You will be surprised
Misinformation has become prevalent just about everywhere you look and here is an excellent example. There was an article published by the “Coeur d’ Alene/Post Falls Press on April 7 titled “Idaho is becoming redder” that caused me to write this piece.
Our current Secretary of State Phil McGrane during a speech for the Coeur d’ Alene Rotarians attempted to pull the preverbal wool over the eyes of his audience and any Idahoans who might read his comments. Secretary McGrane stated that “This is a red state no matter what you heard from someplace else, this is a Republican state and I’m sorry for the Democrats in the room.” What McGrane didn’t tell his audience is that the latest report from the highly respected Institute for Legislative Analysis (ILA) did some real homework on Idaho’s legislators voting habits which does not back up McGrane’s claims. See the ILA report HERE.
McGrane is correct in the fact that we have many more registered republicans in our state than democrats or independents. What he fails to mention is that in Idaho’s house of representatives there are 59 Republicans and 11 democrats but according to their voting records, we have 21 republicans who vote with the 11 democrats and only 38 of the 59 who actually vote and qualify as real conservative republicans. In essence, this tells a very different story about just how red our state is. What is more interesting was the ILA’s voting analysis of our Senate with 28 elected Republicans and 7 elected Democrats only 14 of our 28 republicans vote like conservative Republicans while the other 14 are voting like Democrats. Idaho lawmakers are incorrectly aligning themselves with political parties that do not match their values based on their voting records.
This tells us that Democrats are philosophically in control of Idaho’s senate and Republicans hold a very narrow margin in our House of Representatives. This transition has been going on for the past 20 or so years and I’m not sure if it is because Democrats in an effort to be elected have been running as conservative republicans or our Republicans are “Republicans In Name Only” when it comes to passing liberal legislation. According to the ILA’s most recent findings Idaho represents one of the very worst cases of fraudulent party identification, perhaps even worse than what ILA recently exposed in Wyoming.
I have been intimately involved in the political arena of our state for 15 years and have seen this disheartening metamorphosis take place. Our elected republican officials have become so indebted to the lobbyists from IACI and other powerful political organizations that they no longer represent the constituents they were elected to serve. It is no different with our current Governor Little who is another Republican In Name Only which completes the circle of why Idaho is not getting “Redder” As I say the proof of the pudding is in the eating so gobble up the reality that Idaho is not the Reddest of the Red States and in fact is turning Bluer by the day.
The recent ILA analysis of Governor Little study tells us he is on the wrong side of the fence like so many of our representatives. According to this report “The analysis found that Governor Brad Little sided with the Limited Government position 42.53% of the time which corresponds to a Democratic political philosophy. The data revealed that Governor Little strongly aligned with limited government on policies relating to election integrity and individual liberties but aligns with the progressive wing of the Democratic party on fiscal, spending and regulatory-related issues.” It appears that Governor Little has joined with a significant number of our so-called Republican politicians who have mislabeled their party affiliation.
The point I’m trying to get across is that the supposed thoroughbred Republicans we thought we had been electing to office for the past 15 years have turned into Jackasses. They now represent the values of those entities who pay for their election campaigns not the electorate and this must change soon or we will wind up just like Colorado in a cesspool of progressive liberalism. Let me remind you we had 50 prominent Republicans who supported Tom Arkoosh a Democrat for Idaho’s Attorney General because they feared they could not control former congressman Raul Labrador if he won the election, which he did.
There is currently a huge battle going on in the Republican party where RINOs like Tom Luna and Trent Clark are trying to unseat the current conservative GOP chairwoman Dorothy Moon. They have amassed a couple of million dollars from the corporate elitists to send out disparaging flyers claiming everything from Moon being the cause of our lost presidential republican primary which she had nothing to do with to claiming she is a totalitarian wanting to disenfranchise voters. These disgruntled are currently running a campaign to elect a new crop of handpicked precinct committeeman who will vote for Tom Luna in the next election for Chair of the Idaho GOP. If you think something smells fishy here you’re right. I have to ask the question of our readers: do you really want someone like Luna the Idaho Tuna the man who brought Common Core to our Idaho school system to be the next GOP chairman? I’m warning you that should Luna and his newly elected herd of RINOs take control of the GOP chair we will soon see a blue wave sweeping over Idaho politics that will change our state forever.
In this age of misinformation, it is important that we keep our readers informed of any questionable information we may come across as it is getting harder to decern what is true and what is fake news.
Remember folks, “We Get the Government We Deserve”.
