Posts published in “Idaho”

In the month or so of this year’s Idaho legislative session, one clear theme has been a divergence between the governor’s view of what the state budget (and its proactive programs) should look like, and the view of much of the legislature - at least so far this session, that of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which decides on and drafts the budget bills.

Little, who delivered his own budget proposal to the legislature on day one of the session, has by no means proposed big spending, or even anything approaching a tax increase. But the JFAC view has raced down a much more miserly speedway, drafting bills which set in motion cuts well beyond anything Little had in mind.

The governor has not supported those moves, and his staff has warned of highly specific negative consequences for the state. The Idaho Capital Sun has reported the JFAC approach “will likely delay tax refunds for Idahoans, endanger the state’s crisis response system, lead to hiring fewer state wildland firefighters and increase wildfire risk, jeopardize mental health court and treatment courts that have helped thousands of Idahoans turn their lives around, lead to less water quality monitoring and more.” For starters.

Little’s core response, so far at least, has been: “They’re the legislative branch. They get to set the budget.” (Imagine Little’s endorser, Donald Trump, saying something like that.)

Governors don’t have to be quite so helpless. Idaho governors in the past periodically have pushed back against a legislature they thought was going too far, or not far enough. Little himself has done it, in the (smallish number of) vetoes he has imposed on legislation, maybe most notably in April 2021 when he vetoed two post-Covid  measures aimed at limiting the governor’s emergency powers without seeking legislative authorization.

His four living predecessors in the office all endorsed that move. Dirk Kempthorne remarked, “When we became Governor, we all take the oath of office. Included in that oath is that we will support the Constitution of Idaho. The Constitution makes it very clear it is the responsibility of the executive branch of this government – of the Governor – to respond during emergencies.”

Kempthorne, governor from 1999 to 2006. would have had particular cause to expand on his point. During his time as governor, he bumped heads with legislators several times, most prominently on budget matters. Idaho broke a record for longest legislative session in 2003 because Kempthorne was determined to push for something closer to his priorities than the legislature wanted. In 2005, he once vetoed eight bills in a row, at one sitting, to press the legislature into, uh, seeing things his way.

And Kempthorne was largely successful.

That kind of hardball is only one legitimate approach (as Kempthorne did not limit himself to just vetoes either) to dealing with a legislature that, in a governor’s estimation, is doing the wrong thing. There are other tactics: holding up other legislation; waging a public relations war with the public (chief executives usually prevail over legislatures or congresses) or otherwise using the clout the office does have.

Little has taken pride, and with some justification, in some of the programs he’s tried to push forward, LAUNCH being a central example. Several are at risk this year. So why such a laid-back attitude toward the legislature?

Only he knows. The upcoming election (and desire for party unity) could be a factor. Little is not the combative sort, either; some governors take delight in fighting the good battle, but that doesn’t seem to be Little’s style.

The session isn’t over, and Little could come on a little tougher in the coming weeks. Or he could say it’s simply the legislature’s decision (never, of course, it’s fault).

Either way, he’s likely to absorb some significant blowback from people who blame him for whatever comes next. That may even be unavoidable.

 

Start with this: The state of Idaho never has elected an independent - a candidate running apart from any political party - to congressional office, or to any of the partisan statewide offices. It has not even elected any independent to the state legislature since nearly a century ago, in 1928.

And hardly any independent candidates have approached even shouting distance of actual election, though lots of independents have appeared on the ballot over the years. Most pick up something like one to three percent of the vote. A side note: Quite a few independents have been elected to county offices.

While some states (Vermont and Maine, notably) have been responsive to independents in recent years, Idaho has not. If most political watchers in the state tend to be dismissive about the chances of independents at least for major office, there’s good reason.

Idaho is now seeing a real sprouting of independents, for U.S. senate, governor, and first district U.S. house. Might any of them fare better than their many predecessors?

Looking first at the candidates, the answer wouldn’t be a resounding yes. While all have genuinely attractive qualities, none is (today) exactly a titanic political figure.

Todd Achilles, the independent running for the U.S. Senate (opposing incumbent Republican Jim Risch) is a former (Democratic) state legislator from Boise, articulate and active as a campaigner, with evident skill in generating some headlines.

Sarah Zabel, running for the U.S. House seat in District 1 (now held by Republican Russ Fulcher), has been campaigning steadily for weeks from Meridian to Sandpoint.

