Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds will deliver the Republican response Tuesday night to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
Reynolds has promised to deliver an alternative to what she regards as Biden’s “absent leadership” and far-left agenda.
But who is Reynolds? And why was she chosen to deliver the rebuttal address? Here are eight facts about Reynolds, an Iowa native and rising GOP star.
- Reynolds is the 43rd governor for Iowa. She made historyBy becoming the first woman to hold that position.
- From 2011 to 2017, Reynolds was Iowa’s lieutenant governor. She assumed the top job in 2017 from her predecessor, Terry Branstad, who stepped down to become the U.S. ambassador to China in the Trump administration. She won her 2018 gubernatorial elections.
- She was elected to office for many years before she graduated college. Although she took classes throughout her adult life, Reynolds didn’t graduate until the age of 57, when she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2016 from Iowa State University.
- She was a national celebrity for her COVID-19 policies. first Governor in the country to order schools to reopen in person learning
- Reynolds has three children and 11 grandchildren. They all live in central Iowa.
- When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., announced Reynolds would give the State of the Union rebuttal speech, he praised her “brave, bold, and successful leadership,” and said Biden should take notes from her policy ideas in Iowa.
- She is a proponent of a flat income tax and has worked to change Iowa’s income-tax rates from some of the highest in the nation to the fourth-lowest.
- Reynolds will be the second female Republican from Iowa in the past decade to deliver a GOP response to a State of the Union address, following Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s speech responding to President Barack Obama’s address in 2015. Ernst has supported Reynolds. saying, “She can do a direct comparison to Iowa, our strong economy, how we’ve led through COVID-19 and compare that to President Biden’s disastrous time thus far in office.”
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