Obradovich: Collective bargaining smackdown leaves Democrats spoiling for rematch

At the beginning of the Iowa Legislature’s session, there seemed to be opportunities for bipartisan cooperation. Not many, unfortunately, but there were a few issues like water quality and highway safety that seemed to take priority for both Republicans and Democrats.

Six weeks into the legislative session, all bets are off. Democrats say the way Republicans managed the collective bargaining bill, which included invoking a rare procedural move to cut off debate, will linger over the Capitol like sewer gas.   

“I think they have so poisoned the process, it just makes it very difficult to see how we go forward,” Senate Minority Leader Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, said.

Hogg said the way Republicans conducted themselves on the collective bargaining bill approved last week makes it hard to imagine restoring a cooperative relationship.

His vision for the rest of the session was pretty grim. “What I expect, they’re going to ram every partisan, highly partisan, dark-money thing they want to do,” he said. “I think they’re going to come after us.”

He listed a bunch of GOP bills he expects to see:  workers’ comp legislation, defunding Planned Parenthood, a voter identification bill and what he called extreme firearm legislation.

I tried calling the Republican majority leader in the House and Senate about their plans. I’ll let you know if I hear back from them.

Now, in a quarter-century covering the Legislature, I have heard many times that one party or the other had driven the bipartisan bus off a cliff. This time, however, it seems Republicans have first run it through a demolition derby, slashed the tires and torched it before rolling it into the abyss.

GOP lawmakers in the Iowa House and Senate struck a deal in advance behind closed doors and approved only tiny changes thereafter. They moved the bill simultaneously through the House and Senate, requiring the two chambers to remain in lockstep. Then, they cut off debate and forced a vote with only a few hours of warning.  

That’s rarely done in the Iowa Senate, which has always prided itself on being the more deliberative of the two bodies and more respectful of individual lawmakers’ rights to be heard. Even when Democrats debated expansions to collective bargaining in 2007, they gave Republicans 72 hours notice before setting a time limit on debate, according to Hogg.

 Republicans running the bill in the House and Senate seemed at best unable and at worst unwilling to discuss what effect these changes will have on the more than 180,000 public employees around the state. I saw lawmakers who supposedly helped write the bill unable to answer simple questions about the wording. I also saw Republicans who were supposed to be helping their fellow lawmakers understand the language snapping at them to read the bill themselves. 

 State legislators pushing this legislation spoke of opportunities for local governments to “innovate” in managing taxpayers’ dollars and the services they expect. In the hours of debate I heard, Republicans never offered a single example of what that innovation might entail.

In the two-hour public hearing at the Capitol last week, no local government officials testified, let alone offered any suggestions on what they might do with this newfound flexibility. The rush of local school boards and other local governments to ratify or extend contracts with their public workers suggests many are neither ready nor receptive toward this massive upset in the relationship between management and workers.

 Despite his grim assessment of the rest of the legislative session, Hogg was optimistic about the political opportunities arising from a newly energized public workforce.

 “I think we’re going to see a renewed spirit of citizenship and organizing about people who care about working people across this state. And it’s not just caring about working people and their families, it’s about caring about our communities,” he said.

 One example is a new project coming on line just this week from the Teamsters chapters in Iowa. The Teamsters Community Action Network, or TeamCAN, will allow Iowans to join with organized labor, even if they aren’t union members, said Jesse Case of Iowa City.  He’s the secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 238.

 Case said Friday that TeamCAN was just going up on social media.

  “We plan on growing our political power because of this law being passed,” he said.

 So was this the colossal majority-party overreach that Democrats have described? Or have Republicans handed Democrats the means to win back what they’ve lost over the past couple of election cycles? 

That’s going to be up to Iowans. If opponents of this collective bargaining bill can sustain even a fraction of the outrage we saw at the Statehouse last week, I wouldn’t bet against them.