“Every session and every issue ultimately come down to control. Politicians want to control people. They want to control budgets and spending, education and culture, and even speech and thought, in many cases.”

I agree. Yet there’s more here. Control is merely the symptom. The deeper driver is fear.

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Every session has its dominant issue — budgets one year, taxes the next, health care, education, or culture wars. Yet beneath the headlines, fear has been the constant force, the shadow shaping Idaho’s Legislature for the three decades I’ve watched it, and likely since territorial days.

Fear of outsiders. Fear that a cherished program will disappear. Fear that a new one will never launch. Fear that funding will prove insufficient. Fear is the darkness that lies at the heart of every licensing regime, every prohibition on personal behavior, and every restriction on speech, assembly, or the use of private property.

Lawmakers fear for themselves as well: losing the backing of a powerful interest group, watching campaign donations evaporate, or — above all — losing the next election.

This session provided fresh illustrations. We saw it in the heated debates over bathroom access, flag restrictions, definitions of marriage, regulation of the internet and artificial intelligence, and government spending. In each case, fear became words, and words became new statutes and regulations.

Once enacted into law, fear does not dissipate. It becomes imprinted on the public consciousness, passed from parents to children and grandchildren. It turns neighbors into suspects, blurs the line between prudence and panic, and frays the fragile bonds of understanding and compassion.

This pattern is hardly unique to Idaho. Fear powers the machinery of governance in city halls, county courthouses, state capitols, and Congress alike. It is the fuel on which American politics now runs.

Left unchecked, this endless combustion burns up far more than tax dollars and liberty. It turns trust, civility, and our very humanity into ashes. I cannot help but notice the way in which fear has grafted itself onto society via the politics of the day.

What makes this especially striking is that while we can point fingers for this state of affairs on interest groups, political parties, and media, we have only ourselves to blame.

We are each capable of feeling fearful and fueling our politics with it, and we are also capable of putting our energies behind something better: peace, love, harmony, and mutual respect. We simply choose not to. Fear, it seems, comes easier.

There was a 2026 legislative session, and this is now history. There will now be a 2026 campaign season. This will be followed by a 2027 legislative session. The next question is simple: Will we continue to allow fear to remain the dominant theme, or will we finally choose (and insist on) something better?

Just one word defines every session, and you might even find that it colors conversations and policy in other states and nationally.

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What do you suppose it is? I have my own idea. If I’m right, then this is something worth further exploration, but I’d love to hear your ideas. I’m leaving comments open for you, and then let’s chat about it. In a single word, what’s the one theme that dominated this session and those in the past?

Of these, I have my own preference in theories about the source of the magic and majesty of life, but suffice it to say, in my 54 years, I have yet to meet someone who lacked uniqueness in what he or she brought to the world. The value of this uniqueness might be in question but the existence of it is not.

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A person’s unique gifts and talents might produce an unique idea that propels a person to want to start a business, and that business then is the source of income, which is then the vehicle through which people feed their family or keep roofs other their heads.

If the desire to open a business occurs for a person in the United States, the first “official” step is to notify the government of this fact by registering the company with various government agencies. This “officialness” then opens the doorway for the idea to intersect with various aspects of the economy.

In Idaho, the first in this process is the Secretary of State’s office. I have done business with the Secretary of State for more than 30 years. But this year is the first time I had to wait more than a month for my “idea” to become official, thus keeping me from starting work.

Banks, lenders, insurers, payment processors, and mail services look at official state filings in order to decide whether to transact business with a new business. According to the state’s own data, business applications are a month in arrears. This keeps business creators unable to set up basic aspects of their companies and bring their ideas — the product of their gifts and talents and the source of their revenue for living expenses — to fruition.

All of this brings me to what is happening at the state Legislature, where a budget for the secretary of state was defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives. On Monday, the joint House-Senate budget committee voted to fund the biennial voter pamphlet that the Secretary of State’s office is required by law to produce whenever there’s a constitutional amendment or voter initiative on the ballot.

But legislative budget writers also voted to cut the agency’s budget, which Secretary of State Phil McGrane said would continue to delay business applications in the state, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.

I honestly don’t know why it takes McGrane’s office a month to process the paperwork associated with a new business. Even the IRS simplifies the federal part of the process of starting a business: getting an Employer Identification Number. An EIN takes literally the push of a button on a website and then mere seconds later, a business is birthed. And that’s one from of the worst government agencies in existence.

