With COVID-19 spike, Idaho Legislature is right to recess before someone gets killed

With COVID-19 cases mounting, the Idaho Legislature is being forced to consider taking a recess, leaving important work unfinished.

Legislators would be doing the right thing by taking a recess, before they get someone killed, but they could have avoided this by taking some simple precautions to begin with.

Requiring masks and allowing legislators to vote and debate remotely, as had been suggested earlier in the session, would have helped.

Instead, we learned Thursday night of two more legislators — Democrat John Ruchti of Pocatello and Republican Greg Chaney of Caldwell — testing positive for COVID-19.

This follows news of a string of COVID cases among Republican legislators: Judy Yamamoto, Bruce Skaug, Ryan Kerby and Lance Clow.

Unfortunately, without precautions, taking a break now means important legislation that could help Idahoans will suffer.

Already, the COVID-19 spike has negatively affected legislation.

Clow and Kerby are chair and co-chair of the House Education Committee. Their meetings were all canceled because of their illnesses. They were scheduled to consider a bill to fund all-day kindergarten.

As it stands, Idaho doesn’t even require school districts to provide kindergarten, but if a district does provide it, the state of Idaho pays the district half for each kindergarten student, assuming each student goes for only half the day.

But many districts have recognized the importance of full-day kindergarten, offering it to their families and covering the costs in other ways, including property tax-funded supplemental levies.

Now, that legislation is put off until who knows when.

Other legislation, such as bringing back a bill to accept a $6 million federal preschool development grant, is pushed back, since the House killed the bill earlier over conspiratorial fears of indoctrinating children.

Property tax relief, once the No. 1 priority for many legislators, is nowhere in sight.

Approval of appropriations for K-12 education, higher education, the Attorney General’s Office and more are all pushed back.

Unfortunately, legislators have wasted weeks of their time debating frivolous bills, seeking to limit the governor’s emergency powers, curtail the rights of the voters to get an initiative on the ballot, prohibit marijuana from ever being legal in Idaho, defund the attorney general’s office, kill the Powerball lottery game in Idaho, require cities to get permission from the Legislature to remove a monument or change a street name, set limits on cities’ ability to approve public art and more.

As this editorial board wrote back in January, “It’s only a matter of time that someone at the Idaho Statehouse contracts the virus, which can spread stealthily and infect someone without there being symptoms for days, while the carrier spreads it to others.”

Legislators are right to call a recess now, before things get worse. We just wish they would have followed reasonable safety precautions earlier, so they could continue the people’s business and not be forced to take this disruptive measure.