U.S. Politics

[Rick Plant]

President Biden
@POTUS

The American Rescue Plan offers historic tax relief for working families. A household that files their taxes this year can get $3,600 in tax relief for every child under 6 and $3,000 for every child between 6 and 17. Head to http://ChildTaxCredit.gov to learn more.
https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1514234681683853313


"Today, I spoke with President Zelenskyy and shared with him that my Administration is authorizing an additional $800 million in weapons, ammunition, and other security assistance to Ukraine."

[Rick Plant]

Sure, Jason Ravnsborg Was Impeached. He Still Got Away With Killing Someone.
South Dakota’s attorney general might lose his job. But he underscored how unserious America is about deadly crashes.



On Tuesday, the South Dakota house of representatives impeached the state’s Republican attorney general, Jason Ravnsborg, for killing a 55-year-old pedestrian with his Ford Taurus in September 2020. Ravnsborg paid a small fine and pleaded no contest last year to using his cellphone while driving and driving outside his lane before the crash, but he avoided jail time and more serious charges.

Ravnsborg’s impeachment has intensified divisions within the South Dakota GOP. Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, who harbors national political ambitions, has repeatedly called for him to resign. Ravnsborg has accused Noem of breaking the law by violating a cease-and-desist order to not discuss the impeachment, and he previously floated investigating Noem for using her state office to help her daughter. The impeachment is a notable development for the no doubt dozens of people invested in Ravnsborg’s political future, but it only underscores the grim reality of his case: As a politician, he may pay a steep price. As a driver, he’s faced few consequences for years of bad behavior.

Ravnsborg told the dispatcher the night of the accident that whatever he hit “was in the middle of the road,” and that he had no idea what it had been. He later said he thought he’d struck a deer but found no sign of one and only came across the body of Joe Boever the next morning, when he went to return the car the responding sheriff had lent him.

But investigators learned that Ravnsborg’s vehicle had been solidly on the right shoulder of the two-lane state highway, traveling more than 60 miles per hour, at the time of the crash. Boever, the victim, had been walking along the side of the road with a flashlight. Ravnsborg shouldn’t have had much confusion about where he was on the road—he’d crossed the rumble strip separating the lane from the shoulder. Nor should it have been hard to miss Boever’s body—his flashlight had remained on all night.

When he was interviewed by investigators from the North Dakota Bureau of Investigation (who were brought in to avoid a conflict of interest), more cracks started to appear in his story. For one thing, humans and deer aren’t hard to tell apart. There’s literally an expression to describe what deer look like in the path of a vehicle.

“His face was in your windshield, Jason, think about that,” one investigator told him. Boever’s glasses had even been found in Ravnsborg’s passenger seat.

And Ravnsborg’s account seemed to bolster investigators’ doubts. In his interview with police, the AG said that while he was walking along the road after the crash, he had turned around “and saw him,” and then quickly backtracked. At another point, Ravnsborg said he didn’t see what he’d hit “until the impact,” which is different than not seeing anything at all. Per the Associated Press, “The investigators determined that Ravnsborg would have walked right past Boever’s body and the flashlight Boever had been carrying as Ravnsborg looked around the scene the night of the crash.”

Equally perplexing was the conduct of the local sheriff, who responded to the 911 call and then let the attorney general borrow his car and return it the next day. (In his first public statement after the crash, Ravnsborg took pains to note that he had topped off the tank before he returned it to the sheriff.) The sheriff accepted the deer story and told investigators that he did notice the glow from Boever’s flashlight but did not look to see what it was.

Prosecutors eventually determined that Ravnsborg’s phone was locked at the time of the crash. But they also determined that he had been using it just a moments before, and he wasn’t just consulting Waze; he was reading news articles—including one about Hunter Biden from the right-wing website JustTheNews.com.