At minimum, it seems, it wouldn’t take much for the Secretary of State to note that a business’ application is pending instead of showing no results from the state government search engine.

This maddening reality aside, I do know that given the choice between funding a voter pamphlet and funding the functions of state government that affect my ability to start a business, I would choose the latter. It would be easy enough to repeal the law requiring a voter pamphlet; it was passed around 50 years ago, before the Internet existed.

Today, any voter in Idaho an figure out what’s on the ballot without having to be mailed an official state pamphlet. There are dozens, maybe even hundreds of websites and organizations that have an opinion on the issues before voters in November, and those opinions are easy to discover.

But try as I might, I have no alternative to the Secretary of State’s office when it comes to registering a business doing business in Idaho. Walmart doesn’t sell business registrations. Nor does Amazon. I can’t go to the Post Office and ask them to do it.

The only place in the country that does Idaho business registrations is the Idaho Secretary of State.

I contend that if a person has unique gifts and talents, given to him or her whether by God or by the random collision of particles in the universe, that nothing should stand in the way of bringing those gifts and talents to life, so long as it is peaceful, for this then is an expression of God, Tao, Source, the Universe itself.

Thus, lawmakers are choosing to stand in the way of a person’s unique purpose/being able to use that purpose to earn a living. This is true even though an easy, compelling alternative exists.

The Commission on Hispanic Affairs was created in 1987 with the stated purpose of helping the minority, but growing, Latino population address disparities in high school graduation rates, college attendance, participation in elections, and income parity.

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After nearly 40 years of existence, by most measures, little has changed for Latino Idahoans on the matters the Legislature created the commission to address. According to the commission’s own data, income for Hispanic Idahoans is lower than the median average, and fewer Hispanic Idahoans graduate high school, graduate college, get preventive healthcare, and vote than the white majority population.

My new book: Tao of Liberty

This should raise the question: What has the commission been doing this whole time? So lawmakers were right to look at the commission for possible elimination. Getting rid of the agency wouldn’t affect the state budget by much; the general fund appropriation is less than $300,000 on a budget of more than $5.6 billion. But it’s not nothing. And, most importantly, it wouldn’t make life better or worse for the Hispanic population.

Yet a proposal to eliminate the commission didn’t even get the support to become a bill, failing on a tie vote in a House committee. Another proposal – this time to eliminate a couple of fixed revenue streams for the agency – was introduced but widely panned and won’t go anywhere.

But why? What’s so special about an agency that never accomplished what it set out to do?

During a hearing on the second proposal, Rep. John Shirts, a Republican from Weiser and skeptic of elimination, said the quiet part out loud: The GOP is “actively trying to make inroads with the Spanish community, and has,” Shirts said, pointing to Latino support for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

In other words, the existence – and persistence – of the Commission on Hispanic Affairs — is not about helping a certain underprivileged minority that makes up part of Idaho society; it’s about maintaining the illusion that Idaho politicians care about Latinos so that they can win their votes in elections.

If the Commission on Hispanic Affairs was about actual results, the inquiry should be “Why has the commission been unsuccessful at changing much of anything?” instead of “Why would we want to get rid of the commission when Hispanics have been more friendly to Republicans who make up a supermajority of the state’s elective offices?”

In truth, it’s the latter question that prevents the state Legislature from doing anything meaningful to curtail state spending. In fact, despite all the protestations to the contrary regarding “historic cuts,” the math tells a different story: the state is projected to spend more next year than it did this year. In no universe is a spending increase considered a “cut.” Yet, here we are. Results don’t matter. Appearances are everything.

So if the Idaho Legislature, which self-styles itself as “conservative” and concerned with “limited government,” can’t reconsider the existence of something so small as the Commission on Hispanic Affairs, what does this say about a divided Congress – and the nation’s fiscal health — as we approach $40 trillion in debt?

For many years, I have objected to the Commission on Hispanic Affairs because it is exactly the kind of thing government should avoid: Legalized racism, deviation from the true purpose of government, and political pandering.

Who are the politicians really serving? They make it sound like it’s all about us. But it sure looks like it’s all about them.

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If there were not many con men who tried to take us in, it was because the detection of phoniness was the price of survival. The con­ditions in which we lived bred into us an unrelenting skepticism. To be taken in by deception was a disgrace; to be ‘made a sucker of’ was to be identified with the unfit.

