Tag: Idaho

Categories
free trade & free markets international affairs property rights

Idaho Foils Foul Harvest

China, organ harvesting, insurance

One can be for free trade yet still demand, while sticking to principle, certain restrictions on international trade.

The State of Idaho has demonstrated one sort of restriction compatible with a free society’s free-​trade rules. “As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-​transplant care performed in China or any country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting,” explains Frank Fang in The Epoch Times (No. 508, A5). The legislation had been passed unanimously in both legislative houses earlier in the month and was signed by the governor on April 10.

Idaho wasn’t the first state to do this, following Texas last year and Utah this year, with its law going into effect on May 1.

The problem to be addressed? The suspiciously short waiting time for organ transplants in China, especially after the Chinese government cracked down on the Falun Gong decades ago. 

“In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years ‘on a substantial scale,’ with Falun Gong practitioners being the ‘principal source’ of human organs,” according to Mr. Fang.

This is not protectionism. And it really isn’t any unwarranted regulation on trade. For even in the freest of societies, with 100 percent free trade and freedom of contract, the sale and purchase of stolen goods is unlawful.

Rightly prohibited.

If anything has been taken away unjustly, it’s the internal organs of political prisoners by the Chinazis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary

The 6 Percent Solution

Idaho, initiative

The Idaho Supreme Court has stated the obvious.

The question was whether legislation passed by the Republican-​dominated Idaho state legislature making it prohibitively difficult to run a successful initiative campaign is consistent with the state constitution.

In August, the court ruled that requiring petitioners to obtain signatures from at least 6 percent of voters in every single legislative district of the state — 35 districts — would usher in “tyranny of the minority.”

It said that the new law “conflicts with the democratic ideals that form the bedrock of the constitutional republic created by the Idaho Constitution, and seriously undermines the people’s initiative and referendum powers enshrined therein.”

As the Idaho Statesman observes, the law would have enabled voters of a single district to prevent a question from reaching the ballot.

The Statesman also smashed the silly argument that the current initiative process somehow burdens specifically rural voters in any quest to post a question.

Under current law, petitioners must obtain signatures from 6 percent of all registered voters in the state and also reach that threshold in at least 18 districts, not all 35 districts. The all-​35 mandate would have made the job of running a petition drive massively harder no matter what regions petitioners happen to reside in.

Foes of citizen initiative rights also tend to ignore the fact that getting a question on the ballot hardly constitutes its enactment. Every voter, from whatever part of the state, can then decide Yes or No.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Holding All the Trumps

Idaho, initiative, ballot, Senate Bill 1159, democracy, voting,

Last week, Idaho’s Senate Bill 1159 — “the bill to make it much harder to qualify a voter initiative or referendum for the Idaho ballot,” as the Idaho Press summarized it — passed the Senate on the narrowest 18 – 17 vote.

Now headed to the House, the legislation would 

  • nearly double the number of voter-​signed petitions to place an initiative onto the ballot
  • reduce the time to gather those signatures by a whopping two-thirds 
  • throw up numerous additional hurdles

What’s the point?

The state already has one of the most arduous petition processes in the nation for qualifying a citizen initiative for the ballot. Moreover, without passing any new law, Idaho legislators currently have and have always had a 100 percent veto on any citizen-​initiated measure enacted by voters. 

Idahoans cannot place constitutional amendments on the ballot through their citizen initiative, only statutes. And any statute voters pass can then immediately be repealed by a simple majority of legislators. Or amended any which way those solons so desire.

So, again, why the need for politicians to pull up the ladders? 

Senate Republicans claim — in a news release headlined, “Setting the record straight on initiative bill” — to be “concerned about the integrity, transparency and fairness of the initiative process.”

What does heightening all the hurdles to trip up citizens have to do with integrity, transparency or fairness?*

Voting on an issue is “unfair” to whom … legislators?

Holding all the trump cards, Idaho senators still didn’t want the people to have a say. The politicians are scared to death of democracy. 

Which is why we need more, not less. 

Certainly not none.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* I do acknowledge that the bill is transparently awful.

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Idaho, initiative, ballot, Senate Bill 1159, democracy, voting,

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Categories
Accountability moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility term limits too much government

Ida-​Heave-​Ho

Gov. Butch Otter, Idaho, veto, asset forfeiture, term limits,

“Is there any chance the vetoes can be overridden?” asked a reader in response to yesterday’s commentary on Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s veto of two pieces of common-​sense legislation. 

It’s a good question, because the bill reforming civil asset forfeiture and the bill easing regulations that block employment in cosmetology both passed by wide margins. Unfortunately, the answer is NO. 

