Iowa's Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, is promising to revive her quest to end the state's status as the only place in the country where convicted felons are permanently barred from voting.
She says she is optimistic that when the General Assembly convenes next week, her fellow Republicans in the majority will pass legislation starting a process lasting several years for giving voting rights back to felons as soon as they complete their sentences.
The franchise has been given back to more than 2 million ex-convicts in at least eight states during the past decade, fulfilling a top goal of civil rights groups, who view restoration of the vote as an essential part of making criminals who have done their time productive members of society. Resistance has come mostly from red states. Most freed felons are black or Hispanic and vote reliably Democratic.
In Iowa, the only way for a felon to win the right to vote after prison is to get the governor's permission.
Reynolds could act unilaterally, and groups including the Campaign Legal Center have been pressing her to issue a broad decree this month — theoretically allowing about 52,000 more people to participate Feb. 3 in the first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential caucuses.
But such an executive order could be reversed by a future governor, and Reynolds has said that to prevent uncertainty she is pursuing the cumbersome system for changing the state constitution. A constitutional amendment in Iowa must be passed twice by the Legislature, with an election in between, and then win approval by the voters in a statewide referendum. That means 2024 is the first election year when Iowa felons could participate.
Reynolds first tried to advance the proposal after taking office a year ago, but the bill stalled in the Senate.
The issue then was that blocs of Republicans could not agree on the parameters for who would get back the right to vote. Some wanted to keep rapists, murderers and other violent criminals off the list, which is the case in many states. Others wanted to make felons pay all fines, court fees and restitution before their rights are restored, which civil rights groups say is a de facto poll tax and would prompt them to oppose the bill.
"I believe it's the right thing to do. And it's one of my priorities. Sometimes you don't get it the first year when you talk about it," Reynolds told the Cedar Rapids Gazette. "I think it's the right thing to do, and I'm going to do everything I can to make the case. And I feel pretty confident that we can get them there."
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.