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Beautiful autumnal days here.
Fall has begun and you are back.
on KXEL with Iowa Law Talk.
Breakout weekend hit for 1540 America's original 50,000 watt low torch of free speech, caroming into 21 states and for Canadian provinces on the AM Band alone, along with that great Cedar Rapids transmitter at 100.5 Iowa Law Talk.
with Joseph Piper, J.D.
Esquire, and Nicholas Fratelli, J.D.
Esquire.
I'm your host, John Jacobson here with Sean Xavier, studio engineer, always at tip of the fedora to Jeff Stein, the news director there at KXEL.
Guys, we love it that you listen live here every Saturday during the noon hour.
But remind your friends, they can pick this up if they go to their browser and type in Iowa Law Talk and KXEL.
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Joe Piper in Hiawatha, the Sea Drops Metro with AG and Business
legal strategies, an uncommon law firm, Nick Cratelli, J.D.
Esquire, with offices in Des Moines, New York, and London.
Why London?
Well, he's the first American lawyer in a century and a half to be called to the ends of court and be dubbed an English barrister.
Gentlemen, you both bleed Iowa loyalty.
Joe is a Hawkeye Law alum, as am I. Nick sent a daughter to the University of Iowa Law, and Nick himself is an alumnus of Drake Law.
And I think he has a son, was your son also a Drake alum, Nick?
He's also a bulldog, yeah.
All right, so we... More ways than what?
How's that?
Well, we are equal opportunity, Iowa Law.
denizens to fine law schools in the Hawkeye, Cyclone, Panther, and Bulldog State.
Nick, where are we going to talk about?
Oh, I got a reminder, folks.
Some of you guys tell me, oh, I'd love to talk to Critelli and Joe.
You can.
Would you just let your fingers do the dialing and email to us?
IowaLawTalk at KXEL.com.
Iowa Law Talk at kxel.com.
That's simple.
Email your questions, your comments.
We love them, as Bob Euker would say.
Nick, take us away here on our maiden voyage in the first part of our program here today.
Okay, well as you know, usually what we like to do is to present to you
a synopsis or an overview of decisions issued by the Supreme Court, either the US Supreme Court and more appropriately the Iowa Supreme Court.
But courts are not in session right now.
Courts normally start around the 1st of April.
So what we're looking for, Joe and John, is we're going to get back to our normal routine probably in about a week prior to that.
And we kind of started to go down this road our last session about the election that's coming up and the state of the government as it exists right now.
And I've got some gripes that I'd like to air.
And I'd like to aim them at you, John, because you are a legislator.
You are.
You are our target because you spent a number of years as a legislator, albeit at the state level, but it's the same animal, whether it's Congress or the state.
So here's my complaint.
Joe, you get involved with a lot of people that sign contracts and they come in and they say,
You know, I didn't know that was in there and that type of thing.
And what is your advice to people who sign contract?
My advice is have a lawyer review it before you sign it and make sure that you understand what it is that you're signing.
Right.
In other words, read the thing, right?
Correct.
Read it.
So, and anyone who signs a contract without reading it, and if you don't understand it, take advice from an expert that is crazy, quite frankly.
Well, shouldn't we expect the same thing from our legislator?
In other words, John, before you vote on a bill, don't you think you ought to read it?
Why
don't you ask me to read the bills?
Nick, I would say very few read the bills.
They read the blue sheets that the party leadership will hand out in the morning of maybe 30 bills that might be debated that have bullet points written on there.
Yes, I think that should be a fundamental requirement to read every bill.
One thing I didn't read ironically, and I guess I was kind of naive.
I never read the lobbyist positions.
I didn't even dawn on me to care what they thought.
I basically self-funded myself through my local constituents.
Never got big lobby dollars and didn't care.
I voted the way my folks wanted me to vote.
But Joe Nick is all fleeting.
The funniest story is I did a cameo just the other day up in Council Bloss for a brief period of time.
My students from the university were in a competitive golf tournament up in Council Bloss at Bentree Golf Club there, the Arnold Palmer Design Course, 10 different universities competing, NAIA and the junior colleges, and a great lawyer friend of mine.
Dean Jennings was there, and as I approached all of the folks there, the contestants, the coaches, all of the players and students, Dean in a very loud bellicose voice proclaimed, hey, didn't you used to be John Jacobson?
