If Voters Demanded a Conservative Mandate, Idaho’s Senate Didn’t Get the Memo
One of the first things that stood out after President Trump’s recent election was his willingness to ignore official Washington elites with his selection of Cabinet posts and advisors. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Health and Human Services, Jayanta Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health, and Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense are just some examples of people selected to run major departments as agents of change. They have been vocal critics of the agencies they were selected to lead. And they weren’t selected due to seniority in government.
Unfortunately for Idahoans, it doesn’t work that way in the Idaho Legislature, particularly the Senate. Problem solvers, visionaries, cost cutters, and reformers are generally not wanted as committee chairmen. After a three-way race, Senator Kelly Anthon, the former Majority Leader, was elevated to Senate President Pro Tempore. Anthon was committed to maintaining the Senate “tradition” of using legislative seniority to pick committee chairmanships, and since his core Senate supporters were the most senior senators, we shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome. Selecting by seniority dovetails with the establishment’s desire to protect its turf; e.g. cronyism and the status quo.
Is this a rush to judgment? Perhaps, but at this point, we have to go by people’s track records and not their promises.
Commensurate with the election of new leadership comes the selection of the chairs for the 10 Senate and 14 House Standing Committees. Although conservatives make up close to half of the new Senate caucus, they only received 3 of 10 chairs. And noticeably, conservatives were sprinkled throughout the committees in such a way as to prevent them from holding a solid majority as they did, for example, in the last session on the education committee.
What the leadership election did in the Senate was put the old guard, with among the worst voting records, as chairs of key committees: Senator Jim Guthrie at State Affairs, Senator Julie Van Orden as Health and Welfare Chair, and Senator Dave Lent as Education Chair. This is important because major policy actions must make their way through these committees.
Last session, we cataloged over 15 bills and legislative measures that Sen. Guthrie, as Senate State Affairs Chair, kept from a public hearing. This is known as putting the bills in the drawer. The bills excluded from a public hearing include, but are not limited to, the following:
- H493 – Prohibits government mask mandates
- H538 – Prohibits compelling speech of employees regarding pronouns
- H599 – Prohibits excessive ballot harvesting
- H669 – Prohibits discrimination based on Environmental Social Governance in financial services (debanking)
- H753 – Prohibits illegal aliens from being present in Idaho with certain exceptions and allows enforcement of this law
- S1227 – Protects patient rights
- S1228 – Protects the right to concealed carry firearms on college campuses
- S1229 – Protects all unborn babies from abortion
- S1240 – Protects militias’ right to public marches
- S1304 – Requires school boards and councils to allow sufficient public testimony
- S1357 – Cancels funding for any diversity, equity, and inclusion offices in Idaho universities
- SCR110 – Assembles a committee to review Idaho’s COVID lockdowns and mandates
- HCR35 – Declares a month to honor Idaho’s traditional families
These are all bills that the people of Idaho have demanded the Legislature pass for years, but Sen. Guthrie saw fit not to allow even the public a hearing on them.
Sen. Guthrie has the chance to show that he is a changed man, but the onus is on him to demonstrate this because he is the most senior Senator with a long track record of catering to special interests and simply deferring to leadership on which bills to hear and which to consign to oblivion.
Sen. Van Orden will chair the Health and Welfare (H&W) committee as she did last session. She has shown no inclination in the past to use policy to control the explosion in Medicaid budgets. The Department of Health and Welfare is asking for over $6 billion for Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26), of which about $5.3 billion is for Medicaid. In fact, the Medicaid budget increase request of $551 million is greater than the entirety of increases for all budgets appropriated by the state. Yes, you read that correctly. If there was no increase in Medicaid costs, the total change for all other agencies combined, for the FY26 budget, would be a ($136 million) reduction in spending from FY25! This cost explosion should be addressed by limiting the number of people and programs covered by Medicaid. We are hopeful that Sen. Van Orden will have the H&W committee take up bills to change policies to actually lower costs immediately because Idaho has run out of other options.
It is important to point out that budgeted appropriations have increased by 55% over the last five fiscal years, driven in large part by Medicaid. And, if you review the voting records of the most senior members of the Senate, they both supported the Medicaid budget increases and the spending increases generally.
Sen. Lent is also returning as Education Chairman. As Chairman during the 2023 session, he voted with the Democrats and establishment Republicans against a school choice bill, Senate Bill 1038 (S1038). He also opposed S1161, a more modest bill providing for tuition grants. Perhaps Sen. Lent will see the light and become a true champion of school choice, but we remain skeptical.
We bring all of this up because, while elections have consequences, it is what happens after the elections where the real change occurs. We oppose the seniority system (which hasn’t been consistently applied anyway) in the Senate not because we believe that experience matters; we simply understand that many other qualities in leadership matter more.
After all, nobody came to the Presidency with more relevant experience than Joe Biden, and we all know how that turned out.
From idahofreedom.org