The best case for lifting the Idaho legislature’s assault on ordinary Idahoers’ right to make their own laws came from the most unlikely sources – the legislature’s own attorney, William Myers of Boise.
Myers was drawn into the case because House Speaker Scott Bedke, R-Oakley, and Senate President Pro Tem Chuck Winder, R-Boise, refused to rely on Attorney General Lawrence Wasden’s office.
Myers put this argument to the Idaho Supreme Court last week: If voters don’t like what the legislature is doing, another legislature will bring it up.
“This is remedied by electing a legislature every two years,” Myers said. “If lawmakers make it so difficult to get a vote (no initiative or referendum), people could stand up and elect new lawmakers to change the law.”
Call this the legal equivalent of a political slip-up. As defined by expert Michael Kinsley, when someone is telling the truth it is usually – accidentally. The truth here – as for Myers – is that the legislature thinks it should be in total control.
Of course, if it is that easy to replace the legislature, there would be no need for a political safety valve against the intransigence of the legislation.
But it’s almost impossible to replace a majority of 105 legislators – especially in a one-party state where the GOP operates a closed area code.
For this reason, more than a century ago Idahoers incorporated the Progressive Party’s platform into their state constitution, which gives voters the right to pass new laws (initiative) or repeal existing measures (referendum) at the ballot box.
Back then, popular law was a way of bypassing lawmakers intrigued by the special interests of corporations – the railways, banks, and trusts – that drowned out the voices of Idaho workers and peasants.
Now it is special ideological interests – like the Idaho Freedom Foundation – that have the upper hand over the masses in the State Capitol.
Over the years, voters have used this process to resolve the legislative paralysis:
l Environmental reforms, such as the establishment of an independent Idaho Fish and Game Commission.
l Tax reforms such as the property tax exemption for homeowners and the 1 percent initiative.
l Political reforms, such as the Sunshine Act, which provides for the disclosure of campaign contributions and the limitation of the term of office.
l Education policies, such as the 2012 repeal of the anti-teacher policy advocated by then-state headmaster Tom Luna.
l Health reforms, such as extending Medicaid benefits to the Idaho working poor in 2018.
The legislative antipathy to popular law is not a new development. Over the course of a century, three governors – Moses Alexander in 1915, John Evans in 1984, and Brad Little in 2019 – vetoed legislative attempts to undermine the people’s power to decide their own fate.
Eventually, however, lawmakers gained ground by imposing new barriers on organizers to qualify their actions for the vote.
That year, Little agreed to a legislative attempt to make it all but impossible – by calling for initiative campaigns to collect 6 percent of registered voters in all 35 legislative districts. This gives a district – whether rural or urban, north or south – a veto over the rest of the state. And when no particular deep pocket interest comes, Idaho’s initiative law has effectively been repealed.
All of this contradicts the 1912 constitutional amendment which claims that all “political power resides in the people and begins with the people. The government is set up for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to change, reform or abolish it whenever they deem it necessary. “
Even in Idaho, constitutional law trumps the laws of the legislature.
So the attorney general stuck to the script by denying the obvious. The new requirement does not create an impossible threshold, claimed Deputy Attorney General Megan Larrondo. Hence, the Supreme Court can confirm it as constitutional.
“It’s a complete assumption that lawmakers are preventing people from getting action on the ballot,” she said.
On the other hand, if, as Myers claims, the only means is to vote out the legislature, then all political power is “inherent” to the legislature, not to the people. How can the Supreme Court conclude that the own-initiative procedure has not been overturned by unconstitutional means?
Supporters of betting initiatives like Reclaim Idaho and the Committee to Protect and Preserve the Constitution couldn’t believe their ears and their luck when Myers recognized the shameful legislative intent behind those efforts.
And for this kind of legal venture, Bedke and Winder Myers pay $ 470 an hour with your tax money. – MT