Idaho governor, lt. gov. engage in political grandstanding as COVID-19 pandemic rages

It appears that the two Republican front-runners for the highest office in Idaho lack the most basic trait required of a leader: responsibility.

While Idaho Gov. Brad Little went to the Mexican border Tuesday to grandstand about drugs coming into the country, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin out-grandstanded him by asking the Idaho National Guard about ordering troops to the border while Little is out of state.

“Attempting to deploy our National Guard for political grandstanding is an affront to the Idaho constitution and insults the men and women who have dedicated their life to serving our state and the country,” Little wrote on Twitter.

That’s true, though it is worth pointing out that Little sent Idaho State Police troopers to the border in his own spasm of grandstanding this year.

Not satisfied with attempting to deploy troops, McGeachin then issued an executive order expanding on Little’s prior foolish decision to forbid state officials from requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Her order additionally would prohibit requiring proof of a negative coronavirus test for any reason.

Both of those orders may be popular with a certain segment of right-wing voters. And both raise the number of infections and thereby kill people in a state that’s losing its battle against COVID-19.

Of course, we could have expected this from McGeachin — many of us did — when Little announced that he was heading to Texas. McGeachin has done this before, like a petulant child making mischief while the parents are out of the house.

When Little made the decision to go traipsing around the border holding photo ops with Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, he surely knew something like this was bound to happen. But he went anyway.

So if you’re looking for responsibility, don’t look here. Here, it’s politics all the way down.

This is what it looks like when politics displaces policy, when vanity replaces seriousness, when the desire to win an election eclipses the desire to do good for the people of the state of Idaho. And it’s those people who will lose out because of all this foolishness.

They are the ones who will have to deal with overwhelmed emergency rooms when they have appendicitis. They are the ones who might be wondering whether they will have to leave their families, shipped hundreds of miles away. They are just pawns.

Shame on McGeachin and Little both for failing to take the very real stakes of this game — the people they are supposed to represent — seriously.

This story was originally published October 5, 2021 at 6:47 PM.