So that's the stage that I'm in right
now.
Well, what I was talking about, John, is we're electing
people to Congress, to the House, to the Senate, that aren't reading the bills.
Now, why would we do that?
If we're going to elect a representative, I actually kind of expect that you'll read the bills you're going to vote on.
Now, how do I know they're not reading them?
It's simple.
I get a copy of them.
And I see they're, you know, 500 pages long.
or whatever it is, it's quite a lot of these things, like the Affordable Care Act, around a couple thousand pages.
So I put the clock to it and said, if you got this bill delivered to you, and usually they do, you know, shortly before the vote, maybe a day before or two or three days, there's no way in hell you're going to read that thing.
There's not enough hours in the day for you to read it.
Now, we're not talking just normal reading here, folks.
We're talking reading legislation.
It refers back to other laws.
I mean, good luck.
Good luck spending a minute, a page on this stuff.
Just do this math.
You can't do it.
So this is
my problem, John.
It's this.
Why are these bills so long?
How about we pass a law that say no bill can be longer than 25 pages?
If you can't say 25 pages, maybe we shouldn't be voting on it.
Well, Nick, I completely agree and I'll take it one farther.
What's particularly horrifying is the CNADA the last day of the legislature.
The the rubes call it Sineadive.
That's because they didn't take Latin and weren't properly formed in elementary and high school.
But on CNADA day with adjourn without without date, that is the last of the legislature.
And all sorts of mischief happens there with the standing's bill and everything else.
Literally, there's the equivalent of
hundreds if not thousands of pages of bills that are all passed within probably a 12-hour period.
No one has read those.
No one even knows some of those are going to be up for a vote until literally while the conference, while the caucus is meeting before they walk out on the floor.
So, Nick, you have really touched on a completely legitimate question, and it begs the question, what happens federally if this is what happens at the state level,
Good grief.
How are they reading bills at the federal level?
It is a huge
problem.
That's
correct.
They're not.
Remember Nancy said we'll have to figure it out after we pass it.
That's
true.
I remember
all the promises that were in that bill.
You'll get to keep your own doctor.
Yeah, you know this this upsets me.
I'm neither Republican nor Democrat.
I expect you to read the dog on bill.
So when I go to these meetings and the candidate is there and all of you
Okay, when you go to the meetings and the candidate is there, I don't care what your position is about why the other guy is bad, etc.
If you're elected, are you going to read the bill before you vote?
Not just have your staff read it.
I'm not electing your staff.
I'm electing you and I expect you to read the doggone thing, which gets to the basics.
Why are they so doggone long?
Folks, take a look at these bills.
You're going to be shocked when you see it.
We're talking hundreds of pages, okay?
They're not reading this stuff.
They have staff read it.
I don't elect your staff.
I elect you.
Now, if we can't pass a law that says, look, no bill can be longer than 25, I'll give them a benefit, 50 pages, so that you can read it, digest it, understand the good, bad, and the ugly, then maybe you need to go back to the drawing board and redraft the bill.
It's too complex for humans to understand at 2,000 pages.
I did that with the Affordable Care Act.
I put a clock on it.
And, you know, you're looking at reading it about a minute and a half per page of complex legislation.
Folks, that doesn't happen.
We got to have a law that limits the page size of these bills or the word size.
And I'm not the first one to bring this up.
We have a law in the Supreme Court that limits
How many words or how many pages our briefs are?
Why don't we have the same thing in Congress?
Joe, you can.
I think that's a great idea.
Joe, what say you?
I think it would be very helpful to limit the size of the bills.
But then there comes up the other part.
Are we going to have somebody come and say, well, if we're going to limit the size of the bills, what about the agencies and all of the regulations that they write?
Nick, you said you don't elect the staff, who sure as hell don't elect the agencies, and within the agencies, they're publishing regulations that dwarf the number of pages in the bills that Congress passes.
Oh yeah, yeah, and we'll get to them later, because I got an ax out for them also, Joe.
Okay, I just wanted to make
sure you
didn't
stop with Congress.
Yeah, bureaucracy.
So that's my complaint with respect to Congress.
Cut the bill's size, pass a law that says no bill can be longer than this.
If you can't say... So by the way, I went back, thanks to AI, you can do a lot of research, by the way.
