Some months ago people at the Idaho Democratic Party said something striking: This year, we will run at least one candidate in every legislative district in Idaho.
In other words, they wouldn’t do what they’ve been doing cycle after after, which is to leave so many Republican nominees unchallenged that the legislature would be conceded to the GOP before the election even was held.
My thought was: OK, show me.
Turns out they have.
The regular two-week candidate filing window closed on March 15, and the legislative field is mostly set. (A note: Candidates still can drop out, or can file as write-ins for the primary election, so the numbers cited below still could rise or fall a little.)
In contrast to the typical 50 or so candidates Democrats have been fielding (some of those competing against each other in the primary), this year 99 have filed for legislative seats.
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Some of those are in fact running against each other in the Democratic primaries. But: When the filing deadline closed, at least one D had filed in all 35 legislative districts. How many years has it been since that last happened? I’m not sure, but I’d guess you have to go back a few decades.
Democrats have filed for 27 of the 35 Senate seats, which means 20 of those candidates will be running in current Republican-held seats.
In the House, where Democrats now hold 11 of 70 seats, D candidates have filed for 55 seats.
For the first time in, what?—a generation?—Idaho Democrats have not conceded the legislature, either chamber of it in fact, immediately after the filing deadline.
I don’t mean to press the point too hard.
Obviously, these currently Republican districts are not going to be easy to win, and it’s entirely possible that Democrats will wind up in November with no more seats than they have now. (If that: In Idaho, presidential election years tend to tilt just a bit more Republican than in off-years.)
We have yet to see how much or how well they campaign, and what kind of campaign money and organization they can put together. Those will not be especially easy tasks either.
But the significance of this candidate recruitment shouldn’t be overlooked.
First, the party’s leaders made what sounded like an awfully daring boast in promising a presence in every district—and they carried through. This is something we haven’t seen for a while among Idaho Democrats.
Second is the fact that Idaho Democrats will be seen this year, locally, in places where they’ve been simply invisible for a long time. Here are some of the home communities of this year’s Idaho Democratic candidates: Spirit Lake, Dalton Gardens, Cottonwood, New Plymouth, Weiser, Emmett, Kuna, Homedale, Kimberly, Paul, Arco, Salmon, Preston, Soda Springs, Driggs, Irwin. I can remember when Democratic candidates (and sometimes winners) were not a rarity in such places, but it’s been a long time.
The fact that other voters in the area will have a human face—rather than a dark myth built out of demonic and perverted constructions—to associate with Democrats, could make some long-range difference.
A quick mention here is also warranted for the Democratic efforts to organize their local county parties. A short time ago, only a few were even thinly organized. Now, according to the state Democratic web site, all 44 counties have a Democratic chair at least, and all but a few have considerably more than that. That’s a major change.
These can be considered good initial steps.
If you’re going to change politics in Idaho, at least somewhat, you’re not going to do it all at once. But, one step at a time, this is a place to start.
The Stapilus files
STAPILUS: Party power
It’s a new move in Idaho, this process on the part of some local Republican county central committees to censure elected officials, who have won their party’s nomination in primary elections, on grounds that they inadequately dance to the tune of party officials.
The latest to try this has been the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee. (Social note which may help describe the group’s perspective: Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake is scheduled to be their Lincoln Day speaker next month.) The Bonneville Republicans last week voted to censure two local Republican legislators, Sen. Kevin Cook and Rep. Stephanie Mickelson. Leaders in the county organization have been critical of them for a while, though this development takes things to a new level.
Two censures from a Republican committee (whether legislative district, county or state organization), under current rules, can lead to a demand that the elected official, though nominated and elected as a Republican, “remove Party support and prohibit the use of Republican Party identifiers” in their campaign.
That has the sound of a serious threat, since so many Idaho voters apparently look for those Republican identifiers, and not much more (such as candidate background, qualifications and well-thought-out positions), when deciding how to fill elected offices.
In an opinion piece, Mickelson noted that, “When I ran for office, I needed to secure a majority of votes from over 52,000 people in my district. Now, 20 precinct committeemen on the District 32 Legislative Committee will vote on whether I can call myself a Republican. Of those 20, only nine were elected. The other 11 were appointed.” Which, she asked, ought to have primacy?
Mickelson also said that if a demand actually is made to remove any kind of party support, “Some have suggested they’ll pursue legal action to enforce this decision.” Indeed, some have suggested as much, and it would be interesting to see how that would play out in a court of law.
But there’s also a larger question: Who gets to call themselves a Republican, or a Democrat, or something else, for that matter?
Idaho Democrats and other groups of voters haven’t made much of an issue out of it (nor have the minor parties), and the Republicans whose political dominance in the state isn’t in any way immediately under threat likewise seldom did, until recently. If someone was considered far enough outside the party’s mainstream (however that might be defined), the usual view was that they could be defeated in a primary election.
That approach began to change after 2011 when, after a court decision allowing political parties to limit their primaries to registered members, Idaho Republicans closed their primaries to allow party registrants only. (Other Idaho parties have not chosen that limitation.) Of course, anyone could register as a Republican, so that didn’t completely solve the (perceived) problem of participation by non-true believers.
As the Idaho Republican party structure has been taken over increasingly by more extreme groups, a conflict between the party and its voters started to become almost inevitable. Now we’re starting to see it arrive.
There’s a key question here: Who gets to decide what a real Republican is? This isn’t a one-sided question. A lot of long-time Republican former elected officials have decried the current party leadership — and some of its elected officials — as virtual invaders who have taken the party far away from its roots and meaning. There’s a real dispute about what a real Republican is or should be.
One approach since has been growing imposition of doctrine and dogma, and ever more extreme positions in party platforms and resolutions: You must support all of this, or else you’re not a real Republican.
What’s worth pointing out is how different this is from the historic norm, when the decision of what was a “real” Republican (or Democrat) was left to the people who voted in the primaries, even if that process sometimes was a little messy. Of course, when you have a one-party state, those stakes get higher.
And when that happens, the extremes become more so.
The Stapilus files
STAPILUS: Party power
It’s a new move in Idaho, this process on the part of some local Republican county central committees to censure elected officials, who have won their party’s nomination in primary elections, on grounds that they inadequately dance to the tune of party officials.
The latest to try this has been the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee. (Social note which may help describe the group’s perspective: Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake is scheduled to be their Lincoln Day speaker next month.) The Bonneville Republicans last week voted to censure two local Republican legislators, Sen. Kevin Cook and Rep. Stephanie Mickelson. Leaders in the county organization have been critical of them for a while, though this development takes things to a new level.
Two censures from a Republican committee (whether legislative district, county or state organization), under current rules, can lead to a demand that the elected official, though nominated and elected as a Republican, “remove Party support and prohibit the use of Republican Party identifiers” in their campaign.
That has the sound of a serious threat, since so many Idaho voters apparently look for those Republican identifiers, and not much more (such as candidate background, qualifications and well-thought-out positions), when deciding how to fill elected offices.
In an opinion piece, Mickelson noted that, “When I ran for office, I needed to secure a majority of votes from over 52,000 people in my district. Now, 20 precinct committeemen on the District 32 Legislative Committee will vote on whether I can call myself a Republican. Of those 20, only nine were elected. The other 11 were appointed.” Which, she asked, ought to have primacy?
Mickelson also said that if a demand actually is made to remove any kind of party support, “Some have suggested they’ll pursue legal action to enforce this decision.” Indeed, some have suggested as much, and it would be interesting to see how that would play out in a court of law.
But there’s also a larger question: Who gets to call themselves a Republican, or a Democrat, or something else, for that matter?
Idaho Democrats and other groups of voters haven’t made much of an issue out of it (nor have the minor parties), and the Republicans whose political dominance in the state isn’t in any way immediately under threat likewise seldom did, until recently. If someone was considered far enough outside the party’s mainstream (however that might be defined), the usual view was that they could be defeated in a primary election.
That approach began to change after 2011 when, after a court decision allowing political parties to limit their primaries to registered members, Idaho Republicans closed their primaries to allow party registrants only. (Other Idaho parties have not chosen that limitation.) Of course, anyone could register as a Republican, so that didn’t completely solve the (perceived) problem of participation by non-true believers.
As the Idaho Republican party structure has been taken over increasingly by more extreme groups, a conflict between the party and its voters started to become almost inevitable. Now we’re starting to see it arrive.
There’s a key question here: Who gets to decide what a real Republican is? This isn’t a one-sided question. A lot of long-time Republican former elected officials have decried the current party leadership — and some of its elected officials — as virtual invaders who have taken the party far away from its roots and meaning. There’s a real dispute about what a real Republican is or should be.
One approach since has been growing imposition of doctrine and dogma, and ever more extreme positions in party platforms and resolutions: You must support all of this, or else you’re not a real Republican.
What’s worth pointing out is how different this is from the historic norm, when the decision of what was a “real” Republican (or Democrat) was left to the people who voted in the primaries, even if that process sometimes was a little messy. Of course, when you have a one-party state, those stakes get higher.
And when that happens, the extremes become more so.
The Stapilus files
STAPILUS: Party power
It’s a new move in Idaho, this process on the part of some local Republican county central committees to censure elected officials, who have won their party’s nomination in primary elections, on grounds that they inadequately dance to the tune of party officials.
The latest to try this has been the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee. (Social note which may help describe the group’s perspective: Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake is scheduled to be their Lincoln Day speaker next month.) The Bonneville Republicans last week voted to censure two local Republican legislators, Sen. Kevin Cook and Rep. Stephanie Mickelson. Leaders in the county organization have been critical of them for a while, though this development takes things to a new level.
Two censures from a Republican committee (whether legislative district, county or state organization), under current rules, can lead to a demand that the elected official, though nominated and elected as a Republican, “remove Party support and prohibit the use of Republican Party identifiers” in their campaign.
That has the sound of a serious threat, since so many Idaho voters apparently look for those Republican identifiers, and not much more (such as candidate background, qualifications and well-thought-out positions), when deciding how to fill elected offices.
In an opinion piece, Mickelson noted that, “When I ran for office, I needed to secure a majority of votes from over 52,000 people in my district. Now, 20 precinct committeemen on the District 32 Legislative Committee will vote on whether I can call myself a Republican. Of those 20, only nine were elected. The other 11 were appointed.” Which, she asked, ought to have primacy?
Mickelson also said that if a demand actually is made to remove any kind of party support, “Some have suggested they’ll pursue legal action to enforce this decision.” Indeed, some have suggested as much, and it would be interesting to see how that would play out in a court of law.
But there’s also a larger question: Who gets to call themselves a Republican, or a Democrat, or something else, for that matter?
Idaho Democrats and other groups of voters haven’t made much of an issue out of it (nor have the minor parties), and the Republicans whose political dominance in the state isn’t in any way immediately under threat likewise seldom did, until recently. If someone was considered far enough outside the party’s mainstream (however that might be defined), the usual view was that they could be defeated in a primary election.
That approach began to change after 2011 when, after a court decision allowing political parties to limit their primaries to registered members, Idaho Republicans closed their primaries to allow party registrants only. (Other Idaho parties have not chosen that limitation.) Of course, anyone could register as a Republican, so that didn’t completely solve the (perceived) problem of participation by non-true believers.
As the Idaho Republican party structure has been taken over increasingly by more extreme groups, a conflict between the party and its voters started to become almost inevitable. Now we’re starting to see it arrive.
There’s a key question here: Who gets to decide what a real Republican is? This isn’t a one-sided question. A lot of long-time Republican former elected officials have decried the current party leadership — and some of its elected officials — as virtual invaders who have taken the party far away from its roots and meaning. There’s a real dispute about what a real Republican is or should be.
One approach since has been growing imposition of doctrine and dogma, and ever more extreme positions in party platforms and resolutions: You must support all of this, or else you’re not a real Republican.
What’s worth pointing out is how different this is from the historic norm, when the decision of what was a “real” Republican (or Democrat) was left to the people who voted in the primaries, even if that process sometimes was a little messy. Of course, when you have a one-party state, those stakes get higher.
And when that happens, the extremes become more so.
The Stapilus files
STAPILUS: Party power
It’s a new move in Idaho, this process on the part of some local Republican county central committees to censure elected officials, who have won their party’s nomination in primary elections, on grounds that they inadequately dance to the tune of party officials.
The latest to try this has been the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee. (Social note which may help describe the group’s perspective: Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake is scheduled to be their Lincoln Day speaker next month.) The Bonneville Republicans last week voted to censure two local Republican legislators, Sen. Kevin Cook and Rep. Stephanie Mickelson. Leaders in the county organization have been critical of them for a while, though this development takes things to a new level.
Two censures from a Republican committee (whether legislative district, county or state organization), under current rules, can lead to a demand that the elected official, though nominated and elected as a Republican, “remove Party support and prohibit the use of Republican Party identifiers” in their campaign.
That has the sound of a serious threat, since so many Idaho voters apparently look for those Republican identifiers, and not much more (such as candidate background, qualifications and well-thought-out positions), when deciding how to fill elected offices.
In an opinion piece, Mickelson noted that, “When I ran for office, I needed to secure a majority of votes from over 52,000 people in my district. Now, 20 precinct committeemen on the District 32 Legislative Committee will vote on whether I can call myself a Republican. Of those 20, only nine were elected. The other 11 were appointed.” Which, she asked, ought to have primacy?
Mickelson also said that if a demand actually is made to remove any kind of party support, “Some have suggested they’ll pursue legal action to enforce this decision.” Indeed, some have suggested as much, and it would be interesting to see how that would play out in a court of law.
But there’s also a larger question: Who gets to call themselves a Republican, or a Democrat, or something else, for that matter?
Idaho Democrats and other groups of voters haven’t made much of an issue out of it (nor have the minor parties), and the Republicans whose political dominance in the state isn’t in any way immediately under threat likewise seldom did, until recently. If someone was considered far enough outside the party’s mainstream (however that might be defined), the usual view was that they could be defeated in a primary election.
That approach began to change after 2011 when, after a court decision allowing political parties to limit their primaries to registered members, Idaho Republicans closed their primaries to allow party registrants only. (Other Idaho parties have not chosen that limitation.) Of course, anyone could register as a Republican, so that didn’t completely solve the (perceived) problem of participation by non-true believers.
As the Idaho Republican party structure has been taken over increasingly by more extreme groups, a conflict between the party and its voters started to become almost inevitable. Now we’re starting to see it arrive.
There’s a key question here: Who gets to decide what a real Republican is? This isn’t a one-sided question. A lot of long-time Republican former elected officials have decried the current party leadership — and some of its elected officials — as virtual invaders who have taken the party far away from its roots and meaning. There’s a real dispute about what a real Republican is or should be.
One approach since has been growing imposition of doctrine and dogma, and ever more extreme positions in party platforms and resolutions: You must support all of this, or else you’re not a real Republican.
What’s worth pointing out is how different this is from the historic norm, when the decision of what was a “real” Republican (or Democrat) was left to the people who voted in the primaries, even if that process sometimes was a little messy. Of course, when you have a one-party state, those stakes get higher.
And when that happens, the extremes become more so.
The Stapilus files
STAPILUS: Party power
It’s a new move in Idaho, this process on the part of some local Republican county central committees to censure elected officials, who have won their party’s nomination in primary elections, on grounds that they inadequately dance to the tune of party officials.
The latest to try this has been the Bonneville County Republican Central Committee. (Social note which may help describe the group’s perspective: Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake is scheduled to be their Lincoln Day speaker next month.) The Bonneville Republicans last week voted to censure two local Republican legislators, Sen. Kevin Cook and Rep. Stephanie Mickelson. Leaders in the county organization have been critical of them for a while, though this development takes things to a new level.
Two censures from a Republican committee (whether legislative district, county or state organization), under current rules, can lead to a demand that the elected official, though nominated and elected as a Republican, “remove Party support and prohibit the use of Republican Party identifiers” in their campaign.
That has the sound of a serious threat, since so many Idaho voters apparently look for those Republican identifiers, and not much more (such as candidate background, qualifications and well-thought-out positions), when deciding how to fill elected offices.
In an opinion piece, Mickelson noted that, “When I ran for office, I needed to secure a majority of votes from over 52,000 people in my district. Now, 20 precinct committeemen on the District 32 Legislative Committee will vote on whether I can call myself a Republican. Of those 20, only nine were elected. The other 11 were appointed.” Which, she asked, ought to have primacy?
Mickelson also said that if a demand actually is made to remove any kind of party support, “Some have suggested they’ll pursue legal action to enforce this decision.” Indeed, some have suggested as much, and it would be interesting to see how that would play out in a court of law.
But there’s also a larger question: Who gets to call themselves a Republican, or a Democrat, or something else, for that matter?
Idaho Democrats and other groups of voters haven’t made much of an issue out of it (nor have the minor parties), and the Republicans whose political dominance in the state isn’t in any way immediately under threat likewise seldom did, until recently. If someone was considered far enough outside the party’s mainstream (however that might be defined), the usual view was that they could be defeated in a primary election.
That approach began to change after 2011 when, after a court decision allowing political parties to limit their primaries to registered members, Idaho Republicans closed their primaries to allow party registrants only. (Other Idaho parties have not chosen that limitation.) Of course, anyone could register as a Republican, so that didn’t completely solve the (perceived) problem of participation by non-true believers.
As the Idaho Republican party structure has been taken over increasingly by more extreme groups, a conflict between the party and its voters started to become almost inevitable. Now we’re starting to see it arrive.
There’s a key question here: Who gets to decide what a real Republican is? This isn’t a one-sided question. A lot of long-time Republican former elected officials have decried the current party leadership — and some of its elected officials — as virtual invaders who have taken the party far away from its roots and meaning. There’s a real dispute about what a real Republican is or should be.
One approach since has been growing imposition of doctrine and dogma, and ever more extreme positions in party platforms and resolutions: You must support all of this, or else you’re not a real Republican.
What’s worth pointing out is how different this is from the historic norm, when the decision of what was a “real” Republican (or Democrat) was left to the people who voted in the primaries, even if that process sometimes was a little messy. Of course, when you have a one-party state, those stakes get higher.
And when that happens, the extremes become more so.
STAPILUS: Legislating parental notification of bullying, violence
In a single vote, the governing majority demonstrated its complete lack of concern for two things that likely do interest a wide range of Idahoans:
First, bullying of and by students.
And second, parental involvement and notification of issues in their children’s lives.
House Bill 539 is another in the long line of measures imposing a requirement on how local school districts deal with children, and this one operates in a familiar way: Most significantly, through parental notification. The legislative summary said it would “require school principals to notify parents and guardians of a student’s involvement in harassment, intimidation, bullying, violence, or self-harm and to provide empowering materials and requires school districts to report incidents and confirm the distribution of the materials to the State Department of Education.”
The statement of purpose added, “While it is important to know how much bullying is taking place, there is not much state policymakers can do with this simple quantification. Given the relationship between those who are bullied and harm to self and others, this bill aims to better address the needs of those who are bullied in addition to responding to those who do the bullying.”
Okay: On one level, this would seem to be right up the legislature’s alley. Parental notification is big with Idaho legislators when it comes to a variety of topics like abortion, library materials, gender, curriculum content and testing standards, sex education, vaccinations (and related medical measures) and much more.
And the problem of bullying is not a small matter. Aside from the many reports from schools, there’s been a spike in teen suicides around Idaho (and beyond). Idaho has one of the nation’s worst records for teen suicide (46th best among the states). The Boise School District last fall reported a group of four student suicides in the space of just two months. (That’s the same number of student deaths, but self-inflicted, as the multiple murder of University of Idaho students in Moscow the year before; guess which got the international attention.)
Representative Chris Mathias, D-Boise, the bill’s origins sponsor, remarked that, “For each incident, it would bring us confidence that the districts were providing important pieces of information to all the parties involved: the bully, the bully’s parents, the bullied, the bullied’s parents. And specifically that they would be receiving, to quote from the bill, ‘parental empowerment materials, including suicide prevention resources and information on methods to limit students access to means of harm to self and others.’”
Given all this, you might think the anti-bullying bill — which really wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, requiring not much more than notification — would be a slam dunk.
But it failed on the House floor, 32-38; most of the House Republican leadership voted against it. You can see the vote breakdown at https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/H0539/. Getting at “why” leads to a better and more subtle understanding of what motivates the Idaho Legislature’s majority.
It certainly has nothing to do with the supposed concerns of Representative Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, who talked about, “The poor principal (who) is going to get this ‘Oh one more thing I have to report’.” This is beyond ridiculous: This is a legislature that has poured on the culture war requirements, year after year, decade after decade, when it comes to public schools.
They’re happy to have the parents weigh in on subjects — like those a few paragraphs back — where they suspect the parents (or at least the squeaky-wheel parents) will side with the legislative majority’s viewpoint.
And what is the legislature’s opinion on bullying?
You can’t indict all 105 of them. In the House, 32 (Republicans among them) voted in favor of the bullying notification bill, and there are surely more ayes in the Senate.
But for the operating majority, bullying is one of the facts of student life they’re not interested in discouraging.
Ponder for a moment what that says about the people who run the Idaho Legislature. Then think it over again.
STAPILUS: Processed budgets
From Idaho’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee come lessons in whether complication improves the process … or, what could possibly go wrong?
For decades — generations, actually — the Idaho legislative budget committee acronymed JFAC has had a consistent procedure when it comes to hearing budget proposals and then setting — writing and voting on — actual budgets for state spending on agencies and beyond.
It has involved splitting the work into two parts, spanning nearly all of most sessions. First come the hearings, in which state officials and others involved talk about what they need and propose, in a single comprehensive overview. Once that’s done, they take a short breather, after which the committee members go through the agencies one by one and pass a long series of budgets. All of it is time consuming and attention devouring, often taking most of their mornings during the session. The legislative session usually ends around two weeks after the committee has finished its work, which is about how long the budgets take to pass through action on the floors.
This has worked pretty well for a very long time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, or that legislative leaders shouldn’t try. Other states use various approaches and for the most part all are able to make them work too.