The newest and most prominent of the three is John Stegner, a former state supreme court justice and a district judge (in north-central Idaho), running against Republican Governor Brad Little. I’ve seen descriptions, apparently borne out in interviews, of him as a well-respected jurist, a centrist not far from, say, former Justice Jim Jones, who was for many years a mainstream Republican.

Democratic challengers already are in the field (including but not exclusively David Roth, Kaylee Peterson and Terri Pickens, for those three offices respectively). Since the Republican vote in recent elections (going back to the mid-90s) has been so strong, it’s hard to see how dividing the opposition will do much other than provide an additional, unneeded gift to the incumbents.

That is at least a reasonable view based on all the electoral data from Idaho now available. But let’s use our imaginations and suppose something about this election year is different.

Don’t dismiss the idea of disgust at both political parties.

Idaho’s voter registration system, with its differing rules for who can register in which party, makes it hard to determine the relative popularity of parties as opposed to non-affiliation. Look at registration-by-party stats for other states where the rules impose registration categories and standard rules - Oregon is a good example - and what you find is plunging support for both major parties. (Yes, Oregon has more registered Democrats than Republicans, but non-affiliateds there swamp both parties, both of them in steep decline.)

In Idaho, the Democratic Party has been so thoroughly slimed for so many years that support for anyone who runs under its banner has been rendered literally unthinkable for large swaths of the electorate - a flicker of an idea to be dismissed out of hand without a hearing. That doesn’t automatically mean any great love for the Republican Party, which for many people is just the only other option. More than that: The only option.

That wasn’t true 30 or 50 years ago, but among many of Idaho's voters it is today.

Historically, voters have looked to the two parties to sort between the candidates, an often-used (though too-relied on) shortcut for deciding who to support.

But what if the Republican option, for a key segment of the voting population, has begun to look unappealing too? You likely know as well as I why that might be; just consult the national headlines from recent days, weeks, months.

Would an independent start to look more attractive under those conditions?

Just a thought, for those who want to non-party like it’s 1928.

 

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If you’re really concerned about immigration, especially the not-legal variety, there’s a tool available - and has been for years - that’s cheap, would entail no masked armed forces, and could be implemented quickly. In a state where the political tides seem to run strongly toward sharp control of immigration, this would seem to be just the ticket.

Idaho legislation to do this, at scale and apparently covering most employers in Idaho, was proposed in each of the last two sessions.

What’s happening this session, which is a little different, makes for a telling distinction about attitudes on the subject.

The subject is E-Verify, which was set up in 1996 and is run by the Department of Homeland Security cooperating with the Social Security Administration. Its job is to determine - on request from an employer - whether an employee is a legal resident of the country. Generally, the system is thought to be accurate, with some exceptions.

The states vary widely in how or if they deal with E-Verify. None bar its use, but it’s mainly a voluntary tool in most places. In some like Idaho, governments are required to use it in hiring, and some (like Idaho) include state contractors in the mandate. But some - Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina - require it much more broadly for private employers.

E-Verify has drawn some critics. Civil libertarians are concerned it could lead to a kind of national registration system. The American Farm Bureau, for example, has been a critic of E-Verify: “while E-Verify may not adversely affect some parts of the U.S. economy, it could have dire impacts on agriculture due to the lack of U.S. workers and the absence of a workable visa program.” Other economic sectors could feel some pain as well. You’ll notice between the lines that the concern is the system might work too well, and those business sectors might be deprived of many of the workers they (really do) need.

Averting those touchy areas, Idaho already has some E-Verify requirements for government employers and some state contractors. But it’s not mandatory much beyond that.

In the last two legislative sessions, much broader E-Verify bills were proposed in the last two sessions, in 2025 by Representative Jordan Redman of Coeur d’Alene and in 2024 by Senator Chris T. Trakel and Representative Judy Boyle. The 2025 bill, for example, aimed to “prohibit employment of illegal aliens and require employers to E-Verify each new hire's legal employment status as a condition of employment” - mandates covering “any employer,” in any sector. The 2024 bill was structured a little differently but had a similar end result.

Both bills in their respective sessions were introduced by and quietly died in the House State Affairs Committee. The idea has arisen in several previous sessions too, with similar results.