I don't know, what's the average length of bills?
I'm not talking resolutions and that type of thing, Joe, but have they increased over the years?
Answer, yes.
by about 400% or more.
They get bigger and bigger and bigger.
I can't imagine Thomas Jefferson and Adams and so forth fretting over 2,000 page legislation.
They didn't.
They were shortened to the point.
We all know that because we work with their legislation every day.
A lot of these code sections are very shortened to the point and they're the better ones.
The more you say, the more problems there are.
We know that.
Joe, you lobbied a lot of stuff in financial services and agribusiness at the federal level.
You had these bills.
Were they getting their information?
Are they studying this stuff?
Well, actually, what happens is when you propose a bill, there'll be staffers that are in drafting.
If you're in Iowa, it's a legislative services bill.
And in Congress, there will be people that are
They're paid by Congress to write the legislation trying to make sure it ties out with everything that's already a law and cross-check all of that.
So I remember very well in 1999 I made a proposal to amend chapter 12 and I told him the way I wanted it.
Grassley Stafford came back to me and said, Joe, this is a bill.
I said, well, it's not going to work.
He said, Joe, you get this bill or you get no bill.
Apollo's better than none.
We got movement on it.
But it took us until 2017 to clean up the mess that Congress caused by not listening to me the first time.
So you're going to find in both the state and federal level, there are people there who are going to be basically in charge of drafting bills.
The congressman doesn't draft the bill.
Staffers and people in the special offices are the ones that draft it.
The congressman may say, I want the bill to do this, this, and this, and then somebody else is trying to put it down on paper.
Let me tell you about that, Joe.
You and I get involved in this drafting game all the time, okay?
And you get two lawyers together trying to draft something.
It'll be complex, multi-page.
No one can understand it.
A simple little agreement like for
For $20,000, I release you from any and all liability case closed.
You can say it in three sentences.
We'll take four pages.
Only four?
I've seen one where a simple release, okay?
It goes, I release you from any and all responsibility from the beginning of time and to the end of creation.
I go, where in the hell did you get that language?
Okay, it goes crazy.
Okay, when you get legislative staffers in there trying to
you know, put their fingerprints on legislation, Joe, it gets bigger and fatter and bigger and bigger and more complex.
And we wonder why there's lawsuits.
That needs to be slimmed down.
It's getting ridiculous because they're not reading it.
So when you go to these rallies, just ask the candidate a simple question.
If you are elected to Senator the House, will you actually read all of the bill before you vote on it?
not rely on what your staffers are saying, but where you read it yourself before you vote, okay?
Oh, they'll tell you yes, and then just watch what they do.
There's no way they can do it, because they get it late in the game and there's not enough time.
I think that's
wrong.
So Nick, you've asked them to pledge that they'll read the bill.
So if they're truthful, they'll say it's impossible to read the
bill.
Okay, then don't vote on it until you get something you can read.
They can stop this, Joe.
They're the other ones with the votes.
They're the ones that control the staffers and the bureaucrats.
I remember, you know, the Senate, any one senator can stop any bill that's in Congress.
Senate has that stop provision for any senator.
The House doesn't have it.
And if you don't have a coalition, a strong coalition that's of light mind,
they're not going to do anything you and I say, Nick.
Well, I'm telling you people, we're not being well represented by any of them.
John, you were up there.
You've experienced this.
Nick, I think the biggest problem, of
course, is that the actual bill writing isn't done by the legislators.
As Joe correctly alluded to, it's going to go through the Legislative Services Agency.
And the way Iowa is set up, they have to draft the bills.
It's interesting.
You can give them a template.
You can give them the language that you want in there.
But there are formatting protocols that have to be utilized.
And there are checks and balances that are in there about how to draft legislative language so as not to be ambiguous.
And really, you've got dozens and dozens of people in the LSA that will turn around a draft of your bill.
And I've heard this from several legislators.
They just didn't quite get to what I wanted to get to.
Now, this is not.
A criticism of the LSA, they are trying to thread a needle themselves.
They can't have perfect clairvoyant powers to understand the intent of the legislator who may not use the English language very artfully.