But if you’re going to change the system, be careful. Budget-setting for a state government is complex and sometimes emotional and highly political, and the process should be well understood and broadly accepted. And there should be no hint of under-the-table philosophical agendas.
The new process for this session, promoted by House Speaker Mike Moyle and adopted by the JFAC co-chairs, Senator Scott Grow and Representative Wendy Horman, calls for fracturing the process. It begins with passing, in advance of any hearings, a “bare-bones” budget for everyone—just enough, presumably, to keep the lights on — and then, after a much shorter public hearing process (fewer public statements from agency advocates, more decisions behind closed doors), considering what should be added to (or maybe subtracted from) the bare bones. This back-and-forth approach tends to remove things from their context.
The initial “bare bones” budgets this session were passed by JFAC shortly after the start of the session, in a single two and a half-hour session on January 16. All 15 committee Republicans voted in favor, and the five Democrats voted against. The nays were vocal about it. Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, for example, said “We received these budgets on Friday and are being asked to vote on them on Tuesday, to set the entire budget for the state in the second week of the session before we even have a change in employee compensation recommendation in place, before we have the Millennium Fund recommendation in place.” In other words, a budget was being passed before committee members even had the relevant information for making even any broad-brush decisions.
Apparently, many of the committee’s Republicans apparently started having second thoughts, too.
On February 2, a dozen JFAC members — a majority, most Republicans but including Democrats — decided they wanted to pass their own budgets, after gathering more information to hand. Representative Britt Raybould explained some of that: “The budget that was outlined at the beginning of the year did not actually reflect all of the maintenance line items … In most instances it left out nondiscretionary, it left out replacement items and other what you think of as sort of regular and expected fund adjustments.”
That means two entirely different and conflicting budgets are wandering around the legislature, with lawmakers concerned about what might happen if multiple budgets wind up being passed.
There isn’t anything fatal about this. In the worst case, if the legislature were to actually pass more than one conflicting budget (they’ll say it couldn’t happen, and it’s unlikely, but never say never) the governor could veto one; or, a normal rule of legislative construction might mean that the last one passed takes precedence.
But the whole new system does seem to be resulting in more heat and less light when it comes to deciding how the state’s dollars should be sent.
Which may be fine with some people, ideology depending. But Idahoans simply hoping for a smoothly functioning government are likely to have their doubts.
STAPILUS: Schooled on guns
Idaho House Bill 415 fits so neatly into a central piece of political rhetoric that the surprise is that its progress at the legislature has been slowed as much as it has; which is to say, not much.
The bill provides that any public school employee—who obtains an enhanced concealed weapons permit, not terribly hard to get—who wants to carry a firearm or other “deadly weapon” to school can do it, whether local administrators and school boards like it or not. The sponsor, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, said, “These select school employees will provide an armed force to protect children in the first minutes of an attack. We don’t want to have a stack of 20 kids dead in a classroom because we didn’t do anything.”
The National Rifle Association couldn’t have put it more simply.
After what looked like a short pause, the Idaho House passed it this week (53 to 16, veto-proof), to the Senate for consideration there.
Here are some of the things it does.
Any pistol-packing school employee would have absolute state clearance to carry, regardless whether school principals, teachers, parents, boards or anyone else likes it, “as long as the firearm or deadly weapon is concealed and the school employee maintains immediate control” of it. I’m trying to imagine how that would work in a high school environment. What does that imply about the handling and carrying of guns by staff?
I say “school employee” here because the packers can include not only teachers but, “an officer, board member, commissioner, executive, elected or appointed official, or independent contractor.” Imagine someone who isn’t an educator but has some business relationship with the district … who maybe has a history of domestic or other violence … and obtains an enhanced license. You doubt that could ever happen? Think again. And think as well about how much easier a real shooter would find infiltrating a school already accustomed to seeing adults routinely carrying firearms.
Think too about the school employees who may be well trained to teach but maybe less well schooled on emergency tactical response. The bill has that inexperience question covered this way: “No school employee shall be held civilly or criminally liable for deciding to engage or not to engage in an armed confrontation during a lethal threat to safety inside of a school or on school property. The decision to use a firearm or other deadly weapon during a life-threatening incident inside of a school or on school property lies solely within the school employee and is a personal decision.”
So: If a covered school employee simply decides to pick up their gun—and start firing—the immunity is apparently absolute, regardless who was injured or killed. I can hear right now a smart defense attorney defending a murder charge using this provision as a shield. The beweaponed employee’s personal belief is enough for a shield against any kind of legal action, civil or criminal.
These employees will not be compelled to disclose to anyone but a school administrator (and maybe board: it’s unclear there) and local law enforcement that a gun is in the classroom. In fact, the bill adds a new exemption for Idaho public records law: Any records relating to a school employee who’s carrying. A mere parent would be unable to find out if there’s a gun in their child’s classroom.
Private schools would be specifically exempted from the requirement. The bill’s opening paragraphs seem to endorse carrying guns there too, but a later section says: “Nothing in subsection (4) of this section shall limit the right of an owner of private property, including a private school, from permitting or prohibiting the carrying of a concealed firearm or other deadly weapon on his property.” If it’s such a good idea for public schools, then why not their private counterparts?
There’s also this curious if minor punitive provision: “No public school shall display any signage whatsoever indicating that school property is a gun-free zone, and any violation of this subsection shall result in a fine of three hundred dollars ($300), enforced by the county prosecuting attorney.”
Current state law already allows local school districts to set their own policies, and some Idaho districts do allow some heat-packing by staff. But a Post Falls police detective has pointed out that conditions are different in the various school districts. “In the Post Falls School District, we have a very close relationship with our police department. We’re able to have responding officers at any location in the district within three minutes or less than that. … We need to talk about what’s best for each individual school district.”
That’s a problem when legislation devolves to the level of a bumper sticker. As it has here.
As it is, the Idaho Legislature may well pass this thing; it can be labeled “pro-gun” and therefore hard to oppose. But be aware: Extra warnings may be needed in future when you send the kids off to school.
STAPILUS: Not what it was
In the last 20 years, you can track the trend line of Idaho conservatism — here meaning in the way it is most commonly intended — alongside that of its maybe most prominent non-party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
This is noteworthy now especially because the IFF is at an inflection point, with the departure of the only leader it has ever had — Wayne Hoffman — and the arrival of a new one, Ron Nate. That inflection point, though, seems to extend not to a different direction but to an acceleration of the same one.
But first a little history.
The origins of the IFF, as the group’s About web page indicates, go back to a small group of Canyon County enthusiasts in libertarian politics, of which the spark plug was a businessman named Ralph Smeed. I knew Smeed (as did Hoffman, who evidently was much influenced by him). He was a regular visitor to the Caldwell newsroom where I worked in the mid-70s and to many events I covered. He struck me as a likable guy (attack politics in today’s sense weren’t his thing, and his political criticisms tended toward the ideological), as single-minded on the subject of less government and taxes but vague when it came to specifics and implications. He was much enamored of the “Austrian” school of economics (notably Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), which matched with his cultural and business views.
After a periodical (the Idaho Compass, of which future Senator Steve Symms was also a contributor) and a small think tank (the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives) failed to make large waves outside committed libertarian circles, he and several cohorts looked into founding an organization with more impact. With Hoffman, they in 2008 set the framework for the IFF.
That’s what it was originally about: Promotion of the libertarian idea. The group’s about page still says “The Idaho Freedom Foundation exists to advance the conservative principles — limited government, free markets and self-reliance …”
I suspect that Smeed, who died in 2012, would barely recognize it now.
One reason may have its roots in another sentence from the web site: “At that point (in 2008), every state in the country had a free market think tank except for Idaho.” When the Idaho group was founded, it joined the club, more or less, and over time became caught up in national political/cultural enthusiasms, whether “social justice,” critical race theory, cryptocurrency advocacy, “porn literacy” and similar issues. It didn’t abandon libertarianism entirely, but it’s efforts turned into a local-outlet mirror of one side of the national culture wars.
The elevation of Ron Nate to leadership of the organization seems to confirm as much and may expand it.
Nate is a former state representative from Rexburg (Republican of course), though he narrowly lost his primary election in 2018, and after returning to the House in 2020, lost another in 2022. That may be an indicator.
He co-founded the Madison Liberty Institute, whose policy statements track closely with the state Republican Party leadership. After Governor Brad Little’s state of the state address, for example, the group released a statement largely critical of the governor (that sounded a whole lot like GOP Chair Dorothy Moon’s), and included a quote from Nate: “The Governor may mean well, but throughout his address he raises concerns with his tendency toward using executive orders to achieve his aims.”
He also has been the Madison County chair of anti-LGBT MassResistance, an extreme group deep into the culture wars and says of itself, “We engage in issues and events that most other conservative groups are afraid to touch.” (The group is national, active in many states.)
And this has gone pretty far down that road; von Hayek and von Mises no longer seem to be much of the picture. Somehow I doubt Smeed would have had truck with contracting a propagandist from the alt-right to help with messaging.
The IFF isn’t what it was, if it ever was.
STAPILUS: Will the brakes work?
Last week, I wrote about the growing links and connections the far right has been developing in some of the most politically influential sectors of Idaho. It’s part of a string of 2023 down sides of important developments in the state.
Those are cause for concern, but not despair; they should translate to action, not passivity. Today, looking ahead to a new year, a few thoughts on Idaho developments that show positive things can happen and that people in the state can make progress, that extremism at least can still be countered in the Gem State.
It’s still possible to hit the brakes before the state goes over the cliff.
You may be asking for some evidence of that.
The clout in Idaho of the far right, to which now should be appended the (ill-named) Idaho Freedom Foundation, is large, sweeping through the corps of elected officials, many state legislators among others, not to mention the state Republican Party structure. But it is not absolute.
Within the party, there’s rapidly growing pushback. Dozens of former and some current Republican elected officials have spoken out and, more important, organized. Their success is yet to be determined, but first steps have been taken; among them a willingness of people to go on the record. Legislators, too, have been pushing back. When a half-dozen of them in Idaho Falls were accused of crossing the party platform (which charge doesn’t even seem supportable, but no matter), those legislators refused to be called on the carpet for doing their jobs. It was a positive sign.
So is the push, by way of a ballot initiative through a non-partisan organization, for open primaries and ranked choice voting. These changes to state election law could have the effect of improving chances that the large voting population in the middle will have its voices heard and its votes made more effective. The measure already has passed, its advocates say, 50,000 petition signatures, which makes it a better than even bet for reaching the ballot next November—and if it does, chances of passage would be decent at least. The legislature still could mess with it after that, but enough members might understand that as too provocative.
Within Idaho government, mainly in areas where extremists have less voice, there’s been some useful activity. Governor Brad Little’s Idaho Launch program started in October, which aims to help as many as 10,000 Idaho high school students link with post-secondary education (community colleges and other options) specifically related to employment, appears to be an excellent effort. Others, including Empowering Parents, may show some useful results in years to come too.
The bad actors on the extremes have not been getting away easily, either, in a significant number of cases. Consider the legal action undertaken in Coeur d’Alene against would-be disrupters of the year before. Remember also: Ammon Bundy is in hiding and on the run.
Don’t forget either some smart activity on the part of Idaho Democrats—and yes, there has been some. I’ve talked with Democrats this year who have, unusually for their party, started looking far ahead and deep into the grass roots toward a rebuild of their operation and election chances in Idaho. They have a massive challenge, to be sure, but more than in a long time, a number of determined people are organizing and approaching it in a more practical fashion.
The times can allow for it, too. The doom-laden world view of the extremes to the contrary, much is going well in both the state and the nation: The economy (in remarkably positive shape overall, in Idaho and nationally), peace (for the United States at least), a passing of the pandemic and much more. The times can allow for improvement and, for the fair-minded, be cause for optimism.
The perspective is never as monochrome as it sometimes looks.
Hang in there in ‘24. The ride may be bumpy, but we’ll get through it.
STAPILUS: Links and ties
It was just about 50 years ago that Richard Butler, an expatriate Californian, came to Kootenai County and founded the Aryan Nations, physically established near Hayden Lake.
It established some notoriety within a few years as a hub of activity for extremist and racist people and groups. After a lawsuit effectively extinguished it in 2000, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem reflected, “we had people living in this community and in this area that were full of fear. We had many people that lived outside of this community that wouldn’t come here because they were afraid.”
That was true, but within this context: The Aryan Nations compound included only a small number of people, serving as an outpost in a society that emphatically did not accept it. When the compound was razed, the community overwhelmingly cheered. The racists were largely unconnected to the larger community.
Kootenai County still is a target for extremism, as the Patriot Front group showed in June 2022 when 31 people associated with it were arrested by law enforcement when they apparently were planning to disrupt a pride parade. They poured into Coeur d’Alene from around the nation.
The difference now is that some elements of extreme groups are much better connected.
Consider the national and Idaho linkages of one recent newcomer to the state — as just one example among many, this one being different for having picked up strong news attention.
The best known recent far-right event nationally was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—no doubt you remember it. One of the people there was a talk radio host named Dave Reilly, who said he attended to write about the event, which he did (notably on Twitter). But a report in InvestigateWest says he also “was part of a private invitation-only online group involved with brainstorming, planning and promoting the rally, courtroom testimony and leaked chat messages subsequently revealed.” You don’t get that kind of invite without close connections to the people running it.
Online posts also indicate his support for the America First Political Action Conference, founded, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported, “by Nick Fuentes, a former co-host of a podcast with James Allsup, the former Washington State University student who was ejected from the Whitman County Republican Party and whose appearance at a Spokane County Republican Party gathering prompted the resignation of the party’s chair. Both Fuentes and Allsup have been banned from social media platforms for views espousing white nationalism.”
Reilly has moved to Idaho, where in 2021 (a year after his arrival) he ran for a seat on the Post Falls school board—with the endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. He lost, but running against a lifelong Post Falls resident who had organized backing, and after Reilly’s own past was aired in news reports, he pulled a respectable 46.6% of the vote.
Michelle Lippert, a school board member who worked with Citizens for Post Falls Schools in opposition to Reilly’s candidacy, was quoted, “You want to know the difference between back in the 80s and now? When the Aryan Nations were big in this area you saw young men with shaved heads and jackets with patches on them and saw men with sort of a pseudo-Nazi uniform? Today they wear ties and jackets and don’t shave their heads. They don’t stick out.”
Reilly turned up in Idaho news again this fall, with reports that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is as influential as any organization in Idaho Republican politics, had hired him as a contractor on communications. The IFF is extremely well connected in Idaho politics; its word carries major weight in the Idaho Legislature.
The InvestigateWest article noted a raft of ironies: “The Idaho Freedom Foundation, which began in 2009 as a libertarian-leaning free-market think tank, has been contracting with the self-described Christian nationalist — who’s said ‘free markets are a problem,’ who hates ‘libertarianism more than any other political ideology,’ and who compares conservatives who make capitalism their highest value to ‘being a slave and BEGGING your massa to keep you in chains’.”
A half-century has indeed made a big difference in Idaho, and that’s going beyond appearances.
STAPILUS: Legitimate power
The wave of Idaho Republican Party purity tests, and the push for control by a faction of the party statewide, has been expanding to stunning levels in the last couple of years.
There seems to be no limit to the grasping for control by leaders of the state party, including Chair Dorothy Moon, and such allied groups as the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Republican legislators, even from the farthest right wing of the party, have been called into local star chambers to explain themselves and — presumably — beg for forgiveness for using their best judgment at the Statehouse.
You have to wonder what it will take finally to generate some meaningful pushback.
Maybe that’s beginning to happen.
There’s been, for a while now, some organized effort on the part of long-time Idaho Republicans who are pushing for a return to a Republican Party more like the one they knew a generation or two ago, and quietly among some local Republican leaders.
Backlash may be starting to grow among a tipping point of Idaho legislators, maybe enough to change the political atmosphere.
Directing your attention now to Idaho Falls, where all six of the legislators in Districts 32 and 33 have been called to answer charges of deviation from the state party platform. All six have declined to appear, though five did hold a recent town hall meeting (which spoke to a range of legislative issues, and surely was a better use of their time). What’s most remarkable about the six is how different they are. One of them, Barbara Ehardt, is a fierce culture warrior solidly on the right flank of the legislature; she still wasn’t pure enough to evade the inquisition, and quite reasonably expressed astonishment that she’d been targeted. (Apparently, her chief sin had to do with funding public schools.)
Maybe that claim of Ehardt infidelity was the last straw, the clear evidence that no Republican legislator is safe. In any event, you can sense something a little different in the air.
Consider the comments from one of the six, Representative Marco Erickson, in an interview with the columnist Chuck Malloy. The new party disciplinary actions, he said, “wakes up people to the idea of why they need to run as precinct officers. We need to have rational people in there and civil discourse again. We’re going to have to take those small neighborhood positions and take back the party.”
Spot on.
If his talk of precinct officers strikes you as small stuff, be advised: It isn’t.
If you’re wondering how the extremists and power grabbers took over the Idaho Republican Party, remember: They did it the honest and old-fashioned and structurally sound way.
They ran their candidates for precinct committee spots in the primary elections. (Battles over precinct committee positions are age-old, and tend simply to be won by whoever outworks the other side.) Upon winning majorities of these offices at the county level, they take control of the local party levers, which can strongly affect who runs for county and legislative offices, and in some places provides assistance and encouragement for like-minded people to run for non-partisan city and school offices.
Then, when enough counties are of like mind, they can take over the state party central committee, which can control the direction and select the leadership of the party statewide.
How did the current leadership of the Idaho Republican Party get there? That’s how.
How do you beat them? The same way.
The good news for people like Erickson is that both sides can play, and the odds are that his will be able to generate more public support—most likely—than those now in power.
Erickson said he now plans to run for a precinct office himself. That would make perfect sense, and he would be well advised to get his fellow legislators, and others of like mind, to do the same.
It’s unglamorous, hard work. But it’s how actual change happens.
STAPILUS: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho” map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.”
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
Moving to Idaho: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane's new elections data dashboard hasn't really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the "Voters Moving to Idaho" map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn't overstate his Gem State connections: "I cannot say with first hand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I've never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans."
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d'Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn't happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we'd paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today's Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
In Idaho politics, the word "freedom" continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane's new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state's population.
However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that's of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he's posted so far.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. reach him at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book, "What do you Mean by That?" is available on amazon or at www.ridenbaugh.com/ whatdoyoumeanbythat/.
STAPILUS: Flavors of freedom
In Idaho politics, the word “freedom” continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Your definition and someone else’s may vary.
One of the state’s most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding “freedom”; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you aren’t careful … which ideologues often aren’t.
The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called “Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom.” It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration.
First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of “personal” and “economic” freedom. There’s plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the group’s heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile.
That’s because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of “freedom” by state.
Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others.
It does best on “economic freedom,” which you could translate to “freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes,” coming in seventh.
On “personal freedom,” Idaho’s ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas.
The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts.
Idaho ranked first in the nation on “health insurance freedom,” though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, “Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year.”
Try applying that to your personal “freedom” when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance.
On the “personal freedom” side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well.
It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (“driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods”), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol.
And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to “the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of driver’s licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers).” You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered.
Abortion, generally, didn’t appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially.
Idaho does rank third highest, however, on “gun freedom.” That should come as no shock.
So who’s free? To do what? What’s important to you?
STAPILUS: The lines are blurring in Idaho higher education
The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,” courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees” in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On Nov. 9, the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college — now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.”
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large — imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time — this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear.
But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the CWI proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
STAPILUS: Remembering Max Black, the quintessential Idaho legislator
Max Black, an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on Nov. 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the Legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cellphone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out-of-the-blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the Legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield” Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime — and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,” into publication the next year, and from that year to this, Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.” That, too, would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.
STAPILUS: Finding the middle? Local election results show pattern in Idaho
Local elections, like those last week in Idaho cities and school districts, often are decided because of local considerations and concerns. A city mayor or school board member may be long-established and uncontroversial and thereby win another term, or may be the subject of hot debate (for good reason or not) and be dropped by the voters.
Some other patterns do turn up, though, and one this year in Idaho and other places involves candidates promoted by far-right groups or local Republican Party organizations. In last week’s elections in Idaho, quite a few of these candidates didn’t succeed.
These cases, all involving offices officially non-partisan, involve different kinds of stories.
The Boise mayoral contest, for example, had partisan overtones. The city has become increasingly blue over the last couple of decades, and the incumbent mayor, Lauren McLean, has long been identified as a Democrat. Her opponent, Mike Masterson, has said he formerly was a Republican but is no longer; nonetheless, an informal “R” seemed attached to his name as a “D” was to McLean’s.
All other factors aside — many concerns and issues were raised, and some may have affected a number of votes — the vote McLean received is not far off from what most credible Democratic candidates normally receive in the city. Seen in that way, Boise followed a partisan pattern.
Although the state’s second-largest city, Meridian, is a far more Republican place, the dynamic actually looked similar. Mayor Robert Simison, like McLean seeking a second term, has been relatively centrist and mostly uncontroversial. His chief opponent, Mike Hon, described himself: “I’m a conservative. And I think Meridian is mostly a conservative place. So that’s why we want to focus on family values.” Simison won with about 70% of the vote.
There aren’t many other large population centers around the state where the dynamic works that way. But an informal “R” label this election proved less useful for a number of candidates than it often did in recent years when, for example, candidates for the North Idaho College Board and the West Bonner School District board have ridden those endorsements to wins.
In the West Ada School District, two incumbents, Rene Ozuna and David Binetti, were challenged by well-funded challengers with strong local Republican connections. Both incumbents won, however.
The Idaho Ed News reported that the two highest profile contests for the Coeur d’Alene School Board resulted in losses for the two candidates supported by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee; the two winners apparently (to judge from their fundraising and lists of supporters) appear to have gone into the contest with eyes open and strong organization.
