Nicholas Gluba, U.S. Congressional candidate

By Cheryl Allen
Posted 10/25/24

KALONA

Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, which encompasses the cities of Davenport, Iowa City, Burlington, and Indianola, is considered one of the least Republican districts in the state. …

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Nicholas Gluba, U.S. Congressional candidate

Posted

KALONA

Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, which encompasses the cities of Davenport, Iowa City, Burlington, and Indianola, is considered one of the least Republican districts in the state.

That may be good news for Nicholas Gluba; not only is he the Libertarian candidate, challenging Mariannette Miller-Meeks for the seat, but due to a last-minute snafu, his name will not appear on the ballot.

That’s right: voters will have to write him in, so remember that exact spelling -- Nicholas Gluba – and office – U.S. Congressional District 1.

The Libertarian party is a major party in Iowa; Gluba would have been on the ballot, but for the party holding its county conventions the same day as their precinct caucuses. Had they waited just 181 minutes, after the strike of midnight, they would have been in the clear.

The Libertarians didn’t know they had violated state law until Republican voters challenged them on it.

“Unfortunately, the law had changed, which we weren’t aware of, because we don’t have people that just sit there and read Iowa code all the time. We have other jobs, you know,” Gluba says.

He does, indeed, have other jobs. “Depending on how you classify it, I have anywhere between two and six,” he says.

In terms of paid employment, he works as a second shift production lead at Whirlpool in North Liberty, and on the side, he works for friends as a chef at Price Creek Event Center in Amana (and yes, he did attend culinary school and has entertained the idea of opening a restaurant). He does not receive payment for the work he does as Johnson County Chair and District 1 Representative for the Libertarian Party.

Born in Iowa City, Gluba grew up in Lone Tree, Williamsburg, and Parnell. He and his family currently reside in Lone Tree, where he is serving his first year on the City Council.

Exactly Average

What is most spectacularly unique about Gluba is that he is as spectacularly average as one can be, something he learned once he began thinking about running for Congress.

The seed of that idea first sprouted when Gluba purchased a house in Lone Tree a few years ago, in close proximity to his great grandparents (now deceased) and grandparents.

“I saw some things around town that I thought, you know, we could really do this better and more efficiently. So I ran for City Council,” he says. “Then I noticed the same thing with the U.S. Representatives. There were a lot of people who explained the fact that they didn’t really feel like they were being represented by the Representatives.”

That made him think, “Okay, well, I enjoy talking to people and I enjoy listening to people, and I would probably be a bit better of a Representative for the people of this district than a doctor from California or an environmental protection lawyer from Florida.”

He realized there was a disjunct between the people and those who represent them.

“It’s difficult for the people of this area, who have a median family income of $66,000, to be properly represented by somebody who wasn’t from here and is also a millionaire,” he says.

When he discussed running for Congress with others in his party, they pointed out his perfect averageness: “I am the median age of this district. I have a median-sized house in this district. I have the median income of this district. I have the median vehicles of this district. So they were like, yeah, you’re exactly average.”

Anti-War

Like many young men of his generation – at 37, he is the youngest Congressional candidate in the State of Iowa – Gluba joined the military in response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Serving in the Marine Corps during Operation Iraqi Freedom, spending time in places including Falllujah and Ramadi, “I realized that the Iraqi people didn’t really need us over there. We didn’t really need to be over there as a country. We weren’t benefitting anybody from either side, except for these multi-billion-dollar war profiteering companies. And I developed a very, very heavy anti-war stance off of that,” he says.

Not only did Gluba see the high cost of war in terms of dollars, but also in terms of mental health.

“We were kids when we were over there, we were 18 to early 20’s,” he says. “You have to carry that for the rest of your life, and I do have friends, personally, that the rest of their life was much shorter than it should have been because of the mental tolls that were placed.”

He laments that younger people are typically sent to war because “they’re the only ones that are physically capable of doing everything,” however, “they’re not mentally capable of processing everything at that point. It took years for myself or any of my friends to be able to combat what we had seen mentally. Not all of them made it through it.”

He also laments that “our current representation is still voting to send billions of dollars over to other countries for their war efforts,” and that means a budget shortfall when it comes to helping Americans in need. “Maybe if you stopped sending billions of dollars outside of the country, you would have a little bit of money to help the people here,” he says, thinking particularly of the need to fund hurricane recovery efforts.

Anti-Eminent Domain

Gluba realizes that campaigning and winning office might be easier if he aligned himself with the Republican or Democratic parties; however, he would rather maintain his personal integrity than join the bandwagon of whichever side might be favored in a given year. The fact is, his values align most closely with those of the Libertarian party, the fastest growing party in the state; one of those values pertains to private property.

A proposed CO2 pipeline that would span five states, including Iowa, has caused division in recent years; it would require states to exercise eminent domain – the power of government to take private property for public use. Gluba is against this.

“In District 4, they’re using eminent domain for a carbon sequestration pipeline. That doesn’t really benefit anybody, to take land for a carbon capture facility, because the best carbon capture facilities that have ever existed, and the best that ever will exist, are trees,” he says. “Destroying land to put in a carbon capture facility by removing trees is a little counterproductive.”

While being “very big into green energy,” Gluba is firmly against destroying agricultural land, which many green energy projects, from the pipeline to windmills, seem to do.

“We’re an agrarian state,” he says. “If you destroy the ability for farmers to produce agricultural products, you reduce the ability of our state to function.”

Even if pipelines are underground and the land can still grow crops, “You have to destroy the productivity of that soil,” he says. “In the State of Iowa, we have an incredibly thick layer of topsoil that took thousands of years of continual prairie growth and decay that built that incredibly dark, rich, very thick topsoil. Once we dig that out, we don’t’ have thousands of years to rebuild that.”

Having grown up on a Century Farm and valuing that experience, he does not want to see land made unproductive for his own generation and those down the line.

“The federal government can’t just openly ban eminent domain,” he admits, “but they could remove all the financial incentives that the corporations have to use eminent domain.”

Checks and Balances

Should he be elected, Gluba would work toward achieving a balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, “the way it was originally intended.” The granting of emergency powers to the executive branch in the 1970s has made it so that “they could supersede both the legislative and judicial branches of government and create their own laws.”

This has created a situation where people feel, “We need to vote for this person, because if this [other] person takes the executive branch, we’re going to be absolutely destroyed as a nation, and vice versa,” he says. If the executive branch was limited back, any particular president would hold less power, as Congress would provide a check.

The judicial branch, too, needs to be reformed; “There should be no such thing as a lifetime appointment on any government position. It just too heavily weights that position,” he says.

Rooted in Iowa

Should he be elected, Gluba intends to spend as much time in Iowa, and at home in Lone Tree, as possible; he doesn’t relish the idea of dwelling in Washington D.C.

“There’s a whole lot more benefits to living in a small town,” he says. “No, I can’t DoorDash anything, but I also don’t’ fear any of my neighbors, and I can just go out in my yard whenever I want.”

With his interview with The News ended, he headed back home to mow his lawn.

He is, after all, exactly average.

Nicholas Gluba, U.S. Congress, candidate, Libertarian, Lone Tree, Iowa, write-in