But there are times when it takes several iterations to pass back and forth between the LSA and the legislator to get the language
Into where a legislator says yeah, this is what this is what I
understand John
But they
can you can solve all that just pass a law that says no bill can be longer than so many words Yeah,
just like we
did at the supreme court
Yeah, the fact that the court has done that and then another branch of government has done that successfully that's a really great precedence and Frankly, you know, I've seen that done well in the executive branch of our federal government.
There are some legendary stories
about executive branch heads of different agencies, departments, what have you, that have put restrictions on size of memorandum, for instance, and really makes people be concise and to the point.
Actually, there's some humorous anecdotes that go along with it.
But yeah, Nick, I think just look at the size of the Iowa Code from 1968 when we had a Governor Harold Hughes to today and the code
Looks like it's given birth multiple times.
It's gargantuan compared to what it was just two generations ago.
All right, I've got a second gripe.
This is like Festivus.
You're like Jerry Stiller at Festivus.
I
warned you guys to get me going.
It's this.
Every time I turn on TV, I see legislative investigative committees.
I see legislators trying to pretend to be lawyers, and they're doing a terrible job of it.
to the point where I can't even watch it, okay?
They're not investigating anything.
They're making soundbite speeches for their next campaign.
So I look at this and I go, wait a minute.
I didn't elect you to investigate anything.
I elected you to legislate.
Why aren't you legislating?
So I get on to AI to find out if the number of bills passed by Congress over the number of years have declined or gone up or remain the same.
What do you think?
They'd gone down.
Okay, they've gone down a lot.
We're right now, yesterday was what, the first day of fall?
We can't even get a consensus as to daylight savings time.
Some of the states have passed their own, okay?
Other states have not.
Bills have been pending in Congress.
I don't know how long because they can't get around to deciding what they're going to do on it.
But by gosh, they can investigate everybody for everything as long as there's a camera on.
And when there's a camera, you listen to these people.
Are you proud of what you're seeing?
This is terrible.
Stop the investigations.
And I think the quickest way to do that is say no cameras in the investigation room.
You've got staff that can do this.
that are trained and let them do it.
But the legislator should not be involved in the investigative process.
All it is is campaign sound bites.
Meanwhile, no legislation is getting done.
And
yet,
Nick, what do you do?
Because you've got this historical president, the Army McCarthy hearings were riveting.
The Bobby Kennedy Going After the Mob hearings were riveting.
The Watergate hearings with Sam Irvin were riveting.
The Alley North hearings were riveting television.
It is drama, it's not Frank Capra S, but it is drama.
I didn't elect him
for drama, John.
I'd like to get the legislate.
Pass some bills, why don't you?
That's what you're getting paid to do.
Yeah, I said you elected them to legislate.
Now, how much legislation do we really need?
Let's get down to brass tacks.
There
you go.
They're electing far fewer bills or they're enacting far fewer bills than they used to.
That may actually be a good thing.
Just, yeah, we need to think about it.
How many bills do we need?
How many laws do we need?
Well, that's a good question, Joe.
You brought up the issue of administrative agencies.
And what you see is the growth of administrative regulations.
And worse yet, folks, administrative crime.
So the question is, how many federal crimes are there?
You'd be shocked.
OK, it's not just Title 18 or whatever in the US Code, Joe.
Every federal agency's got criminal jurisdiction.
They passed their own criminal laws, and they all have their little jacket with letters on the back of it, FCC, et cetera, and they have ability for law enforcement in the last few years.
So the number of crimes is through the roof.
That's how we're regulating people's behavior.
Make it illegal, we fine you, we get you out of line that way, because when Congress doesn't act, Joe, the legislature or the administrative agencies will.
Half of the problem we're seeing on the administrative side, whether it's Homeland Security, whatever, is administrative regs.
Okay, so now when we talk about administrative regs, and they can be a morass if ever there were one, you know, you look at the internal revenue code, and the regulations that go along with the internal revenue code, the code will be one volume, then when you study the regs, there will be four volume.
These four volumes are written in about 8.5.
And the pages are paper-thin.
I mean, we're talking about not the normal thickness of paper you get in letters.
They're like on onion skin paper that's half that thick.
And so you'd be sitting there with four volumes that each have about 1,500 pages.
Now, this is my recollection from back in the day when I took the tax classes in the summer of 1908.
Since that time, the regulations have proliferated and they're
much more difficult and more cumbersome than they ever have been.
