And he described a broader shift, in Iowa and nationally, away from listening to the minority party that “shows us that the system that we’re running right now doesn’t work anymore.” A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to an interview request. ![]() Sand framed the legislation as partisan overreach that could impede his ability to do his job. The auditor, Rob Sand, happens to be the only Iowa Democrat still holding a statewide office. On Thursday, Reynolds signed some of the last bills of the session into law, including a measure limiting the authority of the state auditor to access personal information and to take state agencies to court when performing investigations, drawing adamant objections from Democrats. “Americans are taking notice as states around the country are looking to Iowa as a beacon for freedom and opportunity,” Reynolds said in a statement last month in which she called the legislative session “historic.” Her state was also one of at least 16 this year that banned or significantly limited gender transition treatments for minors. Kim Reynolds signed bills passed by her fellow Republicans that loosened child labor rules and allowed families to put taxpayer money toward private school tuition. In Iowa, it was Republicans pressing the advantage conferred by their trifecta - control of the governorship and both legislative chambers - and continuing the transformation of their former swing state into a bastion of conservatism. The pendulum will swing the other way,” McCombie said. “States that do this on the right or the left - it’s going to blow up. Tony McCombie, House leader of the Republican minority in Illinois, where Democrats are in their fifth consecutive year of single-party control, said majority parties that lurch too far in one direction risk long-term political peril. “The real travesty is, that’s nearly 50% of the state that we represent,” said Mark Johnson, the Republican leader in the Minnesota Senate, “and so it’s constituents across the state that had little or no voice.” In the course of just a few months, they had watched from the sidelines as their state became a laboratory of progressive policymaking, even though hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans vote Republican. Minnesota Republicans did not need reminding. “If you need a reminder that elections have consequences,” the former president said on Twitter, “check out what’s happening in Minnesota.” ![]() Tim Walz signed bills codifying abortion rights, legalizing recreational marijuana and expanding voting rights for felons, a spree of liberal wins that drew the attention of Obama. In Minnesota, where Democrats flipped a legislative chamber last year to narrowly take full control of the statehouse, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed laws restricting abortion, banning transgender medical care for minors, loosening the requirements to impose the death penalty and allowing concealed guns to be carried without a permit. In Florida, which voted twice for Barack Obama but has since swung decisively toward Republicans, Gov. In North Dakota, where Republicans have led the government since 1995, officials banned transition care for minors, outlawed abortion and barred materials deemed to be sexually explicit from the children’s section of libraries.īut even in states with recent histories as political battlegrounds, lawmakers pushed hard this year to the left or right, potentially leaving a significant segment of residents alienated. In Washington, where Democrats have had full control of state government for 14 of the past 19 years, lawmakers banned the sale of AR-15-style weapons and enshrined protections for abortion and transgender medical care in law. Some of the states that pursued ambitious partisan agendas had long been single-party strongholds. “We’ve always known that California was progressive, Texas was conservative, but it now feels like almost every state is kind of falling into one of those categories,” said Tim Storey, CEO of the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan group. In some Republican states, lawmakers also took aim at the powers of Democratic officeholders or sought to limit local control in liberal-leaning cities. The result was that the legislative season, which has ended in much of the country, left an even wider divide between Republican and Democratic states on the country’s thorniest social issues.
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