A Republican senator hopes to “make Minnesota Iowa again” after introducing a bill that would allow Iowa to buy nine southern Minnesota counties.
Sen. Mike Bousselot, R-Ankeny, Iowa, proposed the bill on Tuesday at the Land Investment Expo, the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported. Minnesota borders Iowa to the north, and Bousselot wants the state to enter into negotiations with its neighbor. Although the text for the bill was not available as of Wednesday afternoon, the senator said his proposal has support from colleagues in the Iowa House and Senate.
“Make Minnesota Iowa Again!” Bousselot said in a post on X. “Our new Iowans, former MN residents, will have lower income, sales, business taxes. A more farm friendly state. And a better managed state.”
President-elect Donald Trump suggested a similar plan as he recently suggested that the U.S. acquire Greenland and Canada. Bousselot said his bill was being worked on before Trump’s comments.
“I have a lot of respect for President Trump, but we were talking about buying Minnesota long before he started talking about buying Greenland,” Bousselot said at the Land Investment Expo. “I want that on the record.”
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While speaking about the proposal at the Land Investment Expo, which was held at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Bousselot said, “This is something where we can grow Iowa.”
“We can get more investment into farmland and hog buildings and all sorts of agricultural investment… and Minnesota can get the cash that they need to operate the state in a very different way from which we go about it,” the senator said.
Bousselot further explained how the purchase would make sense for both states due to Iowa’s budget surplus, a foreseeable budget deficit in Minnesota and the conservative politics of the counties along Minnesota’s southern band.
“It’s about 180,000 people that would become Iowans,” the senator said. “They’d have a little bit more money in their pocket to buy Minnesota gear. They could still buy Gopher gear. But it would also not change the electoral math. And that political sensibility is important for a Democrat-led Senate, a Democrat governor and a split-control Minnesota House.”
According to the U.S. Constitution, a state can not buy another state as the process of adding states to the Union is controlled by Congress and involves the consent of the existing states involved.
A state cannot buy another state’s counties, per the U.S. Constitution. For this to happen, it would require a change to the federal system because states are considered sovereign entities with defined boundaries, thus meaning states cannot simply acquire territory from another.
“Counties are not at all independent of their states in the way that states are independent of the national government,” Matthew C. Simpson, a political theory and American politics teacher at the University of New Mexico, told the Albuquerque Journal.