And so as society gets more complex, there are more things that do need regulation.
But who should regulate?
How much should they regulate?
And what oversight is there on the regulations that are being written by the administrative bodies?
And they're in every part of the law.
Every agency you can imagine in the federal government
has its own administrative code.
They've got their own regulation.
And as you become a lawyer practicing in any of the various areas, you've got to be cognizant of those regulations.
But those regulations can grant you an awful lot of freedom.
They make you a lot of money from the standpoint of if you can figure out how to nuance them so you qualify for whatever grants they're providing or loans they're providing.
It's astonishing how complex
society has become and should we long for a simpler day?
Well, I think if there's any little bright spot in this a couple years ago there was a concept folks called chevron deference and what that is is that the court system would give deference to what the administrative agencies decisions were in regard to certain eight entities like how they interpreted the statutes and that type of thing it made them the
kind of the guardian of that.
Well, a couple years ago, the US Supreme Court said, no, we're going to distance ourselves from that.
The court system has a responsibility here with regard to these administrative agencies to oversee the way they're interpreting their statutes, et cetera.
Nick, you get to come on back.
We have to announce that it's Iowa Law Talk on KXEL, 1450 AM on the AM dial and 105.5 on the FM dial.
Back you out, Nick.
See, the reason you had to do that is there's an FCC reg that says if you don't announce the station's call sign every so many minutes, they'll come get you, Joe.
No,
we're going to
get
John.
Yeah, well, in that regard, we may rethink all of this.
Now, where I'm going with this is that little by little, maybe the court system is going to get in here and say, wait, we can't have the administrative agency being the sole interpreter of what the statute that created them says.
And they're kind of getting back to where they should be.
But it's gotten completely out of hand.
So the question is, how long has this occurred?
This is stuff that started probably 40 years ago and it's gotten worse and worse and worse and worse.
And each year it gets worse.
There are more administrative and investigated hearings, okay?
Over a hundred thousand of the things.
The legislative number of bills that get passed goes down drastically.
The size of the bills go up unbelievably, okay?
So you look at it and you're going, oh, wait a minute, okay?
We got a problem here.
We have a functional problem.
And no one's addressing it.
So that's my rant on legislation.
Well,
Nick, I think these are two great issues out of the gate.
I would remind all of our folks after Joe's great interregnum there.
Write the show Iowa Law Talk at KXEL.com.
And again, as Joe said, this great AM signal, 1540 AM and then 100.5 on the FM C-Rapids transmitter.
You can always listen live.
And guys, just go to KXEL.com slash podcast or get on your browser.
and type in i will law talk kxel and you can find the audio episodes on podcast as well as listening live if you are somehow outside or have friends outside the amplitude modulation or the fm you can always listen worldwide on the web just type in listen live kxel 100.5 1540 back to you nick
john let me ask you this
The population of the state of Iowa has been around 3 million for a number of years, decades.
It
doesn't
change.
Okay, 30, 40 years.
It just doesn't go up and doesn't go down.
But the size of the Iowa Code is growing like crazy.
What used to be one and a half volumes is now eight.
Now, why?
If the population is not growing that fast, it's maintaining the same,
Why do the number of laws have to metastasize so greatly?
Are we that bad as people we need that many laws to govern us?
No, Nick, what we should be doing is repealing two laws for every law that is passed.
That would be my recommendation from a legislative formatting standpoint that no new law can be passed.
without the rescission or elimination of two laws on the statutes.
How's that for pitching right across home plate?
Well, maybe pitching right across home plate.
Now the question is, which laws do you get rid of?
And how do you build a coalition to get rid of two laws for every law you want to pass?
Because I assumed you would make that be a requirement of the bill, that their repeal of two other laws be set forth in that bill.
Well, and practically it would not.
happened precisely because there is such a stranglehold on all legislatures by the professional lobbying and money class.
You know it, I know it, and the American people know it, and that's why we have so much inertia is because frankly, you know, three things would survive
nuclear armageddon, you know, it would be Tupperware, cockroaches, and the administrative bureaucrats that do lobbying and legislative fundraising.
And it goes back to what we talked about.
last week in the old days, I mean really old days, at least you knew United States senators were really voted in based on the influence of the locals.
If you look at the Senate races across the nation today, some of these are 100 million plus U.S.
