Randy Evans, Iowa Capital Disptach

Iowa law would ground Trump’s donated jet with a thud

Last week, the Pentagon accepted the emir of Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747, a $400 million bauble donated for our president to enjoy by a monarch whose family has ruled the tiny Mideast nation for more than a century.

Our commander in chief said the United States would be stupid to reject the donation — a present he hopes to use as a temporary replacement for Air Force One. The key word there: a temporary replacement.

Controversy clouds this gift for a couple of reasons. And Iowa’s public gift law — which deals with freebies much less ostentatious than the Qatari jet — provides important context on the controversy.

First, the Boeing 747 is far from being free. The United States government will need to spend upwards of $1 billion, according to Business Insider magazine, before the president can climb aboard what has been described as a sky palace considering its opulent use of marble and polished wood.

U.S. experts first must inspect the jet to confirm Qatar did not hide any devices that might jeopardize the president’s safety or security. Then the Pentagon needs to retrofit the aircraft with advanced, military-grade communications, security and defensive gear so the new version of Air Force One can serve as an aerial command post during a time of war.

At the conclusion of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2029, the White House and Pentagon leaders said ownership of the jet will pass to his presidential library foundation — where the plane could become a museum relic or remain in service for Citizen Trump’s personal travel.

Iowa law imposes no-nonsense gift restrictions

That arrangement leaves some of my Iowa government friends incredulous. Even those who are retired can still quote chapter and verse from Iowa’s state government ethics laws that impose no-nonsense restrictions on the acceptance of gifts by public officials and employees.

For example, state government cannot accept a donated $75,000 Chevy Suburban for use by Gov. Kim Reynolds while she is in office and then hand her its keys when her term ends in January 2027.

The fact is, officials in Iowa can accept gifts worth only $3 or less. You read that correctly — $3, not $3 million, and certainly not $300 million.

When The Des Moines Register employed me, I would lunch periodically with state employees. They always paid their tab and I paid mine. They feared even an appearance that they might owe me or my employer a favor in the future if I bought their meal.

With state employees so concerned about such an appearance involving a ham on rye, it is logical to worry about a conflict of interests with Qatar for the rest of the Trump presidency and beyond.

There’s more to this Qatar gift that should raise the eyebrows of Jane and Joe Taxpayer, good-government advocates and Iowans serving in Congress — especially when White House representatives are running chainsaws through the federal budget.

‘Gift’ will cost taxpayers

The cost to U.S. taxpayers to prepare the Qatar 747 for the president should cause political heartburn for Republicans in Congress. The optics are terrible. Two similar 747s — adorned with “United States of America” across their fuselages — are fueled and ready to fly the president anywhere, anytime.

The president and the Republican majorities in Congress talk about out-of-control federal spending. They want to pare government safety net programs for the poor, like SNAP and Medicaid. They want to reign in FEMA, the federal disaster recovery agency, and reduce the National Weather Service budget. They want to cut funding for national parks, medical research, food safety inspections and the arts.

But little comment has arisen about the eye-popping price of retrofitting the Qatar jet for the president’s use for the next 36 months and then to remove the secret weaponry and communications gear before the plane sets course for the departing president’s library or personal airstrip.

The federal government already is spending $4 billion for two new Air Force One 747s that now are in production. The Qatar jet will not save a nickel on that contract.

The House last week approved a budget proposal from the White House and Republican leaders that the Congressional Budget Office says will add $2 trillion, with a “t,” to the $36 trillion national debt over the next 10 years. At the same time, the White House and Pentagon are getting ready for a huge military parade in Washington next month costing an estimated $45 million.

There is one more reason the optics of the Qatar gift are so embarrassing.

President Trump’s tariffs on imported products are expected to raise U.S. consumer prices. The president has lectured Americans on their need to make do with less in the near term for the good of the U.S. economy. You know, two dolls instead of 30, five pencils, not 250.