In a last-ditch letter to lawmakers on Monday Ravnsborg defended himself with the same care and attention to detail he previously extended to the certification of the Electoral College vote. He wrote that Article V of the Constitution guaranteed him the right to due process, which it does not. Article V lays out the process by which the Constitution can be amended by states; the Fifth Amendment assured him due process, something he already received when he pleaded no contest to the two misdemeanor counts last year. It’s a weird mistake for the state’s top lawyer to make in a memo in which he’s pleading to continue serving as the state’s top lawyer, and it’s not the only one. The document is riddled with typos, and at one point, he includes a line of argument he started and then stopped:

“The prosecutors admitted there was no cell phone use at the time of the accident,” he wrote. “Therefore, the charge does not seem to apply to impeachment because who among you has never used your cell phone while driving? Cell phone usage was ruled is not right but unrelated to the accident and not the basis for impeachment.”

The strikethrough was his. I don’t even know how you do that.

In case none of these points resonated, Ravnsborg deployed an argument previously used by Donald Trump’s attorneys in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “Your decision could overturn an election,” Ravnsborg wrote.

Ravnsborg, of course, is not the only politician to have killed someone with his car, nor is he the first to evade accountability. Bill Janklow, a predecessor as South Dakota attorney general, killed a motorcyclist after running a stop sign in 2003 while he was serving in Congress, leading to his resignation and a 100-day jail sentence. Ted Kennedy killed a woman and then fled the scene as she drowned while serving in the Senate—and then continued serving in the Senate without consequences for another three decades.

The years-long Ravnsborg saga has also been a reminder of the way that certain kinds of powerful people coddle other kinds of powerful people. Many Americans live in fear of a traffic stop. Real power in American life is when the sheriff lends you his car after you’ve mysteriously totaled your own. It resides in the exculpatory styling of the passive voice. The “accident…tragically involved a pedestrian,” Ravnsborg wrote days after the crash. The pedestrian’s involvement was that he died. Before Ravnsborg took a deal, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported that his lawyer was preparing to argue that the crash was actually Boever’s fault.

But Ravnsborg’s latest letter, as damning as it is, contains a kernel of truth: He commits the faux pas of asking his colleagues to treat a traffic death caused by reckless inattention with the kind of cavalierness with which, well, policymakers generally do treat such traffic deaths. Ravnsborg is a bad driver and continues to be one; he got another speeding ticket for going 57 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone last August 22, just three days before the judge ruled on the case stemming from the fatal crash. (This time he told the state trooper he wasn’t carrying his license.) But he is the kind of bad driver that policymakers and regulators and cops have decided on a structural level to accommodate, no matter what the PSAs they fund or the laws they’ve passed might say.

As the journalist Jessie Singer lays out in her new book, There Are No Accidents, when it comes to making American roads safer, the US is profoundly unserious in just about every way, seemingly content to maintain conditions in which 40,000 or so annual death toll is considered routine. Until very recently, the US Department of Transportation didn’t require automobile design to take into account pedestrian safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration didn’t care for a full year that new Teslas let drivers literally play computer games while the vehicle is moving. Traffic enforcement, when it exists at all, exists to generate revenue and, thus, has little interest in preventing people from driving dangerously. On a major thoroughfare near my apartment, people get run over at the same poorly designed intersection over and over again and the press conferences from elected officials have never led to anyone actually redesigning it. It is basically open season on cyclists.

The laws and regulations and systems, in other words, are set up to keep such bad drivers behind the wheel and position them to do maximum damage when they err. Which is why, when all of this is over, Jason Ravnsborg may no longer have a job—but he will still have his license.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/sure-jason-ravnsborg-was-impeached-he-still-got-away-with-killing-someone/

[Rick Plant]

Ex-Omaha mayor demands to know what GOP lawmaker was wearing when pro-Trump candidate assaulted her
https://www.rawstory.com/charles-herbster/

[Rick Plant]

Republican Ron Johnson would rather sell you snake oil than talk about his most significant legislative achievement



On tax day this year, wouldn’t you like to be Sen. Ron Johnson?

Wisconsin’s senior U.S. senator paid only $2,015 in state income tax in 2017, despite earning more than $450,000 that year. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Dan Bice, who first reported on Johnson’s teeny-weeny tax bill, pointed out that the multimillonaire’s 2017 Wisconsin tax payment was two dollars less than what a married couple filing jointly paid on a taxable income of $40,000.