According to the Gem State’s constitution, the governor has ten days after legislation reaches his desk or, at the session’s end, ten days after the legislature adjourns to decide whether to sign or veto a bill. If he vetoes after adjournment, it cannot be overridden — unless the legislature comes back into session.*

Only the governor can call legislators back into session, which is exceedingly unlikely if a new session would entail a veto override. 

It turns out that Idaho is one of only six states where legislators are unable after adjournment to override a veto. Still, the problem’s simple enough to solve: legislators could propose a constitutional amendment changing the process. 

Senator Steve Vick did just that, in 2014 and again in 2016. But though his amendment garnered the two-​thirds majority needed in the Senate, the House never took it up. He plans to reintroduce it next year.

There’s another constitutional change needed: term limits for the governor. A 2015 poll found a whopping 84 percent of Idahoans favor such limits. Yet, legislators may be squeamish, knowing that those same voters (by that same margin) also want legislators term-limited. 

“Sometimes it is amazing,” Idaho Politics Weekly’s Bob Bernick explained, “how elected officials can just ignore the will of voters.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Gov. Otter also vetoed the legislature’s repeal of the state sales tax on groceries, the timing of which legislators are challenging in court.

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Categories
Accountability general freedom local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies property rights responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

A Bad Haircut

Gov. Butch Otter, Idaho, asset forfeiture, licensing, veto

Eric Boehm over at Reason excoriated Idaho Gov. Butch Otter for giving libertarians “the double bird salute.” Boehm wondered if the governor, in vetoing two bills earlier this month, had been merely “trying to make libertarians mad.”

That’s not exactly fair. 

The two blocked bills, one reforming unjust civil asset forfeiture and the other easing pernicious regulation of cosmetology, did certainly appeal to libertarians. But they also appealed to conservatives and liberals. And both passed with bipartisan support.

House Bill 139 would have reduced the number of training hours for a cosmetology license and allowed folks to fix hair at special events like weddings without a license, etc. “The fact that many lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, liberals, moderates and conservatives, are working together to advance legislation in the interest of economic opportunity and prosperity,” argued Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, “is a thing of beauty for a profession that’s all about beauty.”

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Those who run cosmetology schools probably like more mandated hours and folks in the profession might wish for less competition. Governor Otter said as much, complaining that HB 139 was written “without input from interested parties or due regard for the health, safety and welfare of the public.”

Just how dangerous is a bad haircut? 

Putting safety in context, Hoffman explained that the current mandated hours of training for a cosmetology license “is more than is required to become an EMT in Idaho.” 

Gov. Otter vetoed HB 202, the civil asset forfeiture reform, at the behest of “law enforcement” — the very interested parties who gain from taking people’s stuff without bothering to charge or convict them of a crime. 

That makes no sense … according to Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
Accountability general freedom nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Report from the Lab

bureaucrats, regulation, laws, Idaho, illustration

The State of Idaho does something the federal government should emulate. The only state I can think of that has a popular candy bar named after it has a legislature that regularly nixes regulations made by the state’s executive branch.

Think of it as a line-​item veto for the legislature.

Now, at this point, if you know the Constitution but not today’s “living Constitution,” you might wonder: Don’t legislatures write the regulations? Alas, at the federal level, as in most states, the legislative branch has granted to bureaucrats in the Executive Branch a great deal of leeway to cook up what sure feel like “laws.”

“Last year the Federal Register,” Wayne Hoffman explains in theWall Street Journal, “which publishes agency rules, proposals and notices, exceeded 80,260 pages — the third-​highest in its history, according to a report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”

Idaho provides a good model for taking back such ceded legislative power.

Let’s remember the idea of “the several states” experimenting with new and old ideas separately, heralded in a famous phrase, “laboratories of democracy.”

This allows good practices to spread slowly throughout all the states … based on results.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hoffman informs us, Idaho’s practice is traditional, not hallowed in the state’s constitution. A 2014 referendum narrowly failed to get Idahoans to change the constitution to incorporate this “best practice” into explicit law — the legislature had not adequately explained the situation to the public first time around — Idaho solons are trying again.

Make representatives responsible for regulations, and therefore more accountable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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bureaucrats, regulation, laws, Idaho, illustration

 

Illustration: Golconda by René Magritte

 

Categories
Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Nullifying Future Fed Gun Regs

The legislative history of Idaho’s Senate Bill 1332 can be briskly told; its enactment was swift indeed. The Federal Firearm, Magazine and Register Ban Enforcement Act was

  • introduced on the tenth of February;
  • unanimously approved by the full Senate nine days later;
  • leapt out of House committee, on March 10, with a Do Pass recommendation;
  • read in full in the House two days later, and
  • passed unanimously; whereupon it
  • went to the governor, who signed it into law March 19.

