Just a quick comment on bill 1067 covering child support payments and acceptance of a treaty that will subject Idaho to foreign laws and data searches. We already have laws on the books to cover child support issues. The Governor and his minions at the liberal media are bringing out the “boogeyman” scenarios to scare the public. Not passing this bill will do nothing to stop all child support payments. This is no more than misinformation as usual from the Otter administration and his cronies.
Why would anyone trust this governor or any of the agencies that work for him when they make blanket statements like on this child support issue. Why did it take10 months after the elections before they told us we had lost $30 million dollars from the FCC on the Idaho Education Network. Why did they lie to us about the problems in the prison system and settle for $1 million in damages? Why should we believe anything they have to say now?
The governor can’t get off of the federal government dole, and he wants the money this bill will bring to Idaho so they can expand government. Does anyone really think that there is not enough money in our Health and Welfare agency to cover a $16 million deficit if we don’t get this federal money? Remember how they found the money to start the State Healthcare Exchange. Over 36% of our state budget is dependent on federal funds, but no one seems to worry when the feds will turn off the money spigot. If passing this bill was so important why did they wait until 3 weeks before the end of the session to bring up this 30 page monstrosity?
As Senator Crane said, one of reasons we have this problem is this treaty that we have to agree to in this bill was not ratified by our Senate in Washington. The Obama administration is going to try and circumvent the U.S. Senate vote against this treaty by threatening the loss of funds if all of the states that don’t approve this bill. It’s more Obama black mail and we should not give up our sovereignty for 30 pieces of silver.
Representative Lynn Luker made the point that we would have to open up our data bases to foreign sources. What is it that Governor Otter doesn’t understand about State Sovereignty? I say thank God that we have conservatives in our House of Representatives who actually read the bills before they pass them unlike the liberal members of our Senate.
Think about this for a minute. The Governor takes care of his buddies in the horse racing business. He takes care of his buddies in the road construction business. He protects the common core people by ignoring a $61 million of our money dumped down the drain in a failed evaluation program by Pearson Co. I guess it’s good to be a friend of the Governor as then many favors will be showered upon you.
This Governor should never have been elected to a third term, and I’m more convinced of that with each passing day. He doesn’t care a bit about the citizens of Idaho. All he cares about is how much money he can get from Washington, and how he can help out his crony buddies who pay for his campaigns. The only reason we didn’t see him take a run to add Medicaid Expansion this session was because his cronies at IACI had been weakened by the offensive e-mail leak by its president Alex LaBeau. But don’t be surprised if they renew this battle next year so they can save their big corporate members a ton of dough in medical insurance.
As for helping the citizens of Idaho, all we get from King Otter is more regressive taxes like the gas tax. We are only one of five states that have a sales tax on groceries for home consumption. Eliminating this would have been an easy way to give tax relief to the lower and middle income working families of Idaho, and not done much to hurt the budget. Unfortunately our Governor would have none of that. Instead he wanted to give tax relief to the highest income earners and said so in his State of the State address. Why is it that the people we put in charge start to think and act like monarchs after being in office for a while? They forget where they came from and consider everyone under them as their subjects.
I would like to say thanks to those members of the House Judiciary Committee who voted against bill 1067. They are the true heroes of our state. Let’s hope they continue to be diligent in their deliberations on bills such as these.
