David Blom repeatedly says that he’s running because it’s time Marshall County had “a seat at the table” in the Iowa legislature. That’s just a less cynical sounding – but still quite cynical – way of saying that a legislator doesn’t matter unless they’re in the majority. The questions that brings to mind are: Is David Blom ok with that, and should we be? Is this how the legislature is supposed to work?

The truth is, Marshall County HAS a seat at the table. That seat does not belong to the Iowa governor, the speaker of the Iowa House, or anyone else affiliated with the legislature. That seat belongs to US – the voters of district 52 – and WE get to say who sits in it. This means that when we twice elected Sue Cahill to sit in that seat, we said that she does indeed represent our values.

The fact that the majority party in the legislature refuses to consider anything that the minority party proposes says nothing about our values, but says volumes about theirs. They have turned a deaf ear to most Iowans who loudly said we didn’t want public dollars used to fund private schools, we didn’t want book bans, we didn’t want the AEAs overhauled and we didn’t want a 6 week abortion ban.

Blom says he disagreed with the restructuring of the AEAs. If he’d been in the legislature, would he have voted against it? If so, that means he also would have voted against raises for teachers – a point that he hammers Cahill with in one of his ads – since that was part of the bill that restructured the AEAs. If he would have voted against it, he should ask all the Republican legislators who opposed Gov. Reynolds’ “educational savings accounts” how they now like their seats at the table. (The answer is, they don’t because they found themselves on the losing end of primaries to opponents that Reynolds recruited.)

What we need is not a change in our representative to the legislature, but in how the legislature operates. A seat at the table needs to equal a voice. Our voice. Vote Sue Cahill.