Idaho delegation leaves us vulnerable to unchecked presidential power | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Idaho delegation stayed silent as White House withholds congressionally appropriated funds.
- Administration used funding cuts to pursue partisan revenge and expand executive power.
- Withheld federal payments risk destabilizing Idaho budgets and rural public services.
The logic of vengeance has no end.
Revenge has been the central theme of Donald Trump’s second presidency. It’s what he campaigned on. And it’s a strategy he’s escalating in the current fight over the government shutdown.
On Wednesday, the administration announced it would withhold $18 billion in congressionally appropriated infrastructure spending slated to be used in New York, along with $8 billion in Department of Energy spending in blue states around the country. This is naked abuse of executive power, setting aside congressional powers to control the purse, without a peep from Idaho’s congressional delegation.
Democrats are insisting on restoration of health care funding — not, as the Republican talking point has it, for illegal immigrants but mainly for low-income Americans whose employers don’t offer health insurance. Health insurance premiums for these families, including thousands in Idaho, will more than double if this funding is not restored, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Republicans want those enhanced subsidies, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, to expire.
That’s a difference in policy that Congress can fight out.
But the fight is also over Trump’s ability to simply refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds whenever he wants, as Politico reported, something he’s threatening to accelerate during the shutdown by getting rid of “a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
With Trump’s rise, the logic of American government is vengeance. The animating force of government is: I hate my enemies, and they will pay. There is no reason to believe elections will change that logic, just who holds power.
The supermajority Republican U.S. Supreme Court — I say Republican rather than conservative because at this point it is an absurdity to believe that recent consequential decisions from the nation’s highest court, particularly on the shadow docket, arise from jurisprudence rather than rank partisanship — has chosen to rubber stamp these unconstitutional actions without even bothering to offer a public justification.
So in the next shutdown — or really, whenever the Democrats next hold power — the president could simply stop sending paychecks to ICE agents and can all new hires and people recently promoted at will. Democrats could stop sending out transportation funding checks bound for red states. They could disrupt the payment of farm insurance or subsidies in red states. They could shut off payments to Idaho National Laboratory simply because it is in a red state. They could withhold Payments In Lieu of Taxes or Secure Rural Schools payments that fund rural Idaho schools.
And red states like Idaho are more vulnerable than blue states to this kind of attack because, on the whole, they tend to be more reliant on federal funding.
For example, New Yorkers paid about $89 billion more in federal taxes than their state received back in 2023.
Idaho, on the other hand, received about $6 billion more in federal payments than residents paid in federal taxes in 2023. For comparison, total state tax revenue was only $7.4 billion that year. Mess with Idaho’s federal payments, even a little bit, and the economy will instantly scream.
“(Republicans) are basically creating a system in which they can’t afford to lose an election. They can’t afford to be in a position when the Democrats could do to them what the Republicans are doing to the system now by all of the enhanced powers of the presidency,” historian Christopher Browning warned Statesman opinion editor Scott McIntosh.
All the local infrastructure projects that Rep. Mike Simpson rightly brags about securing funding for in weekly press releases? Those may last exactly as long as the Trump administration, until the next round of vengeance politics sets in.
While Simpson made some tepid remarks criticizing budget impoundments early in Trump’s term, he’s sycophantically cheered other abuses of power, like Trump firing U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert and replacing him with a former personal lawyer in order to obtain a paper-thin indictment of Trump’s political enemy, former FBI Director James Comey.
The only time Idaho’s congressional delegation has to prevent things like this from happening is right now, by working to ensure their party’s president ends his abuses of power.
Otherwise, they’re just hoping that Democrats will choose to forgo picking up the weapons the Trump and his followers have forged. But there’s no obvious reason it will be in their self-interest to do so.
This is the future Idaho’s congressional delegation is choosing right now.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.