Our country school taught men­tal arithmetic, that is, how to do “figures in your head.” A good pupil could do 89 times 91 “in his head” nearly as easily as 2 times 2. This type of training made it hard on phonies; it was good pro­tection against knavery.

This recitation brings me to the Idaho Legislature’s consideration of House …

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Sixteen people were arrested, and yet the Legislature did pass a bill that year enforcing the minimum wage onto Idaho agriculture for many (if not all) farmworkers.

Before that, the big issue for the Legislature was whether agriculture should continue enjoy decades of exemption from worker’s compensation laws. That ended in 1996, after a southern Idaho farmworker lost both arms and part of a leg to an auger on a farm in Malta.

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Agricultural interests have always had a loud and (most usually) heard voice at the Statehou…

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I’ll explore this more in a moment, but first let me also point out that even if a constitutional convention is held to consider a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and even if that amendment passes as some hope, it’s not likely to have the result they might think it will have. Governments tend to complicate ,matters. They tend to bend rules and break them in order to do or not do things.

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Each of the balanced budget proposals I have seen, including the one Idaho lawmakers are aiming to support, would allow Congress to exempt itself from spending limitations in the event of a national emergency. A national emergency could be anythi…

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Sen. Kevin Cook mostly captured part of my concerns during a meeting of the Legislature’s budget committee a few days ago, minus the part on human flourishing:

We looked for ways to cut. We dug into it. Line by line, we looked for real cuts, cuts that wouldn’t hurt people, cuts that would not come back two to four months and cost the state millions of dollars in jails and hospitals and emergency services. Members of this committee have combed over line by line by budget to find those cuts.

I have identified myself tens of millions of dollars, and I know that I am not alone, that other members of this committee have done the same. And yet, we’re about to lay aside everything that we have done, all of our work, and take a vote on a 1% or 2% across the board. Why would we do that? Why would we ignore the work that this this committee has done? That approach is not precision.

It is taking a chainsaw to their budget. It’s not looking at accountability. We were elected as individuals to come and represent our constituents to come here and look at the budgets to do our job.

However, here’s where Cook’s argument falls short, and why I consider his statements interesting, if true, but totally disingenuous. You haven’t heard the senator propose the elimination of the easiest of all cuts: the $80 million Idaho Launch program. This is the program in which the state government decides which careers need to be filled and then offers students $8,000 to train for those jobs.

Yes, a proposal has been made to trim the program. But only the part of the program that didn’t get totally utilized. This is, essentially, no cut at all.

Idaho Launch is of tremendous concern. Not just because the government is taking money from people who earned it and giving it to people who did not. Not just because the government is taking on the financial responsibility for training employees when that responsibility belongs to businesses. Not just because it makes certain professions and certain industries more valuable than others.

My biggest concern is how money is being used to shape human behavior and interferes with human flourishing. A young man or woman, fresh out of high school and trying to decide what to do with his or her life, might be compelled to make life decisions based entirely on the state’s financial enticement .That decision may or may not fit with anything that the high school graduate intended.

The possibility exists that some students will completely alter their life’s trajectory for a check, because that this is a common impact of financial incentives.

Policymakers are often quite enchanted with the rather predictable reality that the program is popular with young people. Of course it is. .Free money always is popular. And that popularity makes politicians popular with the constituents — students, businesses, industries — that benefit and will either vote for them or donate to their campaigns.

Cook knows that an $80 million is a big chunk of change in Idaho’s budget. How does he know? He was the sponsor of the bill creating the program in 2023. But you haven’t heard him say a peep about defunding this program — even temporarily — in order to allow the state’s budget to balance.

This is the kind of work the Legislature should be doing, but isn’t. Cook certainly isn’t, his statements to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Little has said that “making room for” the federal tax cuts is a priority. But you wouldn’t know it from the budget he presented lawmakers. The governor instead had called for the federal tax cuts — which includes deductions for tips, overtime, and car loan interest, among other things — to take effect for Idahoans next year. But that would be unfair to taxpayers because it would prioritize the maintenance of existing programs via confiscatory tax policies over the return of money to the taxpayer.

