Posts published in “Idaho column”

Pardon the reminiscing, but this week marks a significant personal anniversary: Exactly a half century ago, I came to live in Idaho.

I had packed up my belongings in Virginia and my dad and I drove cross country to Moscow, Idaho, where I would start school at the University of Idaho. The late summer weather was warm but temperate. Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” and Rufus’ “Tell Me Something Good” were on the radio. The Watergate era was just over; we had a brand new president in Gerald Ford.

The University of Idaho campus bore a general resemblance to today’s. Some of the buildings have changed, and new developments have appeared here and there. But it had the attractive leafy, collegiate feel you can still see.

The college newspaper where I went to work and first got to experience journalism, the Idaho Argonaut, still is publishing online at least, which puts it ahead of any number of big-league newspapers out in the “real world.”

After a few weeks, I began putting in some time as well on the campus radio station, KUOI-FM, as an announcer. The paper and the radio station were the two forms of mass media in the area, other than the small educational television station on campus (it wasn’t much like public television as we know it now). Mass media in the area otherwise included the newspapers at Moscow (now no longer daily and no longer printed there) and Lewiston; occasionally we might see one from Spokane. Signals from radio or television stations beyond Moscow were patchy at best. And that was it.

Idaho’s population then was about 750,000, today smaller than one congressional district though then the state had two (which it still does). Ada County's population was about 150,000. Idaho’s population was relatively much less urban, and there were new regional and sub-regional centers. There was much more commerce in the smaller communities, and more of it was locally owned.

News was happening, as it always does. A week or two after my arrival at Moscow, attention statewide was focused four hundred road miles away at Twin Falls, where the daredevil Evel Knievel was trying to jump across the Snake River canyon. (He didn’t make it, as you may have heard.)

I was arriving in Idaho at a time of national political transition, and Idaho, like the rest of the country, was paying close attention to the political landscape.

The governor then was Cecil Andrus, a Democrat, still in his first term but just about to be re-elected to a second in one of the largest landslides in state history.

The lieutenant governor, Jack Murphy, an experienced and successful Republican, was the candidate who lost to him. The lieutenant governor’s job was taken over by Democrat John Evans, who a few years later would become governor himself.

At the top of the ballot was the race for U.S. Senate. The winner in that contest, by a strong margin, was Democrat Frank Church, who won his fourth term. The margin might have been larger except that, as some of his backers acknowledged afterward, they underestimated the opposition. The junior senator was Republican James McClure.

As now, the state Senate in 1974 had 35 members. Five decades ago, its members consisted of 23 Republicans and 12 Democrats. (The margin is 28 Republicans and seven Democrats today.) None of those dozen Democrats came from either Ada County or the Wood River Valley. Here are the communities where they did live: Pocatello, St. Maries, Tetonia, Malad, Lewiston, Mullan, Burley, Moscow, Sandpoint, Cottonwood and Orofino. The situation was similar in the Idaho House. It’s a stunning contrast to today.

The 1974 election did not greatly change any of that, though Democrats did pick up two Senate seats and in the House went from 19 seats to 27 out of 70. (The number of House Democrats today is 11.)

I do have a point to make in reciting all this:

At the time, the overall condition of Idaho seemed, simply, the way it was and probably long would be.

It wasn’t. Not everything changed, but a whole lot has, vastly.

Don’t ever say that nothing changes. Because it does.

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Some people in politics remake the political reality around them. Others jump into the whitewater and run with it, sometimes rapidly, and sometimes successfully.

Steve Symms, one of the central figures in the premier Idaho political contest of the last century, who served in Congress from Idaho for two decades and who died in Virginia on August 8, falls clearly into the second category.

It might not obviously seem that way at first, to look at the effect his rise had.

His political ascent in Idaho was quick, stunning and impactful.

Symm’s first candidacy was for the U.S. House - he didn’t work his way up the steps like fellow Republican Jim McClure, who started as a small-county prosecutor and state senator - and the effect of his races and time in the House was to secure the Idaho first district as solidly Republican. On the front end of his time in the House, the district was plausibly competitive and had a somewhat centrist-right feel. Afterward and since (and despite three Democratic wins there in the last half-century), it has become not just Republican but fiercely so. His successor in the House, Larry Craig, had sounded like a centrist during his time as an Idaho legislator; from his 1980 race to follow Symms he read almost identically from the same script.

In Idaho politics Symms today may be best known as the Republican who finally defeated four-term Democratic Senator Frank Church, a major figure in the state and in the nation too: A candidate for president just four years earlier. Since that election, no Democrat has won a Senate seat from Idaho. The election was a political watershed.