Members of Iowa’s delegation in Congress ought to use one of their pencils to scratch a note to the president and attach a copy of Iowa’s government gift law. The Iowa Code provisions limiting gifts to $3 or less could provide him good airplane reading the next time Air Force One flies over our state.

Plus, a little prairie common sense would teach him that for the good of the federal budget, even presidents can make do with less — specifically, a Qatar 747. Two, not three planes, will work just fine.

Randy Evans is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and his columns may be found on his blog, Stray Thoughts.

The US Supreme Court could fall on this slippery slope of discrimination

Few people like being told what they must do. Lorie Smith is one of them.

The suburban Denver, Colo., business owner, a devout Christian, builds websites for customers. She wants to expand her business and begin building websites for couples who are planning weddings.

But she is adamant that she does not want to be forced to build websites for same-sex couples. Doing so, she says, would violate her faith, which does not allow her to celebrate same-sex marriages.

For more than an hour last week, the U.S. Supreme Court listened to arguments for and against the position staked out by Smith, the proprietor of 303 Creative LLC. The court’s decision is not expected until sometime in the first half of 2023.

An old attorney friend once made the memorable legal observation, “I never had a client listen himself into trouble, but I’ve had many who talked themselves into trouble.” He also reminded me that only a fool predicts how judges or juries will decide a case.

That wisdom also applies to predicting a U.S. Supreme Court decision. But it does not take a wizard to foresee that the 303 Creative case presents the justices with a legal slippery slope if they rule in favor of Lorie Smith.

The court has the potential to drag our country back 75 years, before Congress and the courts made it clear there is no place for discrimination in the United States.

David Cole, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times recently, “If 303 Creative wins here, we will live in a world in which any business that has an expressive service can put up a sign that says ‘Women Not Served, Jews Not Served, Black People Not Served,’ and claim a First Amendment right to do so.”

He added, “I don’t think any of us want to live in that world, and I don’t think the First Amendment requires us to live in that world.”

In a “friend of the court” brief to the Supreme Court, the ACLU defended Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. Cole described the contours of the potential slippery slope this way: “If 303 Creative is correct, could a bakery that opposed celebrating black families refuse to sell a birthday cake to a black mother? Could an architecture firm that serves the public refuse to design homes for Muslims because it opposes their religion? Could a test preparation business that objected to the number of Asians in elite colleges turn away Asian students? Could a restauranteur opposed to ‘mixed marriage’ put up a sign in its window saying ‘No inter-racial or inter-faith couples served’?”

The creative process involved in building websites does not excuse Lorie Smith from complying with the Colorado law. Likewise, other businesses with “expressive” goods and services are not allowed to discriminate in their sales to the public, either — not theaters, jewelry design shops, hair salons, interior decorators, landscape design companies or similar businesses.

And therein is the problem Smith creates by asserting that her First Amendment, free-speech right allows her to refuse to serve certain customers who knock on the door of her design business. Colorado’s anti-discrimination law does not require her to post signs in support of same-sex marriage. It only requires her to build websites for all couples planning weddings, regardless of a couple’s gender or race.

Every state has similar anti-discrimination laws. In some states, these were a product of the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, when Black people were prohibited from attending schools with white students and when Black people could not sit in certain bus seats or eat at certain lunch counter seats. They could not use “Whites Only” drinking fountains or rest rooms.

By opening the door for businesses to serve some customers, but refuse others, the Supreme Court has the potential to take us back to those terrible times of government-sanctioned discrimination.

The ACLU legal brief illustrates the dilemma facing the Supreme Court by pointing to famed portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz. She does not offer her photo services to the public at large. Instead, she picks and chooses her subjects.

By contrast, JCPenney Portrait Studios welcomes any member of the public to sit for portraits. But the studios cannot refuse to take photos of customers because they are female or male, Jewish or Catholic, black or Asian, heterosexual or gay.

The brief offers another example to help the justices grasp the issue. Under the Colorado law, a store that sells Christmas ornaments need not sell Hanukkah products. But such a store could not refuse to sell its Christmas ornaments to Jewish customers.