Under the governor’s plan, programs like Little’s Idaho Launch get priority over immediate tax relief. So Little, true to form, is being disingenuous about his position on the federal tax cuts. He put his pet project ahead of the needs of the baris…

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Guthrie would limit lawmakers to 25 draft proposals per year. But even then, each legislator could only submit 10 proposals for introduction per year. That is, unless they get special permission from the House speaker or Senate pro tem to disregard the limit.

While there’s a certain appeal in limiting the number of legislation drafted, there are several problems with Guthrie’s proposal. First off, Guthrie says the rule is needed because the Legislative Services Office is being overrun with “problematic levels” of bill drafting. In 2025, there were about 1,380 pieces of legislation drafted (LSO has two conflicting numbers but both are in this range),1,238 the year before that, and 1,155 the year before that.

But 2020 and 2022 — in which more than 1,053 and 1,046 pieces of legislation were drafted each year, respectively — are consistent with the workload from 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2006, as you can see in the chart below.

But also notice that, even after a rather prolific period in the Legislative Services Office, there came a more calm period as well. Notice the drop in numbers from 2007-2016.

And the drop happened without the need for a rule. All legislative sessions are different. Some produce fewer bills because legislators are new; or because budget issues dominate; or because of a governor’s agenda may dictate where attention is focused.

But notice that Guthrie’s proposal may affect certain legislators who like to draft a lot of legislation but it might not do anything to the number of bills drafted or introduced if every legislator maxes out their allotment of bills. For reference, there are 105 legislators:

25x105=2,625 possible draft bills, nearly double the number drafted in the “problematic” 2025 session.
10x105= 1,050, possible introduced bills. There were 790 introduced last legislative session, which is a typical volume.

So, if Guthrie’s objective is to limit the work of the Legislative Services Office, it doesn’t seem that his proposal will necessarily achieve its aim. Some legislators are content not drafting any legislation; others draft a handful or a dozen. Creating a rule with an allotment could create an expectation; legislators might be inclined to think of the ceiling as the floor and use their share of legislation each year.

But the problem in Idaho — and in other states — isn’t the propensity of elected officials to be prolific. As government becomes more complex — as laws become voluminous and programs uncountable — more bills tend to become the norm.

Therefore, if the goal is to limit the amount of work being done by a bill drafters, the best option is to stop coming up with new things for government to do, all of which has to be spelled out in statute.

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But instead, the Legislature is opting to take the easy way out by projecting that the state will collect even more money than is being forecast by the Little administration, thus negating the prospect of a deficit and thus avoiding the need to do any deep consideration of the state’s programmatic offerings. This is not surprising, as I predicted this to be the likely outcome a month ago.

How does this happen, and what will it look like? You see, the governor has an economist who works for him, so he is able to lean on that economist to predict the relative health of the state’s economy over the next 18 months in order to predict how much money the state will collect from sales, income, and miscellaneous taxes.

The governor takes what he will of that forecast and then says to the Legislature “here’s the percentage increase we expect in tax collections for the current and following fiscal years.” He might adopt his economists’ projection, or he might fudge the number a bit in order to make the budget balance. My belief is that the governor’s forecast is too optimistic.

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The Legislature then considers the governor’s forecast and decides whether to adopt or reject it. This is done by a committee, which votes on whether the governor’s forecast is too high, too low, or just right. The committee did this, and decided that the governor’s forecast was too low, by about $152 million.

If there’s one thing to understand about the committee revenue-forecasting process, is that it has the tendency to be wildly inaccurate, and everyone knows this. The Legislature doesn’t have its own economist, so it takes different information into account in order to reach a conclusion, however right or wrong it might be. Most often, the conclusion is the product of political considerations. Set the revenue projection too low and the Legislature is forced into making cuts. Set it too high, and the Legislature has room to either spend more or allow for tax cuts. I have seen this same show play out for many years. Particularly in years when the revenue forecast makes or breaks the desire for more spending or more tax cuts, legislators tend to adopt a higher revenue forecast.

The political downside for taking the more optimistic approach is small. Legislators don’t have to reconsider, for example, health or social services programs for possible cuts. They, therefore, don’t anger any constituencies, especially in an election year. At the same time, they don’t have to consider whether the state’s programs fit a proper role of government or whether a program is doing damage to the residents it supposedly serves.

If the revenue number is set too high and the state again veers near deficit spending territory once the Legislature goes home in March or April, it will be up to the governor to order adjustments. This makes all the Legislature’s budget-setting actions and votes perfectly meaningless, but it also avoids the broader question of which programs get in the way of human flourishing.

