How One Red State Congressional Delegation has ... Disappeared
Idaho’s congressional delegation belongs on a milk carton
Idaho, that oddly shaped state up in the northwestern corner of the United States, has long been a conservative stronghold. Republicans have dominated the state with minor exceptions since statehouse in 1890.
Although, as my old boss, Cecil Andrus, the last Democratic governor of Idaho, liked to say, “Idaho borders on six states and a foreign country,” politically the state would more comfortably fit in the deep South.
In fact, some Idahoans have long bemoaned the state as “the Mississippi of the northwest” with limited support for public education, perhaps the most dystopian anti-abortion law in the country and ever more cranks and conspiracy theorists in the state legislature.
At the same time the state has a theoretically powerful congressional delegation that could assert itself, but won’t out of fear - fear of the pushback from the White House and fear of the next election.
Here’s a brief case study of a state captured by the politics of Trumpism.
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Idaho makes national news for all the wrong reasons, including a bizarre incident recently where a woman was carted out of GOP town hall meeting by six private security guards who were subsequently charged with battery and false imprisonment.
The Idaho GOP has supported the private security guards.
In another recent case a young elementary school teacher in Meridian, Idaho was told to remove an “Everyone is Welcome Here” banner from her classroom. The school board thought the banner was not “neutral.” The story went international.
The outstanding former president of Boise State University, Marlene Tromp, was attacked by the far right from her first day on the job even as she grew enrollment, improved the school’s academic standing and kept BSU football on the national radar. Tromp recently decamped to Vermont, a state likely to embrace her competence and decency. As Kevin Richert wrote in Idaho Education News, Tromp left just as the Idaho Legislature was taking a wack - again - at higher education budgets not to save money but for ideological reasons.
The debate over that budget — and a proposed cut targeting Boise State — offers a fitting epilogue to Tromp’s six years at Idaho’s largest four-year university. Tromp is going out where she came in: at the center of controversy over higher education politics.
On Tuesday, a divided Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee voted to cut Boise State’s budget by $2 million (the University of Idaho faces an identical cut). The cuts are not driven by fiscal necessity. Instead, they are ideological, driven by hardliners hell-bent on extracting a pound of flesh from the universities.
Meanwhile, an Idaho judge recently ordered the state’s showboating attorney general, Raul Labrador, to sit for a deposition related to a lawsuit brought for a whistleblower who alleges wrongful termination. As the Idaho Capital Sun reported:
The judge, in a separate ruling, also sanctioned the Idaho Attorney General’s Office for Labrador’s failure to appear for his previously scheduled deposition. Hours after the deposition was set to occur, the Attorney General’s Office filed a motion for a protective order that sought to stop Labrador from being deposed.
The judge required the office to pay expenses, including attorney fees, related to Labrador’s deposition. He also required the Attorney General’s Office to pay plaintiff’s expenses, including attorney fees, associated with their motion for sanctions.
Labrador, who served in Congress before being elected attorney general, has designs on the Governor’s Office, so, of course, he’s mastered the far right art of performance politics and disruption.
You won’t be surprised to recall that Labrador, while in Congress, lead the far right Republican ouster of then-Speaker John Boehner. In his book about the dysfunctional Congress in that period - American Carnage - journalist Tim Alberta places Labrador in the center of the dysfunction.
And there’s more.
The recently adjourned legislature cut taxes and then redirected state funding from public to private schools, an initial $50 million hit that everyone knows will grow exponentially at the expense of mostly small, rural schools. And to put a bow on the session the legislature declared that a firing squad is the state’s preferred method of execution.
Oh, and the legislature decided it should prescribe the flags that could legally be flown from public buildings, a law apparently aimed at a pride flag flying in front of Boise city hall. The attorney general wrote the mayor of Boise a strongly worded letter about the offending flag. The mayor told him to pound sand.
White supremacists and Christian nationalists increasingly influence Idaho politics, while the always very conservative core of traditional Republicans are marginalized. 1
I could go on, but you get the drift. Idaho is the deep south bordering on Canada. The Idaho governor’s name is Little, but it could easily be Huckabee Sanders or Landry.
To paraphrase the great Civil War historian Gary Gallagher, “Idaho joined the Confederacy after the Civil War.”
