Idaho legislators have adjourned. Here are highlights, conflicts the session produced

Idaho lawmakers ended the regular legislative session Wednesday, after Gov. Brad Little signed a prominent bill to allow lawsuits against libraries and allowed a measure to become law that revoked the planned sale of the Idaho Transportation Department’s State Street campus.

This year’s roughly three-month session was marked by heated debate among GOP lawmakers over proposals to provide more funding for school facilities, implement mandatory minimum sentences for fentanyl crimes and endanger the University of Idaho’s planned purchase of the University of Phoenix.

Idaho’s Republican-controlled Legislature also passed laws to curtail the health care transgender people can access.

House Speaker Mike Moyle, R-Star, told reporters Wednesday that he felt the biggest accomplishment was the school facilities legislation, House Bill 521, which will inject $1.5 billion of new funding into schools and was Little’s top priority.

“That for me is the centerpiece of this legislative session,” Moyle said.

School facilities funding

Over the coming year, state coffers will send out $1.5 billion and redirect $500 million to school districts around Idaho to help with a backlog of repairs on school buildings that has dogged the state’s public schools system for years.

After considering nine additional bills to tweak aspects of the facilities bill, lawmakers passed one of them this month. It reallocates misused funds to rural schools and limits provisions that discourage school districts from switching to four-day school weeks.

Some rural school districts have argued that the school facilities bill doesn’t provide enough money for them to pay for the needed repairs or replacement of school buildings. Districts across the state face leaking roofs, discolored drinking water and freezing classrooms, according to reporting from ProPublica and the Idaho Statesman.

Moyle said Wednesday that the state shouldn’t be expected to create “Taj Mahal” schools.

“We don’t need 50-foot ceilings, and open spaces, and couches, and lounges, and open lunch rooms,” he said. “We can build a school building that addresses the needs of the students without going overboard.”

Republican lawmakers also rejected $16 million in federal dollars for meals for low-income children over the summer, when school is not in session.

House Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, D-Boise, said at a second news conference Wednesday that many Republican policies are enacted in the name of what they say are Christian values.

“It is not clear how those Christian values factored into denying food to hungry children,” she said.

For the second year in a row, right-wing lawmakers also pushed to spend state revenue on private schools, either through tax credits or grants. Though proposals this year failed — as they did last year — Moyle said he expects them to come back.

“The school choice issue is not going away,” he said. “We’re going to get it fixed.”

Focus on LGBTQ+ Idahoans

Republicans passed into law bills curtailing gender-affirming health care for state employees and people on Medicaid; making “sex” and “gender” have the same definition in state law; and giving state employees and teachers who don’t wish to use a student’s preferred pronouns legal protection.

Moyle said the bills were needed because some people want to make “one group more equal than another group” and to “make one group more important than others.”

The ACLU of Idaho has called the law to ban public funds from going toward gender transition the strictest ban in the country, and ACLU officials have said the new law will only lead to more lawsuits ultimately paid for by taxpayers. In 2019, Idaho lost a lawsuit filed by a transgender prisoner who was refused gender-affirming care. A judge also temporarily blocked a ban on gender-affirming care for children, which Little signed into law last year, as a lawsuit moves through the courts.

“These unconstitutional bills have no place in Idaho, and only encourage discrimination and harassment against LGBTQ+ people,” Rebecca De León, a spokesperson for the ACLU, said in an email. “These bills do not make anyone freer nor do they improve anyone’s quality of life, but rather serve to take rights away from a small part of our society and make thriving more difficult for them.”

De León added that the organization is reviewing the bills to determine what litigation would be the “most feasible and impactful.”

On Wednesday, Little signed a bill to allow lawsuits against libraries that don’t remove books believed to be obscene by some patrons. ”I signed that stinking library bill,” he told Idaho Reports.

Republicans have pushed for years to pass a bill limiting what books are on shelves in children’s sections at libraries. Last year, the Legislature approved a bill that would have let parents seek damages over each time their child accessed “harmful” material at a library, but Little vetoed it.

“The GOP supermajority’s obsession with divisive social issues continued at fever pitch this session, and it continues to do serious harm to the people and to the economy of Idaho,” Rubel said.

