How Horman, Moyle, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation Hijacked the Budget Process to Protect Their Friends
This is a story about people in power punishing legislators who put their constituents before party leadership. It is also, unfortunately, a true story now playing out in depressing fashion behind closed Republican doors in the Idaho Statehouse.
For those of you who closely follow Idaho politics, what you’re about to read will come as no surprise. You know how the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) and its allies operate. You’ve seen their ugly footprints before—although perhaps not as distinctly as was evident in Boise last week when the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee (JFAC) recklessly upended long-standing budgeting protocols and, if that were not enough, added insult to injury by firing Megan Blanksma, the House Republicans thoughtful and respected Majority Leader, for not toeing the IFF line.
For those of you who don’t keep these sorts of things front of mind (lucky you!), consider what follows as a lesson in how authoritarianism can take root in your backyards with the able, cynical assistance of people you thought you knew and maybe even voted for in the mistaken belief they had Idaho’s and your best interests in mind.
First, some recent and arcane political history: In the fall of 2023, an Idaho PAC spent tens of thousands of dollars printing and distributing door hangers to “remind” voters that Sens. Brian Lenney, Chris Trakel, and Tammy Nichols had voted against state budgets that funded veterans, prisons, and the police. The door hangers claimed—falsely that these three well-known ultra-conservative legislators, who, up until then, had worked in lockstep with IFF, were not what they appeared to be but were really liberals (or globalists, or Democrats, or RINOs, whatever the trope of the day was) because they voted against funding police and veterans, something no true conservative would ever do.
Lenney, Trakel, and Nichols voted against the budgeted funding for veterans, prisons, and the police, just as they were instructed to with the IFF spending index. Casting negative attention to their votes outraged the IFF/ Idaho Freedom Caucus/ Citizens Alliance and other dark money groups that had contributed enormous amounts of out-of-state money to fund IFF and its mission of recruiting, electing, and directing the votes of far-right legislators like them. The message was clear: We elected you with our money to do our bidding, not what is in the best interests of the friends and neighbors in your legislative district who actually put you in office.
It also posed an interesting, if not existential, problem for the organization’s newly-installed leadership, the right-wing power couple of Ron and Maria Nate—he a so-called anti-government economist and former Madison County representative, who, to paraphrase Mencken, are now apparently motivated by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is exercising their free will in defiance of IFF’s efforts to orchestrate state control over what they read, where they worship, and who they love.
Battling the state’s moderates and left-leaners was one thing; IFF and the Idaho Freedom Caucus were used to that and had finely tuned their playbook against the Democrats and the “libs” to near-perfection—hardly a feat in a state that is among the reddest in the nation. Taking on other factions—some even further to the right than IFF had theretofore ventured to go—was quite another thing, however, and posed some difficult logistical problems for the organization: How could IFF appease its out-of-state donors and continue to dominate Idaho Republican politics (and, by extension, its sizeable presence in the House and its increasing presence in the Senate) if its favored legislators were being attacked at multiple fronts along the political spectrum? More basically, how could IFF keep these puppets and proxies ensconced and insulated from increasingly hostile questioning of its odious policies long enough to achieve the goal of completely transforming Idaho’s representative government and its traditions and legacies to their liking?
If last week’s weird happenings in JFAC and, later, in the Republican House caucus, suggest anything, it is that IFF’s and its minions’ answer to the existential threat they are now facing is not to cultivate more thoughtful and less ideological candidates, nor actually address the state’s important policy issues on the merits, it is to dramatically change the rules—in this instance the budgeting process that necessarily and rightly puts all of the state’s elected officials under the klieg lights at one time or another to explain and defend their spending priorities to their colleagues and the people who elected them.
It’s not a radical or difficult concept to appreciate. All of the state’s agencies submit their budgets for review by the governor and the legislature; budget analysts then submit their best revenue projections for the year so that lawmakers can match the projected income stream with the budget requests. The governor then suggests budget increases or decreases, depending on the revenue projections and contingencies, and both bodies in the legislature do the same. Debates are managed and healthy, and a budget is eventually settled on and adopted, consistent with the state’s balanced budget requirements. All of this information is publicly available and readily transparent and always has been. It is an iterative process that has served Idaho and its constituents extremely well for decades in each budget session.
