Before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Roe v. Wade decision in 2022, Idaho legislators were looking for a way to put a stop to all abortions in Idaho. The Roe decision had placed restrictions on what a state could do to limit abortions. Legislators cast their eyes upon the State of Texas, which had just passed a statute designed to bypass those restrictions. The Texas law allowed private citizens to sue anyone who knowingly aided or abetted an abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Someone bringing a successful suit was entitled to a bounty of at least $10,000.
Our legislators were captivated with the Texas bounty law and followed suit in the 2022 session with a statute that gives the abortion patient and her family members the right to recover a minimum amount of $20,000 apiece from an abortion provider. After the Roe decision was overturned later in the year, another Idaho abortion law went into effect. The new law totally banned abortion from the point of fertilization, providing a minimum two-year prison sentence for a doctor performing any type of abortion. That pretty much eliminated the need for the bounty law, because the total ban was effective to intimidate doctors and chase pregnancy care physicians out of the state.
Having seen the utility of giving private citizens the ability to accomplish what the government might not legally be able to do, the Legislature has sought to use the private lawsuit strategy in any number of situations. Senate Bill 1100, which the Governor signed into law on March 23, allows a student to recover a bounty of $5,000 from the school each time the student encounters a person of the opposite sex in a restroom or certain other school facilities.
House Bill 314 provides a $2,500 bounty against a library each time a kid gets his hands on material “harmful to minors†in the library stacks. The House passed the bill, but is not clear whether the Senate will have time to consider it.
The “drag show†bill, House Bill 265, provides for a $10,000 bounty each time a minor is exposed to some loosely defined “sexual conduct.†This bill passed the House by a wide margin, but there may not be time to act upon it in the Senate.
These bounty bills and a number of others have attorney fee provisions that benefit only the person suing. The party defending can’t recover fees if it wins the case. This is a strong incentive for filing frivolous suits. I could envision dozens of overzealous parents filing harassment suits against their local libraries, causing the libraries to rack up thousands of dollars in defense costs without a means of recovering those fees when they prevail in the suits. Almost all other civil suit statutes call for the winning party to recover its attorney fees from the loser. That prevents most abusive lawsuits.
The fixation of legislative extremists with solving problems that do not really exist is troubling enough. Writing and passing poorly-drafted legislation that is designed more to intimidate than to accomplish worthwhile goals is an abuse of our governmental system.
This proliferation of culture war lawsuit legislation reminds me of those days when the baby discovers a groovy new toy and simply won’t let go of it. Some legislators are so fascinated by their new civil suit strategy that they can’t get enough of it, regardless of the fact that their strategy is likely to clog the court system with cases that simply have no merit. They would do us all a favor by working to address Idaho’s real problems.