As hot as immigration is within Republican circles, you might expect this overwhelmingly Trumpian legislature to come back this session with something stronger, and maybe pass it this time.

You would be wrong.

There is a new E-Verify bill this session. The current proposal is Senate Bill 1247, introduced by Senator Mark Harris of Soda Springs. It would be the “Idaho E-Verify Act,” and would go into effect at the start of 2027, when “it shall be unlawful for any covered employer to knowingly hire, recruit, or refer, either for the employer itself or on behalf of another, for private or public employment within the state, an employee whose work authorization has not been verified through the e-verify program.”

Those covered employers, however, are “public agencies, at state and local levels of government, … [and] private employers that do business with state and local government, if they have 150 or more employees and contracts valued at $100,000 or more.”

More simply, Harris said “if taxpayer dollars are involved, the employer must use E-Verify to address the legal status of their employees.” More simply, he said his bill would be intended mostly to codify the existing procedures, which seems accurate.

More of the same, in other words, at a time when the Trump Administration is proclaiming a crisis of illegal immigration.

Must not be that extreme a crisis after all.

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Idaho is a Trumpy state. You won’t easily find anyone to argue with that. I certainly wouldn’t try.

But things are rarely quite that simple, as a new poll subtly suggests.

Before we get to that, you have to consider the evidence of Donald Trump support. In the 2016 general election, he received 59.2% of the Idaho vote. In 2020, he got 63.8%. In 2024, it was 66.9%, winning 42 of 44 counties. So the percentages have been growing.

Such abundance doesn’t come without its cost, though.

Anyone who’s worked in or around a legislature will tell you that a small majority is easier to lead or unify than a very large one. Big legislative caucuses have a way of fracturing in critical moments; it’s happened from time to time in recent years in the Idaho Legislature, so heavily dominated by Republicans. The reasons are simple and common through human nature; we’re all a little bit different, and the larger any group of people becomes, the more differences, over time, are likely to arise.

This point comes up in the context of a poll commissioned by the Mountain States Policy Institute, which describes itself as a think tank but one which has reached its conclusions from the outset, in favor of “ free markets and limited government.” So you would expect that if it runs and releases the results of a poll, it’s unlikely to release results running counter to its stated purpose in life - which as a matter of practice, albeit not official statement, is apt to favor Republicans, at least most of the time. Any bias in the other direction would be truly shocking.

(Don’t confuse this survey with the annual Boise State University poll which covers some of the same topic areas; it’s differently set up and conducted for different purposes.)

That’s not to say the polling is off base. Its new poll also notes for example housing affordability as a top concern among Idahoans, which seems obviously true. It certainly offers useful material to work with.

The 2026 Idaho Poll, conducted January 2 through 9 of 800 Idaho registered voters, asked a question about Trump’s approval in the state, and the details are worth parsing.

It asked “Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Trump is performing his job?” The bottom online was 59% favorable and 39% disapproving (with 1% “not sure”). That’s clearly favorable, but if accurate, represents a big drop from the vote a little more than a year ago.

The more interesting piece was the breakdown between those “strongly” or “somewhat” approving or disapproving. It showed 26% strongly approving of Trump and 33% just somewhat; more soft support than hard.

And more interesting than that, while just 11% said they “somewhat” disapproved of Trump, 28% strongly did - more than strongly approved of him.

As a point of comparison, another set of highly localized data from the monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll puts Trump’s Idaho approval number at 56.8%, third highest in the nation (behind West Virginia and Oklahoma); by comparison, in the city of Portland (they really don’t like Trump) approval is at 14.4%. Approval in Ada County was listed as 38% while, obviously, it was much higher in the rest of the state (highest in central Idaho).

What conclusions might we draw  from this?

One I would suggest is that Trump voters or supporters (in Idaho) are not all alike. That group of 26% strong supporters are the hard core true believers, the unshakeable backers. But the group of softer supporters are another matter. Most of them probably have a hard time with the thought of voting Democratic, but they’re not entirely comfortable with Trump either. His actions over the last year seem likely to have shaken their support to a degree.

The Trump support is in shades and degrees.

Monoliths never look as monolithic when you look at them more closely.

 

A look at the text of Idaho Governor Brad Little’s state of the state speech delivered this week suggests he had two audiences primarily in mind. And they are related, but while the effect on one may be as intended, the other may be more complex.