Senate races.
There's no way the locals have control over that race.
And I think, again, the real elephant in the room is the big money people
really have the control.
And it's just, it's amazing that people usually are low to even vote until they see what the lobbyist roles are of the Forers and
Agains.
You know, the Senate races are 100 million.
You mean spending of 100 million on these races.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, yeah.
The Texas race clearly has a several hundred million dollar race just for starters.
And the Iowa race will be in, I would imagine in the tens of millions of dollars category, it will be well over 10 million a piece spent by each campaign.
How about the spending not by the campaigns,
but by the PACs and all these other... Correct.
...patriots groups.
Correct.
Joe, how about Iowa legislative races that pay $25,000 a year, where you're seeing a quarter of a million and a half million dollars dumped in to elect a candidate one of those races?
It's disproportionate, but that shows you the power that the money interests have on making sure that their voice is her legislation is deliberated upon.
even at the statewide level.
John, can you explain to our listeners the difference between the structure of state government in Nebraska as compared to Iowa?
Yeah, Nick.
It's a great, great question.
Nebraska has a unicameral, which stands for one house.
Every other legislature in the United States, with perhaps one other exception, is bicameral two houses.
But I think Nebraska is the only one.
George Norris, the great renegade independent, was big on this, short after statehood for our fellow Nebraskans.
It, you know, because Nick has explained before why the two houses were needed at the federal level as part of the great compromise.
At the state level, you can say, unless they're pretend federal folks, why do you need two houses in your state legislative?
The answer is you really don't, unless you want it there for checks and balances.
Nebraska state
slightly smaller than Iowa, with maybe between two and two and a half million.
Iowa is approaching three and a half million.
Nebraska has a one house, 49 state senators.
There are no House of Representatives members.
And it's an odd number, 49.
That way you don't have tie votes if they're all voting.
49 state senators.
Interestingly, to compound that, they are term limited, two 40 year consecutive terms.
That's it.
If they sit out for four, technically they can come back and try again.
But basically, it is a revolving door of part-time legislators.
They only make $12,000 a year, and they're in session 90-100 days similar to Iowa.
The other unique aspect is, when you go to vote, unicameral races are nonpartisan.
There is no party affiliation allowed to be affixed next to names of those unicameral Senate candidates from Nebraska.
You may say, well, isn't that just wonderful?
Life partisanship prevails.
Guys, you can argue that although in theory it's a great plan, in many ways it has empowered the lobby and the permanent staffers even more disproportionately because they are the only stable institutional memory there because it is a revolving door with the other 49.
49 of whom, at a $12,000 a year salary,
does not attract the highest quality candidates.
It's either attracting poppers or retirees that are very well off.
And so your pool of eligible candidates that are going through the very machinations of raising families, being middle-class businessmen and women, that is obviated.
That's out the door.
Furthermore, even though you may have what you believe to be
a legislature that is alongside you philosophically, because there is no leadership whip or real party speaker, party majority leader position, it is very easy for there to be renegades that go off of the party platform.
And Nebraska has seen several huge issues where large majorities of Nebraskans are in favor of certain legislation.
And I'll pick on the left here.
They've picked off maybe two erstwhile conservative legislators and have the ability to basically veto the bills because you have a filibuster in Nebraska that has been used as a deadly weapon by the likes of former Senator Ernie Chambers, who's in the legislature for almost half a century,
who is known for single-handedly blocking bills because of the de facto filibuster that even one legislator in Nebraska has.
So again, be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
It is not a panacea, and I still prefer the bicameral legislature, Nick.
But
John, what's wrong with the renegade?
What you're complaining about is that the party can't control.
Okay, we don't have representation by the representatives here.
We have representation by party coalition control, the whips.
Explain to these people what a whip is.
Well, before I do that, I would tell you that in Nebraska, it's not one or two renegades breaking off.
It's that in Nebraska, where you had a super majority of, let's say, conservative or GOP-leaning senators, when one or two broke off, if you have less than a two-third majority in Nebraska,
any legislation can be plugged.
That is not the case in Iowa.
In Iowa, you don't have this de facto filibuster system.
In Iowa, you have a strong whip system.
I occasionally bucked that system because I was not worried about running for office forever.
I did not have aspirations to be a Wilbur Mills lifer, a powerful chairman of a House committee.
