(Radio Iowa) – Greene County Attorney Thomas Laehn is planning to run for the U.S. Senate as a Libertarian.

Laehn said Iowans are ready for someone outside the current two-party system who will push back against executive overreach. “The president was never supposed to have the power to unilaterally make criminal law and just put people in prison for violating…his executive orders,” Laehn said, “and we should all be very alarmed in our constitutional history.”

Some Libertarian Party candidates have won non-partisan elections in Iowa for seats on city councils as township trustees, but Laehn is the first listed on the ballot as a Libertarian to win a partisan election in Iowa. “Part of this is an experiment in liberty, an experiment in popular sovereignty,” Laehn said. “I mean, has the two-party system become so entrenched in our system of government that we can’t have elections or people can’t hold office without it? And if so, then things are even worse than I fear.”

Greene County Attorney Thomas Laene plans to run for the US Senate in 2026. (campaign photo)

Laehn will formally kick off his campaign for one of Iowa’s U.S. Senate seats on Saturday. Laehn was raised in the small northeast Iowa town of Allison, where is father was a Lutheran minister and his mother was the school librarian. Laehn’s online biography lists degrees from Drake University and Louisiana State University and a stint as a professor at McNeese State before enrolling and graduating from the University of Iowa law school in 2017. He was elected Greene County Attorney the following year and reelected in 2022.

(By James Kelley, Iowa Public Radio; Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson also contributed to this story.)