The ACLU said 303 Creative cannot get around the law’s requirement by describing its service as “website design for opposite-sex weddings” — just as it could not offer “website design for white people’s weddings.”

The ACLU added, “If a business has to know who a service is for to decide whether to sell it, its decision is not about the content of the product, but about the identity of the customer.”

That goes against what is right and proper.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

If vigilante justice spreads, who will be the next target?

Let's set aside our views on abortion. Instead, let's consider one aspect of the new Texas abortion law that took effect last week.

All of us should be able to agree on this, whether we find abortions abominable or support a woman's right to end her pregnancy:

The enforcement mechanism created by Texas lawmakers is un-American. It farms out enforcement of a state's laws to vigilantes and bounty hunters.

Iowans who followed news of the new law and the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision last week to let it go into effect, at least for now, can be forgiven if they missed details about this enforcement mechanism. Lawmakers took the enforcement power away from government and gave it to ordinary citizens, the John Q. Publics, or to activist organizations with a strong motivation to track down women suspected of ending their pregnancies by abortion.

The lawmakers' motive was not distrust of government officials or Texas law enforcement agencies. Instead, the motive was to make it impossible for defenders of abortion to sue state officials in federal court to stop them from enforcing the law.

If state officials can't be stopped, who would opponents sue — all 29 million individual people living in Texas?

Americans who support the 50-year quest to rid the United States of Roe v. Wade should be very uneasy about where this type of vigilante justice might be used next.

Maybe supporters of strong gun rights should be uneasy, or maybe those who believe climate change is a cooked-up concern should be worried, or maybe those who think the views of clean-water activists are overblown should be uneasy. These people likely would be troubled if the vigilante approach to justice were used in these types of cases.

That's what makes this moment a game-changer in United States history. Until now, people who sue another person or business must have been directly harmed by the defendant's actions. But the Texas law strips away the need for someone to have “standing" to bring such a lawsuit.

The law empowers any person to sue anyone who assists a woman seeking an abortion from about six weeks on after she misses a menstrual period. The targets of these lawsuits could be the doctor, or the clinic that offers abortions, or employees of these facilities, or the person who drives the woman to the clinic, or the pastor who offers sympathy and counsel.

If John Q. Public wins, the losing party is ordered to pay John's attorney fees, along with a $10,000 bounty for bringing the lawbreaker to justice. But if John Q. Public loses, the target of the lawsuit still is out the attorney fees he or she paid to fight the case and has no recourse against the person bringing the lawsuit.

The underlying strategy is to make it so expensive for those providing abortions, or assisting providers, that doctors and clinics stop performing the procedure. Already, officials in a half-dozen other states have begun talking about adopting the Texas strategy. Don't be surprised if Iowa lawmakers do this, too.

If the U.S. Supreme Court allows this “enforcement" mechanism to stand, do we really believe it will only be used to fight abortions? Think about where this might lead in other states — especially states with Democratic majorities in their legislatures and governors who are Democrats.

We should not be surprised if those states adopt the citizen vigilante and bounty hunter strategy to make it prohibitively expensive for gun sellers to continue selling those legal products.

We should not be surprised if some states decide to target owners of livestock confinement facilities and fertilizer retailers and bring them to their knees financially for fouling that state's rivers and streams.

We should not be surprised if some states go after owners of coal-burning power plants and gasoline retailers with a flood of citizen lawsuits for contributing to the pollution that fuels climate change.

Texas lawmakers have given a green light to state-sanctioned harassment and intimidation, all because lawmakers want to accomplish something the courts have blocked them from doing before, ending abortions in that state.

“Even those opposed to abortion should be alarmed by this law, which could draw a road map for states and localities looking to dismantle constitutional rights with impunity," two civil liberties lawyers, Julia Kaye and Marc Hearron, wrote in a recent Washington Post column.

“S.B. 8 should shock anyone, in any state, who cares about any fundamental right. The Texas Legislature has set fire to basic principles of constitutional governance, and its attack must be quickly extinguished."

Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.