Rick Bertrand, a state senator from Sioux City, Iowa, has announced a primary challenge against GOP Rep. Steve King. What did King do to earn the challenge? In the Iowa caucuses, King supported Ted Cruz, an opponent of the ethanol mandate.
When Cruz won, this embarassed the state’s Republican governor (whose son is a leading figure in the ethanol lobby), and exposed the supposedly formidable ethanol lobby as a paper tiger.
Bertrand hasn’t explicitly said Cruz and ethanol are behind his challenge, but everyone in the state knows it.
The Des Moines Register, in covering Bertrand’s announcment, wrote:
ethanol interests have painted a target on King’s back for supporting the presidential campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who wants to eliminate federal energy subsidies and mandates. Bertrand supported Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida in the caucuses.
The Sioux City Journal reported:
Bertrand said he’s seen that Iowans and particularly those who work in agriculture aren’t happy with King, in part because he supported Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who didn’t support an extension to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard for ethanol. That caused Gov. Terry Branstad to take the step of telling Iowans that Cruz should not be supported in the Iowa caucuses, although Cruz still went on to win that first contest in the 2016 presidential nominee selection process.
Bertrand said he’s heard from disgruntled agriculture-sector employees since King’s endorsement, saying corn-based ethanol is important to the state economy.
The Sioux City Journal’s editorial page welcomed Bertrand’s challenge, specifically citing King’s support for the ethanol industry’s enemy Cruz.
One Iowa State professor said the whole thing was about ethanol:
Iowa State University political science professor Steffen Schmidt said the impetus for Bertrand to move toward a run is fueled by the desire of some Republicans to have a new option, after King endorsed presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
Schmidt said many Republicans were upset with the endorsement because Cruz doesn’t support an extension to the federal Renewable Fuel Standard for ethanol, which is made with a lot of Iowa corn.
“Steve King has been invincible in politics. But this year he took on the Republican establishment in Iowa and embarrassed Gov. Terry Branstad by ‘going rogue,’ as one prominent Iowa GOP heavy-hitter told me over coffee, on King’s support for (Cruz),” Schmidt said.
The Iowa Corn Growers Association has endorsed Bertrand in the past.
The irony is that King, unlike Cruz, supports the ethanol mandate. It seems that’s not enough for the ethanol lobby, which may be desperate after the caucuses to show that it still has teeth.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