Idaho once elected independent minded Democrats as governor (Andrus elected four times), to the Senate (Frank Church for four terms) and to the House of Representatives (Larry LaRocco, Richard Stallings and Walt Minnick) in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
No more.
The Trumpified Republican Party is fully in charge of Idaho and no where does that influence show more than in the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation.
The delegation features three long-tenured lawmakers - two Senate committee chairs and a House appropriations “cardinal” - who could exercise real clout if they chose to do so.
That they don’t is really the story of the Republican Party in Congress, complete acceptance of what the White House offers up on a daily basis and genuinely cowed into never questioning let alone challenging Trump and the MAGA gossip.
Idaho’s congressional delegation could have influence … it doesn’t
So, do a thought experiment with me and consider what has been happening over the last 10 days or so and then consider just how completely the Idaho congressional delegation has vanished.
Poof.
President Donald Trump’s madcap tariff policy, complete with the daily reversals and contradictions, has caused wild gyrations in world and U.S. markets. The S&P 500, as a result, is down nearly 15% since Trump took office. The dollar is weaker. Recession fears are stronger. This week, CEOs from stores like Home Depot, Target and Walmart warned Trump that tariff chaos is affecting supply chains and soon many store shelves will be empty. Trump attacked — again — Jerome Powell, chairperson of the Federal Reserve, before backing off when the attack further spooked the markets.
The market fits and starts have created, as numerous news organizations have reported, enormous opportunities for insider trading. A quiet heads up that Trump is going to post a change in direction on social media is a signal to act in the markets. Trump himself issued such an advisory recently before pausing some of his tariff actions. Some folks undoubtedly, and illegally, made out like bandits.
Trump is personally benefiting from the increasingly unregulated crypto market. Now he’s inviting the biggest owners of his own memecoin to an exclusive dinner at his Virginia golf club, followed by tours of the White House. In short: Buy the Trump crypto, put money into the president’s pocket and get direct access to him.
“This is really incredible,” Corey Frayer, who oversaw crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration, told the New York Times. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”
It’s an unprecedented level of presidential corruption that makes Bill Clinton’s invitations to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom look almost quaint by comparison.
News also broke this week that Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend host who now occupies a big office in the Pentagon, shared operational details of a U.S. military strike in Yemen with his wife, his brother and his lawyer, again using an insecure Signal messaging app. Some of the information was originally transmitted to Hegseth by secure channels, as is appropriate, by the top U.S. general in the Middle East. The president again defended Hegseth.
A NATO official was quoted by Politico as saying: “Did Putin write this for him?” when Trump unveiled his latest “peace” plan for Ukraine. The plan is widely seen in Europe is a gold-plated gift to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Trump bashed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for refusing to accept Putin’s demand that Ukraine accept Russian annexation of Crimea, while handing Russia its territorial gains and removing sanctions against the brutal regime.
“The Trump ‘peace’ plan is no such thing; it is an instrument of surrender, and the Ukrainians are unlikely to accept it,” says conservative writer Tom Nichols. All this foreshadows a total U.S. capitulation to the Kremlin.
That’s just a portion of a week’s worth of utter chaos. I will leave for another day what a federal judge termed the “willful” and “bad faith” disregard of court orders related to illegal deportations, the shakedowns of major law firms, threats to Social Security and Medicaid, the administration’s growing efforts to sell off public lands, the ongoing efforts to intimidate American colleges and universities and the widespread — and often illegal and unconstitutional — executive branch dismantling of the federal government.
Amid this vast executive branch disruption — even destruction — of international trade and foreign and domestic policy you might wonder what has happened to the first branch of government, the Article I branch that the Founders believed would be the most important of three co-equal branches of the federal government? The question begs: Does Idaho even have a congressional delegation anymore?
By virtue of longevity if not capability or accomplishment, the all-Republican Idaho delegation, theoretically, has a lot of power and could exercise real influence. That it doesn’t even try explains a great deal about the state of American democracy.