Johnson also recently confirmed that he personally benefited from the change in the tax code that he pushed through in 2017. Johnson cast the deciding vote for President Donald Trump’s tax code rewrite giving corporations tax cuts worth $1.4 billion — but only after he arm-twisted Trump and Congress into including special benefits for so-called “pass-through” corporations — companies like his own PACUR plastics firm — whose profits are distributed to their owners.

A few months later, Johnson began the process of selling his company, reaping the benefits of the tax law change, which increased the value of pass-through companies and made him more money on the sale.

Johnson won’t say how much money Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut,” was worth to him personally, but he spins his work on the tax bill as some sort of populist crusade, claiming that the tax break was good for “90% of small businesses.” That might be true of the general, across-the-board corporate tax cuts contained in the massive piece of legislation, but when it comes to the pass-through clause Johnson personally shoehorned in, an analysis by Pro Publica of confidential tax records “reveals that Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country — both worth billions and both among the senator’s biggest donors.” Those two families are Liz and Dick Uihlien of Pleasant Prairie and Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who donated a combined $20 million to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 re-election campaign. Between them, according to Pro Publica, they netted $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone thanks to Johnson’s tax stand.

Johnson makes no bones about whose interests he represents in the U.S. Senate. He voted against federal pandemic relief, wrote a letter asking Gov. Tony Evers to cut unemployment benefits on the grounds they make people too lazy to work, embraced outsourcing of good, union jobs from his hometown in Oshkosh — saying “It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin” — and opposed the 2021 child tax credit for couples who made $150,000 or less and which the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated would benefit 1.2 million children in Wisconsin. “In general,” Johnson explained in relation to anti-child tax credit position, “I don’t like to use the tax code for either economic or social engineering.”

But Johnson is willing to do plenty of reverse engineering when it comes to lightening the tax burden on the rich and increasing taxes on the less wealthy. In a Fox News interview he took a stand against progressive taxation, calling tax brackets that allow people with less money to pay less in taxes “absurd.” He endorsed “most of” a controversial 11-point plan by Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that would raise taxes on the bottom half of Americans and open the door for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, calling it “a positive thing.” The poorest one-fifth of Americans would pay 34% of the total tax increase under the proposal, through an average tax hike of about $1,000, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which also estimates that 32% of Wisconsinites would see their taxes go up under the proposal.

These ideas are so bad for the majority of Wisconsinites, it’s hard to see how Johnson can run on them. And, in fact, raising taxes on the poor and middle class is not the centerpiece of his campaign. This week Johnson released an ad with testimony from a COVID-19 patient who says he was close to death and only access to an alternative remedy not approved by the FDA saved his life. The ad touts a bill Johnson promoted that allows terminal patients to use drugs that haven’t been approved.

Off-label drug use is standard practice and speeding up the process for experimental drug use for terminal patients was the centerpiece of the early movement to force action on AIDS. But Johnson’s advocacy for unproven COVID remedies, one of his proudest achievements in the U.S. Senate, is an embarrassment.

Like a peddler pushing quack medicine he has aggressively promoted the horse dewormer Ivermectin, prompting the FDA to launch a public information campaign urging people to stop trying to self-treat their COVID symptoms with veterinary medicine. And Johnson has continued to go to great lengths to undermine confidence in doctors and scientists in the midst of a public health crisis.

His public promotion of wild theories, undermining trust in physicians, has some very negative real-world consequences. Just ask hospital staff in Madison who have had to treat the flood of unvaccinated COVID patients from all over the state. These patients and their families, bolstered by internet conspiracies, have become hostile and confrontational, demanding remedies they’ve read about online that are entirely inappropriate, rejecting appropriate medicine, accusing doctors of withholding life-saving medication and even of trying to do their patients harm.

Johnson’s press conference featuring people allegedly harmed by the COVID vaccine during the height of the pandemic was the opposite of a public service announcement. But then, Johnson’s whole record shows that he’s the opposite of a public servant. He’s a public official who has used his office to serve himself.