The story was similar with the Coeur d’Alene city council election; one observer snarked, “Frankly, after this, maybe #idgop #KCRCC should persist in ‘rating and vetting’ and producing lists of candidates to put in front of voters. It’s the kiss of death.”
In Nampa, the connections to party organizations are thinner, but you can suss them out. In one faceoff, Stephanie Binns, an educator, took what would look like the Democratic side on hot issues, and contractor Jay Duffy took the Republican side; Binns won with 60% of the vote. In the other hot race in the district, the result went the other way, though the “informal R” got just 51%, in a very Republican community.
On the eastern side of the state, results in the Idaho Falls School District were strikingly similar.
In Caldwell, all three incumbents, facing challenges from the right, prevailed.
You can cite countervailing examples, but the number of centrist winners in last week’s contests were notable and may amount to a serious pattern.
There’s been talk over the last year of more centrist voters, groups and candidates pushing back against the strong campaigns from the right. Such efforts succeeded at the community college board level (in some places, not all).
And they may have succeeded again this November.
STAPILUS: The dam fight at 30-something
When the Snake River Basin Adjudication began in 1987, no one expected it would be completed quickly. Water adjudications in Western states often have taken decades, and the SRBA may have been the largest ever, covering six figures worth of water rights across almost nine-tenths of Idaho.
Nonetheless, it has been completed — at least in general terms — and it only took a remarkably brief 26 years.
That bit of history prowled around the back of my mind this week when I saw the latest court developments in the legal action aimed at breaching the four lower Snake River dams, located in southeastern Washington state. The dams are the Lower Granite (closest to the Idaho border), the Little Goose, the Lower Monumental and the Ice Harbor (near the confluence with the Columbia River).
The news involves a delay in further developments, which is to say, another in a long list of delays of anything resembling final action. Specifically, the parties involved asked the court for another 45 days to negotiate, following up on an earlier delay of 60 days.
Those are a pittance. The legal action over the four dams started in 1993, which means attorneys have been kept busy on the subject for 30 years — three years longer than it took to adjudicate the highly complex and contentious water rights across most of Idaho.
It’s hard to conceive that there’s much new left to talk about.
The issues associated with the dams (and I’m not going to try to relitigate them all here) mainly concern preservation of declining salmon runs on one hand, and the electric power the dams generate, and concerns about impacts on commercial river traffic (you’ll hear this a lot at Lewiston) on the other. Environmental, tribal and some governments have been on one side, and a number of federal agencies, economic interests and others have filled the other. The region, and many of its top elected officials, have been split - and within the parties as well as between them.
One report from the University of Washington said, “Despite research and knowledge of the effects of the LSRDs on salmon and steelhead populations, river ecology, and tribal sovereignty there remains resistance at the state and federal level. The barrier to remove the LSRDs for Governor [Jay] Inslee (D) of Washington is the fact that the dams produce renewable energy, recreational, and economic benefits. However, both Gov. Inslee and Senator [Patty Murray] have been open to exploring the possibility of removing the dams if the benefits and services the dams create can be replaced by alternatives.”
The Yale School of the Environment noted that over the last three decades, “On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act.”
Neither side seems inclined to quit.
Still, after 30 years, the context of the legal battle has changed, and the changes may suggest where this is heading.
First, in the last decade, the debate has taken place in the context of demolition of a number of other dams in the region.
Second, the dams need repairs if they’re going to continue in service, and that will be costly.
Third, renewable energy, notably solar and wind, has taken off in a big way in the inland Northwest, and the argument that the dams are needed for their electric power generation has become less central in the debate.
It could be that if the parties come to accept some of the trend lines, and not just the starting and hoped-for ending points, the case could be resolved before another 30 years has passed.
STAPILUS: Legislating parental notification of bullying, violence
In a single vote, the governing majority demonstrated its complete lack of concern for two things that likely do interest a wide range of Idahoans:
First, bullying of and by students.
And second, parental involvement and notification of issues in their children’s lives.
House Bill 539 is another in the long line of measures imposing a requirement on how local school districts deal with children, and this one operates in a familiar way: Most significantly, through parental notification. The legislative summary said it would “require school principals to notify parents and guardians of a student’s involvement in harassment, intimidation, bullying, violence, or self-harm and to provide empowering materials and requires school districts to report incidents and confirm the distribution of the materials to the State Department of Education.”
The statement of purpose added, “While it is important to know how much bullying is taking place, there is not much state policymakers can do with this simple quantification. Given the relationship between those who are bullied and harm to self and others, this bill aims to better address the needs of those who are bullied in addition to responding to those who do the bullying.”
Okay: On one level, this would seem to be right up the legislature’s alley. Parental notification is big with Idaho legislators when it comes to a variety of topics like abortion, library materials, gender, curriculum content and testing standards, sex education, vaccinations (and related medical measures) and much more.
And the problem of bullying is not a small matter. Aside from the many reports from schools, there’s been a spike in teen suicides around Idaho (and beyond). Idaho has one of the nation’s worst records for teen suicide (46th best among the states). The Boise School District last fall reported a group of four student suicides in the space of just two months. (That’s the same number of student deaths, but self-inflicted, as the multiple murder of University of Idaho students in Moscow the year before; guess which got the international attention.)
Representative Chris Mathias, D-Boise, the bill’s origins sponsor, remarked that, “For each incident, it would bring us confidence that the districts were providing important pieces of information to all the parties involved: the bully, the bully’s parents, the bullied, the bullied’s parents. And specifically that they would be receiving, to quote from the bill, ‘parental empowerment materials, including suicide prevention resources and information on methods to limit students access to means of harm to self and others.’”
Given all this, you might think the anti-bullying bill — which really wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, requiring not much more than notification — would be a slam dunk.
But it failed on the House floor, 32-38; most of the House Republican leadership voted against it. You can see the vote breakdown at https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/H0539/. Getting at “why” leads to a better and more subtle understanding of what motivates the Idaho Legislature’s majority.
It certainly has nothing to do with the supposed concerns of Representative Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, who talked about, “The poor principal (who) is going to get this ‘Oh one more thing I have to report’.” This is beyond ridiculous: This is a legislature that has poured on the culture war requirements, year after year, decade after decade, when it comes to public schools.
They’re happy to have the parents weigh in on subjects — like those a few paragraphs back — where they suspect the parents (or at least the squeaky-wheel parents) will side with the legislative majority’s viewpoint.
And what is the legislature’s opinion on bullying?
You can’t indict all 105 of them. In the House, 32 (Republicans among them) voted in favor of the bullying notification bill, and there are surely more ayes in the Senate.
But for the operating majority, bullying is one of the facts of student life they’re not interested in discouraging.
Ponder for a moment what that says about the people who run the Idaho Legislature. Then think it over again.
STAPILUS: Processed budgets
From Idaho’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee come lessons in whether complication improves the process … or, what could possibly go wrong?
For decades — generations, actually — the Idaho legislative budget committee acronymed JFAC has had a consistent procedure when it comes to hearing budget proposals and then setting — writing and voting on — actual budgets for state spending on agencies and beyond.
It has involved splitting the work into two parts, spanning nearly all of most sessions. First come the hearings, in which state officials and others involved talk about what they need and propose, in a single comprehensive overview. Once that’s done, they take a short breather, after which the committee members go through the agencies one by one and pass a long series of budgets. All of it is time consuming and attention devouring, often taking most of their mornings during the session. The legislative session usually ends around two weeks after the committee has finished its work, which is about how long the budgets take to pass through action on the floors.
This has worked pretty well for a very long time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, or that legislative leaders shouldn’t try. Other states use various approaches and for the most part all are able to make them work too.
But if you’re going to change the system, be careful. Budget-setting for a state government is complex and sometimes emotional and highly political, and the process should be well understood and broadly accepted. And there should be no hint of under-the-table philosophical agendas.
The new process for this session, promoted by House Speaker Mike Moyle and adopted by the JFAC co-chairs, Senator Scott Grow and Representative Wendy Horman, calls for fracturing the process. It begins with passing, in advance of any hearings, a “bare-bones” budget for everyone—just enough, presumably, to keep the lights on — and then, after a much shorter public hearing process (fewer public statements from agency advocates, more decisions behind closed doors), considering what should be added to (or maybe subtracted from) the bare bones. This back-and-forth approach tends to remove things from their context.
The initial “bare bones” budgets this session were passed by JFAC shortly after the start of the session, in a single two and a half-hour session on January 16. All 15 committee Republicans voted in favor, and the five Democrats voted against. The nays were vocal about it. Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, for example, said “We received these budgets on Friday and are being asked to vote on them on Tuesday, to set the entire budget for the state in the second week of the session before we even have a change in employee compensation recommendation in place, before we have the Millennium Fund recommendation in place.” In other words, a budget was being passed before committee members even had the relevant information for making even any broad-brush decisions.
Apparently, many of the committee’s Republicans apparently started having second thoughts, too.
On February 2, a dozen JFAC members — a majority, most Republicans but including Democrats — decided they wanted to pass their own budgets, after gathering more information to hand. Representative Britt Raybould explained some of that: “The budget that was outlined at the beginning of the year did not actually reflect all of the maintenance line items … In most instances it left out nondiscretionary, it left out replacement items and other what you think of as sort of regular and expected fund adjustments.”
That means two entirely different and conflicting budgets are wandering around the legislature, with lawmakers concerned about what might happen if multiple budgets wind up being passed.
There isn’t anything fatal about this. In the worst case, if the legislature were to actually pass more than one conflicting budget (they’ll say it couldn’t happen, and it’s unlikely, but never say never) the governor could veto one; or, a normal rule of legislative construction might mean that the last one passed takes precedence.
But the whole new system does seem to be resulting in more heat and less light when it comes to deciding how the state’s dollars should be sent.
Which may be fine with some people, ideology depending. But Idahoans simply hoping for a smoothly functioning government are likely to have their doubts.
STAPILUS: Schooled on guns
Idaho House Bill 415 fits so neatly into a central piece of political rhetoric that the surprise is that its progress at the legislature has been slowed as much as it has; which is to say, not much.
The bill provides that any public school employee—who obtains an enhanced concealed weapons permit, not terribly hard to get—who wants to carry a firearm or other “deadly weapon” to school can do it, whether local administrators and school boards like it or not. The sponsor, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, said, “These select school employees will provide an armed force to protect children in the first minutes of an attack. We don’t want to have a stack of 20 kids dead in a classroom because we didn’t do anything.”
The National Rifle Association couldn’t have put it more simply.
After what looked like a short pause, the Idaho House passed it this week (53 to 16, veto-proof), to the Senate for consideration there.
Here are some of the things it does.
Any pistol-packing school employee would have absolute state clearance to carry, regardless whether school principals, teachers, parents, boards or anyone else likes it, “as long as the firearm or deadly weapon is concealed and the school employee maintains immediate control” of it. I’m trying to imagine how that would work in a high school environment. What does that imply about the handling and carrying of guns by staff?
I say “school employee” here because the packers can include not only teachers but, “an officer, board member, commissioner, executive, elected or appointed official, or independent contractor.” Imagine someone who isn’t an educator but has some business relationship with the district … who maybe has a history of domestic or other violence … and obtains an enhanced license. You doubt that could ever happen? Think again. And think as well about how much easier a real shooter would find infiltrating a school already accustomed to seeing adults routinely carrying firearms.
Think too about the school employees who may be well trained to teach but maybe less well schooled on emergency tactical response. The bill has that inexperience question covered this way: “No school employee shall be held civilly or criminally liable for deciding to engage or not to engage in an armed confrontation during a lethal threat to safety inside of a school or on school property. The decision to use a firearm or other deadly weapon during a life-threatening incident inside of a school or on school property lies solely within the school employee and is a personal decision.”
So: If a covered school employee simply decides to pick up their gun—and start firing—the immunity is apparently absolute, regardless who was injured or killed. I can hear right now a smart defense attorney defending a murder charge using this provision as a shield. The beweaponed employee’s personal belief is enough for a shield against any kind of legal action, civil or criminal.
These employees will not be compelled to disclose to anyone but a school administrator (and maybe board: it’s unclear there) and local law enforcement that a gun is in the classroom. In fact, the bill adds a new exemption for Idaho public records law: Any records relating to a school employee who’s carrying. A mere parent would be unable to find out if there’s a gun in their child’s classroom.
Private schools would be specifically exempted from the requirement. The bill’s opening paragraphs seem to endorse carrying guns there too, but a later section says: “Nothing in subsection (4) of this section shall limit the right of an owner of private property, including a private school, from permitting or prohibiting the carrying of a concealed firearm or other deadly weapon on his property.” If it’s such a good idea for public schools, then why not their private counterparts?
There’s also this curious if minor punitive provision: “No public school shall display any signage whatsoever indicating that school property is a gun-free zone, and any violation of this subsection shall result in a fine of three hundred dollars ($300), enforced by the county prosecuting attorney.”
Current state law already allows local school districts to set their own policies, and some Idaho districts do allow some heat-packing by staff. But a Post Falls police detective has pointed out that conditions are different in the various school districts. “In the Post Falls School District, we have a very close relationship with our police department. We’re able to have responding officers at any location in the district within three minutes or less than that. … We need to talk about what’s best for each individual school district.”
That’s a problem when legislation devolves to the level of a bumper sticker. As it has here.
As it is, the Idaho Legislature may well pass this thing; it can be labeled “pro-gun” and therefore hard to oppose. But be aware: Extra warnings may be needed in future when you send the kids off to school.
STAPILUS: Not what it was
In the last 20 years, you can track the trend line of Idaho conservatism — here meaning in the way it is most commonly intended — alongside that of its maybe most prominent non-party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
This is noteworthy now especially because the IFF is at an inflection point, with the departure of the only leader it has ever had — Wayne Hoffman — and the arrival of a new one, Ron Nate. That inflection point, though, seems to extend not to a different direction but to an acceleration of the same one.
But first a little history.
The origins of the IFF, as the group’s About web page indicates, go back to a small group of Canyon County enthusiasts in libertarian politics, of which the spark plug was a businessman named Ralph Smeed. I knew Smeed (as did Hoffman, who evidently was much influenced by him). He was a regular visitor to the Caldwell newsroom where I worked in the mid-70s and to many events I covered. He struck me as a likable guy (attack politics in today’s sense weren’t his thing, and his political criticisms tended toward the ideological), as single-minded on the subject of less government and taxes but vague when it came to specifics and implications. He was much enamored of the “Austrian” school of economics (notably Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), which matched with his cultural and business views.
After a periodical (the Idaho Compass, of which future Senator Steve Symms was also a contributor) and a small think tank (the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives) failed to make large waves outside committed libertarian circles, he and several cohorts looked into founding an organization with more impact. With Hoffman, they in 2008 set the framework for the IFF.
That’s what it was originally about: Promotion of the libertarian idea. The group’s about page still says “The Idaho Freedom Foundation exists to advance the conservative principles — limited government, free markets and self-reliance …”
I suspect that Smeed, who died in 2012, would barely recognize it now.
One reason may have its roots in another sentence from the web site: “At that point (in 2008), every state in the country had a free market think tank except for Idaho.” When the Idaho group was founded, it joined the club, more or less, and over time became caught up in national political/cultural enthusiasms, whether “social justice,” critical race theory, cryptocurrency advocacy, “porn literacy” and similar issues. It didn’t abandon libertarianism entirely, but it’s efforts turned into a local-outlet mirror of one side of the national culture wars.
The elevation of Ron Nate to leadership of the organization seems to confirm as much and may expand it.
Nate is a former state representative from Rexburg (Republican of course), though he narrowly lost his primary election in 2018, and after returning to the House in 2020, lost another in 2022. That may be an indicator.
He co-founded the Madison Liberty Institute, whose policy statements track closely with the state Republican Party leadership. After Governor Brad Little’s state of the state address, for example, the group released a statement largely critical of the governor (that sounded a whole lot like GOP Chair Dorothy Moon’s), and included a quote from Nate: “The Governor may mean well, but throughout his address he raises concerns with his tendency toward using executive orders to achieve his aims.”
He also has been the Madison County chair of anti-LGBT MassResistance, an extreme group deep into the culture wars and says of itself, “We engage in issues and events that most other conservative groups are afraid to touch.” (The group is national, active in many states.)
And this has gone pretty far down that road; von Hayek and von Mises no longer seem to be much of the picture. Somehow I doubt Smeed would have had truck with contracting a propagandist from the alt-right to help with messaging.
The IFF isn’t what it was, if it ever was.
STAPILUS: Will the brakes work?
Last week, I wrote about the growing links and connections the far right has been developing in some of the most politically influential sectors of Idaho. It’s part of a string of 2023 down sides of important developments in the state.
Those are cause for concern, but not despair; they should translate to action, not passivity. Today, looking ahead to a new year, a few thoughts on Idaho developments that show positive things can happen and that people in the state can make progress, that extremism at least can still be countered in the Gem State.
It’s still possible to hit the brakes before the state goes over the cliff.
You may be asking for some evidence of that.
The clout in Idaho of the far right, to which now should be appended the (ill-named) Idaho Freedom Foundation, is large, sweeping through the corps of elected officials, many state legislators among others, not to mention the state Republican Party structure. But it is not absolute.
Within the party, there’s rapidly growing pushback. Dozens of former and some current Republican elected officials have spoken out and, more important, organized. Their success is yet to be determined, but first steps have been taken; among them a willingness of people to go on the record. Legislators, too, have been pushing back. When a half-dozen of them in Idaho Falls were accused of crossing the party platform (which charge doesn’t even seem supportable, but no matter), those legislators refused to be called on the carpet for doing their jobs. It was a positive sign.
So is the push, by way of a ballot initiative through a non-partisan organization, for open primaries and ranked choice voting. These changes to state election law could have the effect of improving chances that the large voting population in the middle will have its voices heard and its votes made more effective. The measure already has passed, its advocates say, 50,000 petition signatures, which makes it a better than even bet for reaching the ballot next November—and if it does, chances of passage would be decent at least. The legislature still could mess with it after that, but enough members might understand that as too provocative.
Within Idaho government, mainly in areas where extremists have less voice, there’s been some useful activity. Governor Brad Little’s Idaho Launch program started in October, which aims to help as many as 10,000 Idaho high school students link with post-secondary education (community colleges and other options) specifically related to employment, appears to be an excellent effort. Others, including Empowering Parents, may show some useful results in years to come too.
The bad actors on the extremes have not been getting away easily, either, in a significant number of cases. Consider the legal action undertaken in Coeur d’Alene against would-be disrupters of the year before. Remember also: Ammon Bundy is in hiding and on the run.
Don’t forget either some smart activity on the part of Idaho Democrats—and yes, there has been some. I’ve talked with Democrats this year who have, unusually for their party, started looking far ahead and deep into the grass roots toward a rebuild of their operation and election chances in Idaho. They have a massive challenge, to be sure, but more than in a long time, a number of determined people are organizing and approaching it in a more practical fashion.
The times can allow for it, too. The doom-laden world view of the extremes to the contrary, much is going well in both the state and the nation: The economy (in remarkably positive shape overall, in Idaho and nationally), peace (for the United States at least), a passing of the pandemic and much more. The times can allow for improvement and, for the fair-minded, be cause for optimism.
The perspective is never as monochrome as it sometimes looks.
Hang in there in ‘24. The ride may be bumpy, but we’ll get through it.
STAPILUS: Links and ties
It was just about 50 years ago that Richard Butler, an expatriate Californian, came to Kootenai County and founded the Aryan Nations, physically established near Hayden Lake.
It established some notoriety within a few years as a hub of activity for extremist and racist people and groups. After a lawsuit effectively extinguished it in 2000, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem reflected, “we had people living in this community and in this area that were full of fear. We had many people that lived outside of this community that wouldn’t come here because they were afraid.”
That was true, but within this context: The Aryan Nations compound included only a small number of people, serving as an outpost in a society that emphatically did not accept it. When the compound was razed, the community overwhelmingly cheered. The racists were largely unconnected to the larger community.
Kootenai County still is a target for extremism, as the Patriot Front group showed in June 2022 when 31 people associated with it were arrested by law enforcement when they apparently were planning to disrupt a pride parade. They poured into Coeur d’Alene from around the nation.
The difference now is that some elements of extreme groups are much better connected.
Consider the national and Idaho linkages of one recent newcomer to the state — as just one example among many, this one being different for having picked up strong news attention.
The best known recent far-right event nationally was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—no doubt you remember it. One of the people there was a talk radio host named Dave Reilly, who said he attended to write about the event, which he did (notably on Twitter). But a report in InvestigateWest says he also “was part of a private invitation-only online group involved with brainstorming, planning and promoting the rally, courtroom testimony and leaked chat messages subsequently revealed.” You don’t get that kind of invite without close connections to the people running it.
Online posts also indicate his support for the America First Political Action Conference, founded, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported, “by Nick Fuentes, a former co-host of a podcast with James Allsup, the former Washington State University student who was ejected from the Whitman County Republican Party and whose appearance at a Spokane County Republican Party gathering prompted the resignation of the party’s chair. Both Fuentes and Allsup have been banned from social media platforms for views espousing white nationalism.”
Reilly has moved to Idaho, where in 2021 (a year after his arrival) he ran for a seat on the Post Falls school board—with the endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. He lost, but running against a lifelong Post Falls resident who had organized backing, and after Reilly’s own past was aired in news reports, he pulled a respectable 46.6% of the vote.
Michelle Lippert, a school board member who worked with Citizens for Post Falls Schools in opposition to Reilly’s candidacy, was quoted, “You want to know the difference between back in the 80s and now? When the Aryan Nations were big in this area you saw young men with shaved heads and jackets with patches on them and saw men with sort of a pseudo-Nazi uniform? Today they wear ties and jackets and don’t shave their heads. They don’t stick out.”
Reilly turned up in Idaho news again this fall, with reports that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is as influential as any organization in Idaho Republican politics, had hired him as a contractor on communications. The IFF is extremely well connected in Idaho politics; its word carries major weight in the Idaho Legislature.