Because of an emergency clause, SB-​1332 went into full effect on that date.Idaho, with bullet holes?

The new law instructs Idaho’s public servants not to co-​operate with the federal government on any future gun and ammo registration, prohibition or regulation passed by the U.S. Congress. It also provides a civil penalty of a maximum $1000 fine for each instance of co-operation.

It’s part of the low-​key rebellion that many state legislatures and governors are waging  against the federal government. Claiming something like a right to nullify unconstitutional laws — a right enumerated, after all, as the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution — at issue is the usurpation of state prerogatives by the feds.

We’ve seen a number of states resist the federal government’s attempt to “organize” a grand (and catastrophic) public-​private alliance known as Obamacare.

The current Idaho effort doesn’t strike me as pure nullification, however. It relies on a proven principle of federalism: the states may not be commandeered to enforce federal law. Specifically, any future federal law attacking our essential Second Amendment rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling

Legislation for Graduation

The most obvious problem with government-​run schools is that, well, politicians are in charge.

Two Arizona solons have written bills to require high schoolers to pledge their loyalty and allegiance to the Constitution in order to graduate. You’ve probably heard about at least one of these bills, since it affixes a “so help me God” phrase at the end, and that would pose a problem for atheists … and for those pious folks who don’t believe in swearing by the God they believe in.

While most of the media coverage has focused on that tacked-​on “so help me God” aspect, both measures seem “tacked on” to me: Tacked on to the end of a high school career. Pretend you are a student. You’ve worked hard, or at least hard enough to graduate. Much of your future employment depends on your diploma. And now some politician is going to require that you recite a loyalty oath to the federal (not state) government?

Sounds like something more appropriate to a Communist dictatorship.

Stranger yet is the bill, proposed but not moved forward, further north:

Coeur d’Alene Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

Before one hyperventilates, it’s worth noting that the good Sen. Goedde did this to “send a message,” so to speak, to the State Board of Education because of his unhappiness with their recent moves lowering graduation requirements and canceling evaluations of principals.

Well, I guess there’s method to his madness. And besides, there are worse books.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Idaho’s Healthy “No”

By hook and by crook — ignoring the constitution and twisting parliamentary rules — the president and his congressional allies are succeeding in imposing command-​and-​control health care on all Americans.

If the new law is allowed to stand, the scraps of freedom we still enjoy in matters of health care will dwindle as provisions of the bill kick in. And that’s only the prequel. Pelosi and other Democrats promise to introduce even more constrictive legislation once Obamacare Round One has been rammed through.

Friends of freedom aren’t giving up. There’s an election in 2010, for one thing. But many state governments aren’t waiting for that. The Idaho legislature just passed the Idaho Health Care Freedom Act, which states, in part, that “every person within the state of Idaho is and shall be free to choose or decline to choose any mode of securing health care services without penalty or threat of penalty.” Governor Otter is signing the Act because, in his view, health care laws should treat people as individuals “rather than as an amorphous mass whose only purpose in this world is to obey federal mandates.”

Idaho is the first state to pass such a measure, but similar legislation has been proposed in 22 others. Such declarations will most likely have only symbolic significance if Obamacare remains in effect and other legal challenges on the grounds of federalism get beaten down. But those are two big ifs. Americans aren’t ready to surrender to the health care commissars just yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall

Righteous Recalls

According to Ballotpedia​.org, a wiki-​based website created by the Citizens in Charge Foundation to track ballot initiatives, referendums and recalls, this year voters have already launched more than twice as many efforts to recall public officials than occurred all of last year.

In Flint, Michigan, voters were set to recall the mayor for corruption, mismanagement and more. Ten days before the vote, the mayor resigned. 

In Tuolumne County, California, voters removed an entire school board that failed to account for $16 million in bond revenue.

After failed attempts to remove mayors in Toledo and Akron, Ohio, the Akron city council is now trying to dramatically increase the petition signatures needed to start a recall.

In Kimberly, Idaho, a campaign to recall the mayor and two city councilors for jacking up utility rates fell short of the needed voter signatures. But now the police are investigating whether town officials illegally obstructed the effort.

In Cincinnati, no process yet exists for recalling officials, so the local NAACP is poised to launch a petition drive to establish one. County Republican leaders are “studying” the issue. The county’s Democratic Party chairman opposes recall, saying, “I’d hate to see a situation where the mayor could be recalled any time he made a controversial decision.”

That’s a straw man. Recalls have been used very rarely. Besides, none of our political problems stem from voters demanding too much of politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.