It’s too bad. I often hear legislators and the governor brag about how Idaho is a role model for other states when it comes to budgets and policies. True or not, in this instance, lawmakers are kicking the can down the road and avoiding the real meaningful work that could see government get out of the way of the efforts of the 2 million residents to help one another, build community, charitable infrastructure, and person-to-person outreach. In short, it’s the same game that gets played each year, with the same underwhelming results.

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To know the difference is important. This is where mens rea comes in. Mens rea is Latin for "guilty mind." To understand the need for the distinction, let’s take a look at an Idaho bill that has started making its way through the legislative process.

House Bill 489 would make it “unlawful for any individual to wear a mask, hood, or other device that covers, hides, or conceals any portion of the individual's face while committing or attempting to commit another criminal offense.” The bill then says doing so would subject a person to an “enhanced penalty in addition to the sentence imposed for the underlying offense … consist[ing] of an additional fine not to exceed $2,500 (and) an additional term of imprisonment not to exceed one year” or both.

Now, I suppose that the authors of this legislation, for example, imagine being able to add another charge to a person accused of robbery, rape, or murder. After all, if you put a mask on in order to commit an act of violence and evade identification, it should be considered in the sum total of your criminal action.

Because laws tend to get passed to address a topical concern, it is rather likely that the authors were looking toward violent political protests in Idaho or other states, in which the perpetrators wore masks or other disguises.

But this kind of mechanism is really unneeded. In any of the above cases a prosecutor could argue that the defendant had malice aforethought. “He knew what he was doing; he was wearing a mask.” For forever and a day, this sort of conduct has been addressed as part of the prosecution and sentencing. Idaho sentencing guidelines already take into account factors like premeditation or attempts to evade detection as part of aggravating circumstances.

Even though this bill is presented as being optional — a tool for prosecutorial consideration — in practice, such statutes become weapons to hold over the heads of criminal defendants in order to strike plea bargains in any case in which it might be applicable.

The new law is so broad, it would also apply to a person who happens to be wearing a hoodie during, for example, a fight that broke out; or even in the course of misdemeanor drug possession, disorderly conduct, or allowing dogs to run free without a leash or collar. It would also apply to a child or adult wearing a Halloween mask who happens to damage public or private property while they’re out in costume. It would also apply to anyone who happens to wear face coverings for medical reasons or as part of their culture or heritage.

In each of the above examples, none might be trying to conceal their identities, per se — they might not have even been intentionally trying to commit a crime whatsoever — but the proposed new charge could apply nonetheless.

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I say “supposedly” because no one knows whether this story is actually true. It was a claim made by a candidate for office at the time; the media picked it up and ran with it. (More on that for paid subscribers below).

The actual woman in question — said to be 92 — was never identified and never stepped forward. The candidate for office lost his campaign. Whether the story was real or fabricated, it has framed the discussion about Medicaid adult dental services ever since.

Responding to that criticism, the Legislature brought the program back in 2003. And then cut the program in 2011. And brought it back in 2018. Now we’re in 2026, and Gov. Brad Little’s budget contemplates some unknown cuts to Medicaid. This has lawmakers discussing the fate of adult dental care yet again. This is largely because Little has submitted a budget that obliquely calls for cuts to Medicaid, but doesn’t specifically say where those will be applied. Adult dental services is one of the possibilities. Again.

And typically, the argument for keeping the program in place will go something like this: If the state doesn’t pay for dentures and teeth extractions now, we’ll pay for tooth aches and heart disease later.

This is the problem with government-run charity. It becomes an exercise based on accounting and optics. And because government has drowned out private charity, there are not a lot of alternatives left standing.

So a government program starts, stops, starts, and stops, and the people who depend on the services are left wanting. If government were not involved in the delivery of adult dental services to the poor, it is more likely that a non-government alternative, if the market demands it, would spring up in its place. But here, it’s the worst of all possible scenarios: Government drowns out charitable alternatives and then pulls the plug on the replacement from time to time.

The correct approach to the situation is to ask:

Does the government’s involvement in providing adult dental care stand in the way of compassionate, charitable alternatives? The answer is obviously yes. Since the answer is yes, the question shouldn’t be framed as “what program can we temporarily eliminate to balance the budget?” but rather “is our history here making access to care sporadic and unpredictable?” The answer is obviously yes.

