State Sen. Merv Riepe still the center of attention in Nebraska Legislature

Yahoo

08-04-2025

State Sen. Merv Riepe of Ralston, in his seventh year in the Nebraska Legislature, stands by a portrait in his Lincoln office memorializing his first campaign for the Legislature in 2014, including photos of his two grandchildren. Riepe served in the Legislature from 2015 to 2019, and he returned in 2023 with an independent streak in his service. March 11, 2025. (Zach Wendling/Nebraska Examiner)
LINCOLN — State Sen. Merv Riepe, the Ralston lawmaker at the nexus of controversy the past three years since returning to the Nebraska Legislature, isn't afraid to go against his Republican colleagues.
Riepe returned to the Legislature in January 2023 after losing a reelection bid to his predecessor in 2018. While his first term was more in line with the then-Nebraska Republican Party — which he notes was different, too — his return has positioned him differently, as more of an independent thinker and pivotal vote on many proposals, earning him the short-lived title of 'Hot Merv Summer.'
From new abortion restrictions, Medicaid expansion and gender-related care to sports and bathrooms for transgender students, winner-take-all and criminal justice for teen offenders, the 82-year-old Riepe found a spotlight he says he never intended to seek.
'Hell no,' he says when asked whether he sought to often be the key '33rd vote' — the threshold to cut off debate on contentious measures. But he's not bashful in doing so.
'If I'm the 33rd vote to kill something, then I say, 'OK.' If I feel strongly about it, I will do that, regardless of what the consequences are,' Riepe told the Nebraska Examiner during a two-hour interview in his office last month.
'The only rule I've ever had is anyone can say anything about me, just don't say anything about my mom,' he continued. 'I don't want to be on the bench. I want to be in the game.'
Nearly two years from when he killed a near-total abortion ban, and more than a year since he withheld a vote a sponsor needed to advance the 'Sports and Spaces Act' to restrict K-12 bathrooms and sports to students' sex at birth, Riepe's more independent flame could burn bright again this week.
Tuesday marks a four-hour debate on Legislative Bill 3, which seeks to return Nebraska to 'winner-take-all' for its five Electoral College votes. Currently, just Nebraska and Maine split two presidential votes for the statewide winner and one presidential vote for the winner of each congressional district. Nebraska has split its votes three times — 2008, 2020 and 2024.
Vice President Kamala Harris won Riepe's Ralston and Omaha district in November by 2.3% over President Donald Trump. She also won the 'blue dot' in the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District. Riepe is the only Republican in the Legislature representing a Harris-won legislative district.
Yet Tuesday won't be the first time Riepe has voted on winner-take-all. He supported the change all four times it came up for a vote in 2015 and 2016. He also voted for it last year on a procedural attempt by former State Sen. Julie Slama of Dunbar to attach the proposal to a different bill.
In an April 2024 floor speech on Slama's efforts, Riepe said: 'A vote for winner-take-all might be the one critical vote to keep Sleepy Joe from the White House.' Riepe is four months older than former President Joe Biden.
Last September, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., went to the Nebraska Governor's Mansion to give Gov. Jim Pillen backup in the continued push, connecting Riepe and Trump on a brief call.
Riepe said Trump praised the governor and added: 'Senator Riepe, I've heard of you.'
'He never heard of me,' Riepe recalled last month with a laugh. 'I'm not so vain that I think that he — it was just what you say when you're schmoozing with someone.'
Riepe that day signed on to support winner-take-all that fall, but Riepe said Pillen 'naively' took that signature as indicative of future support, which he called a 'bad assumption.' Pillen and his team shared screenshots of Riepe's past votes and the signature this weekend.
'It's like an Etch A Sketch, you pull it and it's gone, and we start over,' Riepe said. 'I don't consider that a flip-flop. I consider it a situational decision.'
What was the difference in 2024? Harris and Biden.
Riepe felt strongly that Harris was not 'even remotely qualified' and might be a 'puppet for some behind-the-scene bureaucratic process.' He said he refused to live with the idea that Nebraska's 'blue dot' could decide the election.
Riepe gave Trump his vote, both in the pledged signature to Pillen and later at the ballot box. He said he wasn't 'head over heels' for Trump. But he was firmly against Harris.
'To keep her from coming in there if it meant my vote, I would throw myself on the fire to do that,' Riepe said.
Riepe said he feels that people in his district want to keep the district model. Civic Nebraska hosted a 'community conversation' Monday night urging Nebraskans to share support for the current electoral method. Riepe said he had planned to attend that event in his district.
Maine leaders have vowed to follow Nebraska if winner-take-all is enacted, Riepe noted, which he argued would be a 'sum-zero game.'
'So what have we done? We've just stirred the beehive for no honey,' Riepe said.
Riepe described politics as a bell curve where most people fall in the center. He said he doesn't 'subscribe' to what he often considers 'extreme positions' of the NEGOP platform.
State Sen. Tom Brandt of Plymouth, a farmer in his seventh year at the statehouse, said Riepe brings perspectives that he leans on. He calls Riepe a 'fun guy' with a 'thick hide.'
