As an intern in Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office more than two decades ago, Laehn recalled when a staffer took him to the Senate floor. What he saw shocked him. Rather than a room full of senators debating and deliberating, Laehn said he saw just one senator talking to a camera.
“I realized then — 20 years ago — that it was all a Hollywood production,” Laehn said. “That members of Congress are using the floor of the House and the Senate not to deliberate, discuss pending litigation, or compromise about things. The senators are using the Senate floor as a place to campaign.”
It’s a memory he said he often harkened back to while contemplating his campaign for U.S. Senate.
“I realized that they’re all complicit in defrauding the American people, that every single member of Congress — Democrat and Republican alike, in both the House and the Senate, all 535 members — are complicit in this Hollywood production,” Laehn said.
He added that he believes Congress has continuously abdicated its responsibility by letting current and past presidents overstep their authority and by funneling candidates into a two-party system that strips voters of their autonomy.
“I think if the people of Iowa were ever to become fully aware of the extent of corruption in Washington, D.C., the extent to which our constitutional system and practice has departed from our constitutional system in theory, I think the people will rise up,” Laehn said. “And I think it’s time for a third party to kind of have a revolution.”
Laehn grew up in Allison in northeast Iowa to a pastor and a school librarian. He studied at Drake University, Louisiana State University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before becoming a professor at McNeese State University in Louisiana, where he taught constitutional law and political philosophy.
He moved back to Iowa and ran for Greene County Attorney in 2017. He became the first Libertarian to ever hold elected office in the state’s history and was reelected in 2021.
“The Libertarian Party believes the government should stay out of both our pocketbooks and our bedrooms," he said. "It should neither interfere in the economy, in the free market, nor interfere in the individual’s sphere of personal autonomy and moral decision-making."
Priorities as a candidate
If elected to the U.S. Senate, he hopes to push back against overreaching executive authority, which he said has included changing criminal law through executive orders, unilaterally imposing tariffs on other countries and appropriating money from the Department of Defense to build a wall along the country’s Southern border.
“The president was never supposed to have the power to unilaterally make criminal law and put people in prison for violating criminal provisions in his executive orders, and we should all be very alarmed about this development in our constitutional history,” Laehn said.
His other priorities include protecting private property from eminent domain seizures, leaving decisions about abortion regulation to the states and decriminalizing marijuana.
“I believe that our state law prohibiting marijuana for recreational use is a constitutional law, and therefore I have a duty to enforce it,” Laehn said. “But based on my experience, it is a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. If someone is caught with a personal amount of marijuana, it probably costs my office between $500 to $1,000 to prosecute that case.”
Pushing back against the two-party system
No Libertarian has come close to winning a statewide office in Iowa. The closest was Rick Stewart, who received less than 3% of the vote in his gubernatorial bid in 2022. Laehn said he thinks he can win because Iowans are ready for a third-party candidate.
“The majority want something other than what the two parties are offering, but the two-party system is kind of narrowing their choices on Election Day such that they have to repeatedly and every election cycle choose between what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils,” Laehn said.
If earning the blessing of either a Republican or Democratic Party nomination is a prerequisite for holding elected office, he said, then people are no longer governing themselves.
“Part of this is an experiment on liberty, an experiment in popular sovereignty,” Laehn said. “I mean, has the two-party system become so entrenched in our system of government that we can’t have elections or people can’t hold office without it? If so, then things are even worse than I fear."
Republicans U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, former state Sen. Jim Carlin and Joshua Smith, as well as Democrats Nathan Sage, state Sen. Zach Wahls, state Rep. Josh Turek and Jackie Norris are also running for the seat.
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst announced last month she won't be seeking reelection to a third term.