One audience is President Donald Trump and his White House, unconstrained praise for which dominated the first part of the speech. Some of it read like an excerpt from a Trump Administration cabinet meeting. One example: “For Idaho, the change from the last administration to having a Republican in the White House now is night and day. Under Biden, Idaho was kept in the dark. Now, we have a real partner at the federal level.”

Through the speech, Trump was a woven-in element, subtly evident even when not directly cited.

I can’t recall a state of the state speech in Idaho (or for that matter elsewhere) as overwhelmed by the current presidential administration, either positively or negatively. It left less time and room for other subjects, which seemed addressed with abridged detail.

Trump’s endorsement of Little for re-election may have cleared the path for him this year. It also may help avert the attacks from federal agencies some other states, including at least one neighbor, have endured in the past year.

The second major target audience, a more usual one, is the legislature. After all, the state of the state is where governors set forth their budget and legislative proposals, and legislators will decide what to do about them.

Here Little’s money and policy approach sounded less different from earlier years. But the lack of extended argument or relative emphasis for most of his policies suggested he knew the legislature is unlikely to wholeheartedly embrace many of them.

If you need evidence, consider the provocative statements shortly afterward from Representative Josh Tanner, the newly-installed co-chair of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which drafts the budget after hearing the governor’s proposals. Tanner said in a press release about Little’s budget plan, “The governor’s budget does not balance. It relies on one-time gimmicks, spends more than the state takes in on an ongoing basis, and leaves Idaho with the lowest ending fund balances in nearly a decade.”

Another useful indication of where many Republican legislators are coming from can be gleaned from the Idaho Republican Party’s January 9-10 midwinter conference. Writing just in advance of it, party chair Dorothy Moon previewed the expected highlights: “This year, the Idaho GOP will consider resolutions addressing issues such as consolidating elections into even-numbered years, prohibiting the use of Sharia law in Idaho, preventing universities from becoming gun-free zones, calling on the Legislature to cut spending, and, of course, honoring the memory of Charlie Kirk.”

A review of the adopted resolutions shows Moon’s assessment was accurate, and may be close to what many Republican legislators came to Boise thinking about.

It’s a drastically different view of the state of the state. And a comparison of the two viewpoints - Little’s far more upbeat, for one thing - tells you a lot about what’s going on in the Idaho Republican Party, which is to say in Idaho’s elected leadership.

The many references to Trump may have been intended, among other things, to tell those legislators that he’s one of them.

But all those  references to Trump may not be enough. Little and many of the legislators simply look at the world in different ways: sunnier on one side, culture-warriorish on the other, with a gap between what each thinks is important.

That’s not to say that this legislative session necessarily will be a bad one for Little.

But it’s unlikely to be easy.

 

In its last regular session, the Idaho Legislature passed an income tax cut amounting to $253 million, a successor to other tax cuts in previous recent sessions. The state is on track to receive hundreds of millions of dollars less in revenue than it would have been under the mostly long-standing tax approach, which in Idaho never has been terribly aggressive.

It also has been in effect pushing a good deal of discretionary money out the door, as when the state also kicked in $50 million to replace local property taxes and another $50 million for school vouchers (which is structured as a tax benefit).

The core message from the legislature was, in the area of budgets and spending, no problem. Idaho’s tax revenues had been growing solidly for years. What, me worry?

In this new session about to convene, legislators will be confronting the consequences of those decisions.

Those consequences are bounded by an absolute requirement that most legislators will quickly note: They are required, by the Idaho Constitution, to produce a balanced budget, one that provides for no more spending than there is income. Constitutions require most of the states similarly to balance their budgets, varying only in details.

Idaho’s economy is stable, for now, but it is not exploding fast enough to make up for the budget decisions from last session. Last fall, Governor Brad Little had to order spending holdbacks for state agencies (an approach often used by governors when the money runs short).

That hasn’t been enough. The deficit for this fiscal year now is estimated at about $40 million, and if you bet on it increasing significantly in coming months you probably wouldn’t lose your wager.

And the Idaho Capital Sun reported this: “It is important to note that the projected budget deficit is not a hiccup limited to the current year. State budget officials have projected a much larger budget deficit of $555.2 million for next year’s budget, fiscal year 2027. The state’s top budget official, Idaho Division of Financial Management Administrator Lori Wolff told the Idaho Capital Sun the state may need to come up with an additional $600 million to $1 billion for the 2027 budget if the state wants to conform with federal tax changes championed by President Donald Trump and also leave an ending cash balance to serve as a budget cushion to guard against additional budget uncertainty.”