No action taken on abortion

In the two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion, Idaho lawmakers have debated whether to add a health exception to the state’s total abortion bans, which allow for exceptions inreported cases of rape or incest or in cases when a pregnant person’s life is at risk.

Hospitals and doctors in the state have urged lawmakers to make changes to the law, warning that the strictly limited exceptions — violations of which could end in jail time for doctors — pose major health risks to women in the state.

More than a fifth of obstetricians in the state have stopped practicing, and more than half of maternal-fetal medicine specialists have left, according to a report this year. The pool of OB-GYNs applying to work in Idaho has fallen by half, according to the Idaho Hospital Association.

House Republicans said Wednesday that Idaho’s laws protect women whose lives are threatened — an assertion that physicians such as Dr. Jim Souza, chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Health System, have disputed, according to previous Statesman reporting.

Moyle said lawmakers have discussed the health effects of the law, but there has “never been a solution yet.” He cast doubt on whether Idaho’s loss of physicians has been caused by the abortion laws. For years, Idaho has had the lowest doctors per capita of any state, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I don’t know that the doctors are leaving because of that, it might be a convenient excuse,” he said.

Moyle said he wants to use Idaho’s partnership with medical schools in other states to increase the number of physicians. Moyle said he doesn’t yet know how to address the issues doctors have raised about how to distinguish between life and health threats to mothers.

Democrats in the statehouse had blistering remarks Wednesday about the Legislature’s lack of changes to the abortion laws, which are scheduled to be argued later this month before the very U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Rubel called Moyle’s comments “gaslighting” and said Republicans are “committed to forcing women into involuntary childbirth regardless of the health damage.”

She said it is “crystal clear” that Idaho’s strict abortion laws have led to the flight of doctors and said that to claim otherwise is “not credible.”

Rep. Ned Burns, D-Bellevue, said a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers this year were willing to add a health exception to Idaho’s abortion law but that Attorney General Raúl Labrador discouraged any changes while the laws are litigated. The attorney general’s discouragement kept committee chairs in the Legislature from holding hearings on abortion bills, Burns said.

A spokesperson for Labrador, Dan Estes, told the Statesman by email that the assertions were not true. “This is another example of Democrats not being honest with the people of Idaho about abortion issues,” he said.

’You sometimes get yourself in trouble’

Fights within the GOP boiled over in Boise this session, when House Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, R-Hammett, was ousted from her position in February — the first mid-session removal of a caucus leader in recent history.

Blanksma had voted against proceeding with significant changes implemented by the budget committee this year to alter how state agencies are funded.

Republican lawmakers also battled the state’s executive branch, canceling an already-approved sale of the Idaho Transportation Department’s State Street headquarters and threatening litigation against the $550 million purchase of the University of Phoenix by the University of Idaho.

Little didn’t sign the ITD budget bill, simply letting it become law by allowing the veto deadline to pass. In a letter to lawmakers, he said the cancellation of the $52 million sale was “unfair” and would cause “reputational risk” to the state.

Moyle said the Phoenix purchase, which is now in limbo, was arranged “in a vacuum behind closed doors.”

“When you do that, you sometimes get yourself in trouble,” he said. He said the Legislature’s dislike for both transactions could be a message.

“In the future, if you want to get something done like that, you need to bring the legislative body in,” he said.

Problems with Medicaid bill

Little signed a bill to require legislative approval of waivers and other amendments to Idaho’s Medicaid program but wrote to lawmakers Monday that he had serious concerns about its potential effects.

Little wrote that unless the bill is amended, substance abuse and behavioral health programs could be impeded, payments to skilled nursing homes could stop, and millions of dollars of adjustments to other health programs would be “immediately stopped.”

“Unless the issues are sufficiently addressed in a trailer bill, it is possible the Legislature may be required to return frequently for special sessions to ensure compliance with the law,” Little wrote.

Lawmakers did not pass what Little requested before they adjourned Wednesday, which Moyle said was because they were unable to come to an agreement. Moyle said he hopes the problem can be put off until the scheduled session next year, but that might not happen.

Moyle said lawmakers will need to wait to see whether the Medicaid bill causes problems that cannot be resolved by the executive branch in the coming months.