We the people hire and fire the Idaho attorney general, not the Idaho Legislature

The Idaho Attorney General is a constitutional officer who is hired or fired by the people of Idaho every four years in an election based on his or her ability to uphold the Idaho Constitution and the rule of law.

What the Idaho Attorney General is not: a low-rent lawyer-for-hire whose goal is to weasel a victory for his clients at all costs, like some sort of elected version of an ambulance chaser.

Yet, that’s what some Republican Idaho legislators want to turn the position into — private legal counsel: One call, that’s all.

A number of bills targeting the Attorney General’s Office are underway in the Legislature, including one that would remove the attorney general as the primary defender of state agencies. Another bill would prevent the attorney general from representing Idaho’s interest in state lands. The House last week rejected the Attorney General’s Office budget.

The motivation for these pieces of legislation appear to be because some Republican legislators don’t like the legal opinions of current Attorney General Lawrence Wasden.

He declined to join a lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general to challenge election results in other states, arguing rightly that how those states conduct their elections is their business, and other states shouldn’t be meddling in their affairs.

Wasden, in keeping with that position, signed a letter opposing federal House Resolution 1, the so-called “For The People Act,” because it violated states’ rights to conduct elections on their terms as decided by their individual legislatures.

Wasden has been able to maintain consistency on a number of issues, primarily because his opinions are based not on politics but on the law and the Constitution.

Some have suggested that Wasden’s opposition to the election lawsuit brought by the Texas attorney general, which the U.S. Supreme Court quickly and rightly dismissed, is the reason for this session’s legislative moves to defund his office and seek outside counsel.

Wasden also has a long history of issuing fact-based, Constitution-centered and legally sound opinions that some legislators just don’t like. They prefer to have a lawyer who will “take their side” and “fight for their cause.”

“I hear the term from our good attorney general that ‘I call balls and strikes,’ ” Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, said. “Well, sometimes I want to hire an attorney who can throw a curveball, a knuckleball, a changeup, because I need that 100 miles an hour fastball on my cases.”

Skaug is one of the co-sponsors of a bill to allow state departments and agencies to use counsel other than the Attorney General’s Office.

Even though some believe competition will lower costs, this would do just the opposite.

Idaho Land Board members Tuesday voted to oppose a bill that would prohibit the Department of Lands from using the Attorney General’s Office, anticipating attorney fees would go from the current $405,000 to $1.8 million.

The state of Idaho gets in-house consultation at a rate of about $45 to $80 an hour, compared with $400 or more per hour in the private market.

Rep. Megan Blanksma has argued the Legislature would be able to rein in frivolous expenses.

But legislators have proved to be the poster children for frivolous spending — losing court challenge after court challenge because of laws they passed that were contrary to legal advice they were given by the Attorney General’s Office.

The state has paid over $3 million in legal fees since 1995 — some of it after ignoring Wasden’s advice and losing court challenges, according to The Associated Press.

For example, Wasden advised legislators in 2011 that a proposed fetal pain abortion law likely would be found unconstitutional. Lawmakers passed it anyway and lost a lawsuit in 2013, forcing the state to pay out $137,000, according to The Associated Press.

Time and again, Wasden has rightly cautioned against such laws as anti-transgender prohibitions, Medicaid expansion sideboards, abortion restrictions, restrictions on removing monuments, trimming the governor’s emergency powers and more.

The Legislature’s repeated disregard of the Idaho Constitution has gotten so bad that a group of former Idaho attorneys general and a secretary of state have formed a committee to challenge legislators’ unconstitutional proposals. They, too, warn against the dangers of inflated budgets, which they saw prior to a 1995 law to consolidate legal services in the Attorney General’s Office.

That law was precipitated by a more than fourfold increase in the state agencies’ legal expenses from about $1.3 million on outside lawyers in 1988 to $6 million in 1994, according to The Spokesman-Review.

We do not want to return to those days.

Lawyers for the state of Idaho should not be hired and fired by the Legislature, which has demonstrated an appalling lack of legal acumen. Attorneys general should not be hired and fired by department heads or commissions; attorneys general work for the people. They are hired and fired at the ballot box every four years.

Wasden, the longest-serving attorney general in Idaho’s history, has been hired and rehired by the people five times, first hired in 2002 and rehired in 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018.

He routinely faces primary challengers and has dispatched each one of them. He has gone on to win the general elections resoundingly, with 60% to 74% of the vote.

The reason he wins so handily? He’s good at his job.

The voters of Idaho recognize that. We’re the ones who should be making that decision, not legislators who are motivated by politics and flawed legal reasoning.

Vote no on these damaging bills.