The InvestigateWest article noted a raft of ironies: “The Idaho Freedom Foundation, which began in 2009 as a libertarian-leaning free-market think tank, has been contracting with the self-described Christian nationalist — who’s said ‘free markets are a problem,’ who hates ‘libertarianism more than any other political ideology,’ and who compares conservatives who make capitalism their highest value to ‘being a slave and BEGGING your massa to keep you in chains’.”
A half-century has indeed made a big difference in Idaho, and that’s going beyond appearances.
STAPILUS: Legitimate power
The wave of Idaho Republican Party purity tests, and the push for control by a faction of the party statewide, has been expanding to stunning levels in the last couple of years.
There seems to be no limit to the grasping for control by leaders of the state party, including Chair Dorothy Moon, and such allied groups as the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Republican legislators, even from the farthest right wing of the party, have been called into local star chambers to explain themselves and — presumably — beg for forgiveness for using their best judgment at the Statehouse.
You have to wonder what it will take finally to generate some meaningful pushback.
Maybe that’s beginning to happen.
There’s been, for a while now, some organized effort on the part of long-time Idaho Republicans who are pushing for a return to a Republican Party more like the one they knew a generation or two ago, and quietly among some local Republican leaders.
Backlash may be starting to grow among a tipping point of Idaho legislators, maybe enough to change the political atmosphere.
Directing your attention now to Idaho Falls, where all six of the legislators in Districts 32 and 33 have been called to answer charges of deviation from the state party platform. All six have declined to appear, though five did hold a recent town hall meeting (which spoke to a range of legislative issues, and surely was a better use of their time). What’s most remarkable about the six is how different they are. One of them, Barbara Ehardt, is a fierce culture warrior solidly on the right flank of the legislature; she still wasn’t pure enough to evade the inquisition, and quite reasonably expressed astonishment that she’d been targeted. (Apparently, her chief sin had to do with funding public schools.)
Maybe that claim of Ehardt infidelity was the last straw, the clear evidence that no Republican legislator is safe. In any event, you can sense something a little different in the air.
Consider the comments from one of the six, Representative Marco Erickson, in an interview with the columnist Chuck Malloy. The new party disciplinary actions, he said, “wakes up people to the idea of why they need to run as precinct officers. We need to have rational people in there and civil discourse again. We’re going to have to take those small neighborhood positions and take back the party.”
Spot on.
If his talk of precinct officers strikes you as small stuff, be advised: It isn’t.
If you’re wondering how the extremists and power grabbers took over the Idaho Republican Party, remember: They did it the honest and old-fashioned and structurally sound way.
They ran their candidates for precinct committee spots in the primary elections. (Battles over precinct committee positions are age-old, and tend simply to be won by whoever outworks the other side.) Upon winning majorities of these offices at the county level, they take control of the local party levers, which can strongly affect who runs for county and legislative offices, and in some places provides assistance and encouragement for like-minded people to run for non-partisan city and school offices.
Then, when enough counties are of like mind, they can take over the state party central committee, which can control the direction and select the leadership of the party statewide.
How did the current leadership of the Idaho Republican Party get there? That’s how.
How do you beat them? The same way.
The good news for people like Erickson is that both sides can play, and the odds are that his will be able to generate more public support—most likely—than those now in power.
Erickson said he now plans to run for a precinct office himself. That would make perfect sense, and he would be well advised to get his fellow legislators, and others of like mind, to do the same.
It’s unglamorous, hard work. But it’s how actual change happens.
STAPILUS: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho” map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.”
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
Moving to Idaho: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane's new elections data dashboard hasn't really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the "Voters Moving to Idaho" map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn't overstate his Gem State connections: "I cannot say with first hand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I've never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans."
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d'Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn't happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we'd paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today's Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
In Idaho politics, the word "freedom" continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane's new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state's population.
However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that's of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he's posted so far.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. reach him at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book, "What do you Mean by That?" is available on amazon or at www.ridenbaugh.com/ whatdoyoumeanbythat/.
STAPILUS: Flavors of freedom
In Idaho politics, the word “freedom” continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Your definition and someone else’s may vary.
One of the state’s most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding “freedom”; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you aren’t careful … which ideologues often aren’t.
The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called “Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom.” It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration.
First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of “personal” and “economic” freedom. There’s plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the group’s heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile.
That’s because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of “freedom” by state.
Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others.
It does best on “economic freedom,” which you could translate to “freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes,” coming in seventh.
On “personal freedom,” Idaho’s ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas.
The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts.
Idaho ranked first in the nation on “health insurance freedom,” though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, “Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year.”
Try applying that to your personal “freedom” when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance.
On the “personal freedom” side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well.
It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (“driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods”), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol.
And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to “the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of driver’s licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers).” You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered.
Abortion, generally, didn’t appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially.
Idaho does rank third highest, however, on “gun freedom.” That should come as no shock.
So who’s free? To do what? What’s important to you?
STAPILUS: The lines are blurring in Idaho higher education
The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,” courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees” in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
KIGGINS: We want more people around our table — to help us reach deeper into south-central Idaho, teach us what we don’t know, bring a new accent to our voice.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On Nov. 9, the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college — now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.”
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large — imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time — this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear.
But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the CWI proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
STAPILUS: Remembering Max Black, the quintessential Idaho legislator
Max Black, an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on Nov. 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the Legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cellphone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out-of-the-blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the Legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield” Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime — and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,” into publication the next year, and from that year to this, Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.” That, too, would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.
STAPILUS: Finding the middle? Local election results show pattern in Idaho
Local elections, like those last week in Idaho cities and school districts, often are decided because of local considerations and concerns. A city mayor or school board member may be long-established and uncontroversial and thereby win another term, or may be the subject of hot debate (for good reason or not) and be dropped by the voters.
Some other patterns do turn up, though, and one this year in Idaho and other places involves candidates promoted by far-right groups or local Republican Party organizations. In last week’s elections in Idaho, quite a few of these candidates didn’t succeed.
These cases, all involving offices officially non-partisan, involve different kinds of stories.
Election Day in the Magic Valley was a mixed bag — with Twin Falls and Declo among cities voting for change and Burley and Bellevue among those sticking with incumbents.
The Boise mayoral contest, for example, had partisan overtones. The city has become increasingly blue over the last couple of decades, and the incumbent mayor, Lauren McLean, has long been identified as a Democrat. Her opponent, Mike Masterson, has said he formerly was a Republican but is no longer; nonetheless, an informal “R” seemed attached to his name as a “D” was to McLean’s.
All other factors aside — many concerns and issues were raised, and some may have affected a number of votes — the vote McLean received is not far off from what most credible Democratic candidates normally receive in the city. Seen in that way, Boise followed a partisan pattern.
Although the state’s second-largest city, Meridian, is a far more Republican place, the dynamic actually looked similar. Mayor Robert Simison, like McLean seeking a second term, has been relatively centrist and mostly uncontroversial. His chief opponent, Mike Hon, described himself: “I’m a conservative. And I think Meridian is mostly a conservative place. So that’s why we want to focus on family values.” Simison won with about 70% of the vote.
There aren’t many other large population centers around the state where the dynamic works that way. But an informal “R” label this election proved less useful for a number of candidates than it often did in recent years when, for example, candidates for the North Idaho College Board and the West Bonner School District board have ridden those endorsements to wins.
In the West Ada School District, two incumbents, Rene Ozuna and David Binetti, were challenged by well-funded challengers with strong local Republican connections. Both incumbents won, however.
The Idaho Ed News reported that the two highest profile contests for the Coeur d’Alene School Board resulted in losses for the two candidates supported by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee; the two winners apparently (to judge from their fundraising and lists of supporters) appear to have gone into the contest with eyes open and strong organization.
The story was similar with the Coeur d’Alene city council election; one observer snarked, “Frankly, after this, maybe #idgop #KCRCC should persist in ‘rating and vetting’ and producing lists of candidates to put in front of voters. It’s the kiss of death.”
In Nampa, the connections to party organizations are thinner, but you can suss them out. In one faceoff, Stephanie Binns, an educator, took what would look like the Democratic side on hot issues, and contractor Jay Duffy took the Republican side; Binns won with 60% of the vote. In the other hot race in the district, the result went the other way, though the “informal R” got just 51%, in a very Republican community.
On the eastern side of the state, results in the Idaho Falls School District were strikingly similar.
In Caldwell, all three incumbents, facing challenges from the right, prevailed.
You can cite countervailing examples, but the number of centrist winners in last week’s contests were notable and may amount to a serious pattern.
There’s been talk over the last year of more centrist voters, groups and candidates pushing back against the strong campaigns from the right. Such efforts succeeded at the community college board level (in some places, not all).
And they may have succeeded again this November.
STAPILUS: The dam fight at 30-something
When the Snake River Basin Adjudication began in 1987, no one expected it would be completed quickly. Water adjudications in Western states often have taken decades, and the SRBA may have been the largest ever, covering six figures worth of water rights across almost nine-tenths of Idaho.
Nonetheless, it has been completed — at least in general terms — and it only took a remarkably brief 26 years.
That bit of history prowled around the back of my mind this week when I saw the latest court developments in the legal action aimed at breaching the four lower Snake River dams, located in southeastern Washington state. The dams are the Lower Granite (closest to the Idaho border), the Little Goose, the Lower Monumental and the Ice Harbor (near the confluence with the Columbia River).
The news involves a delay in further developments, which is to say, another in a long list of delays of anything resembling final action. Specifically, the parties involved asked the court for another 45 days to negotiate, following up on an earlier delay of 60 days.
Those are a pittance. The legal action over the four dams started in 1993, which means attorneys have been kept busy on the subject for 30 years — three years longer than it took to adjudicate the highly complex and contentious water rights across most of Idaho.
It’s hard to conceive that there’s much new left to talk about.
The issues associated with the dams (and I’m not going to try to relitigate them all here) mainly concern preservation of declining salmon runs on one hand, and the electric power the dams generate, and concerns about impacts on commercial river traffic (you’ll hear this a lot at Lewiston) on the other. Environmental, tribal and some governments have been on one side, and a number of federal agencies, economic interests and others have filled the other. The region, and many of its top elected officials, have been split - and within the parties as well as between them.
One report from the University of Washington said, “Despite research and knowledge of the effects of the LSRDs on salmon and steelhead populations, river ecology, and tribal sovereignty there remains resistance at the state and federal level. The barrier to remove the LSRDs for Governor [Jay] Inslee (D) of Washington is the fact that the dams produce renewable energy, recreational, and economic benefits. However, both Gov. Inslee and Senator [Patty Murray] have been open to exploring the possibility of removing the dams if the benefits and services the dams create can be replaced by alternatives.”
The Yale School of the Environment noted that over the last three decades, “On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act.”
Neither side seems inclined to quit.
Still, after 30 years, the context of the legal battle has changed, and the changes may suggest where this is heading.
First, in the last decade, the debate has taken place in the context of demolition of a number of other dams in the region.
Second, the dams need repairs if they’re going to continue in service, and that will be costly.
Third, renewable energy, notably solar and wind, has taken off in a big way in the inland Northwest, and the argument that the dams are needed for their electric power generation has become less central in the debate.
It could be that if the parties come to accept some of the trend lines, and not just the starting and hoped-for ending points, the case could be resolved before another 30 years has passed.
STAPILUS: Legislating parental notification of bullying, violence
In a single vote, the governing majority demonstrated its complete lack of concern for two things that likely do interest a wide range of Idahoans:
First, bullying of and by students.
And second, parental involvement and notification of issues in their children’s lives.
House Bill 539 is another in the long line of measures imposing a requirement on how local school districts deal with children, and this one operates in a familiar way: Most significantly, through parental notification. The legislative summary said it would “require school principals to notify parents and guardians of a student’s involvement in harassment, intimidation, bullying, violence, or self-harm and to provide empowering materials and requires school districts to report incidents and confirm the distribution of the materials to the State Department of Education.”
The statement of purpose added, “While it is important to know how much bullying is taking place, there is not much state policymakers can do with this simple quantification. Given the relationship between those who are bullied and harm to self and others, this bill aims to better address the needs of those who are bullied in addition to responding to those who do the bullying.”
Okay: On one level, this would seem to be right up the legislature’s alley. Parental notification is big with Idaho legislators when it comes to a variety of topics like abortion, library materials, gender, curriculum content and testing standards, sex education, vaccinations (and related medical measures) and much more.
And the problem of bullying is not a small matter. Aside from the many reports from schools, there’s been a spike in teen suicides around Idaho (and beyond). Idaho has one of the nation’s worst records for teen suicide (46th best among the states). The Boise School District last fall reported a group of four student suicides in the space of just two months. (That’s the same number of student deaths, but self-inflicted, as the multiple murder of University of Idaho students in Moscow the year before; guess which got the international attention.)
Representative Chris Mathias, D-Boise, the bill’s origins sponsor, remarked that, “For each incident, it would bring us confidence that the districts were providing important pieces of information to all the parties involved: the bully, the bully’s parents, the bullied, the bullied’s parents. And specifically that they would be receiving, to quote from the bill, ‘parental empowerment materials, including suicide prevention resources and information on methods to limit students access to means of harm to self and others.’”
Given all this, you might think the anti-bullying bill — which really wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, requiring not much more than notification — would be a slam dunk.
But it failed on the House floor, 32-38; most of the House Republican leadership voted against it. You can see the vote breakdown at https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/H0539/. Getting at “why” leads to a better and more subtle understanding of what motivates the Idaho Legislature’s majority.
It certainly has nothing to do with the supposed concerns of Representative Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, who talked about, “The poor principal (who) is going to get this ‘Oh one more thing I have to report’.” This is beyond ridiculous: This is a legislature that has poured on the culture war requirements, year after year, decade after decade, when it comes to public schools.
They’re happy to have the parents weigh in on subjects — like those a few paragraphs back — where they suspect the parents (or at least the squeaky-wheel parents) will side with the legislative majority’s viewpoint.
And what is the legislature’s opinion on bullying?
You can’t indict all 105 of them. In the House, 32 (Republicans among them) voted in favor of the bullying notification bill, and there are surely more ayes in the Senate.
But for the operating majority, bullying is one of the facts of student life they’re not interested in discouraging.
Ponder for a moment what that says about the people who run the Idaho Legislature. Then think it over again.
STAPILUS: Processed budgets
From Idaho’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee come lessons in whether complication improves the process … or, what could possibly go wrong?
For decades — generations, actually — the Idaho legislative budget committee acronymed JFAC has had a consistent procedure when it comes to hearing budget proposals and then setting — writing and voting on — actual budgets for state spending on agencies and beyond.
It has involved splitting the work into two parts, spanning nearly all of most sessions. First come the hearings, in which state officials and others involved talk about what they need and propose, in a single comprehensive overview. Once that’s done, they take a short breather, after which the committee members go through the agencies one by one and pass a long series of budgets. All of it is time consuming and attention devouring, often taking most of their mornings during the session. The legislative session usually ends around two weeks after the committee has finished its work, which is about how long the budgets take to pass through action on the floors.
This has worked pretty well for a very long time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, or that legislative leaders shouldn’t try. Other states use various approaches and for the most part all are able to make them work too.
But if you’re going to change the system, be careful. Budget-setting for a state government is complex and sometimes emotional and highly political, and the process should be well understood and broadly accepted. And there should be no hint of under-the-table philosophical agendas.
The new process for this session, promoted by House Speaker Mike Moyle and adopted by the JFAC co-chairs, Senator Scott Grow and Representative Wendy Horman, calls for fracturing the process. It begins with passing, in advance of any hearings, a “bare-bones” budget for everyone—just enough, presumably, to keep the lights on — and then, after a much shorter public hearing process (fewer public statements from agency advocates, more decisions behind closed doors), considering what should be added to (or maybe subtracted from) the bare bones. This back-and-forth approach tends to remove things from their context.
The initial “bare bones” budgets this session were passed by JFAC shortly after the start of the session, in a single two and a half-hour session on January 16. All 15 committee Republicans voted in favor, and the five Democrats voted against. The nays were vocal about it. Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, for example, said “We received these budgets on Friday and are being asked to vote on them on Tuesday, to set the entire budget for the state in the second week of the session before we even have a change in employee compensation recommendation in place, before we have the Millennium Fund recommendation in place.” In other words, a budget was being passed before committee members even had the relevant information for making even any broad-brush decisions.
Apparently, many of the committee’s Republicans apparently started having second thoughts, too.
On February 2, a dozen JFAC members — a majority, most Republicans but including Democrats — decided they wanted to pass their own budgets, after gathering more information to hand. Representative Britt Raybould explained some of that: “The budget that was outlined at the beginning of the year did not actually reflect all of the maintenance line items … In most instances it left out nondiscretionary, it left out replacement items and other what you think of as sort of regular and expected fund adjustments.”
That means two entirely different and conflicting budgets are wandering around the legislature, with lawmakers concerned about what might happen if multiple budgets wind up being passed.
There isn’t anything fatal about this. In the worst case, if the legislature were to actually pass more than one conflicting budget (they’ll say it couldn’t happen, and it’s unlikely, but never say never) the governor could veto one; or, a normal rule of legislative construction might mean that the last one passed takes precedence.
But the whole new system does seem to be resulting in more heat and less light when it comes to deciding how the state’s dollars should be sent.
Which may be fine with some people, ideology depending. But Idahoans simply hoping for a smoothly functioning government are likely to have their doubts.
STAPILUS: Schooled on guns
Idaho House Bill 415 fits so neatly into a central piece of political rhetoric that the surprise is that its progress at the legislature has been slowed as much as it has; which is to say, not much.
The bill provides that any public school employee—who obtains an enhanced concealed weapons permit, not terribly hard to get—who wants to carry a firearm or other “deadly weapon” to school can do it, whether local administrators and school boards like it or not. The sponsor, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, said, “These select school employees will provide an armed force to protect children in the first minutes of an attack. We don’t want to have a stack of 20 kids dead in a classroom because we didn’t do anything.”
The National Rifle Association couldn’t have put it more simply.
After what looked like a short pause, the Idaho House passed it this week (53 to 16, veto-proof), to the Senate for consideration there.
Here are some of the things it does.
Any pistol-packing school employee would have absolute state clearance to carry, regardless whether school principals, teachers, parents, boards or anyone else likes it, “as long as the firearm or deadly weapon is concealed and the school employee maintains immediate control” of it. I’m trying to imagine how that would work in a high school environment. What does that imply about the handling and carrying of guns by staff?
I say “school employee” here because the packers can include not only teachers but, “an officer, board member, commissioner, executive, elected or appointed official, or independent contractor.” Imagine someone who isn’t an educator but has some business relationship with the district … who maybe has a history of domestic or other violence … and obtains an enhanced license. You doubt that could ever happen? Think again. And think as well about how much easier a real shooter would find infiltrating a school already accustomed to seeing adults routinely carrying firearms.
Think too about the school employees who may be well trained to teach but maybe less well schooled on emergency tactical response. The bill has that inexperience question covered this way: “No school employee shall be held civilly or criminally liable for deciding to engage or not to engage in an armed confrontation during a lethal threat to safety inside of a school or on school property. The decision to use a firearm or other deadly weapon during a life-threatening incident inside of a school or on school property lies solely within the school employee and is a personal decision.”
So: If a covered school employee simply decides to pick up their gun—and start firing—the immunity is apparently absolute, regardless who was injured or killed. I can hear right now a smart defense attorney defending a murder charge using this provision as a shield. The beweaponed employee’s personal belief is enough for a shield against any kind of legal action, civil or criminal.
These employees will not be compelled to disclose to anyone but a school administrator (and maybe board: it’s unclear there) and local law enforcement that a gun is in the classroom. In fact, the bill adds a new exemption for Idaho public records law: Any records relating to a school employee who’s carrying. A mere parent would be unable to find out if there’s a gun in their child’s classroom.
Private schools would be specifically exempted from the requirement. The bill’s opening paragraphs seem to endorse carrying guns there too, but a later section says: “Nothing in subsection (4) of this section shall limit the right of an owner of private property, including a private school, from permitting or prohibiting the carrying of a concealed firearm or other deadly weapon on his property.” If it’s such a good idea for public schools, then why not their private counterparts?
There’s also this curious if minor punitive provision: “No public school shall display any signage whatsoever indicating that school property is a gun-free zone, and any violation of this subsection shall result in a fine of three hundred dollars ($300), enforced by the county prosecuting attorney.”
Current state law already allows local school districts to set their own policies, and some Idaho districts do allow some heat-packing by staff. But a Post Falls police detective has pointed out that conditions are different in the various school districts. “In the Post Falls School District, we have a very close relationship with our police department. We’re able to have responding officers at any location in the district within three minutes or less than that. … We need to talk about what’s best for each individual school district.”
That’s a problem when legislation devolves to the level of a bumper sticker. As it has here.
As it is, the Idaho Legislature may well pass this thing; it can be labeled “pro-gun” and therefore hard to oppose. But be aware: Extra warnings may be needed in future when you send the kids off to school.
STAPILUS: Not what it was
In the last 20 years, you can track the trend line of Idaho conservatism — here meaning in the way it is most commonly intended — alongside that of its maybe most prominent non-party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
This is noteworthy now especially because the IFF is at an inflection point, with the departure of the only leader it has ever had — Wayne Hoffman — and the arrival of a new one, Ron Nate. That inflection point, though, seems to extend not to a different direction but to an acceleration of the same one.
But first a little history.
The origins of the IFF, as the group’s About web page indicates, go back to a small group of Canyon County enthusiasts in libertarian politics, of which the spark plug was a businessman named Ralph Smeed. I knew Smeed (as did Hoffman, who evidently was much influenced by him). He was a regular visitor to the Caldwell newsroom where I worked in the mid-70s and to many events I covered. He struck me as a likable guy (attack politics in today’s sense weren’t his thing, and his political criticisms tended toward the ideological), as single-minded on the subject of less government and taxes but vague when it came to specifics and implications. He was much enamored of the “Austrian” school of economics (notably Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), which matched with his cultural and business views.