The Senate Finance Chairman = Empty Suit
Sen. Mike Crapo is uniquely positioned as chairperson of the Senate Finance Committee to exercise influence over trade policy. What has Crapo done? Well, he did recently say it was a good thing that people were asking questions about tariffs, a response that in a different context might get a young athlete a participation medal. The Constitution gives Congress power over trade policy.
Crapo has punted his power.
Is Crapo happy with the administration’s increasing war on Idaho industries, including agriculture and computer chips? Does the Finance Committee chairperson have any concerns about an unregulated crypto market? Crapo’s committee has broad jurisdiction over many targets of the current administration, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid policy and the Federal Reserve.
How does Crapo feel about a policy that seems certain to replace the U.S. with China as the world’s champion of international trade and stable markets? Does he have anything to say about these issues?
Anything at all?
Risch is the weakest Foreign Relations Chairman in Memory
Sen. James Risch’s position of influence is as chairperson of the Foreign Relations Committee. Risch, once a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its existential struggle against Russia, has gone totally missing other than to twice recently stop consideration of Senate resolutions condemning Putin’s brutal war of aggression. Big change is afoot at the State Department, including a determination to reduce American diplomatic and humanitarian influence across the globe. Does Risch care? Will he even stir himself to conduct a hearing on the administration’s policy? I think we know the answer.
Rep. Mike Simpson has roused himself, more or less, to push back against the sale of public lands. Yet despite his senior position as an appropriator, Simpson seems perfectly fine with executive branch domination over spending.
Does Simpson have anything to say about widespread layoffs of U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management personnel? Does Simpson care that the agricultural college at the University of Idaho had a $59 million grant designed to assist Idaho farmers — the largest in school history — cancelled by the Trump Administration?
Idaho’s other congressman, Russ Fulcher, should really be on milk cartons. He’s not even reached the status of a replacement level backbencher in the House. In his increasingly rare public comments, Fulcher toes the Trumpist line, but must be feeling some heat around the tariff chaos and much else.
As Fulcher told the Coeur d’ Alene Press this week:
“I don’t know if there really is a solid plan,” he said. “That’s not a criticism. But it is creating some uncertainty. I have talked to the president, and I think I know what he’s looking at. It’s a valid vantage point, somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion in foreign investment committed to the U.S.”
From the Trump administration’s perspective, it’s a “huge win,” Fulcher said. But tariffs are putting pressure on Idaho businesses.
That’s “not a criticism” is the weak gruel of a man without a clue or a real reason to be in Congress. But, hey, that’s Idaho.
Co-president Elon Musk has been demanding federal employees provide weekly accountings of what they are doing to earn their salary. Idaho constituents might ask the same of their disappeared congressional delegation.
An honest answer would be: nothing.
Idaho is a case study: Republicans members of Congress in thrall to an increasingly unpopular president supporting presidential policies that are hurting their own voters.
These are not stupid people. But they are frightened people, afraid of a dangerous leader of their own party, afraid of being targeted for speaking out, so afraid that they literally won’t go out in public. None of these elected officials have had a real public appearance in months, even years, afraid they might be asked an awkward question about about our time of chaos, turmoil and unlawfulness.
There is a moral and intellectual rot here deeper than Hells Canyon.
The late Idaho Sen. James McClure was a very conservative Republican, but certainly not a John Bircher or a conspiracy theorist. McClure often worked across the political aisle with Cecil Andrus and other Democrats, particularly on energy, conservative and national security issues. A policy institute at the University of Idaho carries McClure’s name. Other recent Idaho Republicans who once had a national profile are most invisible in the state’s politics. Former governor, senator and George W. Bush Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, while conservative, was no alt right firebrand. Even former Sen. Larry Craig, he of the infamous Minneapolis airport bathroom caper, was very conservative, but not a far right loon. Kempthorne led a campaign as governor to improve childhood vaccination rates and Craig, believe it or not, actually once championed immigration reform. Interestingly, neither Kempthorne or Craig have any public profile today in Idaho GOP politics. They are not viewed in any way, for example, by Idaho GOP legislators as “senior statesmen” who might still have something to contribute to the party of the nation.
Thanks for your accurate read on our current Congressional delegation of eunuchs. Few have ever had so much power to do good but have done so little for Idaho. They are prime candidates for "profiles in cowardice".
Outstanding commentary. Thank you.