McKinley ran for the post last year, but Wieck defeated him.  Shortly after his victory last year, Wieck told the Iowa Independent that he planned to contrast Republican and Democratic positions on property taxes and social issues, among other things, during the 2008 legislative session.

More recently, however, Wieck was known for setting a low bar for GOP State Senators on election day, hoping only to keep Democrats from picking up enough seats to achieve a supermajority.

Gronstal and House Minority Leader Christopher Rants, R-Sioux City, participated in a post-election online chat with voters Wednesday sponsored by The Des Moines Register.

Responding to a question about what the election means for the Republican Party of Iowa and its leadership, Gronstal said a change is definitely coming.

“The Republican Party is expected to name a new state chair. And my Republican sources are saying that Senator Wieck, the Senate Minority leader, and Rep. Rants, the House Minority Leader, will face leadership challenges after losing seats last night.”

Rants said the GOP needs to continually re-evaluate how it approaches elections and early voting but did not respond directly to Gronstal’s claim.

“The election day has stretched from 24 hours to 24 days. I will credit the Democrats in their ability to get low propensity voters in the bank before they turn lose the negative ads. The Rs have to find a way to replicate it. We’ve prided ourselves for too long on a 72 hour turn out program, that wins on Election Day, but doesn’t bank enough votes before hand.”

Throughout the chat, the two legislative leaders sparred over the state budget and priorities for the January’s session. Rants told readers 2009 will be the toughest budget year since the 1993 floods, which Gronstal said just wasn’t true.

“Again, that message of “the sky is falling” didn’t sell with voters, mostly because it isn’t true. Democrats will balance the state budget and I bet that we’ll do it without raising property taxes, like Rep. Rants and his fellow Republicans did when they were in control.”

Rants responded with, “I bet you raise [property taxes] in the first 30 days.

Sen. Ron Wieck, R-Sioux City, said with an election coming in 2008,the Democratic leadership will shy away from making tough decisions necessary to make Iowa a better place.

“If Iowa is to be a place that grows and thrives for all of its citizens, we need to do the heavy lifting that bold and responsible leadership requires,” Wieck said in his opening remarks. “Sadly, you won’t find it in the Iowa Senate.  It is easy to tax and spend, so we tax and spend, and spend, and spend.”

Senate Majority Leader Michael Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, said Wieck’s comments are typical of the leader of a party out of power. Gronstal’s party holds a majority in both the Iowa House and Senate and with Chet Culver in the Governor’s Office, the Democratic party holds an advantage in getting legislation passed this year.

“Look, he’s the leader of a fractured caucus so his remarks don’t surprise me” Gronstal said. “I think there are a bunch of Republicans we’ve worked very closely with in the past three years (since the Democrats took power.)”Earlier in the morning, Gronstal called on behalf of his fellow senators to finish the work that was begun in 2007, including strengthening incentives for the production of alternative energy, providing quality daycare to all Iowa pre-schoolers, and making health insurance available to more Iowans.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate already disagree over the amount of money available to spend this year. Republicans say it won’t be possible to increase spending without jacking up property taxes. But Gronstal and others point to a report by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency that says the state has about $592 million in reserves.

The legislature is faced with an aggressive agenda this year that includes adopting statewide education standards, replacing an out-dated prison in Fort Madison, revamping the state’s deposit law on beverage containers, improving the state’s roads and bridges and overhauling the property tax structure.

The letter, which painted Courtney and a former local official as being anti-business, appeared Tuesday, Nov. 20, on the paper’s website. It was signed simply: “Brent Oleson, Marion.”

Oleson, an attorney by trade, does maintain a residence in Marion with his family. As he points out in the letter, he grew up in the community and is a graduate of Burlington High School. What the letter and his signature fail to disclose is that he is also the administrative assistant to the highest ranking Republican member of the Iowa Senate, Ron Wieck of Sioux City. Previously, he worked for Mary Lundby of Marion, the former Senate Minority Leader.

Four days earlier, a similar letter appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, also signed “Brent Oleson, Marion,” but this time critical of Rep. Swati Dandekar. That letter accused Dandekar, a Marion Democrat who has announced she will seek Lundby’s vacated Senate seat in the next election, of engaging in double talk.

While there is no rule that prevents legislative staff from writing letters to the editor, it is not a typical or general practice and has generally been frowned upon.

“At a minimum it is deceptive,” said Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal in a phone interview Tuesday. “It is unfortunate for the Republican side that their new leader has indicated that he is all politics, all the time. The day he won the title of minority leader, he said, ‘Our sole goal has nothing to do with changing policy. It all has to do with getting a majority.’ His statement was that he was going to play politics all the time and that he wasn’t going to work on moving Iowa forward.”

Wieck, whose own website highlights his agenda to return Republicans to the majority, maintains he neither knew nor approved of the letters written by his assistant.

