Idaho’s fringe politics could kill the progress we’ve made as a great place to live

Last year, Boise once again scored highest in the rankings game, this time by Livability.com as the number one place to live among 100 Best Places to Live. We marvel with each passing year as Boise continues to earn national honors as one of the best cities in America. Over the years, civic leadership, entrepreneurial innovation and volunteer efforts created a national buzz about Boise that spread across the West and worked its way east, as well.

It doesn’t take a newcomer long to figure out what makes this city tick. Its two major health care providers, Saint Alphonsus and St. Luke’s, bring medical professionals to Boise above the quality you would expect to find in a region the size of the Treasure Valley. Its mayor and city councils over the years created an impressive series of Foothills trails for outdoor treks. The Greenbelt snakes it way across the Valley and offers walkers, runners and cyclists a look at one of the cleanest urban rivers in America.

Thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of a baker named Joe Albertson, the Parkinson brothers who started Micron and other innovators like Boise Cascade and Simplot that fired up the its economy, Boise became well-known as the home of Fortune 500 companies. When Hewlett-Packard came to town years ago, it not only added jobs to the growing Boise economy, but some of its most creative team members spun off new businesses, including software engineering firms recognized today as satellites of Silicon Valley.

On the arts scene, when I arrived in Boise in the days before its current growth spurt, it was hard to believe a city of Boise’s size at the time could sustain a Philharmonic, Ballet Company, Shakespeare Festival of renown and an opera company.

And then there’s Boise Nice, which I addressed in my last column. No doubt, many who have scouted a move here noticed the friendly confines of Boise.

On the education front, the Meridian and Boise school districts offer students and parents a first-class educational experience that creates a bright pathway to the future. Idaho higher education has prospered as Boise State morphed into Boise’s metropolitan research university, the land-grant University of Idaho brought its law school to Boise, already home to UI graduate and undergraduate programs. Idaho State built a health care education complex in Meridian that supplies area medical facilities with talented professionals.

Citizens of the counties of Gem, Canyon and Ada counties approved a referendum a few years ago creating the College of Western Idaho which now serves over 29,000 students. Take notice, Republican legislators, taxpayers voted for taxes to support education. It happened right here in Idaho, although you’d never know it in the midst of a hyper-partisan pandemic of mean-spirited Republican legislators intent on penalizing our progress in positioning the Boise and Idaho of today and, worse yet, focusing their right-wing mania on problems that don’t exist.

In one recent legislative proposal, they attempt to outlaw funding that some counties have received from an out-of-state foundation to upgrade and improve county election systems. If you’re looking for equally preposterous behavior, Republican legislators voted against the education funding bill for elementary and secondary education. They already spun their fantastical and mythical tales of indoctrination on our college and university campuses and reduced funding accordingly. Was there any doubt these “know-nothings” would attack the school down the street where your kids attend?

Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, appears to have emerged as the leader of right-wing efforts to turn Idaho into a dictatorship ruled by a handful of Republican legislators in charge of Idaho’s way of life. His most recent raid on an Idaho institution, introducing legislation to wrest control of high school sports from the Idaho High School Activities Association and hand it over to a review board of legislators, masquerades as public policy, but is really an effort to overrule the association from limiting seating at athletic events due to COVID-19 protections.

Republican legislators haven’t acted alone as they have taken a wrecking ball to institutions Boiseans and Idahoans have come to trust. They had lots of help from the ironically named Idaho Freedom Foundation. With donors lacking the courage to identify themselves, it spews out right-wing nonsense more in keeping with Big Brother in the futuristic novel “1984.” So many of the “freedoms” it advocates in legislation actually dictate and impose its own reactionary controls on Boiseans and Idahoans who understand the role government plays in building a first-class public education for their children and protecting the public health and safety of its citizens.

Until recently, it appeared the Idaho Freedom Foundation was “free” to spread its extremist venom without fear of reprisal. Then, in one of the boldest and most courageous moves, the University of Idaho President Scott Green, while not specifically naming the Idaho Freedom Foundation, charged “these (special) interests represent a libertarian-based ideology, the principles of which generally do not believe that any public funding should be used for public education. They have targeted and tried to redefine issues of diversity, inclusion and social justice to create an illusion that higher education in Idaho is actively pushing a political agenda wrought with ‘leftist’ indoctrination.”

Idaho Business for Education also spoke out in a letter calling on the Legislature to reverse its decision to hold up higher education funding, signed by 100 business members of IBE. And most recently, four past chairs of the Boise State Foundation authored a guest commentary decrying the “punitive and harmful” cuts to Boise State.

These are important first steps in taking back Idaho from a legislative cabal of fringe thinkers who are out to destroy the good work of Idaho’s leaders.

But there is much work yet to done, and Gov. Brad Little, together with four former governors, signaled recently to the Republican Party that it must take account of how it’s been hijacked by a few wingnuts who do not have the best interests of Idaho in mind. In vetoing legislative efforts to curb a governor’s emergency powers during crises like a pandemic that demand immediate action, Little said the Legislature had gotten too divisive, and its duties of serving Idahoans “have taken a back seat to fringe topics.”

“Anger,” he said, “drives people apart during a time when we should be working together to heal and move forward.”

It will take more than the sitting governor and those who formerly held the office to regain control of their party from what former U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner calls the “knuckleheads,” more interested in power than public policy. Boehner could have been speaking directly to current-day Republicans in the Idaho Legislature.

Now is the time for Republican donors to withhold financial support from incumbents who buy into the conspiracy theories cooked up by the Idaho Freedom Foundation and played out in the Legislature. Now is the time for challengers to “primary” extremists who have sullied the reputation of Idaho and do harm to our children’s future. Now is the time for all to speak up loudly and clearly above the din of a fanatical subset of Republicans and return the GOP to the days of Govs. Otter, Kempthorne and Batt.

To do anything less is to find Boise and Idaho ranked some day soon as a city and state that lost their way and were overtaken by a loony mob of autocrats.

Bob Kustra served as president of Boise State University from 2003 to 2018. He is host of Reader’s Corner on Boise State Public Radio and is a regular columnist for the Idaho Statesman. He served two terms as Illinois lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator.