STAPILUS: The new Idaho Republican geography (2024)

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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, “p*rn 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.

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.