After a periodical (the Idaho Compass, of which future Senator Steve Symms was also a contributor) and a small think tank (the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives) failed to make large waves outside committed libertarian circles, he and several cohorts looked into founding an organization with more impact. With Hoffman, they in 2008 set the framework for the IFF.
That’s what it was originally about: Promotion of the libertarian idea. The group’s about page still says “The Idaho Freedom Foundation exists to advance the conservative principles — limited government, free markets and self-reliance …”
I suspect that Smeed, who died in 2012, would barely recognize it now.
One reason may have its roots in another sentence from the web site: “At that point (in 2008), every state in the country had a free market think tank except for Idaho.” When the Idaho group was founded, it joined the club, more or less, and over time became caught up in national political/cultural enthusiasms, whether “social justice,” critical race theory, cryptocurrency advocacy, “porn literacy” and similar issues. It didn’t abandon libertarianism entirely, but it’s efforts turned into a local-outlet mirror of one side of the national culture wars.
The elevation of Ron Nate to leadership of the organization seems to confirm as much and may expand it.
Nate is a former state representative from Rexburg (Republican of course), though he narrowly lost his primary election in 2018, and after returning to the House in 2020, lost another in 2022. That may be an indicator.
He co-founded the Madison Liberty Institute, whose policy statements track closely with the state Republican Party leadership. After Governor Brad Little’s state of the state address, for example, the group released a statement largely critical of the governor (that sounded a whole lot like GOP Chair Dorothy Moon’s), and included a quote from Nate: “The Governor may mean well, but throughout his address he raises concerns with his tendency toward using executive orders to achieve his aims.”
He also has been the Madison County chair of anti-LGBT MassResistance, an extreme group deep into the culture wars and says of itself, “We engage in issues and events that most other conservative groups are afraid to touch.” (The group is national, active in many states.)
And this has gone pretty far down that road; von Hayek and von Mises no longer seem to be much of the picture. Somehow I doubt Smeed would have had truck with contracting a propagandist from the alt-right to help with messaging.
The IFF isn’t what it was, if it ever was.
STAPILUS: Will the brakes work?
Last week, I wrote about the growing links and connections the far right has been developing in some of the most politically influential sectors of Idaho. It’s part of a string of 2023 down sides of important developments in the state.
Those are cause for concern, but not despair; they should translate to action, not passivity. Today, looking ahead to a new year, a few thoughts on Idaho developments that show positive things can happen and that people in the state can make progress, that extremism at least can still be countered in the Gem State.
It’s still possible to hit the brakes before the state goes over the cliff.
You may be asking for some evidence of that.
The clout in Idaho of the far right, to which now should be appended the (ill-named) Idaho Freedom Foundation, is large, sweeping through the corps of elected officials, many state legislators among others, not to mention the state Republican Party structure. But it is not absolute.
Within the party, there’s rapidly growing pushback. Dozens of former and some current Republican elected officials have spoken out and, more important, organized. Their success is yet to be determined, but first steps have been taken; among them a willingness of people to go on the record. Legislators, too, have been pushing back. When a half-dozen of them in Idaho Falls were accused of crossing the party platform (which charge doesn’t even seem supportable, but no matter), those legislators refused to be called on the carpet for doing their jobs. It was a positive sign.
So is the push, by way of a ballot initiative through a non-partisan organization, for open primaries and ranked choice voting. These changes to state election law could have the effect of improving chances that the large voting population in the middle will have its voices heard and its votes made more effective. The measure already has passed, its advocates say, 50,000 petition signatures, which makes it a better than even bet for reaching the ballot next November—and if it does, chances of passage would be decent at least. The legislature still could mess with it after that, but enough members might understand that as too provocative.
Within Idaho government, mainly in areas where extremists have less voice, there’s been some useful activity. Governor Brad Little’s Idaho Launch program started in October, which aims to help as many as 10,000 Idaho high school students link with post-secondary education (community colleges and other options) specifically related to employment, appears to be an excellent effort. Others, including Empowering Parents, may show some useful results in years to come too.
The bad actors on the extremes have not been getting away easily, either, in a significant number of cases. Consider the legal action undertaken in Coeur d’Alene against would-be disrupters of the year before. Remember also: Ammon Bundy is in hiding and on the run.
Don’t forget either some smart activity on the part of Idaho Democrats—and yes, there has been some. I’ve talked with Democrats this year who have, unusually for their party, started looking far ahead and deep into the grass roots toward a rebuild of their operation and election chances in Idaho. They have a massive challenge, to be sure, but more than in a long time, a number of determined people are organizing and approaching it in a more practical fashion.
The times can allow for it, too. The doom-laden world view of the extremes to the contrary, much is going well in both the state and the nation: The economy (in remarkably positive shape overall, in Idaho and nationally), peace (for the United States at least), a passing of the pandemic and much more. The times can allow for improvement and, for the fair-minded, be cause for optimism.
The perspective is never as monochrome as it sometimes looks.
Hang in there in ‘24. The ride may be bumpy, but we’ll get through it.
STAPILUS: Links and ties
It was just about 50 years ago that Richard Butler, an expatriate Californian, came to Kootenai County and founded the Aryan Nations, physically established near Hayden Lake.
It established some notoriety within a few years as a hub of activity for extremist and racist people and groups. After a lawsuit effectively extinguished it in 2000, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem reflected, “we had people living in this community and in this area that were full of fear. We had many people that lived outside of this community that wouldn’t come here because they were afraid.”
That was true, but within this context: The Aryan Nations compound included only a small number of people, serving as an outpost in a society that emphatically did not accept it. When the compound was razed, the community overwhelmingly cheered. The racists were largely unconnected to the larger community.
Kootenai County still is a target for extremism, as the Patriot Front group showed in June 2022 when 31 people associated with it were arrested by law enforcement when they apparently were planning to disrupt a pride parade. They poured into Coeur d’Alene from around the nation.
The difference now is that some elements of extreme groups are much better connected.
Consider the national and Idaho linkages of one recent newcomer to the state — as just one example among many, this one being different for having picked up strong news attention.
The best known recent far-right event nationally was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—no doubt you remember it. One of the people there was a talk radio host named Dave Reilly, who said he attended to write about the event, which he did (notably on Twitter). But a report in InvestigateWest says he also “was part of a private invitation-only online group involved with brainstorming, planning and promoting the rally, courtroom testimony and leaked chat messages subsequently revealed.” You don’t get that kind of invite without close connections to the people running it.
Online posts also indicate his support for the America First Political Action Conference, founded, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported, “by Nick Fuentes, a former co-host of a podcast with James Allsup, the former Washington State University student who was ejected from the Whitman County Republican Party and whose appearance at a Spokane County Republican Party gathering prompted the resignation of the party’s chair. Both Fuentes and Allsup have been banned from social media platforms for views espousing white nationalism.”
Reilly has moved to Idaho, where in 2021 (a year after his arrival) he ran for a seat on the Post Falls school board—with the endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. He lost, but running against a lifelong Post Falls resident who had organized backing, and after Reilly’s own past was aired in news reports, he pulled a respectable 46.6% of the vote.
Michelle Lippert, a school board member who worked with Citizens for Post Falls Schools in opposition to Reilly’s candidacy, was quoted, “You want to know the difference between back in the 80s and now? When the Aryan Nations were big in this area you saw young men with shaved heads and jackets with patches on them and saw men with sort of a pseudo-Nazi uniform? Today they wear ties and jackets and don’t shave their heads. They don’t stick out.”
Reilly turned up in Idaho news again this fall, with reports that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is as influential as any organization in Idaho Republican politics, had hired him as a contractor on communications. The IFF is extremely well connected in Idaho politics; its word carries major weight in the Idaho Legislature.
The InvestigateWest article noted a raft of ironies: “The Idaho Freedom Foundation, which began in 2009 as a libertarian-leaning free-market think tank, has been contracting with the self-described Christian nationalist — who’s said ‘free markets are a problem,’ who hates ‘libertarianism more than any other political ideology,’ and who compares conservatives who make capitalism their highest value to ‘being a slave and BEGGING your massa to keep you in chains’.”
A half-century has indeed made a big difference in Idaho, and that’s going beyond appearances.
STAPILUS: Legitimate power
The wave of Idaho Republican Party purity tests, and the push for control by a faction of the party statewide, has been expanding to stunning levels in the last couple of years.
There seems to be no limit to the grasping for control by leaders of the state party, including Chair Dorothy Moon, and such allied groups as the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Republican legislators, even from the farthest right wing of the party, have been called into local star chambers to explain themselves and — presumably — beg for forgiveness for using their best judgment at the Statehouse.
You have to wonder what it will take finally to generate some meaningful pushback.
Maybe that’s beginning to happen.
There’s been, for a while now, some organized effort on the part of long-time Idaho Republicans who are pushing for a return to a Republican Party more like the one they knew a generation or two ago, and quietly among some local Republican leaders.
Backlash may be starting to grow among a tipping point of Idaho legislators, maybe enough to change the political atmosphere.
Directing your attention now to Idaho Falls, where all six of the legislators in Districts 32 and 33 have been called to answer charges of deviation from the state party platform. All six have declined to appear, though five did hold a recent town hall meeting (which spoke to a range of legislative issues, and surely was a better use of their time). What’s most remarkable about the six is how different they are. One of them, Barbara Ehardt, is a fierce culture warrior solidly on the right flank of the legislature; she still wasn’t pure enough to evade the inquisition, and quite reasonably expressed astonishment that she’d been targeted. (Apparently, her chief sin had to do with funding public schools.)
Maybe that claim of Ehardt infidelity was the last straw, the clear evidence that no Republican legislator is safe. In any event, you can sense something a little different in the air.
Consider the comments from one of the six, Representative Marco Erickson, in an interview with the columnist Chuck Malloy. The new party disciplinary actions, he said, “wakes up people to the idea of why they need to run as precinct officers. We need to have rational people in there and civil discourse again. We’re going to have to take those small neighborhood positions and take back the party.”
Spot on.
If his talk of precinct officers strikes you as small stuff, be advised: It isn’t.
If you’re wondering how the extremists and power grabbers took over the Idaho Republican Party, remember: They did it the honest and old-fashioned and structurally sound way.
They ran their candidates for precinct committee spots in the primary elections. (Battles over precinct committee positions are age-old, and tend simply to be won by whoever outworks the other side.) Upon winning majorities of these offices at the county level, they take control of the local party levers, which can strongly affect who runs for county and legislative offices, and in some places provides assistance and encouragement for like-minded people to run for non-partisan city and school offices.
Then, when enough counties are of like mind, they can take over the state party central committee, which can control the direction and select the leadership of the party statewide.
How did the current leadership of the Idaho Republican Party get there? That’s how.
How do you beat them? The same way.
The good news for people like Erickson is that both sides can play, and the odds are that his will be able to generate more public support—most likely—than those now in power.
Erickson said he now plans to run for a precinct office himself. That would make perfect sense, and he would be well advised to get his fellow legislators, and others of like mind, to do the same.
It’s unglamorous, hard work. But it’s how actual change happens.
STAPILUS: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho” map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.”
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
Moving to Idaho: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane's new elections data dashboard hasn't really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the "Voters Moving to Idaho" map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn't overstate his Gem State connections: "I cannot say with first hand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I've never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans."
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d'Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn't happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we'd paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today's Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
In Idaho politics, the word "freedom" continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane's new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state's population.
However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that's of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he's posted so far.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. reach him at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book, "What do you Mean by That?" is available on amazon or at www.ridenbaugh.com/ whatdoyoumeanbythat/.
STAPILUS: Flavors of freedom
In Idaho politics, the word “freedom” continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Your definition and someone else’s may vary.
One of the state’s most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding “freedom”; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you aren’t careful … which ideologues often aren’t.
The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called “Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom.” It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration.
First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of “personal” and “economic” freedom. There’s plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the group’s heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile.
That’s because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of “freedom” by state.
Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others.
It does best on “economic freedom,” which you could translate to “freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes,” coming in seventh.
On “personal freedom,” Idaho’s ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas.
The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts.
Idaho ranked first in the nation on “health insurance freedom,” though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, “Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year.”
Try applying that to your personal “freedom” when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance.
On the “personal freedom” side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well.
It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (“driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods”), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol.
And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to “the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of driver’s licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers).” You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered.
Abortion, generally, didn’t appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially.
Idaho does rank third highest, however, on “gun freedom.” That should come as no shock.
So who’s free? To do what? What’s important to you?
STAPILUS: The lines are blurring in Idaho higher education
The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,” courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees” in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
KIGGINS: We want more people around our table — to help us reach deeper into south-central Idaho, teach us what we don’t know, bring a new accent to our voice.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On Nov. 9, the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college — now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.”
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large — imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time — this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear.
But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the CWI proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
STAPILUS: Remembering Max Black, the quintessential Idaho legislator
Max Black, an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on Nov. 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the Legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cellphone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out-of-the-blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the Legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield” Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime — and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,” into publication the next year, and from that year to this, Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.” That, too, would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.
STAPILUS: Finding the middle? Local election results show pattern in Idaho
Local elections, like those last week in Idaho cities and school districts, often are decided because of local considerations and concerns. A city mayor or school board member may be long-established and uncontroversial and thereby win another term, or may be the subject of hot debate (for good reason or not) and be dropped by the voters.
Some other patterns do turn up, though, and one this year in Idaho and other places involves candidates promoted by far-right groups or local Republican Party organizations. In last week’s elections in Idaho, quite a few of these candidates didn’t succeed.
These cases, all involving offices officially non-partisan, involve different kinds of stories.
Election Day in the Magic Valley was a mixed bag — with Twin Falls and Declo among cities voting for change and Burley and Bellevue among those sticking with incumbents.
The Boise mayoral contest, for example, had partisan overtones. The city has become increasingly blue over the last couple of decades, and the incumbent mayor, Lauren McLean, has long been identified as a Democrat. Her opponent, Mike Masterson, has said he formerly was a Republican but is no longer; nonetheless, an informal “R” seemed attached to his name as a “D” was to McLean’s.
All other factors aside — many concerns and issues were raised, and some may have affected a number of votes — the vote McLean received is not far off from what most credible Democratic candidates normally receive in the city. Seen in that way, Boise followed a partisan pattern.
Although the state’s second-largest city, Meridian, is a far more Republican place, the dynamic actually looked similar. Mayor Robert Simison, like McLean seeking a second term, has been relatively centrist and mostly uncontroversial. His chief opponent, Mike Hon, described himself: “I’m a conservative. And I think Meridian is mostly a conservative place. So that’s why we want to focus on family values.” Simison won with about 70% of the vote.
There aren’t many other large population centers around the state where the dynamic works that way. But an informal “R” label this election proved less useful for a number of candidates than it often did in recent years when, for example, candidates for the North Idaho College Board and the West Bonner School District board have ridden those endorsements to wins.
In the West Ada School District, two incumbents, Rene Ozuna and David Binetti, were challenged by well-funded challengers with strong local Republican connections. Both incumbents won, however.
The Idaho Ed News reported that the two highest profile contests for the Coeur d’Alene School Board resulted in losses for the two candidates supported by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee; the two winners apparently (to judge from their fundraising and lists of supporters) appear to have gone into the contest with eyes open and strong organization.
The story was similar with the Coeur d’Alene city council election; one observer snarked, “Frankly, after this, maybe #idgop #KCRCC should persist in ‘rating and vetting’ and producing lists of candidates to put in front of voters. It’s the kiss of death.”
In Nampa, the connections to party organizations are thinner, but you can suss them out. In one faceoff, Stephanie Binns, an educator, took what would look like the Democratic side on hot issues, and contractor Jay Duffy took the Republican side; Binns won with 60% of the vote. In the other hot race in the district, the result went the other way, though the “informal R” got just 51%, in a very Republican community.
On the eastern side of the state, results in the Idaho Falls School District were strikingly similar.
In Caldwell, all three incumbents, facing challenges from the right, prevailed.
You can cite countervailing examples, but the number of centrist winners in last week’s contests were notable and may amount to a serious pattern.
There’s been talk over the last year of more centrist voters, groups and candidates pushing back against the strong campaigns from the right. Such efforts succeeded at the community college board level (in some places, not all).
And they may have succeeded again this November.
STAPILUS: The dam fight at 30-something
When the Snake River Basin Adjudication began in 1987, no one expected it would be completed quickly. Water adjudications in Western states often have taken decades, and the SRBA may have been the largest ever, covering six figures worth of water rights across almost nine-tenths of Idaho.
Nonetheless, it has been completed — at least in general terms — and it only took a remarkably brief 26 years.
That bit of history prowled around the back of my mind this week when I saw the latest court developments in the legal action aimed at breaching the four lower Snake River dams, located in southeastern Washington state. The dams are the Lower Granite (closest to the Idaho border), the Little Goose, the Lower Monumental and the Ice Harbor (near the confluence with the Columbia River).
The news involves a delay in further developments, which is to say, another in a long list of delays of anything resembling final action. Specifically, the parties involved asked the court for another 45 days to negotiate, following up on an earlier delay of 60 days.
Those are a pittance. The legal action over the four dams started in 1993, which means attorneys have been kept busy on the subject for 30 years — three years longer than it took to adjudicate the highly complex and contentious water rights across most of Idaho.
It’s hard to conceive that there’s much new left to talk about.
The issues associated with the dams (and I’m not going to try to relitigate them all here) mainly concern preservation of declining salmon runs on one hand, and the electric power the dams generate, and concerns about impacts on commercial river traffic (you’ll hear this a lot at Lewiston) on the other. Environmental, tribal and some governments have been on one side, and a number of federal agencies, economic interests and others have filled the other. The region, and many of its top elected officials, have been split - and within the parties as well as between them.
One report from the University of Washington said, “Despite research and knowledge of the effects of the LSRDs on salmon and steelhead populations, river ecology, and tribal sovereignty there remains resistance at the state and federal level. The barrier to remove the LSRDs for Governor [Jay] Inslee (D) of Washington is the fact that the dams produce renewable energy, recreational, and economic benefits. However, both Gov. Inslee and Senator [Patty Murray] have been open to exploring the possibility of removing the dams if the benefits and services the dams create can be replaced by alternatives.”
The Yale School of the Environment noted that over the last three decades, “On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act.”
Neither side seems inclined to quit.
Still, after 30 years, the context of the legal battle has changed, and the changes may suggest where this is heading.
First, in the last decade, the debate has taken place in the context of demolition of a number of other dams in the region.
Second, the dams need repairs if they’re going to continue in service, and that will be costly.
Third, renewable energy, notably solar and wind, has taken off in a big way in the inland Northwest, and the argument that the dams are needed for their electric power generation has become less central in the debate.
It could be that if the parties come to accept some of the trend lines, and not just the starting and hoped-for ending points, the case could be resolved before another 30 years has passed.
STAPILUS: Legislating parental notification of bullying, violence
In a single vote, the governing majority demonstrated its complete lack of concern for two things that likely do interest a wide range of Idahoans:
First, bullying of and by students.
And second, parental involvement and notification of issues in their children’s lives.
House Bill 539 is another in the long line of measures imposing a requirement on how local school districts deal with children, and this one operates in a familiar way: Most significantly, through parental notification. The legislative summary said it would “require school principals to notify parents and guardians of a student’s involvement in harassment, intimidation, bullying, violence, or self-harm and to provide empowering materials and requires school districts to report incidents and confirm the distribution of the materials to the State Department of Education.”
The statement of purpose added, “While it is important to know how much bullying is taking place, there is not much state policymakers can do with this simple quantification. Given the relationship between those who are bullied and harm to self and others, this bill aims to better address the needs of those who are bullied in addition to responding to those who do the bullying.”
Okay: On one level, this would seem to be right up the legislature’s alley. Parental notification is big with Idaho legislators when it comes to a variety of topics like abortion, library materials, gender, curriculum content and testing standards, sex education, vaccinations (and related medical measures) and much more.
And the problem of bullying is not a small matter. Aside from the many reports from schools, there’s been a spike in teen suicides around Idaho (and beyond). Idaho has one of the nation’s worst records for teen suicide (46th best among the states). The Boise School District last fall reported a group of four student suicides in the space of just two months. (That’s the same number of student deaths, but self-inflicted, as the multiple murder of University of Idaho students in Moscow the year before; guess which got the international attention.)
Representative Chris Mathias, D-Boise, the bill’s origins sponsor, remarked that, “For each incident, it would bring us confidence that the districts were providing important pieces of information to all the parties involved: the bully, the bully’s parents, the bullied, the bullied’s parents. And specifically that they would be receiving, to quote from the bill, ‘parental empowerment materials, including suicide prevention resources and information on methods to limit students access to means of harm to self and others.’”
Given all this, you might think the anti-bullying bill — which really wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, requiring not much more than notification — would be a slam dunk.
But it failed on the House floor, 32-38; most of the House Republican leadership voted against it. You can see the vote breakdown at https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/H0539/. Getting at “why” leads to a better and more subtle understanding of what motivates the Idaho Legislature’s majority.
It certainly has nothing to do with the supposed concerns of Representative Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, who talked about, “The poor principal (who) is going to get this ‘Oh one more thing I have to report’.” This is beyond ridiculous: This is a legislature that has poured on the culture war requirements, year after year, decade after decade, when it comes to public schools.
They’re happy to have the parents weigh in on subjects — like those a few paragraphs back — where they suspect the parents (or at least the squeaky-wheel parents) will side with the legislative majority’s viewpoint.
And what is the legislature’s opinion on bullying?
You can’t indict all 105 of them. In the House, 32 (Republicans among them) voted in favor of the bullying notification bill, and there are surely more ayes in the Senate.
