Taking food out of constituents’ mouths? Shrug. This is what Idaho lawmakers fear more | Opinion
The 2024 legislative session is drawing toward a close as lawmakers are eager to get back home to their districts, where many face primary challenges in about seven weeks.
Which makes a recent vote on the Senate floor befuddling.
On Thursday, the Senate killed S1445, a budget bill for the Welfare Division of the Department of Health and Welfare, in a 10-25 vote. The primary reason was that the bill contained funding for the Summer EBT program, which offers $40 per month to kids eligible for free or reduced school lunches so they can eat during the summer.
Remarkably, nearly all members of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee, which wrote the budget, voted against it. That was so unusual that Senate Pro Tem Chuck Winder, R-Boise, gathered senators on the committee for a closed-door meeting to figure out what was going on, according to Idaho Reports.
Did committee members bring forth the bill just so they could make a show of voting it down? So they could go back home and say they killed summer nutrition funding for kids?
And it takes food from a lot of children. About 136,000 students were eligible for the program, which relies almost entirely on federal funding. That’s a bit less than half of the roughly 313,000 students in Idaho, according to figures from Idaho Education News.
Sen. Scott Herndon, R-Sagle, argued that approving Summer EBT would make permanent a program meant only for pandemic relief. Sen. Brian Lenney, R-Nampa, warned it would expand the welfare state. Sen. Cindy Carlson, R-Riggins, seemed to suggest hungry kids should get a job.
“We all need to work for what we get,” she said.
On the policy level, all this is needless cruelty. Hungry kids deserve food, and a society that doesn’t provide hungry kids with food is an immoral one.
As Sen. Carrie Semmelroth, D-Boise, pointed out, 40,000 Idaho kids are food insecure every summer, a problem especially bad in rural areas. Those are real kids, whose parents can vote, whom their representatives opted not to feed for ideological reasons.
Why aren’t they afraid of a backlash?
Idaho is a conservative state to be sure, but programs like free and reduced lunch and SNAP are broadly popular around the country. Around 60% of Americans think all students, regardless of income, should receive free breakfast and lunch, as Chalkbeat reported, and an overwhelming 85% support expanding SNAP, according to The Hill.
And that’s why this vote is so hard to understand.
Simply put, you wouldn’t expect a bunch of politicians to want to go into an election having just taken the lunch money from about half of the families in their districts.
But the preferences of the vast majority of Idahoans are an electoral irrelevance under the closed primary system. What matters is the preferences of the roughly 18% of voters who show up for the primary, where hardcore activists are vastly overrepresented.
They choose your elected officials; you don’t.
An obvious way to solve this problem is to support the Open Primaries Initiative, which would create a system of elections much more responsive to political preferences.
As Northwest Nazarene University Professor Peter Crabb recently pointed out, no system of elections is guaranteed to perfectly capture public preferences. But some systems are better, and others are worse.
Ours is about as bad as it can get. Voters have consistently said that their top priorities are things like education, housing, jobs and health care, according to Boise State University’s running Public Policy Survey, while the central issues of the last legislative sessions have been abortion, transgender rights and library policies.
And now it’s clear legislators are more afraid they’ll be vulnerable to losing their office if they feed their constituents’ kids than if they let them go hungry.
Don’t expect them to make your concerns the top issues until they’re more afraid of making you mad than of irking party fanatics. And don’t expect that to change until Idaho’s system of primary elections does, as well.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer with the Idaho Statesman.
