Republican legislators send a strong message to extremists: Welcome to Idaho! | Opinion

A pair of Republican bills making their way through the Idaho Legislature would send a message to extremist groups like the Patriot Front and the Ku Klux Klan: Welcome to Idaho!

One bill, pitched by Sen. Kelly Anthon, R-Burley, aims to make it more difficult to label someone a domestic terrorist. Another bill, from Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, famous for going on a video-recorded rant against a group of high school students, seeks to get rid of a state law that regulates militias.

In defending his bill, Anthon cited a controversy from 2021 when the National School Boards Association asked the federal government to look into death threats against school board members over curricula, diversity efforts and COVID-19 health and safety policies as domestic terrorism.

Anthon and others on the far right have minimized those threats and used the controversy as a rallying cry against what they call the weaponization of the government.

But making death threats against a public official in order to influence a decision or policy is the exact definition of domestic terrorism. That’s not just “exercising their rights.”

We suppose Anthon might feel differently if someone showed up to a Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee hearing with an AR-15 threatening to kill a senator if a bill were to pass out of committee. Just exercising their rights, you know.

But more than that, Anthon’s bill includes the bizarre caveat that only people working “in cooperation with any foreign terrorist organization” could be considered terrorists.

So if you’re terrorizing fellow citizens or even plotting to kidnap the governor, like a group did in Michigan, come on in! The water’s just fine for you here in Idaho.

Anthon’s bill also would rescind a provision in Idaho law that has been around since the 1980s.

Anyone remember the Aryan Nations?

It was a neo-Nazi, white supremacist hate group based in North Idaho in the 1980s whose long shadow casts a dark cloud over Idaho’s reputation to this day.

Lawmakers passed a law that aimed to combat the practice of “civil disorder” through organized violence in reaction to the Aryan Nations.

“It’s stunning to me that we’re 40 years away and our memory is so short,” Stephen Paolini, the Anti-Defamation League’s associate regional director for the Pacific Northwest, told the Statesman. “This statute was designed to address groups like the Aryan Nations.”

Meanwhile, Foreman is trying yet again to get rid of a state law that bans private militias.

This is at least the third time legislators have tried to get rid of the law, which forbids a “body of men” outside of the government from associating “together as a military company or organization, or parade in public with firearms in any city or town of this state.”

While a repeal of the law is painted as protecting First Amendment rights of peaceful assembly and free speech, bringing a gun to a debate has the opposite effect and actually infringes on the free speech of others through fear and intimidation.

Further, even if you take the NRA’s warped definition of the Second Amendment, one can’t simply ignore that whole part about “a well regulated militia.” So funny how the far right overlooks those words.

Finally, with most of these bills that we see in the early days of the Idaho Legislature, we can’t help but ask, “What’s the problem here?”

What are these Republican legislators trying to fix? Are these really priorities that need attention? Of course not.

The Idaho Legislature has a good rule that you don’t impugn the motives of a legislator. So we won’t impugn the motives of Foreman and Anthon by suggesting they want far-right extremists, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, Nazis and fascists to openly set up shop in Idaho and use armed intimidation to strike fear in citizens to impose their ideology across the state.

That may not be the intention at all.

But that very well could be the end result.

Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Mary Rohlfing and Patricia Nilsson.