For all that, and for all that individualism was an important part of his ideology, Symms was very much part of the tide and part of his group.

When he first won in 1972, he was part of an emerging collection of Canyon County libertarians (former Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter was in the circle), and seemed at first to enter the race more with the idea of spreading his faction’s free-market and ideological message than with any realistic idea of winning. But Symms turned out to be an excellent retail campaigner, among the best Idaho has seen, and in the primary his Republican opponent had a flawed campaign: The cheerful fresh face won. In the general election he benefited from the strong organizational work McClure, who was also on the ballot for senator, had led over the previous six years. Symms always campaigned energetically, and people liked him, but he broke no real new ground in his eight years. During his time in the House, he even seemed to edge back a bit on some of his earliest stances (on abortion, for example), getting more in line with the Republican caucus.

In 1980, running against Church, Symms had the benefit of an extremely well-run campaign (campaign manager Phil Reberger long has been regarded as one of the best Idaho has seen). But that wasn’t all: National conservative groups weighed in too, scorching the earth against Church long before Symms formally even announced as a candidate.

And not only that: This was the year of the Reagan Revolution, led by the soon to be president whose popularity approached godhood in Idaho. Symms was very much swimming with the tide. This is clearer in hindsight than it was at the time, because Church was widely popular in Idaho; had won decisive re-elections in 1974 against one of Symms’ closest political allies (Bob Smith) and in 1968 against another sitting U.S. representative, George Hansen, who like Symms was a terrific retail campaigner.

A less talented candidate couldn’t have beaten Church, but Symms’ political strength was limited. Six years later, as an incumbent, Symms nearly lost his re-election to Democratic Governor John Evans. And, after personal issues emerged into public view, he opted not to run again in 1992.

Right time, right place.

This weekend, on the afternoon of August 10, a group of Idaho authors organized as Authors Against Book Bans is scheduled to hold a reading. But not the usual kind.

Authors often are asked to read a passage from their works, typically at an event like a book signing. What’s happening here is different. The public invitation reads: “Bring your favorite book, banned book, current read, or whatever kind of book you'd like - we're celebrating our right to read freely on the front steps of the Idaho State Capitol building.”

Rather than a literary activity, this is part of a political voter-registration event, in effect a protest against the new library materials measure (House Bill 710) passed this year by the Idaho Legislature. The American Civil Liberties Union argues about the new law that, “Rather than ‘protect’ children from ‘obscene’ materials, HB 710 offers vague and overbroad language that threatens to censor library books and materials. It also allows ordinary people to file lawsuits and even receive monetary awards for these legal claims.” The law in practice is an attack on Idaho’s libraries, both public and private.

All true, but I’d add another dimension to the case against the bill: That it can’t possibly accomplish its stated purpose, because of a misunderstanding about the nature of most human beings.

At the Saturday event there might reasonably be some emphasis on the “banned book” element, with readings from the challenged materials serving as a pushback against the new law.

The readings also could serve as a metaphor for the way the law is likely to collapse in on itself. The measure is purported to try to keep “harmful materials” out of the hands of children. One immediate difficulty is that hardly any two people will find perfect agreement on what might or might not be harmful to children; my list of bad materials may be very different from someone else’s, which means trying to legislate to an arbitrary, ever-shifting and ever-variable standard.

But the problem goes further than that. In practice, to the degree the law actually has an impact, it likely will drive those materials of most concern directly into the hands of children.

For people said to be so deeply interested in the family, these legislators seem not to understand who drives a lot of children.

Let me explain through my earliest memories of visiting my city’s public library, well before I started elementary school.

I would wander around (this was a place I could freely explore on my own, which by itself was great), but at that age I mostly was on the lookout for anything good about dinosaurs. The children’s section was hopeless (back then), and I spent almost no time there. Instead, I was all over the science sections in the adult stacks. If I had to pile up chairs to reach the upper shelves, so be it. I wanted whatever I was interested in; other subjects had little purchase on me. How could they? They were just undifferentiated rows of books.

And so, I suspect, it is with a lot of children, whatever their interest may be. You’re not going to keep them away from reading about something they’re curious about by moving it from one section of a library to another, or trying to block them away using bureaucratic rules. They’ll probably find it, wherever it is. If they’re told no, they’ll get more determined.

Except that today, compared to a generation or two ago, the point of access is broader. As much as I continue to appreciate (and use) libraries, I know they’re just one place among many I can pick up on whatever I want to read. Every child with a smartphone (not to mention a computer) can easily find anything they may be looking for, including some things that really could do them some damage.

Nothing grabs a child’s attention like being told they can’t have - or see - something.

