Iowa Legislature

Republican leaders in the Senate have said journalists will have to work from an upstairs gallery during the session that starts Monday, but a group representing Iowa Capitol reporters said the move cuts off easy access to lawmakers.

Two Republican lawmakers released a proposal Tuesday that would ban Iowa businesses from hiring or firing workers, requiring masks or testing, and denying services to customers based on a person’s vaccination status. But Republican leaders said they want to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.

COVID-19 and its impact on meatpacking workers, the future of mask mandates in schools and the campaign trails emerging for 2022 are all stories that IPR will continue to follow into the new year.

Nearly a quarter of Iowa students belong to racial and ethnic minorities, compared to only about three percent of teachers.

The top Republican in the Iowa House of Representatives says his number one priority for the upcoming legislative session is cutting income taxes.

Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver says tax cuts are the number one priority for Senate Republicans in the 2022 legislative session.

According to Iowa Workforce Development, 176 people filed for unemployment benefits “citing jobs that had ended due to a failure to comply with an employer’s mandate for the COVID-19 vaccine” between Nov. 1 and Dec. 8.

The top Democrat in the Iowa Senate says addressing the state’s workforce shortage is going to be the main priority for the minority party during the legislative session that starts in January. Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls, D-Coralville, said the workforce shortage was a top concern in the state before the pandemic, but now it’s even worse.

A group of Iowa lawmakers and criminal justice system professionals met Monday to study how prosecutors share information about police officers whose credibility is in question. The committee discussed concerns about inconsistencies across the state that could infringe on the due process rights of Iowans accused of crimes and officers involved in their cases.

An Iowa judge has ruled the state can no longer ban Medicaid coverage of transgender Iowans' medically necessary gender-affirming surgeries.