Iowa legislature violates the spirit of the home rule law
Home rule is the ultimate "live and let live" method of governance; Iowa Republicans prefer a nanny state.
Growing up in Iowa in the 1980s and 1990s, Kelcey appreciated the “live and let live” attitude that Iowa took toward most things. Keep to yourself, you do you, and as long as no one gets hurt, we’re good.
Part of that “live and let live” attitude was home rule for cities and counties. “Home rule” means that local governments can make any law that isn’t prohibited by a state or federal law. Iowans recognized the sense in letting the governments that know them best–their local ones–set their local laws, so they amended the Iowa Constitution to grant home rule to cities in 1968 and to counties in 1978.
Prior to the amendment, Iowa operated under “Dillon’s Rule,” named after the Iowa Supreme Court justice whose 1868 legal opinion stated that local governments could only take actions when expressly authorized to do so by the state legislature. This opinion only applied in Iowa initially but was later adopted by other states.
Dillon’s Rule was, in short, a pain for everyone. According to the Iowa League of Cities, its disadvantages included:
(a) a city needed legislation to make sure that it had the necessary express power to carry out its functions of governing; (b) the legislature spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with essentially local matters; (c) the legislature either would fail to grant the power or would hamstring the exercise of the power; and (d) city attorneys were frequently unable to ascertain whether their cities had the necessary authority to act in given circumstances.
100 years later, the state had had enough of leaving cities guessing and spending excessive time on matters best left to cities and counties. The legislature passed those two amendments and got out of the business of micromanaging local government.
Until recently.
After becoming a Republican trifecta in 2017, Iowa’s state government first passed several bills remaking the state in the party’s image (anti-union, anti-choice, anti-education, anti-woman), then turned to micromanaging local government.
These micromanaging bills and laws frequently appear to target specific local governments, especially those run by Democrats. Some examples from this long list are:
Prohibiting local minimum wages;
Restricting locals’ ability to oversee their police departments;
Prohibiting local governments from banning discrimination based on gender or rental income source;
Prohibiting local plastic bag bans;
Prohibiting county auditors from choosing satellite voting locations;
Prohibiting masking requirements;
Forcing the county boards of supervisors for Johnson, Story, and Blackhawk Counties to be elected in districts instead of county-wide votes.
And they aren’t done meddling. Among others, this year’s session has included bills dictating where, how, and to whom local libraries can provide services, removing the semi-autonomous library board powers, and prohibiting local governments from issuing local identification cards to their residents.
The last one would kill the popular Johnson County Community ID program. The program has existed for 11 years without controversy. But, as one Republican legislator wrote to Kelcey when she contacted him expressing her support for the program, undocumented immigrants could get those IDs, and the lawmaker’s constituents agreed that this was a problem. He declined to say how the people of his district–more than an hour’s drive from Johnson County–were impacted by our ID program in any way.
And that disconnect is itself the problem. Even (and perhaps especially) when their constituents have no skin in the game and no knowledge of the local conditions, Iowa legislators are micromanaging our local governments based on their constituents’ perceived preferences. In other words, rather than addressing truly statewide issues like water pollution, our lagging economy, population loss, or so on, the Iowa Legislature is back to “[spending] an inordinate amount of time dealing with essentially local matters.”
Iowa’s legislature has become like an incompetent boss: it is failing to do its own job and micromanaging its subordinates out of doing theirs. This is exactly what our home rule amendments were meant to prevent.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Press-Citizen on March 28, 2026.