But for the operating majority, bullying is one of the facts of student life they’re not interested in discouraging.
Ponder for a moment what that says about the people who run the Idaho Legislature. Then think it over again.
STAPILUS: Processed budgets
From Idaho’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee come lessons in whether complication improves the process … or, what could possibly go wrong?
For decades — generations, actually — the Idaho legislative budget committee acronymed JFAC has had a consistent procedure when it comes to hearing budget proposals and then setting — writing and voting on — actual budgets for state spending on agencies and beyond.
It has involved splitting the work into two parts, spanning nearly all of most sessions. First come the hearings, in which state officials and others involved talk about what they need and propose, in a single comprehensive overview. Once that’s done, they take a short breather, after which the committee members go through the agencies one by one and pass a long series of budgets. All of it is time consuming and attention devouring, often taking most of their mornings during the session. The legislative session usually ends around two weeks after the committee has finished its work, which is about how long the budgets take to pass through action on the floors.
This has worked pretty well for a very long time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, or that legislative leaders shouldn’t try. Other states use various approaches and for the most part all are able to make them work too.
But if you’re going to change the system, be careful. Budget-setting for a state government is complex and sometimes emotional and highly political, and the process should be well understood and broadly accepted. And there should be no hint of under-the-table philosophical agendas.
The new process for this session, promoted by House Speaker Mike Moyle and adopted by the JFAC co-chairs, Senator Scott Grow and Representative Wendy Horman, calls for fracturing the process. It begins with passing, in advance of any hearings, a “bare-bones” budget for everyone—just enough, presumably, to keep the lights on — and then, after a much shorter public hearing process (fewer public statements from agency advocates, more decisions behind closed doors), considering what should be added to (or maybe subtracted from) the bare bones. This back-and-forth approach tends to remove things from their context.
The initial “bare bones” budgets this session were passed by JFAC shortly after the start of the session, in a single two and a half-hour session on January 16. All 15 committee Republicans voted in favor, and the five Democrats voted against. The nays were vocal about it. Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, for example, said “We received these budgets on Friday and are being asked to vote on them on Tuesday, to set the entire budget for the state in the second week of the session before we even have a change in employee compensation recommendation in place, before we have the Millennium Fund recommendation in place.” In other words, a budget was being passed before committee members even had the relevant information for making even any broad-brush decisions.
Apparently, many of the committee’s Republicans apparently started having second thoughts, too.
On February 2, a dozen JFAC members — a majority, most Republicans but including Democrats — decided they wanted to pass their own budgets, after gathering more information to hand. Representative Britt Raybould explained some of that: “The budget that was outlined at the beginning of the year did not actually reflect all of the maintenance line items … In most instances it left out nondiscretionary, it left out replacement items and other what you think of as sort of regular and expected fund adjustments.”
That means two entirely different and conflicting budgets are wandering around the legislature, with lawmakers concerned about what might happen if multiple budgets wind up being passed.
There isn’t anything fatal about this. In the worst case, if the legislature were to actually pass more than one conflicting budget (they’ll say it couldn’t happen, and it’s unlikely, but never say never) the governor could veto one; or, a normal rule of legislative construction might mean that the last one passed takes precedence.
But the whole new system does seem to be resulting in more heat and less light when it comes to deciding how the state’s dollars should be sent.
Which may be fine with some people, ideology depending. But Idahoans simply hoping for a smoothly functioning government are likely to have their doubts.
STAPILUS: Schooled on guns
Idaho House Bill 415 fits so neatly into a central piece of political rhetoric that the surprise is that its progress at the legislature has been slowed as much as it has; which is to say, not much.
The bill provides that any public school employee—who obtains an enhanced concealed weapons permit, not terribly hard to get—who wants to carry a firearm or other “deadly weapon” to school can do it, whether local administrators and school boards like it or not. The sponsor, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, said, “These select school employees will provide an armed force to protect children in the first minutes of an attack. We don’t want to have a stack of 20 kids dead in a classroom because we didn’t do anything.”
The National Rifle Association couldn’t have put it more simply.
After what looked like a short pause, the Idaho House passed it this week (53 to 16, veto-proof), to the Senate for consideration there.
Here are some of the things it does.
Any pistol-packing school employee would have absolute state clearance to carry, regardless whether school principals, teachers, parents, boards or anyone else likes it, “as long as the firearm or deadly weapon is concealed and the school employee maintains immediate control” of it. I’m trying to imagine how that would work in a high school environment. What does that imply about the handling and carrying of guns by staff?
I say “school employee” here because the packers can include not only teachers but, “an officer, board member, commissioner, executive, elected or appointed official, or independent contractor.” Imagine someone who isn’t an educator but has some business relationship with the district … who maybe has a history of domestic or other violence … and obtains an enhanced license. You doubt that could ever happen? Think again. And think as well about how much easier a real shooter would find infiltrating a school already accustomed to seeing adults routinely carrying firearms.
Think too about the school employees who may be well trained to teach but maybe less well schooled on emergency tactical response. The bill has that inexperience question covered this way: “No school employee shall be held civilly or criminally liable for deciding to engage or not to engage in an armed confrontation during a lethal threat to safety inside of a school or on school property. The decision to use a firearm or other deadly weapon during a life-threatening incident inside of a school or on school property lies solely within the school employee and is a personal decision.”
So: If a covered school employee simply decides to pick up their gun—and start firing—the immunity is apparently absolute, regardless who was injured or killed. I can hear right now a smart defense attorney defending a murder charge using this provision as a shield. The beweaponed employee’s personal belief is enough for a shield against any kind of legal action, civil or criminal.
These employees will not be compelled to disclose to anyone but a school administrator (and maybe board: it’s unclear there) and local law enforcement that a gun is in the classroom. In fact, the bill adds a new exemption for Idaho public records law: Any records relating to a school employee who’s carrying. A mere parent would be unable to find out if there’s a gun in their child’s classroom.
Private schools would be specifically exempted from the requirement. The bill’s opening paragraphs seem to endorse carrying guns there too, but a later section says: “Nothing in subsection (4) of this section shall limit the right of an owner of private property, including a private school, from permitting or prohibiting the carrying of a concealed firearm or other deadly weapon on his property.” If it’s such a good idea for public schools, then why not their private counterparts?
There’s also this curious if minor punitive provision: “No public school shall display any signage whatsoever indicating that school property is a gun-free zone, and any violation of this subsection shall result in a fine of three hundred dollars ($300), enforced by the county prosecuting attorney.”
Current state law already allows local school districts to set their own policies, and some Idaho districts do allow some heat-packing by staff. But a Post Falls police detective has pointed out that conditions are different in the various school districts. “In the Post Falls School District, we have a very close relationship with our police department. We’re able to have responding officers at any location in the district within three minutes or less than that. … We need to talk about what’s best for each individual school district.”
That’s a problem when legislation devolves to the level of a bumper sticker. As it has here.
As it is, the Idaho Legislature may well pass this thing; it can be labeled “pro-gun” and therefore hard to oppose. But be aware: Extra warnings may be needed in future when you send the kids off to school.
STAPILUS: Not what it was
In the last 20 years, you can track the trend line of Idaho conservatism — here meaning in the way it is most commonly intended — alongside that of its maybe most prominent non-party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
This is noteworthy now especially because the IFF is at an inflection point, with the departure of the only leader it has ever had — Wayne Hoffman — and the arrival of a new one, Ron Nate. That inflection point, though, seems to extend not to a different direction but to an acceleration of the same one.
But first a little history.
The origins of the IFF, as the group’s About web page indicates, go back to a small group of Canyon County enthusiasts in libertarian politics, of which the spark plug was a businessman named Ralph Smeed. I knew Smeed (as did Hoffman, who evidently was much influenced by him). He was a regular visitor to the Caldwell newsroom where I worked in the mid-70s and to many events I covered. He struck me as a likable guy (attack politics in today’s sense weren’t his thing, and his political criticisms tended toward the ideological), as single-minded on the subject of less government and taxes but vague when it came to specifics and implications. He was much enamored of the “Austrian” school of economics (notably Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), which matched with his cultural and business views.
After a periodical (the Idaho Compass, of which future Senator Steve Symms was also a contributor) and a small think tank (the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives) failed to make large waves outside committed libertarian circles, he and several cohorts looked into founding an organization with more impact. With Hoffman, they in 2008 set the framework for the IFF.
That’s what it was originally about: Promotion of the libertarian idea. The group’s about page still says “The Idaho Freedom Foundation exists to advance the conservative principles — limited government, free markets and self-reliance …”
I suspect that Smeed, who died in 2012, would barely recognize it now.
One reason may have its roots in another sentence from the web site: “At that point (in 2008), every state in the country had a free market think tank except for Idaho.” When the Idaho group was founded, it joined the club, more or less, and over time became caught up in national political/cultural enthusiasms, whether “social justice,” critical race theory, cryptocurrency advocacy, “porn literacy” and similar issues. It didn’t abandon libertarianism entirely, but it’s efforts turned into a local-outlet mirror of one side of the national culture wars.
The elevation of Ron Nate to leadership of the organization seems to confirm as much and may expand it.
Nate is a former state representative from Rexburg (Republican of course), though he narrowly lost his primary election in 2018, and after returning to the House in 2020, lost another in 2022. That may be an indicator.
He co-founded the Madison Liberty Institute, whose policy statements track closely with the state Republican Party leadership. After Governor Brad Little’s state of the state address, for example, the group released a statement largely critical of the governor (that sounded a whole lot like GOP Chair Dorothy Moon’s), and included a quote from Nate: “The Governor may mean well, but throughout his address he raises concerns with his tendency toward using executive orders to achieve his aims.”
He also has been the Madison County chair of anti-LGBT MassResistance, an extreme group deep into the culture wars and says of itself, “We engage in issues and events that most other conservative groups are afraid to touch.” (The group is national, active in many states.)
And this has gone pretty far down that road; von Hayek and von Mises no longer seem to be much of the picture. Somehow I doubt Smeed would have had truck with contracting a propagandist from the alt-right to help with messaging.
The IFF isn’t what it was, if it ever was.
STAPILUS: Will the brakes work?
Last week, I wrote about the growing links and connections the far right has been developing in some of the most politically influential sectors of Idaho. It’s part of a string of 2023 down sides of important developments in the state.
Those are cause for concern, but not despair; they should translate to action, not passivity. Today, looking ahead to a new year, a few thoughts on Idaho developments that show positive things can happen and that people in the state can make progress, that extremism at least can still be countered in the Gem State.
It’s still possible to hit the brakes before the state goes over the cliff.
You may be asking for some evidence of that.
The clout in Idaho of the far right, to which now should be appended the (ill-named) Idaho Freedom Foundation, is large, sweeping through the corps of elected officials, many state legislators among others, not to mention the state Republican Party structure. But it is not absolute.
Within the party, there’s rapidly growing pushback. Dozens of former and some current Republican elected officials have spoken out and, more important, organized. Their success is yet to be determined, but first steps have been taken; among them a willingness of people to go on the record. Legislators, too, have been pushing back. When a half-dozen of them in Idaho Falls were accused of crossing the party platform (which charge doesn’t even seem supportable, but no matter), those legislators refused to be called on the carpet for doing their jobs. It was a positive sign.
So is the push, by way of a ballot initiative through a non-partisan organization, for open primaries and ranked choice voting. These changes to state election law could have the effect of improving chances that the large voting population in the middle will have its voices heard and its votes made more effective. The measure already has passed, its advocates say, 50,000 petition signatures, which makes it a better than even bet for reaching the ballot next November—and if it does, chances of passage would be decent at least. The legislature still could mess with it after that, but enough members might understand that as too provocative.
Within Idaho government, mainly in areas where extremists have less voice, there’s been some useful activity. Governor Brad Little’s Idaho Launch program started in October, which aims to help as many as 10,000 Idaho high school students link with post-secondary education (community colleges and other options) specifically related to employment, appears to be an excellent effort. Others, including Empowering Parents, may show some useful results in years to come too.
The bad actors on the extremes have not been getting away easily, either, in a significant number of cases. Consider the legal action undertaken in Coeur d’Alene against would-be disrupters of the year before. Remember also: Ammon Bundy is in hiding and on the run.
Don’t forget either some smart activity on the part of Idaho Democrats—and yes, there has been some. I’ve talked with Democrats this year who have, unusually for their party, started looking far ahead and deep into the grass roots toward a rebuild of their operation and election chances in Idaho. They have a massive challenge, to be sure, but more than in a long time, a number of determined people are organizing and approaching it in a more practical fashion.
The times can allow for it, too. The doom-laden world view of the extremes to the contrary, much is going well in both the state and the nation: The economy (in remarkably positive shape overall, in Idaho and nationally), peace (for the United States at least), a passing of the pandemic and much more. The times can allow for improvement and, for the fair-minded, be cause for optimism.
The perspective is never as monochrome as it sometimes looks.
Hang in there in ‘24. The ride may be bumpy, but we’ll get through it.
STAPILUS: Links and ties
It was just about 50 years ago that Richard Butler, an expatriate Californian, came to Kootenai County and founded the Aryan Nations, physically established near Hayden Lake.
It established some notoriety within a few years as a hub of activity for extremist and racist people and groups. After a lawsuit effectively extinguished it in 2000, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem reflected, “we had people living in this community and in this area that were full of fear. We had many people that lived outside of this community that wouldn’t come here because they were afraid.”
That was true, but within this context: The Aryan Nations compound included only a small number of people, serving as an outpost in a society that emphatically did not accept it. When the compound was razed, the community overwhelmingly cheered. The racists were largely unconnected to the larger community.
Kootenai County still is a target for extremism, as the Patriot Front group showed in June 2022 when 31 people associated with it were arrested by law enforcement when they apparently were planning to disrupt a pride parade. They poured into Coeur d’Alene from around the nation.
The difference now is that some elements of extreme groups are much better connected.
Consider the national and Idaho linkages of one recent newcomer to the state — as just one example among many, this one being different for having picked up strong news attention.
The best known recent far-right event nationally was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—no doubt you remember it. One of the people there was a talk radio host named Dave Reilly, who said he attended to write about the event, which he did (notably on Twitter). But a report in InvestigateWest says he also “was part of a private invitation-only online group involved with brainstorming, planning and promoting the rally, courtroom testimony and leaked chat messages subsequently revealed.” You don’t get that kind of invite without close connections to the people running it.
Online posts also indicate his support for the America First Political Action Conference, founded, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported, “by Nick Fuentes, a former co-host of a podcast with James Allsup, the former Washington State University student who was ejected from the Whitman County Republican Party and whose appearance at a Spokane County Republican Party gathering prompted the resignation of the party’s chair. Both Fuentes and Allsup have been banned from social media platforms for views espousing white nationalism.”
Reilly has moved to Idaho, where in 2021 (a year after his arrival) he ran for a seat on the Post Falls school board—with the endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. He lost, but running against a lifelong Post Falls resident who had organized backing, and after Reilly’s own past was aired in news reports, he pulled a respectable 46.6% of the vote.
Michelle Lippert, a school board member who worked with Citizens for Post Falls Schools in opposition to Reilly’s candidacy, was quoted, “You want to know the difference between back in the 80s and now? When the Aryan Nations were big in this area you saw young men with shaved heads and jackets with patches on them and saw men with sort of a pseudo-Nazi uniform? Today they wear ties and jackets and don’t shave their heads. They don’t stick out.”
Reilly turned up in Idaho news again this fall, with reports that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is as influential as any organization in Idaho Republican politics, had hired him as a contractor on communications. The IFF is extremely well connected in Idaho politics; its word carries major weight in the Idaho Legislature.
The InvestigateWest article noted a raft of ironies: “The Idaho Freedom Foundation, which began in 2009 as a libertarian-leaning free-market think tank, has been contracting with the self-described Christian nationalist — who’s said ‘free markets are a problem,’ who hates ‘libertarianism more than any other political ideology,’ and who compares conservatives who make capitalism their highest value to ‘being a slave and BEGGING your massa to keep you in chains’.”
A half-century has indeed made a big difference in Idaho, and that’s going beyond appearances.
STAPILUS: Legitimate power
The wave of Idaho Republican Party purity tests, and the push for control by a faction of the party statewide, has been expanding to stunning levels in the last couple of years.
There seems to be no limit to the grasping for control by leaders of the state party, including Chair Dorothy Moon, and such allied groups as the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Republican legislators, even from the farthest right wing of the party, have been called into local star chambers to explain themselves and — presumably — beg for forgiveness for using their best judgment at the Statehouse.
You have to wonder what it will take finally to generate some meaningful pushback.
Maybe that’s beginning to happen.
There’s been, for a while now, some organized effort on the part of long-time Idaho Republicans who are pushing for a return to a Republican Party more like the one they knew a generation or two ago, and quietly among some local Republican leaders.
Backlash may be starting to grow among a tipping point of Idaho legislators, maybe enough to change the political atmosphere.
Directing your attention now to Idaho Falls, where all six of the legislators in Districts 32 and 33 have been called to answer charges of deviation from the state party platform. All six have declined to appear, though five did hold a recent town hall meeting (which spoke to a range of legislative issues, and surely was a better use of their time). What’s most remarkable about the six is how different they are. One of them, Barbara Ehardt, is a fierce culture warrior solidly on the right flank of the legislature; she still wasn’t pure enough to evade the inquisition, and quite reasonably expressed astonishment that she’d been targeted. (Apparently, her chief sin had to do with funding public schools.)
Maybe that claim of Ehardt infidelity was the last straw, the clear evidence that no Republican legislator is safe. In any event, you can sense something a little different in the air.
Consider the comments from one of the six, Representative Marco Erickson, in an interview with the columnist Chuck Malloy. The new party disciplinary actions, he said, “wakes up people to the idea of why they need to run as precinct officers. We need to have rational people in there and civil discourse again. We’re going to have to take those small neighborhood positions and take back the party.”
Spot on.
If his talk of precinct officers strikes you as small stuff, be advised: It isn’t.
If you’re wondering how the extremists and power grabbers took over the Idaho Republican Party, remember: They did it the honest and old-fashioned and structurally sound way.
They ran their candidates for precinct committee spots in the primary elections. (Battles over precinct committee positions are age-old, and tend simply to be won by whoever outworks the other side.) Upon winning majorities of these offices at the county level, they take control of the local party levers, which can strongly affect who runs for county and legislative offices, and in some places provides assistance and encouragement for like-minded people to run for non-partisan city and school offices.
Then, when enough counties are of like mind, they can take over the state party central committee, which can control the direction and select the leadership of the party statewide.
How did the current leadership of the Idaho Republican Party get there? That’s how.
How do you beat them? The same way.
The good news for people like Erickson is that both sides can play, and the odds are that his will be able to generate more public support—most likely—than those now in power.
Erickson said he now plans to run for a precinct office himself. That would make perfect sense, and he would be well advised to get his fellow legislators, and others of like mind, to do the same.
It’s unglamorous, hard work. But it’s how actual change happens.
STAPILUS: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho” map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.”
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
Moving to Idaho: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane's new elections data dashboard hasn't really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the "Voters Moving to Idaho" map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn't overstate his Gem State connections: "I cannot say with first hand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I've never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans."
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d'Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn't happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we'd paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today's Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
In Idaho politics, the word "freedom" continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane's new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state's population.
However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that's of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he's posted so far.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. reach him at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book, "What do you Mean by That?" is available on amazon or at www.ridenbaugh.com/ whatdoyoumeanbythat/.
STAPILUS: Flavors of freedom
In Idaho politics, the word “freedom” continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Your definition and someone else’s may vary.
One of the state’s most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding “freedom”; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you aren’t careful … which ideologues often aren’t.
The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called “Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom.” It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration.
First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of “personal” and “economic” freedom. There’s plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the group’s heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile.
That’s because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of “freedom” by state.
Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others.
It does best on “economic freedom,” which you could translate to “freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes,” coming in seventh.
On “personal freedom,” Idaho’s ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas.
The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts.
Idaho ranked first in the nation on “health insurance freedom,” though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, “Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year.”
Try applying that to your personal “freedom” when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance.
On the “personal freedom” side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well.
It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (“driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods”), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol.
And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to “the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of driver’s licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers).” You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered.
Abortion, generally, didn’t appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially.
Idaho does rank third highest, however, on “gun freedom.” That should come as no shock.
So who’s free? To do what? What’s important to you?
STAPILUS: The lines are blurring in Idaho higher education
The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,” courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees” in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
KIGGINS: We want more people around our table — to help us reach deeper into south-central Idaho, teach us what we don’t know, bring a new accent to our voice.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On Nov. 9, the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college — now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.”
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large — imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time — this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear.
But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the CWI proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
STAPILUS: Remembering Max Black, the quintessential Idaho legislator
Max Black, an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on Nov. 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the Legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cellphone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out-of-the-blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the Legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield” Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime — and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,” into publication the next year, and from that year to this, Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.” That, too, would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.
STAPILUS: Finding the middle? Local election results show pattern in Idaho
Local elections, like those last week in Idaho cities and school districts, often are decided because of local considerations and concerns. A city mayor or school board member may be long-established and uncontroversial and thereby win another term, or may be the subject of hot debate (for good reason or not) and be dropped by the voters.
Some other patterns do turn up, though, and one this year in Idaho and other places involves candidates promoted by far-right groups or local Republican Party organizations. In last week’s elections in Idaho, quite a few of these candidates didn’t succeed.
These cases, all involving offices officially non-partisan, involve different kinds of stories.
Election Day in the Magic Valley was a mixed bag — with Twin Falls and Declo among cities voting for change and Burley and Bellevue among those sticking with incumbents.
The Boise mayoral contest, for example, had partisan overtones. The city has become increasingly blue over the last couple of decades, and the incumbent mayor, Lauren McLean, has long been identified as a Democrat. Her opponent, Mike Masterson, has said he formerly was a Republican but is no longer; nonetheless, an informal “R” seemed attached to his name as a “D” was to McLean’s.