The present-day censors could succeed in damaging libraries, cutting public literacy, and driving away librarians.

But keep kids from reading whatever attracts their interest? Good luck with that.

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Here’s something a little different:

Eastern Idaho farmers on July 30 were rolling their tractors down the streets of Idaho Falls to protest … Republican Governor Brad Little.

On they rolled down Lindsay Avenue, toward the middle of town, an expression of dissatisfaction with what the governor and his administration has done about the toughest local issue in eastern Idaho this year: The water supply.

The depth of the seriousness may be indicated by the fact that 2024 isn’t even shaping up as an especially bad water year; it could have been much worse. It has been rough and difficult enough, though, for people who have junior - that is, low-priority - rights to use water. Loosely, that means users of groundwater. For the most part, surface water users have older rights and top priority. So when the supply of water, which is limited, falls short of the demand, as has happened this year, farmers reliant on groundwater have a big problem with few options to help them avoid disaster.

At one point this year a massive curtailment - shutting off water use - was ordered by the state Department of Water Resources across hundreds of thousands of acres. That led to loud protests from groundwater pumpers who said they might be ruined as a result (and for many that might have been no exaggeration).

The state tried to work out something mutually agreeable, with the aim of still avoiding too large a water draw from the Snake River Plain Aquifer while giving the various irrigators what they need. A deal announced some weeks ago and codified in a governor’s executive order returned allowable water use to groundwater pumpers, to a point - and it conditioned the ongoing use on the two sides reaching an agreement (to be overseen by the state) by October.

Little and Lieutenant Governor Scott Bedke, who was key in the negotiations, praised the deal and seemed to breathe a big sigh of relief. The more the groundwater users seemed to think about it, though, the less agreeable it seemed.

Frank Vander Sloot, probably the Idaho Falls area’s top businessman, offered this succinct take to the East Idaho News: “The truth is, one side has a gun to the head, and the other the side holding the gun. … The same groups are back to the table, and I think they needed some help from the Legislature and the Governor, and it doesn’t feel like they’re going to get it.”

He’s not wrong. The surface water holders hold the high cards.

But considering Idaho’s prior appropriations principle of water use - “first in time, first in right” - and its limited water supply (most of southern Idaho really is desert, remember), the alternatives may be limited. What exactly are the groundwater users suggesting that would make them whole, would also satisfy the water uses of the surface water users (ground and surface water is connected), and also avoid disastrous aquifer drawdowns?

Maybe someone has a better answer (and that might be good if they do), but from here, it seems that some key element of the existing water regime in Idaho would have to be thrown overboard to achieve satisfaction for the groundwater farmers.

Most simply, that would seem to mean revising the prior appropriation doctrine, changing the way water users stand in line to get their previous liquid.

That of course sounds simpler than it would be in practice. Since there’s no way to simply manufacture more water, someone would be getting less water. The question is, who?

Little remarked in Idaho Falls, “My executive order earlier this summer created a framework for farmers and water users to get their work done as productively and expeditiously as possible. I can tell you that waiting until the last minute is unacceptable to me. We must give certainty to all water users in future years.”

A good aspiration. How to make it happen in practice is another matter. Do it wrong, and in years to come more than a few dozen tractors may be rolling down Idaho city streets in protest.

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This seems to be the month of top Idaho elected officials warning about, and offering decisive action, on a serious problem … that doesn’t exist.

I’m making no argument that non-citizens should vote in public elections in this country; I don’t think they should. (If you want to vote in Germany or India, become a citizen of those countries.)

Problem is, this just isn’t a big problem, as much as some public officials and media celebs try to drive people into a froth over it.

Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch (with some of their colleagues) on July 12 were “demanding answers from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to prevent aliens from registering to vote in American elections.”

They noted the substantial number of people crossing our border (that much is true, quite a few are) and then said, “Plainly, there are opportunities for and instances of non-citizen voter registration, and so the critical question is whether the laws against doing so are being enforced by your Department.  There appear to have been few prosecutions by your Department under these laws, and there is no indication that you have been pursuing cases in places like Georgia and Ohio where aliens have been caught registering or voting.”

First, we know that the states and not the federal government run elections, so what exactly the DOJ is remiss in doing is unclear.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said that “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable." If after a lot of years of searching for the evidence no one has been able to prove it’s happening, you might have to stop to consider that there might be a reason.  Johnson’s debunked intuition aside, there have been few identifiable cases in the nation, ever.

For one thing, a 1996 law specifically has barred non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Non-citizen voting is allowed only in the District of Columbia and in some cities in three states: California (San Francisco and Oakland, where it applies only to school elections), Maryland and Vermont - but only in specified local elections.

