Election-Related Protests Inspire ‘Suck It Up, Buttercup’ Law

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• published: 16 Nov 2016
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Republican Iowa Representative Bobby Kaufmann is planning to introduce new legislation in January that will cut the budgets of state-funded universities that spend taxpayer dollars on election related protests and grief counseling. Bobby Kaufmann: “You know the bill was inspired by what I saw across the nation where I saw schools with rising, skyrocketing tuition costs, were also finding new monies and expenditures for things such as ‘cry rooms.’ I was hearing reports of rooms where you could play with Play-Doh and you could color on books and talk about your feelings. And I was even hearing reports of some schools that were bringing in ponies to be able to get students through the election. Well for me, that’s a waste of taxpayers’ dollar. And that also doesn’t prepare kids for life. Because in life, there’s winners and losers. And in life, when your car breaks down, your kids get sick or you have to take a second job to pay your mortgage - you don’t get to go to a 'cry zone.' You don’t get to pet a pony. You have to deal with it. Which is why I came up with the bill and the idea-inspired ‘Suck It Up, Buttercup.’ What really inspired me to push this forward was there was an actual blockade of my constituents on Interstate 80 last week. And that’s dangerous. That’s incredibly dangerous. What if someone had been trying to go to the hospital? What if someone was in an emergency? And you had these kids, you had people acting like spoiled brats - let’s just call it what it is - blocking Interstate 80 and I have no problem with dissent. I have no problem with protesting. I encourage protesting. I encourage dissent. But you don’t have a Constitutional right to impede on the Constitutional rights of others. And when you’re blocking the Interstate, when you’re falsely imprisoning my constituents and putting their lives in danger, I have a big problem with that. So I’m proposing to increase the penalties and giving law enforcement more tools to prevent that from happening in the future."