I did not have aspirations to be governor or senator.
I was there to fight for my people on things like blood relief and mental health and those types of things.
But the whip, if you had ambitions, the whip could make it very uneasy for you to go against the party.
And again, the reason is the whips and the leadership of both houses.
And this has been done in Iowa with some real acrimony.
They will strip you of a committee chairmanship.
they will strip you of your very committee assignment as as revenge and that can
really John think what you're saying you're elected by the people to do what your people want you to do
and you get
over there and
all of a
sudden the whip is whipping you to do what they want to do oh all the time
and they're also asking you're demanding that you
hand over, fork over your money that has been raised from your donors so they can then redistribute it.
Isn't that some kind of socialism?
It sounds
like mafia, Joe.
As my wife said, John, the Democrats hate you.
The Republicans despise you.
She said but your constituents love you and that's why I won six elections by landslides because my people knew I had their back and I knew they had my back and I loved
them.
Until you
come to Des
Moines and you want a favorable committee assignment then you do whatever the whip tells you to do.
Where's the
fairness
in that John?
Well like
Captain Kirk in the Kobayashi Maru
the unwinnable scenario.
There were occasions when I did some creative enterprising to get around that with de facto committee chairmanship and ad hoc assignments that ameliorated the injustice of things.
Let's just put it that way.
Gentlemen, I've been looking a little bit on how much money has been spent.
Two gate.
on the Iowa Senate race.
And my source is Quiver Quantitative.
Quiver Quantitative says that it's a toss-up and the spending is north of 80 million dollars.
Joe, we're not even in October.
We're talking penny ante poker games.
Wait until October rolls in with media bias.
Yes,
and then you come in and
you know it's the spending that's coming up here which really was amazing was the outside spending you know we're seeing the names of whatever committees out there and the amounts they're spent there's a committee called Fight on Iowa and the opposed terror for five hundred twenty six thousand five hundred dollars they support ashley for that amount and it's just astonishing to see
the sheer amounts of money that have been spent that have been disclosed as of September 20th.
I mean we're talking several million dollars that are showing up so far and when we get the campaign finance reports the next time they're going to show a hell of a lot
more.
Joe it's hard and I know some of the October buys are already in so a lot of the October buys are probably accounted for on this but the fact is even though Frank Capra correctly put his fingers in the pulse of
the greatness of America, the decency of America, albeit within a corrupt political system going back as far as the 1930s.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington, that standout performance by Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith.
You know, he was appointed, I believe, originally in that movie or brought in as a useful benign figure that they thought they could essentially control.
And then when he didn't play ball with them, they tried to take
him out in a very dishonest way.
My concern today is that I honestly do not believe it is possible for any man or any woman from even a middle class or frankly upper middle class background to run and win a seat in the United States Senate or a governorship or in the United States Congress without either A, being a multimillionaire, B, marrying a multimillionaire or C,
having a lot of friends who are themselves multimillionaires who will not press the thumb screws on you every time they want a vote to go a certain way while you're trying to maintain your independence.
It's a terrible conundrum.
Can an average
Joe Eifer, average Joe literally, can an average Joe do it today?
They really can't unless there is literally a saintly benefactor, multi-millionaire wanting nothing in return, who is just seeding this money.
And we all know that the lobbying money, I mean, who's the worst lobbyist?
I think Big Farm is the devil, but there are others who would say other groups are just as bad.
and is poisonous.
The amount of money has ruined representative republicanism with
a small bar.
Yeah, John, you talked about big pharma and doing things.
What about big agribusiness companies?
I hear you.
I'm thinking about Bayer in particular.
Yep.
Yep.
I got you.
They've been counting legislation for years that would effectively eliminate any ability
to suit them based upon product defects.
As soon as the EPA approves a pesticide or an herbicide, they would say there can be no suits against them, and they're pushing that in all 50 states.
They've pushed it down over the last two years, and we've been so far able to push back.
Yeah,
yeah.
Thankful you have been, and I think it's one of the most shameful votes that any legislate
later could take to denude people of a rightful cause of action for product liability that is so injurious.
And you know what?
I think Bobby Kennedy would be with me on this.
And this is an issue, Joe, that fascinatingly and astonishingly cuts across party lines.