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True resilience is built through human connection, compassion, and community. You can’t get to human flourishing through the outsourcing of our own responsibilities for one another to agencies and politicians. Yet very infrequently do government officials ask questions about whether existing programs starve people of their humanity.

Gov. Brad Little’s latest budget proposal follows perfectly in line with my thesis: He carefully considered how to sustain the government programs above all other considerations. This represents a very big missed opportunity.

You will recall that I have projected that the state faces a budget deficit this year and next, getting close to $800 million or more in FY2027. …

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• It’s our money, so we should be doing everything we can to get it back.

• If we refuse the money, some other state will take it, and we will still be stuck with the bill.

• The cost to the state is relatively low (meaning the deal involves either no state match or a small amount of money relative to what the federal government is putting up).

And try as I might to discourage this kind of thinking, I have largely failed. The federal government offers up attractive programs, and state lawmakers, and whoever the governor happens to be at that moment, most often accept these.

The latest inducement comes in the form of the promise of nearly a billion dollars for the state to set up a new rural healthcare service to extend into the far reaches of Idaho. Here is what Gov. Brad Little had to say about that in a recent press release:

For many Idaho families – especially in rural areas – affordable, accessible health care is a real concern. This investment, made possible by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, recognizes those challenges and puts resources where they’re needed most. It helps strengthen local health care and ensures Idahoans can get the affordable care they need, no matter where they live.

The problem is that because federal spending is completely untethered from any restraining features — lack of money is no problem; we will just print whatever is needed — there is no limit to what Congress could create. Want a program to give healthcare subsidies to everyone? No problem! Retirement support? Sure! Free and reduced lunch for schoolchildren? You betcha!

In this approach, the federal government has systematically turned America into a homogenized version of what bureaucrats and politicians dream the country to be, devoid of the differences and distinctions that make each community, each town, each county, and each state unique.

Whether you live in California, Idaho, Vermont, or Florida, the same services exist and, with only modest exceptions, run exactly the same way. Policies from politicians inside the Beltway make everywhere as predictable as a visit to the local Walmart store. Every new program cements this reality into place.

So now comes this latest installment — rural healthcare grants.

I’m not here to argue about the strings attached to federal grants, the reporting requirements, or the size of the national debt. You know these things already. I argue that these programs are changing the national character of the country, and the people along with it. It has the tendency to treat urban and rural places the same, which denies each of them access to the solutions that might otherwise arise from the thing that makes a community truly unique: its people.

Idaho, in particular, has a rich history built around its rural independence. Pioneer settlers came here via wagon train in the 1800s, for crying out loud. They didn’t expect modern conveniences, and their resilience in the face of isolation and hardship forged the independent spirit we celebrate today. They understood that this came with high risks, including untreated injuries or diseases that claimed lives prematurely.

Thankfully, they didn’t check their sense of adventure at the door because of the lack of a nearby hospital. They were satisfied — even excited by — the idea of homesteading among the sagebrush and the mountain forests, expecting that to survive, they’d need to muster all the courage, strength, and fortitude they had. If they needed something, maybe, if they were lucky, they could depend on a neighbor many miles away. But that was it. This forced them to be inventive, to bring their own skills to bear in order to solve the challenge of the moment.

The question isn’t whether rural folks should tough it out like pioneers — many already do — but whether federal programs truly preserve our self-reliant ethos or subtly shift us toward dependency on distant bureaucrats.

A federal grant might offer a measure of support — temporarily or permanently — it should be understood that centralized ideas get in the way of allowing the specialness of rural living to shine through. This might arrive in the form of a local doctor deciding to make house calls, local landowners developing medicinal gardens using natively-grown herbs, a neighbor who shares her grandmother’s homemade soup with a sick neighbor, or something else entirely.

A Washington, D.C. program, even when it is administered in Boise, keeps these unique alternatives from ever materializing, and is the unfortunate but easy to predict outcome that undermines the rural communities the program is supposedly was serving.

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If you’re new to Idaho or haven’t really paid attention to the Legislature in the past, it’s best to think of it the way you do the episodes of the 1990s TV comedy “Seinfeld.” Once you understand it’s really just a show about nothing, it makes the Legislature easier to follow.

