Kudos to Idaho House Speaker Mike Moyle for starting a crusade against “outdated, obsolete and unnecessary” laws. Moyle’s House Bill 14 — the “Idaho Code Cleanup Act”— would cleanse Idaho’s statute books of laws that are void, unenforceable and not in the public interest. It is high time to comb through our laws and get rid of those oldies that are no longer relevant. But we should not overlook newer laws that serve no purpose, nor legislative proposals that would just add to the clutter.
The House could do itself a favor by tossing Rep. Jaron Crane’s House Bill 11, which seeks to insert the state into the immigration field. Immigration law is in the legal wheelhouse of the United States Government. A Texas law, upon which the bill is modeled, has been blocked from being enforced in Texas for over a year. HB 11 starts off with making it a crime for an alien to enter Idaho “directly from a foreign nation.” According to my recollection of grade school geography, that would only be possible from Canada. And the bill would require Idaho judges to take actions that exceed their authority. HB 11 would certainly qualify for the “unnecessary” category of Moyle’s Code Cleanup bill.
Another measure that should never darken the pages of the Idaho Code is Sen. Ben Toew’s anti-DEI proposal. It has been politely described as “an unabashed mishmash” but it is much worse than that. A court would find it to be a herculean task to winnow through the mind-numbing definitions to determine the conduct that is being targeted.
Like much of the culture war legislation these days, it suffers from a number of constitutional problems–free speech, vagueness, etc. It would give our Attorney General enforcement authority, making Raul Labrador Idaho’s campus speech czar. Plus, any student, staff member or alumnus of a college could bring a civil suit for damages against the college for its violation of whatever it is that the bill is designed to prohibit.
In addition to these beauties, there are a number of recently-enacted culture war laws that are totally useless. These laws were imported from out of state to stir up fear and outrage in order to help extremists defeat reasonable Republicans in the closed GOP primary. They have worked quite well to shift the Legislature ever further to the right.
Idaho Code section 33-138, which prohibits the teaching of critical race theory, is a prime suspect for removal. Legislative sleuths searched high and low to find any instance where CRT had been taught in an Idaho school and came up short. Nevertheless, they enacted the prohibition against it, although failing to define exactly what it is. I suspect the sponsors knew it was constitutionally defective, but culture war laws are made primarily to intimidate, rather than constitutionally regulate.
The bathroom law, which requires separate facilities for kids in public school based on their sexual designation at birth, was imported from out of state by vote-seeking culture warriors. There had been no discernable problem in our schools before its passage. The law gives a student who “encounters” a person of the opposite sex in a restroom the right to file suit and collect $5,000. The law was placed on hold by a federal appeals court in October of 2023.
And, of course, there is the book ban law, requiring librarians to relocate “materials harmful to minors” or face a penalty of $250. Christian nationalist Blaine Conzatti of the Idaho Family Policy Center was the guiding hand behind the legislation. He as much as admitted that the law was primarily intended to intimidate librarians into self-censoring books that he deemed impure. He crowed that the $250 penalty would drive up liability insurance costs for libraries.
These and other culture war laws should be eliminated in the Code Cleanup. Idaho legislators first enrage their supporters with fake culture war issues and then make a big show of “fixing” them. The remedy is usually hastily-conjured, ambiguously-worded legislative measures that often exceed constitutional limitations. Targeted groups are intimidated into compliance for fear of prosecution or the cost and expense of litigation.
Legislation should be designed to fix real problems, not to create them.
