’s view), an executive order cannot overturn a decision by the state’s highest court.