Can the Idaho Legislature finally go home? No, says the GOP Book Burner Caucus
Just when everyone was hoping the Idaho Legislature would finally leave — no such luck.
In a 36-33 vote on Thursday afternoon, the Idaho House killed the budget of the state library commission. Whether lawmakers intend to cut the budget or this is a last-minute play to strong-arm the Senate into voting on legislation it has killed, the chances that lawmakers remain in Boise next week just went up considerably.
Led by Rep. Gayan DeMordaunt, R-Eagle — the sponsor of this year’s bill to jail librarians and last year’s bill to target the phantom teaching of critical race theory — 36 Republicans in the House voted to kill the budget of the Idaho Commission for Libraries.
She was joined by the likes of Reps. Ben Adams, R-Nampa; Megan Blanksma, R-Hammett; Brent Crane, R-Nampa; Greg Ferch, R-Boise; Codi Galloway, R-Boise; Steven Harris, R-Meridian; James Holtzclaw, R-Meridian; Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton; Jason Monks, R-Meridian; Mike Moyle, R-Star; Joe Palmer, R-Meridian; Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa; and John Vander Woude, R-Nampa.
Call them the GOP Book Burner Caucus.
You almost had to feel sorry for Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, who was carrying the agency’s budget on the floor. But only almost — after all, Horman supported DeMordaunt’s bill to use the threat of criminal charges against librarians in order to impose self-censorship, and co-sponsored last year’s bill targeting critical race theory — so her budget failing was simply a taste of her own medicine.
Horman pleaded that the commission had existed for more than a century and was working to address lawmakers’ concerns. Handouts that had been distributed about librarians opposing House Bill 666 — the House-passed bill subjecting them to criminal penalties for lending materials that fall into the Republicans’ ill-defined category of obscenity — had not come from the agency whose budget was being considered, she noted.
But reason did not matter Thursday.
The force driving the Book Burner Caucus isn’t cultural conservatism or “traditional values” or anything like that. It’s sheer delusion. It’s fever dreams of vast left-wing conspiracies, classrooms led by America-hating teachers and stacks stalked by cryptocommie librarians.
Reality is much more mundane, as everyone who ever went to school knows. Teachers hope to get children to pay attention to basic subjects instead of falling into distraction. Librarians hope they can get kids to read a decent novel instead of playing video games all day. And students do their best to ignore teachers and librarians — and do whatever they want.
But teachers keep at it, and every now and again something clicks, and kids genuinely learn something new — something that stays with them for the rest of their lives.
Librarians occasionally put the right book in front of the right child, which puts them on the path to a life of curiosity and questioning. And education.
That’s the hard daily labor that teachers and librarians go through to improve lives, and to prepare the next generation of Idaho’s polity for participation in democracy.
The project of the Book Burner Caucus has been to insult them year after year. To accuse them of trying to indoctrinate kids with secret critical race theory propaganda (despite nobody ever finding any). To say that librarians are trying to hand out porn (despite nobody ever finding any).
Idaho continues to lose educators, even after significant pay increases in recent years. Perhaps this is part of the reason: Year after year, House Republicans gather for three months to call them monsters, spit in their faces and lob ludicrous accusations at them.
Who would want to hang around for that?