Going after the wingnut aspect of Johnson’s record — going back to his interrogation of the MIT nuclear physicist who served as President Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, on internet conspiracy theories about electromagnetic pulse weaponry — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But none of Johnson’s would-be Democratic opponents appears very interested in pursuing that line of attack.

Instead, they are emphasizing how out of touch Johnson is – a multimillionaire who complains that he has “underperformed” by merely doubling his net worth during his time in the Senate.

Johnson, an advocate of trickle-down economics, responded to that criticism last Friday in Medford, Wisconsin, by saying, “Now, did my business benefit? Sure. Did some of my donors’ businesses? Sure. When you give tax relief to everybody, everybody benefits.”

But serious analysis of the 2017 tax cut shows just the opposite.

As Chye-Ching Huang of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explained in February 2019 testimony to Congress, the 2017 tax law Johnson helped craft exacerbated inequality, weakened revenue and encouraged “rampant tax avoidance and gaming.”

It also, contrary to the fiscally conservative posturing of Johnson and his fellow Republicans, blew a nearly $2 trillion hole in the deficit. Their answer is to raise taxes on people who can afford it least, while proposing to cut essential services for most people.

No wonder Johnson would rather sell you snake oil than talk about his most significant legislative achievement — making the rich more comfortable and sticking it to workers by making the tax code less fair.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/04/14/ron-johnsons-tax-rebellion/

[Rick Plant]

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a stain on Congress, must be washed out of public life



If the House Republican Conference has a sense of decency, it will now unanimously support a resolution of censure for Georgia’s radical Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene deserves to be shunned — and, in the state’s Republican primary, to be overwhelmingly defeated.

It would be one thing if the congresswoman were merely prone to verbal blunders of the slightly embarrassing but harmless kind. Instead, Green so frequently says and does things beyond the pale, such as parroting Russian lies that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is necessary to save Ukrainians from "Nazi groups that torture innocent people, especially women and children.” According to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “thug,” no ban should be instituted on Russian oil, no plane flew into the Pentagon on 9/11, former President Bill Clinton was responsible for the “murder” of John F. Kennedy Jr., who actually died while badly piloting a plane, California wildfires were started by a space laser financed by wealthy Jews, and the threesome of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi should be executed.

Greene also makes no apologies for speaking at conferences organized by virulent white nationalists who joined neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and who cheer openly for Russian murderer Vladimir Putin. And those are only a sampling of the idiocies and viciousness she has promoted.

After all of which, Republicans in the House spent more time complaining that Democrats had stripped Greene of her committee assignments than they did in castigating her themselves. Well, Greene, who also is the subject of campaign ethics complaints, in the past two weeks has given them more reasons finally to make clear she is anathema.

First, she tweeted, and then defiantly repeated, that Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah “are pro-ped*phile” because they voted to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. This is not just nasty — it's vile, especially considering the actual records of those three senators. Even for those of us who think Jackson absolutely should not have been confirmed, this would have been an epithet too far to apply to the judge herself, much less to the senators who decided to go old-school by deferring to the president’s choice for the high court.

What’s worse is that Greene’s obsessions are so strong that she voted against funding America’s defense forces while claiming she did so because she didn’t want to cast a vote forcing military personnel to get vaccinated. Memo to Greene: The defense budget bill didn’t address that issue, so her vote against our nation’s defenses was sheer performance art.

Then again, perhaps Greene’s truer feelings about military service emerged in an April 9 interview with former cable news host Lou Dobbs. In response to a question from Dobbs, she said that to serve in the military effectively means “throwing your life away.” Even in the context of a leading question, no normal, patriotic person would have said such a thing.

Fortunately, an even better-than-normal, patriotic conservative is mounting a strong campaign against Greene in Georgia. Jennifer Strahan is an entrepreneur who put herself through college and two graduate schools before building a national company advising healthcare facilities, municipal governments, and nonprofit organizations on how to cut costs while improving patient services. One of five Republican challengers to Greene in the May 24 primary, she is garnering the most attention and polling support among them.