All other factors aside — many concerns and issues were raised, and some may have affected a number of votes — the vote McLean received is not far off from what most credible Democratic candidates normally receive in the city. Seen in that way, Boise followed a partisan pattern.
Although the state’s second-largest city, Meridian, is a far more Republican place, the dynamic actually looked similar. Mayor Robert Simison, like McLean seeking a second term, has been relatively centrist and mostly uncontroversial. His chief opponent, Mike Hon, described himself: “I’m a conservative. And I think Meridian is mostly a conservative place. So that’s why we want to focus on family values.” Simison won with about 70% of the vote.
There aren’t many other large population centers around the state where the dynamic works that way. But an informal “R” label this election proved less useful for a number of candidates than it often did in recent years when, for example, candidates for the North Idaho College Board and the West Bonner School District board have ridden those endorsements to wins.
In the West Ada School District, two incumbents, Rene Ozuna and David Binetti, were challenged by well-funded challengers with strong local Republican connections. Both incumbents won, however.
The Idaho Ed News reported that the two highest profile contests for the Coeur d’Alene School Board resulted in losses for the two candidates supported by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee; the two winners apparently (to judge from their fundraising and lists of supporters) appear to have gone into the contest with eyes open and strong organization.
The story was similar with the Coeur d’Alene city council election; one observer snarked, “Frankly, after this, maybe #idgop #KCRCC should persist in ‘rating and vetting’ and producing lists of candidates to put in front of voters. It’s the kiss of death.”
In Nampa, the connections to party organizations are thinner, but you can suss them out. In one faceoff, Stephanie Binns, an educator, took what would look like the Democratic side on hot issues, and contractor Jay Duffy took the Republican side; Binns won with 60% of the vote. In the other hot race in the district, the result went the other way, though the “informal R” got just 51%, in a very Republican community.
On the eastern side of the state, results in the Idaho Falls School District were strikingly similar.
In Caldwell, all three incumbents, facing challenges from the right, prevailed.
You can cite countervailing examples, but the number of centrist winners in last week’s contests were notable and may amount to a serious pattern.
There’s been talk over the last year of more centrist voters, groups and candidates pushing back against the strong campaigns from the right. Such efforts succeeded at the community college board level (in some places, not all).
And they may have succeeded again this November.
STAPILUS: The dam fight at 30-something
When the Snake River Basin Adjudication began in 1987, no one expected it would be completed quickly. Water adjudications in Western states often have taken decades, and the SRBA may have been the largest ever, covering six figures worth of water rights across almost nine-tenths of Idaho.
Nonetheless, it has been completed — at least in general terms — and it only took a remarkably brief 26 years.
That bit of history prowled around the back of my mind this week when I saw the latest court developments in the legal action aimed at breaching the four lower Snake River dams, located in southeastern Washington state. The dams are the Lower Granite (closest to the Idaho border), the Little Goose, the Lower Monumental and the Ice Harbor (near the confluence with the Columbia River).
The news involves a delay in further developments, which is to say, another in a long list of delays of anything resembling final action. Specifically, the parties involved asked the court for another 45 days to negotiate, following up on an earlier delay of 60 days.
Those are a pittance. The legal action over the four dams started in 1993, which means attorneys have been kept busy on the subject for 30 years — three years longer than it took to adjudicate the highly complex and contentious water rights across most of Idaho.
It’s hard to conceive that there’s much new left to talk about.
The issues associated with the dams (and I’m not going to try to relitigate them all here) mainly concern preservation of declining salmon runs on one hand, and the electric power the dams generate, and concerns about impacts on commercial river traffic (you’ll hear this a lot at Lewiston) on the other. Environmental, tribal and some governments have been on one side, and a number of federal agencies, economic interests and others have filled the other. The region, and many of its top elected officials, have been split - and within the parties as well as between them.
One report from the University of Washington said, “Despite research and knowledge of the effects of the LSRDs on salmon and steelhead populations, river ecology, and tribal sovereignty there remains resistance at the state and federal level. The barrier to remove the LSRDs for Governor [Jay] Inslee (D) of Washington is the fact that the dams produce renewable energy, recreational, and economic benefits. However, both Gov. Inslee and Senator [Patty Murray] have been open to exploring the possibility of removing the dams if the benefits and services the dams create can be replaced by alternatives.”
The Yale School of the Environment noted that over the last three decades, “On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act.”
Neither side seems inclined to quit.
Still, after 30 years, the context of the legal battle has changed, and the changes may suggest where this is heading.
First, in the last decade, the debate has taken place in the context of demolition of a number of other dams in the region.
Second, the dams need repairs if they’re going to continue in service, and that will be costly.
Third, renewable energy, notably solar and wind, has taken off in a big way in the inland Northwest, and the argument that the dams are needed for their electric power generation has become less central in the debate.
It could be that if the parties come to accept some of the trend lines, and not just the starting and hoped-for ending points, the case could be resolved before another 30 years has passed.
STAPILUS: Legislating parental notification of bullying, violence
In a single vote, the governing majority demonstrated its complete lack of concern for two things that likely do interest a wide range of Idahoans:
First, bullying of and by students.
And second, parental involvement and notification of issues in their children’s lives.
House Bill 539 is another in the long line of measures imposing a requirement on how local school districts deal with children, and this one operates in a familiar way: Most significantly, through parental notification. The legislative summary said it would “require school principals to notify parents and guardians of a student’s involvement in harassment, intimidation, bullying, violence, or self-harm and to provide empowering materials and requires school districts to report incidents and confirm the distribution of the materials to the State Department of Education.”
The statement of purpose added, “While it is important to know how much bullying is taking place, there is not much state policymakers can do with this simple quantification. Given the relationship between those who are bullied and harm to self and others, this bill aims to better address the needs of those who are bullied in addition to responding to those who do the bullying.”
Okay: On one level, this would seem to be right up the legislature’s alley. Parental notification is big with Idaho legislators when it comes to a variety of topics like abortion, library materials, gender, curriculum content and testing standards, sex education, vaccinations (and related medical measures) and much more.
And the problem of bullying is not a small matter. Aside from the many reports from schools, there’s been a spike in teen suicides around Idaho (and beyond). Idaho has one of the nation’s worst records for teen suicide (46th best among the states). The Boise School District last fall reported a group of four student suicides in the space of just two months. (That’s the same number of student deaths, but self-inflicted, as the multiple murder of University of Idaho students in Moscow the year before; guess which got the international attention.)
Representative Chris Mathias, D-Boise, the bill’s origins sponsor, remarked that, “For each incident, it would bring us confidence that the districts were providing important pieces of information to all the parties involved: the bully, the bully’s parents, the bullied, the bullied’s parents. And specifically that they would be receiving, to quote from the bill, ‘parental empowerment materials, including suicide prevention resources and information on methods to limit students access to means of harm to self and others.’”
Given all this, you might think the anti-bullying bill — which really wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, requiring not much more than notification — would be a slam dunk.
But it failed on the House floor, 32-38; most of the House Republican leadership voted against it. You can see the vote breakdown at https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2024/legislation/H0539/. Getting at “why” leads to a better and more subtle understanding of what motivates the Idaho Legislature’s majority.
It certainly has nothing to do with the supposed concerns of Representative Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, who talked about, “The poor principal (who) is going to get this ‘Oh one more thing I have to report’.” This is beyond ridiculous: This is a legislature that has poured on the culture war requirements, year after year, decade after decade, when it comes to public schools.
They’re happy to have the parents weigh in on subjects — like those a few paragraphs back — where they suspect the parents (or at least the squeaky-wheel parents) will side with the legislative majority’s viewpoint.
And what is the legislature’s opinion on bullying?
You can’t indict all 105 of them. In the House, 32 (Republicans among them) voted in favor of the bullying notification bill, and there are surely more ayes in the Senate.
But for the operating majority, bullying is one of the facts of student life they’re not interested in discouraging.
Ponder for a moment what that says about the people who run the Idaho Legislature. Then think it over again.
STAPILUS: Processed budgets
From Idaho’s Joint Finance Appropriations Committee come lessons in whether complication improves the process … or, what could possibly go wrong?
For decades — generations, actually — the Idaho legislative budget committee acronymed JFAC has had a consistent procedure when it comes to hearing budget proposals and then setting — writing and voting on — actual budgets for state spending on agencies and beyond.
It has involved splitting the work into two parts, spanning nearly all of most sessions. First come the hearings, in which state officials and others involved talk about what they need and propose, in a single comprehensive overview. Once that’s done, they take a short breather, after which the committee members go through the agencies one by one and pass a long series of budgets. All of it is time consuming and attention devouring, often taking most of their mornings during the session. The legislative session usually ends around two weeks after the committee has finished its work, which is about how long the budgets take to pass through action on the floors.
This has worked pretty well for a very long time. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, or that legislative leaders shouldn’t try. Other states use various approaches and for the most part all are able to make them work too.
But if you’re going to change the system, be careful. Budget-setting for a state government is complex and sometimes emotional and highly political, and the process should be well understood and broadly accepted. And there should be no hint of under-the-table philosophical agendas.
The new process for this session, promoted by House Speaker Mike Moyle and adopted by the JFAC co-chairs, Senator Scott Grow and Representative Wendy Horman, calls for fracturing the process. It begins with passing, in advance of any hearings, a “bare-bones” budget for everyone—just enough, presumably, to keep the lights on — and then, after a much shorter public hearing process (fewer public statements from agency advocates, more decisions behind closed doors), considering what should be added to (or maybe subtracted from) the bare bones. This back-and-forth approach tends to remove things from their context.
The initial “bare bones” budgets this session were passed by JFAC shortly after the start of the session, in a single two and a half-hour session on January 16. All 15 committee Republicans voted in favor, and the five Democrats voted against. The nays were vocal about it. Senator Janie Ward-Engelking, for example, said “We received these budgets on Friday and are being asked to vote on them on Tuesday, to set the entire budget for the state in the second week of the session before we even have a change in employee compensation recommendation in place, before we have the Millennium Fund recommendation in place.” In other words, a budget was being passed before committee members even had the relevant information for making even any broad-brush decisions.
Apparently, many of the committee’s Republicans apparently started having second thoughts, too.
On February 2, a dozen JFAC members — a majority, most Republicans but including Democrats — decided they wanted to pass their own budgets, after gathering more information to hand. Representative Britt Raybould explained some of that: “The budget that was outlined at the beginning of the year did not actually reflect all of the maintenance line items … In most instances it left out nondiscretionary, it left out replacement items and other what you think of as sort of regular and expected fund adjustments.”
That means two entirely different and conflicting budgets are wandering around the legislature, with lawmakers concerned about what might happen if multiple budgets wind up being passed.
There isn’t anything fatal about this. In the worst case, if the legislature were to actually pass more than one conflicting budget (they’ll say it couldn’t happen, and it’s unlikely, but never say never) the governor could veto one; or, a normal rule of legislative construction might mean that the last one passed takes precedence.
But the whole new system does seem to be resulting in more heat and less light when it comes to deciding how the state’s dollars should be sent.
Which may be fine with some people, ideology depending. But Idahoans simply hoping for a smoothly functioning government are likely to have their doubts.
STAPILUS: Schooled on guns
Idaho House Bill 415 fits so neatly into a central piece of political rhetoric that the surprise is that its progress at the legislature has been slowed as much as it has; which is to say, not much.
The bill provides that any public school employee—who obtains an enhanced concealed weapons permit, not terribly hard to get—who wants to carry a firearm or other “deadly weapon” to school can do it, whether local administrators and school boards like it or not. The sponsor, Representative Ted Hill of Eagle, said, “These select school employees will provide an armed force to protect children in the first minutes of an attack. We don’t want to have a stack of 20 kids dead in a classroom because we didn’t do anything.”
The National Rifle Association couldn’t have put it more simply.
After what looked like a short pause, the Idaho House passed it this week (53 to 16, veto-proof), to the Senate for consideration there.
Here are some of the things it does.
Any pistol-packing school employee would have absolute state clearance to carry, regardless whether school principals, teachers, parents, boards or anyone else likes it, “as long as the firearm or deadly weapon is concealed and the school employee maintains immediate control” of it. I’m trying to imagine how that would work in a high school environment. What does that imply about the handling and carrying of guns by staff?
I say “school employee” here because the packers can include not only teachers but, “an officer, board member, commissioner, executive, elected or appointed official, or independent contractor.” Imagine someone who isn’t an educator but has some business relationship with the district … who maybe has a history of domestic or other violence … and obtains an enhanced license. You doubt that could ever happen? Think again. And think as well about how much easier a real shooter would find infiltrating a school already accustomed to seeing adults routinely carrying firearms.
Think too about the school employees who may be well trained to teach but maybe less well schooled on emergency tactical response. The bill has that inexperience question covered this way: “No school employee shall be held civilly or criminally liable for deciding to engage or not to engage in an armed confrontation during a lethal threat to safety inside of a school or on school property. The decision to use a firearm or other deadly weapon during a life-threatening incident inside of a school or on school property lies solely within the school employee and is a personal decision.”
So: If a covered school employee simply decides to pick up their gun—and start firing—the immunity is apparently absolute, regardless who was injured or killed. I can hear right now a smart defense attorney defending a murder charge using this provision as a shield. The beweaponed employee’s personal belief is enough for a shield against any kind of legal action, civil or criminal.
These employees will not be compelled to disclose to anyone but a school administrator (and maybe board: it’s unclear there) and local law enforcement that a gun is in the classroom. In fact, the bill adds a new exemption for Idaho public records law: Any records relating to a school employee who’s carrying. A mere parent would be unable to find out if there’s a gun in their child’s classroom.
Private schools would be specifically exempted from the requirement. The bill’s opening paragraphs seem to endorse carrying guns there too, but a later section says: “Nothing in subsection (4) of this section shall limit the right of an owner of private property, including a private school, from permitting or prohibiting the carrying of a concealed firearm or other deadly weapon on his property.” If it’s such a good idea for public schools, then why not their private counterparts?
There’s also this curious if minor punitive provision: “No public school shall display any signage whatsoever indicating that school property is a gun-free zone, and any violation of this subsection shall result in a fine of three hundred dollars ($300), enforced by the county prosecuting attorney.”
Current state law already allows local school districts to set their own policies, and some Idaho districts do allow some heat-packing by staff. But a Post Falls police detective has pointed out that conditions are different in the various school districts. “In the Post Falls School District, we have a very close relationship with our police department. We’re able to have responding officers at any location in the district within three minutes or less than that. … We need to talk about what’s best for each individual school district.”
That’s a problem when legislation devolves to the level of a bumper sticker. As it has here.
As it is, the Idaho Legislature may well pass this thing; it can be labeled “pro-gun” and therefore hard to oppose. But be aware: Extra warnings may be needed in future when you send the kids off to school.
STAPILUS: Not what it was
In the last 20 years, you can track the trend line of Idaho conservatism — here meaning in the way it is most commonly intended — alongside that of its maybe most prominent non-party organization, the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
This is noteworthy now especially because the IFF is at an inflection point, with the departure of the only leader it has ever had — Wayne Hoffman — and the arrival of a new one, Ron Nate. That inflection point, though, seems to extend not to a different direction but to an acceleration of the same one.
But first a little history.
The origins of the IFF, as the group’s About web page indicates, go back to a small group of Canyon County enthusiasts in libertarian politics, of which the spark plug was a businessman named Ralph Smeed. I knew Smeed (as did Hoffman, who evidently was much influenced by him). He was a regular visitor to the Caldwell newsroom where I worked in the mid-70s and to many events I covered. He struck me as a likable guy (attack politics in today’s sense weren’t his thing, and his political criticisms tended toward the ideological), as single-minded on the subject of less government and taxes but vague when it came to specifics and implications. He was much enamored of the “Austrian” school of economics (notably Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), which matched with his cultural and business views.
After a periodical (the Idaho Compass, of which future Senator Steve Symms was also a contributor) and a small think tank (the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives) failed to make large waves outside committed libertarian circles, he and several cohorts looked into founding an organization with more impact. With Hoffman, they in 2008 set the framework for the IFF.
That’s what it was originally about: Promotion of the libertarian idea. The group’s about page still says “The Idaho Freedom Foundation exists to advance the conservative principles — limited government, free markets and self-reliance …”
I suspect that Smeed, who died in 2012, would barely recognize it now.
One reason may have its roots in another sentence from the web site: “At that point (in 2008), every state in the country had a free market think tank except for Idaho.” When the Idaho group was founded, it joined the club, more or less, and over time became caught up in national political/cultural enthusiasms, whether “social justice,” critical race theory, cryptocurrency advocacy, “porn literacy” and similar issues. It didn’t abandon libertarianism entirely, but it’s efforts turned into a local-outlet mirror of one side of the national culture wars.
The elevation of Ron Nate to leadership of the organization seems to confirm as much and may expand it.
Nate is a former state representative from Rexburg (Republican of course), though he narrowly lost his primary election in 2018, and after returning to the House in 2020, lost another in 2022. That may be an indicator.
He co-founded the Madison Liberty Institute, whose policy statements track closely with the state Republican Party leadership. After Governor Brad Little’s state of the state address, for example, the group released a statement largely critical of the governor (that sounded a whole lot like GOP Chair Dorothy Moon’s), and included a quote from Nate: “The Governor may mean well, but throughout his address he raises concerns with his tendency toward using executive orders to achieve his aims.”
He also has been the Madison County chair of anti-LGBT MassResistance, an extreme group deep into the culture wars and says of itself, “We engage in issues and events that most other conservative groups are afraid to touch.” (The group is national, active in many states.)
And this has gone pretty far down that road; von Hayek and von Mises no longer seem to be much of the picture. Somehow I doubt Smeed would have had truck with contracting a propagandist from the alt-right to help with messaging.
The IFF isn’t what it was, if it ever was.
STAPILUS: Will the brakes work?
Last week, I wrote about the growing links and connections the far right has been developing in some of the most politically influential sectors of Idaho. It’s part of a string of 2023 down sides of important developments in the state.
Those are cause for concern, but not despair; they should translate to action, not passivity. Today, looking ahead to a new year, a few thoughts on Idaho developments that show positive things can happen and that people in the state can make progress, that extremism at least can still be countered in the Gem State.
It’s still possible to hit the brakes before the state goes over the cliff.
You may be asking for some evidence of that.
The clout in Idaho of the far right, to which now should be appended the (ill-named) Idaho Freedom Foundation, is large, sweeping through the corps of elected officials, many state legislators among others, not to mention the state Republican Party structure. But it is not absolute.
Within the party, there’s rapidly growing pushback. Dozens of former and some current Republican elected officials have spoken out and, more important, organized. Their success is yet to be determined, but first steps have been taken; among them a willingness of people to go on the record. Legislators, too, have been pushing back. When a half-dozen of them in Idaho Falls were accused of crossing the party platform (which charge doesn’t even seem supportable, but no matter), those legislators refused to be called on the carpet for doing their jobs. It was a positive sign.
So is the push, by way of a ballot initiative through a non-partisan organization, for open primaries and ranked choice voting. These changes to state election law could have the effect of improving chances that the large voting population in the middle will have its voices heard and its votes made more effective. The measure already has passed, its advocates say, 50,000 petition signatures, which makes it a better than even bet for reaching the ballot next November—and if it does, chances of passage would be decent at least. The legislature still could mess with it after that, but enough members might understand that as too provocative.
Within Idaho government, mainly in areas where extremists have less voice, there’s been some useful activity. Governor Brad Little’s Idaho Launch program started in October, which aims to help as many as 10,000 Idaho high school students link with post-secondary education (community colleges and other options) specifically related to employment, appears to be an excellent effort. Others, including Empowering Parents, may show some useful results in years to come too.
The bad actors on the extremes have not been getting away easily, either, in a significant number of cases. Consider the legal action undertaken in Coeur d’Alene against would-be disrupters of the year before. Remember also: Ammon Bundy is in hiding and on the run.
Don’t forget either some smart activity on the part of Idaho Democrats—and yes, there has been some. I’ve talked with Democrats this year who have, unusually for their party, started looking far ahead and deep into the grass roots toward a rebuild of their operation and election chances in Idaho. They have a massive challenge, to be sure, but more than in a long time, a number of determined people are organizing and approaching it in a more practical fashion.
The times can allow for it, too. The doom-laden world view of the extremes to the contrary, much is going well in both the state and the nation: The economy (in remarkably positive shape overall, in Idaho and nationally), peace (for the United States at least), a passing of the pandemic and much more. The times can allow for improvement and, for the fair-minded, be cause for optimism.
The perspective is never as monochrome as it sometimes looks.
Hang in there in ‘24. The ride may be bumpy, but we’ll get through it.
STAPILUS: Links and ties
It was just about 50 years ago that Richard Butler, an expatriate Californian, came to Kootenai County and founded the Aryan Nations, physically established near Hayden Lake.
It established some notoriety within a few years as a hub of activity for extremist and racist people and groups. After a lawsuit effectively extinguished it in 2000, Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem reflected, “we had people living in this community and in this area that were full of fear. We had many people that lived outside of this community that wouldn’t come here because they were afraid.”
That was true, but within this context: The Aryan Nations compound included only a small number of people, serving as an outpost in a society that emphatically did not accept it. When the compound was razed, the community overwhelmingly cheered. The racists were largely unconnected to the larger community.
Kootenai County still is a target for extremism, as the Patriot Front group showed in June 2022 when 31 people associated with it were arrested by law enforcement when they apparently were planning to disrupt a pride parade. They poured into Coeur d’Alene from around the nation.
The difference now is that some elements of extreme groups are much better connected.
Consider the national and Idaho linkages of one recent newcomer to the state — as just one example among many, this one being different for having picked up strong news attention.
The best known recent far-right event nationally was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—no doubt you remember it. One of the people there was a talk radio host named Dave Reilly, who said he attended to write about the event, which he did (notably on Twitter). But a report in InvestigateWest says he also “was part of a private invitation-only online group involved with brainstorming, planning and promoting the rally, courtroom testimony and leaked chat messages subsequently revealed.” You don’t get that kind of invite without close connections to the people running it.