'He makes up his mind and he sticks with it, I really admire that about him,' Brandt said. 'It would take some very solid logic to get him off of his position.'
State Sen. Jana Hughes of Seward, who was elected alongside Riepe in 2022, described Riepe as a 'fiscal hawk' and said that 'for being the oldest senator, he has the strongest backbone.'
Riepe described his political position as 'center, slightly right.' He has often said he's a 'compassionate conservative.' He considers himself moderate but isn't a typical swing vote.
Brandt and others have similarly fallen into the 'moderate' category, but he rejected the label.
'I see us as the Republicans,' Brandt said. 'Maybe the other ones are out of step, and maybe we're in step.'
Riepe has supported reducing unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 16 weeks, and he's advancing a criminal justice package backed by Pillen this year to lower the age at which juveniles can be detained or charged as adults.
He also helped with property tax negotiations in the summer of 2024 but criticized the fast-paced and ever-changing process as a 'jump-and-the-net-will-appear' philosophy.
Riepe, a farm kid who joined the U.S. Navy hospital corpsmen at the age of 17 in 1960 and served until just before his 21st birthday, came back and worked his way through school. He said he always intended to be a hospital administrator, as he did until his retirement in 2008. He held top roles at Bergen Mercy Medical Center and what is now Children's Nebraska.
Health care has dominated Riepe's focus in the Legislature, such as:
Expanding options for direct primary care.
Adding blood testing options for pregnant women to fight syphilis.
Funding respite facilities for eligible homeless adults in Lincoln and Omaha.
Allowing emergency medical services to care for and transport injured Nebraska K-9s.
Riepe also takes a narrow view on expanding Medicaid, opposing an in-progress bill to cap the costs of epinephrine injectors for severe allergic reactions while having previously brought a measure to expand Medicaid coverage to include obesity for potential cost savings. He also opposed a 2023 bill to repeal the state's helmet law for motorcyclists, citing potential Medicaid costs.
Partnering with Hughes, Riepe has defended a currently stalled partnership with Iowa for a prescription drug donation program, potentially for Medicaid savings. Riepe also predated Hughes in seeking to combat youth tobacco use and vaping.
State Sen. John Fredrickson, a progressive who like Riepe represents a more purple district in Omaha, described Riepe as a 'wildcat' because it can be hard to know where he might land on certain topics. To some that might be 'wishy-washy,' Fredrickson said, yet Riepe is the 'exact opposite.'
'I think he's someone who is curious. We joke that he's Curious George, and he's someone who I hope, when I'm Merv's age, that I am still wanting to learn as much as he is,' said Fredrickson, who is 38.
Fredrickson, vice chair of the Legislature's Health and Human Services Committee, said he's a better lawmaker because of Riepe and that the two help one another, especially on an all-male committee for the first time since 2004.
Riepe chaired the HHS Committee in 2017 and 2018 and lost a bid to return on a 28-21 vote this January.
Riepe's fascination with health also got him reading more about abortion in 2023, leading to his 'change of heart' from LB 626, which sought to ban nearly all abortions after an ultrasound detected embryonic cardiac activity. He viewed that as a 'total abortion ban' before most women know they're pregnant.
He signaled his opposition early and pushed for a 12-week cutoff. He has said that if his 2022 election had gone just a few more weeks, citing headwinds after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, he might have lost.
During the second-round debate on LB 626 in April 2023, Riepe tried to force a vote on his 12-week amendment. Lt. Gov. Joe Kelly, instead of putting the motion to an immediate vote as he typically does, ruled there hadn't been 'full and fair debate.'
'I tell you what, I was mad,' Riepe said.
Reflecting on the vote last month, Riepe paused and walked over to grab a coffee mug from his office. It bore the German flag and read: 'Never underestimate the power of a stubborn German.'
Riepe said his independent streak had started before that LB 626 debate, but the maneuvering around his amendment 'was the straw that broke the camel's back.'
'It made me so angry that they had maneuvered to not even give me a shot,' Riepe said. 'They were that determined to not only kill my bill but in essence shut me up, and that really, that may have been the trigger that made me say, 'Fine, you want to smack me, I'll smack you back.''
When the allotted four hours passed on former Thurston State Sen. Joni Albrecht's LB 626, Riepe withheld his vote, and so entered 'Hot Merv Summer,' a term used by abortion-rights advocates, including on T-shirts, praising Riepe for torpedoing the stricter measure. Riepe said he got one of the shirts and wore it once, to the end-of-session legislative party in 2023.
Riepe's non-vote and opposition to LB 626 earned him a censure from the NEGOP, a local billboard from Students for Life Action calling for his resignation, the loss of his Nebraska Right to Life endorsement and an open letter in the McCook Gazette from a southwestern Nebraska county party chair blasting Riepe for an '11th-hour bargain with the Devil.'
'Senator Riepe, you shall be remembered as a shadow of a man, who prized political expediency over integrity,' Bruce Desautels, then-chair of the Hitchcock County Republican Party, wrote in May 2023. 'As went the legacy of Judas Iscariot and General Benedict Arnold, yours shall ever be synonymous with dishonor and betrayal.'