Legislatures often engage in “supplemental” or “reverse supplemental” budgeting for the current year when the revenue stream slackens, and that should be expected this year.

The list of targets are many. A number of them have been suggested by the semi-formal Idaho DOGE group, which met in past months and came up with a number of budget cut recommendations, though most of them are tiny specks of money in the context of billion-dollar budgets. The possible elimination of Medicaid expansion, which many Republican legislators favor even absent finance concerns, would be a larger chunk but - in addition to the massive immiseration of many Idahoans it would cause - might also create whole new cost centers.

Remember, however, that balancing the budget can be done in more than one way. Cutting budgets is one way. Another is increasing revenue.

If, for example, some of those massive tax cuts (which few outside the legislature were really crying out for) were scaled back, that could go a long way to solving the balancing problem.

This happens to be an election year session, with candidate filing coming even before the session is likely to adjourn, and a primary election only weeks afterward. Just how much appetite for major service cuts do Idaho legislators have under these conditions?

Or maybe they figure their seats are secure, that Idaho voters would never consider unseating them.

Maybe. But one day, this year or later, they might.

 

On the surface, local law enforcement and mental health services might seem an odd couple, two pieces of public policy that appear not to have a lot to do with each other. And the broader picture of Idaho politics might seem some distance from either of them.

But they absolutely intertwine, as key officials in both law enforcement and mental health services would be quick to tell you, and that interconnection - not least on the political side - is growing rapidly.

The overall picture has been clear for a long time. This, for example, in a report a year ago from the American Police Beat website: “Some research studies have estimated that at least 20% of police service calls involve a mental health or substance use crisis, and this demand has been increasing for many departments. In a nationwide survey of over 2,400 senior law enforcement officials, approximately 84% reported an increase in mental-health-related calls during their careers, and 63% noted that their department now spends more time on mental illness calls than in the past.”

The mindset of a mental health organization and that of a police force - and their modes of operating and approaching a situation - are ordinarily highly different. But some meeting of those minds is necessary, because of the large numbers of cases and incidents where neither approach - the purely medical on one side, the sheer enforcement on the other - by itself is likely to lead to a happy result. And on the evidence, and on the whole, both sets of professionals understand that.

Around the country, many communities have been trying out “models” - structures involving both law enforcement and mental health professionals, to de-escalate situations and avert problems in the future. So far no one seems to have come up with a perfect silver bullet, and maybe each community will have to work it out for themselves.

The need to do that seems well understood, and it is poking into political issues, such as the state budget.

In November, Magellan of Idaho, which operates the state Medicaid mental health payment system, said it planned program cuts which would (as a news article said) “affect peer support specialists who help people navigate mental health treatment, and specialized mobile teams that treat patients with severe mental illness who have struggled in routine treatment settings. The cuts, which call to end the services on Dec. 1, stem from the state’s attempts to avoid a projected budget shortfall.”

That drew quick and loud statements of concern and criticism from mental health professionals. Mental health clinics and patients have sued the state Department of Health and Welfare.

But on December 1, the Idaho Sheriff’s Association weighed in too, in a letter from its President Samuel Hulse of Bonneville County. It warned that the reductions to mental health services represent a significant public-safety concern. “As sheriffs, our foremost duty is to protect the people of Idaho. We urge State leadership to recognize the real-world public-safety consequences of these decisions and to work with counties to ensure Idahoans in crisis — and the agencies who respond to them — are not left without support.”

The state’s revenue shortfall, he added, was “self-inflicted” by the legislature, and the governor who signed the bills.

On December 19, Hulse hosted a Behavioral Health Open House at the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office location in Ammon, and area law officials as well as  mental health professionals appeared to discuss the problem. It drew a crowd.

Hulse is on to something here. The next step would be to round up coalition-level support, including law enforcement and the mental health community but reaching beyond that, to anyone concerned about issues ranging from education to homelessness and business security.

Broaden that base wide enough, and keep it in front of public view steadily (maybe with the use of case studies and specific examples) and maybe even the Idaho Legislature will find itself compelled to listen.

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