In a phone interview, Strahan told me that not only is Greene unable to legislate effectively because she serves on no committees and has made herself a pariah, but complaints are widespread about Greene’s poor constituent service.

“If you aren’t legislating and you are not taking care of constituents, we have to ask the question what is she doing all day?” Strahan said. “Instead, we see that she is acting out on social media and … [making] comments that parrot the Russian rationale for invading Ukraine.”

Calling herself pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Israel, and a supporter of free speech and religion, Strahan sounded particularly passionate about reining in “atrocious” government spending.

“My business is all about helping organizations [including local governments] operate as efficiently and effectively as possible,” she said, adding that her work has made her especially aware of the damage caused by federal regulatory burdens and the need to mitigate them.

“I think government needs to be held accountable,” she said.

As is easy for outside observers to see, the incumbent Greene can’t even hold her own mouth or hatefulness accountable. Greene is a discredit to Georgia and to Congress. Maybe she should be sent packing to Putin’s Georgia, half a world away. She certainly should be more welcome in the Caucasus than in the Republican Caucus.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/marjorie-taylor-greene-a-stain-on-congress-must-be-washed-out-of-public-life

[Rick Plant]

Big Pharma Front Group to Kyrsten Sinema: “We’ve Got Your Back”



Since Senator Kyrsten Sinema started undermining Democrats’ plan to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, Big Pharma has been her BFF.

Center Forward, a dark money group funded by the drug industry and led by pharmaceutical lobbyists, has been running ads touting Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona for five months — ever since she started working to undermine Democrats’ plan to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices.

Sinema’s demolition campaign came despite polling showing that 94 percent of Arizonans support the idea of Medicare negotiating drug prices. A 2017 survey found that more than a quarter of residents in her state had stopped taking prescribed medication because of the cost.

Amid that crisis, Arizonans earlier this month started seeing a new TV ad from Center Forward saying that “Arizonans are tough and independent, just like Kyrsten Sinema.” Center Forward’s previous ads contained similar drivel about independence and bipartisanship — but this latest ad does something special: it screams the quiet part out loud about who Sinema actually works for.

“Thank Kyrsten Sinema and tell her: Keep fighting,” the ad says. “We have your back, just like you’ve always had ours.”

Yes, really: a pharma front group put an ad on TV saying of Sinema, “We have your back, just like you’ve always had ours” — after she helped to water down and stall the party’s signature drug pricing bill — and they want Arizonans to thank Sinema for this. This ad is supposed to help boost Sinema’s poor poll numbers.

A Washington Front Group With No Ties to Arizona

Front groups like Center Forward often run ads like this one to thank their legislative allies for going to bat for their financiers. The hope, of course, is that people aren’t paying enough attention to catch that the ad isn’t paid for by Sinema’s campaign, but by an industry propaganda outfit. People probably wouldn’t trust the message if they know who’s paying for it, but who has the time to research the name behind every ad they see on TV?

For all of its talk about what Arizonans are like, Center Forward couldn’t be more removed from the Grand Canyon State. Center Forward is a Washington, DC–based front group run by corporate lobbyists. The organization lists its address, in its filing for the ad purchase and in DC incorporation records, as a Northern Virginia McMansion owned by one of its lobbyist board members.

Center Forward has long been funded by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a drug industry lobbying powerhouse that generated $573 million in revenue in 2020, according to its tax return. PhRMA donated $7.2 million to Center Forward from 2016–20, accounting for more than a quarter of its revenue.

Two Center Forward board members, Libby Greer and Cindy Brown of Forbes Tate Partners, lobby for PhRMA. They also lobby for many individual drug companies, including Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Emergent Biosolutions, Gilead Sciences, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi.

The Cost of Protecting Industry

Sinema played a key role in gutting Democrats’ drug pricing measure, significantly reducing the money it would cost the pharmaceutical industry — and how much money it would save the public — if it becomes law.

She also helped stall President Joe Biden’s broader health care, climate, and social spending bill, the vehicle being used to pass the drug pricing measure. Democrats failed to pass that package late last year — and its prospects this year remain dim.