This is why, while I usually write a column in January about what I hope the next Idaho legislative session will accomplish in the new year, I am more content to keep it real and offer a prediction: Very little will happen. Because if there’s one thing I have learned watching the Legislature since 1995, it’s that election year legislative sessions are the absolute worst.

Blame 1968 voters for this. That’s when a 57.7% majority approved a constitutional amendment to make legislative sessions annual affairs. And so starting Jan. 12, we will be forced to put up with political shenanigans, flash, and theater. This will last for three or four months while someh…

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But it really doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a dollar or $100,000, taxpayers paid too much. Government agencies do not need “branding.” They’re not restaurants, grocery stores, or auto dealerships that are trying to attract business. They’re government agencies, and to the degree we must deal with them, we don’t really have a choice.

Still sometimes an agency’s rebranding effort — they’re practically endemic — will be Cracker Barrel-level stupid, and the Board of Education’s effort is exactly that.

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Earlier in the week, Idaho state officials held a big gathering in the Statehouse Rotunda to *checks notes* present themselves with a ceremonial check? Yep. That happened. I can’t decide whether I should be amused or annoyed by this. I’m leaning toward the latter.

The Idaho Capital Sun was there and reported on the self-congratulatory display:

The Idaho State Board of Land Commissioners presented state leaders with a ceremonial $68.2 million check on Tuesday to celebrate this year’s funding disbursement to the K-12 public school system. Idaho Department of Lands Director Dustin Miller said the $68.2 million funding distribution is a record high amount, due to a combination of increased timber sales and low expenses.

“We saw increased revenue from endowment lands this past fiscal year mostly through the increase in our timber harvest level over time,” Miller said. “Also, one thing I am proud of is that while our revenue is going up, expenses are staying relatively flat. This is an added benefit to the beneficiaries.”

The State Board of Land Commissioners is a board that is made up of the governor, attorney general, state controller, and secretary of state, and superintendent of public instruction. The big fake check is being handed to Debbie Critchfield, the superintendent of public instruction, so this is, in effect, the board moving publicly moving money from one pocket to another.

This is not like the state Lottery giving a ceremonial check to a lucky winner, nor a nonprofit charity presenting funds to its beneficiaries. This is the political equivalent of a high-five in a mirror: people involved in the decision-making patting themselves on the back so hard it borders on the surreal.

To prove this is a stunt and nothing more let me point out that if the government really wanted to make a show of its endowment distribution and be a little less self-congratulatory, what it should have done is offer ceremonial checks to its other beneficiaries, all of which are due payouts from the endowment fund, too. These include the state hospitals and prisons for adults and juveniles. But that didn’t happen, now did it?

Because it’s not nearly as much fun to hand a giant ceremonial check to the prison warden as it is to hand it to the state school superintendent.

Because this was all about showmanship. It’s all about politicians showing how much they “love the little children.” It was about manufactured public relations. And you paid for it.

Arranging this staged event required coordination among the schedulers from almost all of the state’s constitutional offices, press staff participation, and security detail. All to the benefit of no one except the people grinning for the camera. It’s not a lot of money that was wasted, to be sure, but it’s stuff like this that puts the care of the public dollar and resources on full display.

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Idaho politics is the same kind of predictable sequel. The 2026 legislative session is already spoiling its own plot.

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Act I: The state faces a budget hole in 2026 that balloons in 2027 if spending isn’t reined in.
Act II: Certain special interests (cough, public schools) want more money anyway.
Act III: It’s an election year, so broad tax hikes are off the table.
Act IV: Enter the perfect villain: there’s a product only some adults use, widely considered a “sin,” currently untaxed, and that busybodies insist taxing is all about protecting and educating the children.

That product is the vape.

Idaho’s cigarette and tobacco tax became law in 1974. Vapes didn’t exist, so they’re not taxed. The Idaho School Boards Association just passed a resolution begging legislators to “modernize” the law. The association wants the tax to apply to e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches.

Translation: tax something that isn’t taxed today. The rest of us call that a tax increase.

ISBA deputy director Quinn Perry insists it’s just an “additional revenue source” for schools and whether it’s really a new tax is “a question of semantics.” (Legislators, she helpfully notes, hate the phrase “new taxes.”)

It’s not semantics. If tomorrow the Legislature decided to slap sales tax on haircuts or car repairs, no one would call that “modernizing.” They’d call it a tax hike. Same principle.

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