Riepe said he didn't feel threatened after that vote but did have people show up at his house and church. Pillen, who supported LB 626, offered security if it became a problem, Riepe said.
One of the people that Riepe earned praise from was his son, who told his father: 'It's one of my proudest moments to be your son, that you had the guts to take that kind of a vote.'
With a laugh, Riepe said he replied: 'Well, that's good. So I can expect something nice for Father's Day?'
Riepe said he wears the censure as a 'badge of courage' that helps in his purple district, and he joked that at least the southwest Omaha billboard featured a nice picture of him.
'Being a stubborn German, give me an ultimatum, I'm just stubborn enough I'm likely to go the opposite way,' Riepe said.
Behind the scenes, Riepe continued working with conservatives to find a path forward for abortion restrictions, which became the current law: 12 weeks tied to gestational age. The abortion language was added to LB 574, which on its own prohibited gender transition surgeries for minors and restricted youths with gender dysphoria from accessing certain medications.
Riepe said his support for LB 574, beyond abortion, had come after meeting a family who said their two-year-old child was transgender, which he said left him speechless. He said he was concerned that age was too early to know.
The new amendment was filed May 8, ending 'Hot Merv Summer' just 11 days later.
Abortion and gender care restrictions were combined on May 16, 2023, in what State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Omaha described as one of the worst days of her life. She warned Riepe against supporting the measures and said women and children would die.
She told supporters: 'You will have buckets and buckets of blood on your hands.'
Cavanaugh said it was heartbreaking and 'really, really, really difficult to move past,' yet Riepe reflected and said he regretted not pushing harder to include fatal fetal anomalies as an exception and not fighting to explicitly repeal criminal penalties against doctors for abortions.
Riepe tried to do so in 2024 but had few political allies to help move the measure forward.
'Obviously, I'm still upset. We can't go back and undo it. But there is something in acknowledging our mistakes and trying to do better moving forward,' Cavanaugh said. 'While it was a horrible moment, I think it also resulted in a great deal of growth for him.'
LB 574 passed May 19, cementing a summer of, as Riepe offered: 'He's not as hot as we thought.'.
Cavanaugh and Riepe both served on the HHS Committee in 2023, where the two had a relationship akin to Statler and Waldorf, two grouchy older Muppets often seen from the balcony of a theater, Cavanaugh said. It was a relationship similar to Fredrickson and Riepe now, rooted, they said, in good policy.
'He's one of the rare animals in here who you can still actually engage in thoughtful policy discussion with and who will come to the table and have those conversations,' Fredrickson said.
Legislation impacting transgender Nebraskans would again be debated in 2024, with Riepe placing himself at the center of that debate, too — LB 575, or the 'Sports and Spaces Act' from State Sen. Kathleen Kauth of the Millard area.
While LB 574 and LB 626 were fought publicly, Riepe had privately raised caution in a March 2023 memo to Kauth, suggesting that they leave the fight up to the State Board of Education while quoting a Chinese general that 'The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.'
The issue would wait until April 2024, after Riepe had spent months meeting with families and continuing to read. He remarked during the debate that trans students and families were seeking accommodations, not attention.
He asked how to know a child's chromosomes by looking at them: 'Are they like shirt sizes? Are they an 'X' and a double 'X' or triple 'X,' and what are they?'
Riepe and Brandt were the two Republican senators to be 'present, not voting' on the bill, ending its chances for the year. Riepe maintains his 'leaning' opposition to the latest version of Kauth's bill, the 'Stand With Women Act,' LB 89. It could come up for debate at any time.
Riepe has said he holds that position partly because of executive action by Trump forcing schools to restrict sports to students' sex at birth or risk federal funding. Riepe said he wants a national solution, not a state-by-state patchwork.
Kauth, who succeeded Riepe as chair of the Business and Labor Committee, said she respects Riepe and 'his right to vote his conscience, whether it's the same worldview as mine or not.'
'We have more in common than we do apart and have worked together on important issues and will do so in the future,' she said in a text.
Riepe knows he is the oldest member of the Nebraska Legislature. But he walks in parades and goes door to door in part to prove he has the stamina, he says, and that he can still put two sentences together.
'I'm not some babbling old fool,' Riepe said. 'I'm just an old fool.'
Whether Riepe runs for reelection in 2026 is still up in the air, largely depending on his health and whether his wife is agreeable, he says smiling. He feels good where he is at and has communicated to others, including the governor's office, that they're in a 'tough spot' should they try to primary him.
'You can't run someone to the right of me, really, and ever get elected,' Riepe said. 'And you're not going to run somebody on the left.'
Should Riepe run and win reelection, he would be 88 by the time he is term-limited at the end of 2030. But should he lose, or decide against running, he won't 'go home and cry.'
Instead, he said he'll try to figure out which hardware store he can go to and 'sort nuts and bolts.'
Asked how he wants to be remembered, Riepe said:
'He was a decent guy who appreciated some humor and, hopefully, was a reasonable individual who was a good parent, a good husband and things that are above and more important than the Legislature. I don't want them at my funeral saying, 'I know ol' Riepe would have wished he would have spent another session stuck on the floor during some filibuster.''
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