More recently, Sinema led a crusade to preserve the legislative filibuster — a top priority for the US Chamber of Commerce and big business lobbyists — helping Republicans block Democratic legislation meant to protect the public from state GOP voter suppression laws.

These efforts have helped Sinema raise tons of money, but it’s come at a cost. A recent poll found Sinema’s favorability numbers are underwater among Democrats and even weaker among independents. She has also alienated the state Democratic party. Sinema isn’t up for reelection until 2024, but it looks like she will have a tough time winning another a Democratic primary.

If Sinema wants to continue her political career, she will need all the industry air support she can get. At least she knows one Big Pharma front group has her back.

As Center Forward’s full ad puts it:

Arizonans are tough and independent, just like Kyrsten Sinema. Every day, she fights to improve the lives of working families while protecting our pocketbooks — like leading on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that controls costs, rebuilds our roads, and grows the Arizona economy with good jobs. Working tirelessly until the job is done right, just like we do here in Arizona. Thank Kyrsten Sinema and tell her: Keep fighting. We have your back, just like you’ve always had ours.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/big-pharma-front-group-kyrsten-sinema-medicare

[Rick Plant]

‘Rot wasn’t just Donald Trump’: Neal Katyal says Jan 6. Committee has proof implicating GOP leaders



Culpability for former President Donald Trump's coup attempt extends far across the GOP, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal explained on MSNBC on Friday.

"We're starting to see more incriminating evidence leak out, we're seeing just how deep the plan to steal the election of 2020 was. Newly revealed text messages obtained by CNN show Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) going right to Mark Meadows in full support of the claims of fraud being pushed by Trump and the MAGA team," MSNBC anchor Jason Johnson reported.

For analysis, Johnson interviewed Katyal and Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks.

"We know that it's bad and exposes what the Republicans were trying to do, but what can DOJ do with the text messages with the case that they're currently pursuing?" Johnson asked.

"I think they can do a lot," Katyal replied. "And even before we get to DOJ, I think it paints a bigger picture about what the January 6th investigation is all about. And I think a lot of us have been wondering, 'Why is it that the Republican Party hasn't cared more about what happened on January 6th?' Right after it happened, Mitch McConnell and others condemned it and the like. And I think these texts today, Jason, start to point to an answer, which is that the rot wasn't just Donald Trump. It goes to many leaders in the party."

The extent of the rot was discussed by the panel.

Wine-Banks argued viewers should give a break to GOP senators who voted to accept the Electoral College results. Only six GOP senators voted to overturn the election after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Katyal disagreed, he argued that the culpability extended to every Republican who voted against convicting Trump in his second impeachment trial.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

GOP fails to keep Democrat Abby Finkenauer from challenging Chuck Grassley for US Senate



The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday ruled that former Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D-IA) qualified to run for U.S. Senate in Iowa.

The court overruled a district court decision that would have kept Finkenauer off the ballot.

"The ruling ends a tense week for Finkenauer, a former U.S. representative who is vying for the Democratic nomination to take on Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley," the Des Moines Register reported. "A pair of Republicans brought the challenge against Finkenauer: Kim Schmett, a former chair of the Polk County Republicans, and Leanne Pellett, co-chair of the Cass County Republicans."

Grassley has served in public office since winning his campaign for the legislature in 1958 and has served in the Senate since 1981.

"Finkenauer is seen as the front-runner in the three-candidate Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate race. She is competing against Mike Franken, a retired Navy admiral, and Glenn Hurst, a doctor and Minden city council member. Finkenauer has led in fundraising and secured a range of endorsements," the newspaper reported."

Finkenauer celebrated the court ruling on social media:

The GOP’s attempts to undermine ballot access and our election process were pathetic and desperate.

Today they lost.

With a unanimous decision by the Iowa Supreme Court, we're still in this fight and we WILL beat Chuck Grassley in November.

It's a good day for our democracy.

https://twitter.com/Abby4Iowa/status/1515022369231982599