Posts published in “Day: February 10, 2023”

Here’s a suggestion for how Idaho readers of legislative news might absorb it more effectively:

Read the legislative news from other states, too. And in addition to that, the websites of organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, and especially the cluster of ideologically-focused national education-related groups.

When you see a news story declaring the latest problematic (and maybe unconstitutional) idea is being sponsored by such-and-such an Idaho legislator, there’s an excellent chance it’s merely the local planting of something originating from a national organization. In fact, it’s a good probability.

One of the most influential organizations at the Statehouse is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which has an outsized impact through its ratings of legislation and legislators, and has an operations base in Boise. But put aside the recent (albeit amusing) headlines about how the group’s leader, Wayne Hoffman, now lives in Washington state. More important are the close ties the IFF has to “conservative, free market” interest groups around the country. These groups, active in many states, are far from grass roots. Not only the “Freedom” but also the “Idaho” in the IFF’s name is more illusion than fact.

ALEC is probably the better example of all this. Decades old (I was writing about its impact on the Idaho Legislature back in the 80s), it is a big-money collective of top corporate lobbyists who hold regular conferences to which state legislators - large numbers nationwide participate - are invited. The legislators are wined and dined and carry back home legislation someone at a corporation or a well-funded think tank or a Republican party organization dreamed up. And then the next legislative session, and that state’s actual residents, have to deal with it. It’s happened in Idaho (and other states) uncounted times in the last couple of generations, barely noted publicly. (Idaho’s current state chair is Representative Sage Dixon.)

But ALEC is by no means alone. A whole lot of that “Idaho legislation” comes from other places, and one of the best (and relatively few) recent outlines of how that works showed up in a recent article in the Idaho Capital Sun and Idaho Ed News.

Under the headline “Records show powerful, wealthy funders outside Idaho back school choice campaign,” it describes how a collection of national organizations, centered mainly on education, have been funding Idaho legislative races and then feeding its preferred and winning candidates legislation to run through Boise.

The story said, “The national special interests groups who have poured millions of dollars into efforts to make education savings account programs a reality in states like Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Wisconsin and New Hampshire are the same donors who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during Idaho’s midterm election to ensure school choice-friendly legislators occupied as many seats as possible in the Idaho Legislature, records show.” (Read the whole article; the rundown on how the money is filtered through one shell after another is a little complex.)

Most prominently it cited the American Federation for Children (focused on alternatives to public schools) and the State Policy Network (slogan: “state solutions. national impact,” and opposed generally to unions and public services overall); the IEN describes them as “coordinated and funded by millionaires and billionaires dedicated to conservative policy positions.” Their fingerprints are all over the Idaho Legislature this term.

Check out as well the op-ed in the Idaho Falls Post Register which pointed out, “Much of the funding comes from out-of-state groups such as Betsy Devos’s American Federation for Children. They spent $274,000 in the Idaho primary and general elections on pro-school privatization candidates.”

It’s not that Idaho shouldn’t pick up good ideas from other states, or even national organizations, when they might make sense locally - and there are many good examples of the state benefiting from doing that. But most of those ideas worth implementing are good enough to sell themselves; their advocates don’t need to stuff Idaho political campaigns full of money to push them through.

So if your legislator is backing one of these things, ask them who they’re really working for: People in Idaho, or money bags outside of it.