“Someone had mentioned to me about the first letter — I believe in the Cedar Rapids Gazette — that it was in there,” he said by phone Tuesday evening. “But I’m not sure why you are calling me. [Oleson] has a right to his personal opinion and his own time. He doesn’t ask me if it is okay if he writes to the editor and I’m not even sure what’s in the letters.”

Oleson returned a phone call, but chose not to make public comment.

Courtney said that when he read the letter, which claimed he yelled on the floor of the Iowa Senate that he was tired of protecting small business, he found it “appalling.”

“When I came into the Iowa Senate, I began working — almost daily — for an increase in the minimum wage,” he said.

When he first came into office, the Senate was Republican controlled. A few years later, Senate was evenly split — 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats. Only in 2006 did Democrats win majority.

Courtney said he worked throughout his tenure to pass legislation that would raise the minimum wage in Iowa. During the time when the Republicans had a majority, he said, none of his proposed bills gained traction. When the Senate was split, he worked to hammer out a compromise, but Republicans still took offense with the proposed bill and refused to pass it. The statement in the letter referenced his remarks as floor manager of the minimum wage increase that passed during the 2007 session.

“Every day — during the time that we were evenly split — I would bring it up,” he said. “And every day they would say no. Knowing that an increase might be a strain on some small businesses for a short time, I proposed amendments that would protect those businesses. Still, the Republicans said no because they were not interested in doing anything with the minimum wage.

“When we won majority and I was floor managing the bill, they starting bringing amendments up — I don’t know how many exactly — but some of them offering the very things that I’d tried to compromise on before. These were the very same things that the Republicans had voted down previously when they had the numbers to do so.”

When then Senate Minority Leader Mary Lundby attacked Courtney for refusing to help small business, he said that he made the statement which led to the quote in Oleson’s letter.

I told Lundby that I’d been working this bill for four years and that I was sick and tired of hearing about small businesses,” he said. “I told her that she had never wanted to hear about small businesses before, when I had compromises, and that we were now going to run this bill as it was in our packet. That’s what I said. I wasn’t yelling and I wasn’t screaming.”

Wieck, a Republican from Sioux City in his second term, was elected by party colleagues last week to replace retiring Sen. Mary Lundby.

Republicans, holding only 20 seats in the 50-seat Senate, have little power to wield. Their new leadership will determine what actions they will take to use what little power they have in influencing policies — and to maneuver to regain seats in the 2008 elections.

In an interview with Iowa Independent this week, Wieck discussed three main areas of focus that he will use to achieve those goals. Those three issues: property tax reform, health care reform and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

“We have to be realistic and we have to remember that we’re in the minority. To believe that we are going to pass major legislation as Republicans in the minority next year, we’d just be fooling ourselves. Our primary function, our primary goal during the next session will be to do everything that we possibly can to regain the majority,” Wieck said.

“There will definitely be a process of contrasting Republican and Democrat values in the state of Iowa,” he said. “And we’ll be prepared to talk about the property tax issue. Realistically, you can take the property tax issue on another level, and that level is that if we don’t do something about spending, particularly the spending in the last session, we’re never going to get to do anything about property taxes in the state of Iowa. We’ll continue to see high property taxes. I happen to be on the property tax interim study group that met last winter at the capitol, and I heard in the entire day of discussion and testimony nothing about an effort to cut spending so that we could truly do something about taxes. All I heard was a way to shift and look for revenues in a different place so property taxes could be reduced. That doesn’t increase the ability of Iowans to retain money in their pocket, it simply is taking out of a different pocket to meet the demands of government.”

Republicans see the recent ruling in an Iowa court striking down the state’s marriage law as an opportunity to bring Democrats to their side — or as an issue to defeat Democrats on Election Day.

“One of our priorities would include a marriage amendment,” said Wieck, discussing what he calls “the issue with the judge legislating from the bench and overturning the marriage law. We’ll have a bill asking for that. You know, I really believe there are some Democrats that believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. They continue to stand with the rest of their party on that issue, but we know for a fact that there’s been a number of times when some of the Democrats in the Senate have said that if the courts overturned the law, they’d re-think it. And so we’re going to be calling on those people to re-think the issue and cross the aisle on that issue and vote with us.”

Wieck, who came out of the closed-door leadership election with a victory over Sen. Paul McKinley of Chariton, said that the Senate Republicans will be united in their efforts. He said that he is planning some committee re-assignments to better utilize the skills of Republican Senators.

Iowa Senate Republicans gathered today to elect their new leadership team for the coming legislative session.

In addition to naming Wieck to the postion of Minority Leader, Sen. Mark Zieman, of Postville, was named Minority Whip.

Those elected to assistant minority leadership positions include Sen. Larry McKibben (Marshalltown), Sen. David Johnson (Ocheyedan), Sen. Jeff Angelo (Creston), Sen. Pat Ward (West Des Moines), and Sen. Nancy Boettger (Harlan).

Wieck’s rise to the leadership position means that both the Iowa Senate and House of Representatives minority leaders will hail from Sioux City.
House Minority Leader Chris Rants is also a resident of that western Iowa community.