There is a coalition of folks that are worried about this very issue that include a broad swath of Republicans and Democrats.
And ironically, on the other side, to bolster big ag, there is a white swath of Republicans and Democrats.
This is one of those rare issues that really transcends party lines in Joe.
I think it's one of the most critical bellwether issues of conscience that a legislator can deal with at the statewide level today.
I think you have identified one of the most pressing and prescient issues.
You know, you think about that, and I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they were talking about the effects of glycophosphate.
That's called ground up in vernacular.
And the things it does, because there's some of that left in all those, the types of
food that we get if it comes from crops that were produced with it.
And they were talking about all the different things that impact.
And we're wondering why Iowa is number one in the increased incidence of cancer.
Could it be the chemicals that allow us to raise the bounteous crops that we raise?
Remember?
I think that's a fair question, Joe.
And I've heard agribusiness people give me numbers defending the use of these chemicals.
I will tell you this.
It is a cause of a major split within the Republican Party nationally.
The MAHA movement, all the MAHA moms, Bobby Kennedy, et cetera, really juxtaposed against...
some of Trump administration policy on allowing the continuance of the Glyphosates.
It has created a wedge.
I think it's a healthy wedge.
It's a conversation we've absolutely got to have.
And Iowa's at the forefront of this because of the rampant high incidences of cancer in Iowa, along with our water quality issues.
And I mean, this is a huge issue in the governor's campaign, as it certainly should be.
Yes, it definitely should be.
We have another four and a half weeks before the election.
We still have time to ask the candidates their position on these issues.
And while we're at it, we ought to ask them, are you going to read every bill before you vote on
it?
And would you be in favor of limiting the length of bills to 50 pages?
The worst they can tell us is no.
And I would hope that if they're not going to read the bills, they'd be honest enough to say, no, it's physically impossible to read them all.
And then we come back with Nick's report, which is, I'm electing you, not your staff.
You're the one that has passed judgment on these in answer to me, the voter.
That's a powerful final argument from Joe.
I will let Nick have the, that was the penultimate from Joe.
I'll let Nick have the final word.
I will just say, at some point too, one thing we've not had the time to touch on, but sadly our time is up here for this episode.
Where do the 45% of Americans who now consider themselves political independence find their home?
I am one of them.
I am a registered, non-affiliated, with any party voter or go independent.
Where is their home, Nick?
That's 45% now of the self-identified American people in public opinion polling.
Well, that's a very good question.
I happen to be one of those.
Okay, I don't like either one of them.
So I take a look and say, all right, I got to judge myself.
I judge my vote by the person.
Give the vote to the person who I'm judging.
And what are the characteristics of what I'm judging?
Number one, what is your platform?
Don't tell me what your opponent does that you don't like.
What are you going to do for me?
Okay, why am I electing you?
Why should I vote for you?
And anyone that gives me a negative because my opponents are this, that, or the other thing, they're off my list.
I don't need you telling me how bad the opponent is.
I need you telling me how good you are.
I mean, I'm a salesman in court.
That's all I am.
I don't sell by shooting down the opponent.
I sell by showing my own product as being good.
I'm not hearing this, John, from any of them, Republican or Democrat, spathetic.
No, Nick.
And I'll just close out by saying my two great Irish campaign consultants, Kip Murphy and Sheila Murphy, always told me, John, stay positive.
So I always tried to be that combination of Ronald Reagan and the happy warrior, Hubert Humphrey.
And you know what?
It was sound advice.
Well, we're happy that you all joined us today.
We'll be happy if you write us at Iowa Law Talk at KXEL.com.
Tell us your thoughts, your opinions, any questions you have.
Tell your friends about the show.
Have them enter on their browser, KXEL, Iowa Law Talk.
They can listen to it on podcasts.
And guys, we'll be back again next week with more Iowa Law Talk from these great, wise denizens of jurisprudence, Joseph Piper, JD, Esquire, Ag and Business Legal Strategy.
an uncommon law firm out of Hiawatha, Iowa, in the Cedar Rapids Metro, and Nicholas Cratelli, JD Esquire, with offices in Des Moines, in New York City, and in London itself, as he also duly is an English barrister.
In the meantime, be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, honor the blessings of liberty with great citizenship,
God bless America and God bless us, everyone.
Till we meet again, bye-bye.
