Idahoans have Reclaim Idaho to thank for education spending — and a whole lot more

Reclaim Idaho announced earlier this week that it will remove the Quality Education Act from the ballot.

We’re sorry to see it go, but so glad it came.

It was the right decision on Reclaim’s part — the special legislative session both appropriated money comparable to that envisioned in the initiative and included a section that would repeal the initiative if it passed. That pass-and-repeal mess would have created a lot of confusion with voters.

And Reclaim had already won — it’s inconceivable the Legislature would have appropriated so much money without the pressure from an impending initiative vote.

We all owe Reclaim Idaho a debt of gratitude. Its volunteers offer a solution to the hardest problem facing Idaho politics.

It’s been a decade since Idaho’s first closed primary, following the ruling in Idaho Republican Party v. Ysursa, where Judge Lynn Winmill found that requiring an open primary would violate the GOP’s right of association.

Whatever the legal merits of this decision, Idaho has been very poorly served by it. The closed primary creates a system where most Republican candidates have to worry only about challengers on their right flank. The incentives of this system have pushed Idaho’s ruling party into the grip of paranoia and extremism.

And this has led, year after year, to higher levels of dissatisfaction with Idaho’s government and state policy.

The policy preferences of Idaho’s general population are not a secret. For the last seven years, through the diligent work of the School of Public Service at Boise State University, thousands of Idahoans have been asked about their top policy priorities.

Until 2020, a majority of Idahoans always said the state was on the right track. But as of the last two surveys, that’s no longer true.

And it’s not hard to see why. There is a gaping chasm between what these surveys indicate Idahoans want and what its lawmakers have been willing to deliver.

Consistently, taxes — the main subject of several of the last few legislative sessions — have been near the bottom of Idahoans’ list of priorities. Education is always at the top, followed by issues like jobs and health care.

Reclaim Idaho has stepped into that chasm, addressing the issues at the top of Idahoans’ priorities rather than those of the party big wigs or major donors.

The grass-roots volunteers at Reclaim have overcome staggering obstacles to do it. It’s worth reflecting for a minute on them.

After Idaho citizens passed Reclaim’s Medicaid expansion initiative — one of the most successful pieces of policy in Idaho’s recent history, which has provided coverage to tens of thousands of our working neighbors — the Legislature sought to regulate the right of the initiative out of existence. Reclaim sued the state and won decisively, protecting Idaho’s initiative process for future generations.

Then they sought to use it again, crafting the Quality Education Act to address the Legislature’s years of failure to adequately fund Idaho’s education system.

But just as their signature gathering efforts were starting to swing into high gear, the COVID-19 pandemic stuck. Acting with responsibility, they decided to suspend in-person signature gathering rather than risk spreading the disease.

They then sought to be able to gather signatures electronically — a rather obvious solution that the state government fought tooth and nail to prevent. The Republican supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the state, and Reclaim’s first signature gathering effort was rejected.

So in 2021, they did it all over again, and collected enough signatures to make it onto the 2022 ballot.

That’s a heck of a lot to overcome — and win. Generations of Idaho students owe Reclaim volunteers thanks for this.

So three cheers for Reclaim Idaho. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work to restore “government of, by and for the people.” We hope to hear more from them soon.