Bleeding Heartland bleedingheartland.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bleedingheartland.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Bleeding Heartland
Tuesday, Jun 29 2021
Gross abuse of power.
Those are words you won’t read in any newspaper, local tv, or online news article about the Des Moines City Council meeting on June 28 – or any council meeting, for that matter. However, that is exactly what has been happening for more than a year.
The consent agenda, by definition, is for day to day city business. In other words, non-controversial agenda items – liquor licenses and things of that nature. If there were something disagreeable on the consent agenda, normally the public could address the council at the meeting to have the item pulled.
Indira Sheumaker was born to a Black American mother and a white American father who searched the world for a unique name to give her and landed on that of India’s first female prime minister. Indira Gandhi was a complicated political figure, but a strong leader, and daughter of the beloved Jawaharlal Nehru, the freedom fighter who became India’s first leader after independence.
Sheumaker was not from a political dynasty and didn’t grow up dreaming of elective office, though the northwest Des Moines native and Hoover High graduate is certainly politically aware. Now 26, she attended protest rallies on the heels of incidents of racial injustice, like the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri. But here in her hometown, those typically amounted to some people showing up at the state Capitol with signs and speeches and “then we all went home.”