No more. What we have now, thanks to the semi-secretive machinations of Rep. Wendy Horman and her allies at IFF and JFAC, is a budget process that splits budgets into maintenance and line item budgets, thereby giving IFF’s captive legislators the ability to keep the various agencies intact, albeit at maintenance levels (“See what I’ve done! How dare you accuse me of being anti-government.”) yet simultaneously shields them from ever having to go on the record with respect to any of the stickier funding problems that typically arise—be they needed increases in funding for public schools and public schoolteachers, more money for road and highway infrastructure, the burgeoning effects of population and development in places like the Treasure Valley and Madison County, or the Quagga Mussel infestation of the state’s waters.
It is a cynical and foolish tactic and one that is certainly not in keeping with IFF’s once credible reputation as a fiscal watchdog. Much as Horman and her allies might try to couch all of this as an improvement in the state’s budgeting process—as an approach that keeps everything running smoothly and efficiently and affords more time to JFAC to focus on new or greater agency spending requests—it is anything but that.
Consider the following:
Horman and her JFAC colleagues’ assurances that the “maintenance budgets” that were singled out for quick passage last week would keep the agency lights on—thereby implying the new budget process was not as dramatic or harmful as some felt it would be—was a lie. As Rep. Illana Rubell pointed out during the limited debate on the quickly orchestrated passage, the “maintenance” levels that were approved were by no means realistic and were adopted without the benefit of any real understanding of the state’s revenue projections. In a word, the new process sacrifices continuity and experience for political maneuvering and chicanery.
The new budgeting process takes the chair of the relevant House committee overseeing a particular state agency completely out of the picture and relegates budgeting responsibility for the agency to JFAC, many of whose members either lack the historical knowledge and experience that frames agency budgets or can safely be said to have near-complete disdain for the state’s government’s mandated role to deliver services to its citizens and taxpayers through careful stewardship of the agencies that provide such services.
The piecemeal approach to bringing the budgets forward promotes further time-consuming and nonsensical political power plays. The Speaker of the House could, for example, demand changes or substitutions in an agency budget if IFF or another behind-the-scenes power broker demanded or insisted on it as a condition to political fealty
By splitting the budgets into two pieces, certain far-right legislators will have the ability to tell their constituents during the primaries that they voted for the maintenance budgets but refused to fund ongoing projects or services if it suits their messaging and their incessant culture war. This will make it easier for IFF and other anti-government groups to promote messaging against those responsible legislators who came to town to do the only work demanded of them by the state constitution—this being to consider and pass responsible budgets that address the needs of the state and its citizens.
It is a step toward a full-time legislature that benefits IFF-backed candidates who are financially constrained from serving without a full-time paycheck from the state government. Conversely, it penalizes those legislators who run ranches, farms, and small businesses and would suddenly find themselves unable to serve without surrendering their livelihoods. It could create a new class of activist legislative candidates who become career politicians, the very thing IFF has claimed to fight since it was founded.
It is certainly telling—maybe even dispositive—that the budget scheme that was adopted last week was put together and executed in near darkness without a vote by JFAC’s members. Many members were in fact, blindsided by the maneuver—a fact that Rep. Horman neatly tried to cover up by pointing to an email she had sent to the committee just prior to ramming the changes through.
What is most intriguing—and troubling—about the new budget scheme is its disregard for the agency personnel who do the actual heavy lifting of the state’s work—that and its cynical patronizing of the voters who put people like Horman (and Herndon, and Grow, and Speaker Moyle, and Lenney, and Trakel, and Nichols) in office. Better, they were represented by good people like the first female Majority Leader, Megan Blanksma, who stood their ground to protect their constituents and the constitutional mandate to keep the state agencies running and provide services to the taxpayers.