In Idaho, where Republican Party leaders have - without any evidence - more than once spoken of truckloads of non-citizens crossing the border to vote in Idaho elections, Governor Brad Little and Secretary of State Phil McGrane have joined the chorus.

On July 9 the governor signed “the ONLY CITIZENS WILL VOTE Act.” It is harmless enough: It mostly calls for coordination and reports. But the language describing it is breathless.

“Idaho already has the most secure elections in the nation, and we’re going to keep it that way. My executive order – the ONLY CITIZENS WILL VOTE Act – directs Secretary of State Phil McGrane to work with local county clerks to scrub our voter rolls and make sure Idaho's elections do not fall prey to the consequences of Biden's lawless open border,” Governor Little said.

McGrane: “Across Idaho’s 44 counties, we have excellent mechanisms in place already to ensure non-citizens do not vote in Idaho, but there is always more we can do to make sure only citizens will vote. I am proud to work closely with Governor Brad Little to put in place a plan that keeps Idaho ahead of the pack in election integrity.” Shorter: We don’t have a problem in this area.

Nor do other states. Only a few states have reported more than a tiny stray number of non-citizens either registering to vote or actually voting. The most substantial case is in Georgia, where in 2022 the secretary of state reported “1,634 cases of potential noncitizens registering to vote in Georgia.”  However, most of them seem to have registered to vote in error - they thought they were in a long bureaucratic line to do something else - and none of them actually voted.

Federal District Judge Fred Biery in Texas remarked of his state’s efforts on the subject, “This is a solution looking for a problem.”

He’s right.

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To start with, it’s not a bad deal. It’s just that it’s a temporary stopgap, if that.

Last month, the state of Idaho and users of water from ground and surface sources cut a deal about groundwater use. Absent a deal, thousands of groundwater users, across half a million acres of territory, were in line, because of state orders, to lose their irrigation water this season. Their growing season would have been wiped out. The economic impact, for these people and those connected to them, and even to the state overall, would have been massive.

The hit was directed generally toward groundwater pumpers, because many of them had more junior water rights, while many surface water rights were mostly older and so had a legal priority for water use (“first in time, first in right”). But the issue also pitted ground people against surface people, a not-unusual situation in Idaho water.

Earlier this year, the state Department of Water Resources calculated that the Eastern Idaho Snake River Aquifer was running low - too low. The aquifer has been in decline for about 60 years, a fact that has been carefully measured and hasn’t been ignored. The issue was important in working through the Snake River Basin Adjudication. In 2015 another agreement on water usage was worked out for preserving the aquifer, and the subject has been under regular review since.

The state has been involved in recharging (pumping water back down) and other steps to help, but if too much groundwater is drawn out, the aquifer will drop and eventually dry. You can ask people around the Great Plains’ Ogallala Aquifer about the terrible consequences of that.

Idaho’s water management system, in southern Idaho at least, long has tended to be cooperative, with interested parties usually more willing to talk than insistent on fighting. The state has been the beneficiary of that for decades.

So when the state ordered water shutoffs for thousands of irrigators, which led to - call it concerns or something approaching panic - widespread realization that a search for solutions had to be undertaken. Negotiations got underway (Lieutenant Governor Scott Bedke seems to have been a key figure in them), and finally late last month a deal was struck, included in an agreement signed as an executive order by Governor Brad Little.

It has six main provisions. It proposed to “improve understanding of the aquifer”; convene a legislative commission on water infrastructure; put a priority on funding projects that would help the aquifer; ask stakeholders to meet; get the regional groundwater management advisory council to submit a new plan by September; and commit groundwater users to develop a mitigation plan by October.

None of this is bad, but only the last item (and it’s still in the territory of aspiration) has the sound of something concrete that specifically addresses the question of how to deal with not enough water for everybody. Water mitigation in this case presumably means that groundwater users would have to specify how they will be able to use water, or engage in recharges or something else, without further endangering the aquifer. How exactly they will do this seems less than clear.

The problem may not be insoluble. Water conservation - which some elements of Idaho water law doesn’t always encourage - may be one of the options. Finding other new efficiencies or reuse of runoff water might be considerations. Some good engineers are at work on this.

The core conundrum, though, remains: If everyone uses the water they need for their operations, the aquifer likely would be drawn down, maybe to dangerous levels. That’s why the Department of Water Resources took action in the first place.

There are no evil players here. But unless someone comes up with an unexpected, and brilliant, answer, the problem looks like a diminishing circle: An ongoing game of musical chairs with someone being left out. This year’s negotiation, probably a predecessor to next year’s, leaves that problem unresolved.

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