Joni Ernst has been running for Iowa Senate as the kind of Republican woman who’s tough enough to castrate hogs and serve in the National Guard, but also a nice-mom-next-door. Basically Sarah Palin’s image circa 2008, minus the glamour and with hog castration taking the place of caribou hunting to show her down-home toughness. After her first race for office back in 2004, though, it turns out Ernst’s toughness was fully on display, but not so much the niceness, as she exacted retribution on members of a county veterans’ commission who had opposed her candidacy.
Ernst wanted to run for county auditor, but was in Kuwait with the National Guard at the time that the paperwork needed to be filed. That potentially put her in violation of laws about political involvement and active duty military personnel, and 29 people in her county signed a petition trying to remove her from the ballot on those grounds. Those 29 people included two members of the local county veterans’ commission. After Ernst won her election:
The first commission member to be forced out was Claude Peterson, a Vietnam vet who had signed the petition. Peterson’s reappointment to the commission, which he had served on since 1982, suddenly became caught up in a debate about whether to add additional members to the board. The county supervisors responsible for selecting members of the board, almost all of whom were allies of Ernst, voted against his reappointment. In the aftermath of that decision, Dale Watt, the longtime head of the veterans commission, resigned, as did the other two members.
Watt, another petition signer who was recovering from having a gangrenous gall bladder removed, had served in the post for 14 years. He cited Ernst and her husband Gail in his reasons for resignation, specifically for how they had treated Peterson. In his resignation, Watt claimed that he had never heard a single complaint about his conduct in office until he signed the petition, when Gail Ernst began telling people that Watt hadn’t helped him with a back injury claim. Watt never did anything to regain his position, although it bothered him for the rest of his life. Peterson, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit to try to get his old job back, although he tried to downplay what happened to The Daily Beast, saying “it was just a volunteer job anyway, no big deal and [Ernst] just wanted her people in.” He still seemed disappointed that, in his view, Ernst had injected politics into a job that had never before been political.
“I guess people want power,” Peterson said. “They want to be in control.”
Now, Joni Ernst wants the power of the United States Senate, and what she wants to do with it includes tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, arresting federal agents for implementing Obamacare, and opposing the federal minimum wage. It’s a ruthless and cruel agenda—that’s part of why Ernst’s image of homespun Sunday-school-teaching wholesomeness is so important, to paper over the cruelty of the policies she’s pushing. Now we know how ruthless she can be on a personal level.
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It’s time for Iowa voters to see Joni Ernst for who she really is, and her far-right agenda for what it is.