Online posts also indicate his support for the America First Political Action Conference, founded, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review reported, “by Nick Fuentes, a former co-host of a podcast with James Allsup, the former Washington State University student who was ejected from the Whitman County Republican Party and whose appearance at a Spokane County Republican Party gathering prompted the resignation of the party’s chair. Both Fuentes and Allsup have been banned from social media platforms for views espousing white nationalism.”
Reilly has moved to Idaho, where in 2021 (a year after his arrival) he ran for a seat on the Post Falls school board—with the endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee. He lost, but running against a lifelong Post Falls resident who had organized backing, and after Reilly’s own past was aired in news reports, he pulled a respectable 46.6% of the vote.
Michelle Lippert, a school board member who worked with Citizens for Post Falls Schools in opposition to Reilly’s candidacy, was quoted, “You want to know the difference between back in the 80s and now? When the Aryan Nations were big in this area you saw young men with shaved heads and jackets with patches on them and saw men with sort of a pseudo-Nazi uniform? Today they wear ties and jackets and don’t shave their heads. They don’t stick out.”
Reilly turned up in Idaho news again this fall, with reports that the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which is as influential as any organization in Idaho Republican politics, had hired him as a contractor on communications. The IFF is extremely well connected in Idaho politics; its word carries major weight in the Idaho Legislature.
The InvestigateWest article noted a raft of ironies: “The Idaho Freedom Foundation, which began in 2009 as a libertarian-leaning free-market think tank, has been contracting with the self-described Christian nationalist — who’s said ‘free markets are a problem,’ who hates ‘libertarianism more than any other political ideology,’ and who compares conservatives who make capitalism their highest value to ‘being a slave and BEGGING your massa to keep you in chains’.”
A half-century has indeed made a big difference in Idaho, and that’s going beyond appearances.
STAPILUS: Legitimate power
The wave of Idaho Republican Party purity tests, and the push for control by a faction of the party statewide, has been expanding to stunning levels in the last couple of years.
There seems to be no limit to the grasping for control by leaders of the state party, including Chair Dorothy Moon, and such allied groups as the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Republican legislators, even from the farthest right wing of the party, have been called into local star chambers to explain themselves and — presumably — beg for forgiveness for using their best judgment at the Statehouse.
You have to wonder what it will take finally to generate some meaningful pushback.
Maybe that’s beginning to happen.
There’s been, for a while now, some organized effort on the part of long-time Idaho Republicans who are pushing for a return to a Republican Party more like the one they knew a generation or two ago, and quietly among some local Republican leaders.
Backlash may be starting to grow among a tipping point of Idaho legislators, maybe enough to change the political atmosphere.
Directing your attention now to Idaho Falls, where all six of the legislators in Districts 32 and 33 have been called to answer charges of deviation from the state party platform. All six have declined to appear, though five did hold a recent town hall meeting (which spoke to a range of legislative issues, and surely was a better use of their time). What’s most remarkable about the six is how different they are. One of them, Barbara Ehardt, is a fierce culture warrior solidly on the right flank of the legislature; she still wasn’t pure enough to evade the inquisition, and quite reasonably expressed astonishment that she’d been targeted. (Apparently, her chief sin had to do with funding public schools.)
Maybe that claim of Ehardt infidelity was the last straw, the clear evidence that no Republican legislator is safe. In any event, you can sense something a little different in the air.
Consider the comments from one of the six, Representative Marco Erickson, in an interview with the columnist Chuck Malloy. The new party disciplinary actions, he said, “wakes up people to the idea of why they need to run as precinct officers. We need to have rational people in there and civil discourse again. We’re going to have to take those small neighborhood positions and take back the party.”
Spot on.
If his talk of precinct officers strikes you as small stuff, be advised: It isn’t.
If you’re wondering how the extremists and power grabbers took over the Idaho Republican Party, remember: They did it the honest and old-fashioned and structurally sound way.
They ran their candidates for precinct committee spots in the primary elections. (Battles over precinct committee positions are age-old, and tend simply to be won by whoever outworks the other side.) Upon winning majorities of these offices at the county level, they take control of the local party levers, which can strongly affect who runs for county and legislative offices, and in some places provides assistance and encouragement for like-minded people to run for non-partisan city and school offices.
Then, when enough counties are of like mind, they can take over the state party central committee, which can control the direction and select the leadership of the party statewide.
How did the current leadership of the Idaho Republican Party get there? That’s how.
How do you beat them? The same way.
The good news for people like Erickson is that both sides can play, and the odds are that his will be able to generate more public support—most likely—than those now in power.
Erickson said he now plans to run for a precinct office himself. That would make perfect sense, and he would be well advised to get his fellow legislators, and others of like mind, to do the same.
It’s unglamorous, hard work. But it’s how actual change happens.
STAPILUS: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane’s new elections data dashboard hasn’t really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the “Voters Moving to Idaho” map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn’t overstate his Gem State connections: “I cannot say with firsthand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I’ve never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans.”
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d’Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn’t happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we’d paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today’s Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane’s new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state’s population. However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that’s of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he’s posted so far.
Moving to Idaho: The changing face of Gem State voters
The top-line news in Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane's new elections data dashboard hasn't really been news for more than 40 years. Still, drawing out the details in finer granularity does make for some expanded understanding of why Idaho is where it is.
McGrane has posted on his website five dashboards, covering absentee voting, demographic data about voters, lobbying and campaign finance, which all merit a look, but the attention has gone to the "Voters Moving to Idaho" map, which has generated stories in the Idaho Capital Sun, the Seattle Times and even an analysis piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post.
Bump didn't overstate his Gem State connections: "I cannot say with first hand experience that Idaho is a great state. Like most Americans (I assume), I've never been there. The state would like you to know, though, that it is gaining new residents and that, in apparent accordance with the political-sorting theory of intrastate relocation, that most of those new arrivals are Republicans."
That the larger share of recent arrivals are Republicans has seemed evident to closer-in Idaho watchers for a long time. The last time it was less than clear was, as indicated, around 40 to 50 years ago.
In the later 1970s, Idaho was economically and demographically a little stagnant. When its engines revved again in the next decade, Idahoans were noticing plenty of new people showing up in their midst, especially in the Boise and Coeur d'Alene areas. Political, lobbying, journalistic and other people I talked to back then were asking: Who were they?
We could tell that quite a few of them came from California, and (though the information sources were less than perfect) many seemed not to come from especially on-balance conservative places. For a short time, there was a persistent line of thought that the newcomers might moderate the Idaho electorate: Edge it leftward, making the state more politically competitive.
That didn't happen, of course. We might have known that earlier if we'd paid less attention to the top line numbers and looked for some smaller-scale trend indicators.
What I have in mind is the arrival, in small numbers at first, of people like Ron Rankin, a conservative Californian unappeased by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor there, and looking in the late sixties for a new place to make his ideological mark. That was Kootenai County, where he and others from California (including, on a more extreme level, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations) started organizing and spreading the word to those of like mind that this was the place to be. The seeds of today's Kootenai Republicanism trace back generally to him.
In Idaho politics, the word "freedom" continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Over time, Idaho generally was swept up in it. By the eighties, the arrivals were increasing in number and tilted more strongly Republican, and the trend line continued to steepen through the following decades. McGrane's new chart shows that as the Pacific states — California, Oregon, Washington — turned blue, the large share of their residents moving to Idaho were Republicans — in 2022, more than 60% of them in the case of each state. No great surprise.
The effect on Idaho society may be larger than the raw numbers suggest. Bump points out that in 2022, about 88,000 people came to Idaho from another state, one of the higher rates per capita but still only a small slice of the state's population.
However, if you add the incomers (often at smaller rates) over the course of four decades, together they have made significant change in Idaho.
A large portion of the Idaho electorate now is there because of a dynamic of rejecting other places. If there seems to be an increasingly angry tone to Idaho public life, a diminished sense of community and less willingness to get along, and the shifting nature of the Idaho Republican Party, well, that's of a piece, and probably a function in considerable part of the moving motivations of not all but many of the newcomers.
Of course, some of these changes work both ways: As red states draw more red people, blue states often do the same.
A suggestion to McGrane for another dashboard: Map the turned-in voter registrations from other states (notifications that a person has left Idaho and re-registered to vote somewhere else), and break that down by Idaho party registration. The results might be even more useful food for thought than the provocative charts he's posted so far.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. reach him at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book, "What do you Mean by That?" is available on amazon or at www.ridenbaugh.com/ whatdoyoumeanbythat/.
STAPILUS: Flavors of freedom
In Idaho politics, the word “freedom” continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it.
Your definition and someone else’s may vary.
One of the state’s most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding “freedom”; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you aren’t careful … which ideologues often aren’t.
The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called “Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom.” It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration.
First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of “personal” and “economic” freedom. There’s plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the group’s heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile.
That’s because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of “freedom” by state.
Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others.
It does best on “economic freedom,” which you could translate to “freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes,” coming in seventh.
On “personal freedom,” Idaho’s ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas.
The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts.
Idaho ranked first in the nation on “health insurance freedom,” though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, “Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year.”
Try applying that to your personal “freedom” when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance.
On the “personal freedom” side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well.
It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (“driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods”), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol.
And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to “the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of driver’s licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers).” You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered.
Abortion, generally, didn’t appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially.
Idaho does rank third highest, however, on “gun freedom.” That should come as no shock.
So who’s free? To do what? What’s important to you?
STAPILUS: The lines are blurring in Idaho higher education
The dividing line used to be clear between community colleges as one thing, and four-year colleges and universities as another.
Community colleges were two-year institutions. People sometimes used them to take lower-level collegiate courses, and then transfer to a four-year college or university, sometimes getting an associate degree in the process. Or they might take technical and vocational courses and training there, or do other preparatory work.
The four-year institutions, in this frame, would be where you find “higher education,” courses specifically leading to undergraduate or graduate degrees (“college degrees” in the usual sense).
The lines seem, of late, to be blurring.
KIGGINS: We want more people around our table — to help us reach deeper into south-central Idaho, teach us what we don’t know, bring a new accent to our voice.
It’s a national development, but it’s becoming increasingly visible in Idaho, and lately has erupted into some controversy. You can expect talk around the subject to grow.
Part of it has to do with community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees, which traditionally are the province of four-year institutions. The College of Southern Idaho at Twin Falls offers an Operations Management BAS Degree, which is a bachelor’s (intended for people who already have completed qualifications for an associate degree), but has been an outlier.
On Nov. 9, the board of the College of Western Idaho (Meridian-Nampa, founded in 2007) voted to provide a business administration bachelor’s at the community college — now Idaho’s largest college by overall enrollment, and its fastest-growing. The decision would be effective only if the state Board of Education agrees.
The addition was in a sense market-driven. Idaho Ed News reported that, “trustees pointed to a workforce demand. Within the past year, employers within 100 miles of CWI’s Nampa campus posted 18,000 listings for business-related jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree.” Idaho higher education isn’t meeting nearly those numbers.
The four-year institutions apparently do not approve. All four of Idaho’s four-years offer comparable (not exactly the same) business administration degrees, and three of them (Boise State University, the University of Idaho and Lewis-Clark State College) specifically asked the Board of Education to deny the request. (Idaho State University seems not to have weighed in.) BSU said that some of CWI’s arguments for the expansion were “inaccurate, unsupported and frankly outright misleading.”
This has turned into a squabble, with the institutions starting to throw shade at each other over graduation rates and other data points. (The objection from the University of Idaho, given its proposed affiliation with the mostly online University of Phoenix, is of special interest.)
Whatever happens in this specific issue, social and economic pressure is likely to move toward the community colleges in expanding their offerings, and this pressure point may become an education and political flash point in years ahead.
One reason is money. Community colleges almost always are far less costly for students to attend than are four-year institutions, and that seems to be true (speaking generally) in Idaho as elsewhere. CWI has reported its estimated tuition cost for a student to obtain the bachelor’s would be about $20,000, well below the four-year institutions.
Writ large — imagine this proposal for a bachelor’s degree expanding into a number of others over time — this could start to have a serious effect on the older Idaho colleges and universities, with overall ripple effects unclear.
But one of them is likely to be money, if students begin drifting away toward the less-expensive and more convenient community colleges. If you can get many of the same results at the less costly community level, why not?
The state Board of Education is expected to consider, and probably decide, on the CWI proposal at its December meeting. There are some indications it’s favorably inclined, but some of those indicators came before the other institutions began weighing in.
But this could mark the start of a reshaping of Idaho higher education. In the shape of college to come, the lines between different institutions, and different kinds of institutions, may become less clear.
STAPILUS: Remembering Max Black, the quintessential Idaho legislator
Max Black, an Idaho state representative from 1992 to 2006, and who died at Boise on Nov. 10, was a good state legislator.
I knew at the time, as I watched him at the statehouse, that he was a good legislator, but only years after he served did I piece together some of the important reasons why, and those reasons had nothing to do with the Legislature as such.
Max was cheerful, enthusiastic, seldom critical or downbeat (in my observation), and unlike many elected officials did not seem to be a great self-promoter. He was a well-regarded legislator, though, across the chamber and among people (such as lobbyists and reporters) around it. His reputation was made on the basis of careful work and maintaining good personal relationships. Throwing shade or red meat was nowhere near his style.
So what drove Max, if not the usually expected personal aggrandizement?
I got my first clue of that one day in 2012, years after his days in elected office, when my cellphone rang while I happened to be walking through the Idaho Statehouse. It was an out-of-the-blue call from Max, who I hadn’t seen for some years. His reason for the call: Knowing that I published books, he wanted to talk about a book proposal.
(A disclaimer: I am the publisher of the book I’m about to describe.)
I’ve fielded a number of such book pitch calls over the years, but this one was different from most. After leaving the Legislature, Max became deeply interested in regional history, to the point of taking extensive efforts to research it from original people and materials. He became captivated by the well-known southern Idaho murder case, from the late 19th century, of “Diamondfield” Jack Davis, who was convicted and nearly (and more than once) hanged for the killing of two sheepmen.
Books had been written before about Davis (I had even read one), and their writers included ample speculation but also lots of blank area when it came to important facts of the case and Davis’ life. I asked Max why he wanted to write a new one.
His answer was stunning. He had investigated the case from scratch, walking the desert landscape and visiting people in the region to find obscure clues. His persistence led him to the point of locating the firearm and one of the bullets involved in the murder case, and unlike anyone previously he had pieced together the evidence that Davis not only did not but could not have committed the crime — and he had developed nearly conclusive evidence about who did. He even unearthed new information about what became of Davis in his later years, and scotched a number of spurious stories.
He convinced me.
We brought the book, called “Diamondfield: Finding the Real Jack Davis,” into publication the next year, and from that year to this, Max has been a tireless promoter of it: His enthusiasm for the work he does has been as great as anyone I’ve known.
He also has been doing ongoing research into other obscure corners of western history, and he often has shared unexpected tales from the old, and sometimes not so old, intermountain west.
His persistence and ingenuity, and ability to find help and leverage information, was remarkable.
That’s not all there was to him, of course. An obituary said that, “He found joy in creating pens, trains, violins, boxes and really almost anything out of wood and giving his creations away or donating them for others to enjoy.” That, too, would fit with the Max Black I saw in the context of his book.
His enthusiasm, persistence and refusal to accept anything less than the best evidence before deciding on what the story really is: These are useful qualities for a state legislator, or anyone in a position of public responsibility.
STAPILUS: Finding the middle? Local election results show pattern in Idaho
Local elections, like those last week in Idaho cities and school districts, often are decided because of local considerations and concerns. A city mayor or school board member may be long-established and uncontroversial and thereby win another term, or may be the subject of hot debate (for good reason or not) and be dropped by the voters.
Some other patterns do turn up, though, and one this year in Idaho and other places involves candidates promoted by far-right groups or local Republican Party organizations. In last week’s elections in Idaho, quite a few of these candidates didn’t succeed.
These cases, all involving offices officially non-partisan, involve different kinds of stories.
Election Day in the Magic Valley was a mixed bag — with Twin Falls and Declo among cities voting for change and Burley and Bellevue among those sticking with incumbents.
The Boise mayoral contest, for example, had partisan overtones. The city has become increasingly blue over the last couple of decades, and the incumbent mayor, Lauren McLean, has long been identified as a Democrat. Her opponent, Mike Masterson, has said he formerly was a Republican but is no longer; nonetheless, an informal “R” seemed attached to his name as a “D” was to McLean’s.
All other factors aside — many concerns and issues were raised, and some may have affected a number of votes — the vote McLean received is not far off from what most credible Democratic candidates normally receive in the city. Seen in that way, Boise followed a partisan pattern.
Although the state’s second-largest city, Meridian, is a far more Republican place, the dynamic actually looked similar. Mayor Robert Simison, like McLean seeking a second term, has been relatively centrist and mostly uncontroversial. His chief opponent, Mike Hon, described himself: “I’m a conservative. And I think Meridian is mostly a conservative place. So that’s why we want to focus on family values.” Simison won with about 70% of the vote.
There aren’t many other large population centers around the state where the dynamic works that way. But an informal “R” label this election proved less useful for a number of candidates than it often did in recent years when, for example, candidates for the North Idaho College Board and the West Bonner School District board have ridden those endorsements to wins.
In the West Ada School District, two incumbents, Rene Ozuna and David Binetti, were challenged by well-funded challengers with strong local Republican connections. Both incumbents won, however.
The Idaho Ed News reported that the two highest profile contests for the Coeur d’Alene School Board resulted in losses for the two candidates supported by the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee; the two winners apparently (to judge from their fundraising and lists of supporters) appear to have gone into the contest with eyes open and strong organization.
The story was similar with the Coeur d’Alene city council election; one observer snarked, “Frankly, after this, maybe #idgop #KCRCC should persist in ‘rating and vetting’ and producing lists of candidates to put in front of voters. It’s the kiss of death.”
In Nampa, the connections to party organizations are thinner, but you can suss them out. In one faceoff, Stephanie Binns, an educator, took what would look like the Democratic side on hot issues, and contractor Jay Duffy took the Republican side; Binns won with 60% of the vote. In the other hot race in the district, the result went the other way, though the “informal R” got just 51%, in a very Republican community.
On the eastern side of the state, results in the Idaho Falls School District were strikingly similar.
In Caldwell, all three incumbents, facing challenges from the right, prevailed.
You can cite countervailing examples, but the number of centrist winners in last week’s contests were notable and may amount to a serious pattern.
There’s been talk over the last year of more centrist voters, groups and candidates pushing back against the strong campaigns from the right. Such efforts succeeded at the community college board level (in some places, not all).
And they may have succeeded again this November.
STAPILUS: The dam fight at 30-something
When the Snake River Basin Adjudication began in 1987, no one expected it would be completed quickly. Water adjudications in Western states often have taken decades, and the SRBA may have been the largest ever, covering six figures worth of water rights across almost nine-tenths of Idaho.
Nonetheless, it has been completed — at least in general terms — and it only took a remarkably brief 26 years.
That bit of history prowled around the back of my mind this week when I saw the latest court developments in the legal action aimed at breaching the four lower Snake River dams, located in southeastern Washington state. The dams are the Lower Granite (closest to the Idaho border), the Little Goose, the Lower Monumental and the Ice Harbor (near the confluence with the Columbia River).
The news involves a delay in further developments, which is to say, another in a long list of delays of anything resembling final action. Specifically, the parties involved asked the court for another 45 days to negotiate, following up on an earlier delay of 60 days.
Those are a pittance. The legal action over the four dams started in 1993, which means attorneys have been kept busy on the subject for 30 years — three years longer than it took to adjudicate the highly complex and contentious water rights across most of Idaho.
It’s hard to conceive that there’s much new left to talk about.
The issues associated with the dams (and I’m not going to try to relitigate them all here) mainly concern preservation of declining salmon runs on one hand, and the electric power the dams generate, and concerns about impacts on commercial river traffic (you’ll hear this a lot at Lewiston) on the other. Environmental, tribal and some governments have been on one side, and a number of federal agencies, economic interests and others have filled the other. The region, and many of its top elected officials, have been split - and within the parties as well as between them.
One report from the University of Washington said, “Despite research and knowledge of the effects of the LSRDs on salmon and steelhead populations, river ecology, and tribal sovereignty there remains resistance at the state and federal level. The barrier to remove the LSRDs for Governor [Jay] Inslee (D) of Washington is the fact that the dams produce renewable energy, recreational, and economic benefits. However, both Gov. Inslee and Senator [Patty Murray] have been open to exploring the possibility of removing the dams if the benefits and services the dams create can be replaced by alternatives.”
The Yale School of the Environment noted that over the last three decades, “On at least five occasions, federal judges ordered the agencies to consider removing the lower Snake River dams, and each time the agencies responded with delay and diversions, once going so far as to call the dams immutable parts of the landscape and therefore not subject to the Endangered Species Act.”
Neither side seems inclined to quit.
Still, after 30 years, the context of the legal battle has changed, and the changes may suggest where this is heading.
First, in the last decade, the debate has taken place in the context of demolition of a number of other dams in the region.
Second, the dams need repairs if they’re going to continue in service, and that will be costly.
Third, renewable energy, notably solar and wind, has taken off in a big way in the inland Northwest, and the argument that the dams are needed for their electric power generation has become less central in the debate.
It could be that if the parties come to accept some of the trend lines, and not just the starting and hoped-for ending points, the case could be resolved before another 30 years has passed.
Randy Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor and blogs at www.ridenbaugh.com. He can be reached at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com. His new book What Do You Mean by That? has just been released and can be found at http://www.ridenbaugh.com/whatdoyoumeanbythat/ and on Amazon.com.
Democrats have filed for 27 of the 35 Senate seats, which means 20 of those candidates will be running in current Republican-held seats.