By Tim Oren
The Idaho House now has 21 divided votes in the record book, and that’s enough to begin – as promised – tracking the emerging political map of the session. (With only 5 divided votes, the Senate isn’t there yet.) Here’s the first chart of the year:
The ideological spread has emerged, with the Gang o’ Eight and friends on one end, and Steve Berch way over on the other, as per usual. There’s not enough data yet for the usual clusters to be visible. Most of the D’s are still adjacent to the IACI/RINO ‘Main Street’ gang (or you can read that the other way around). One member of the latter, Jack Nelsen, is voting right in the middle of the Democrat pack. Clean up on aisle 26!?
I’ll also be showing the more interesting votes of each week, displayed on the current map. Here’s the (failed) vote to propose an Idaho constitutional amendment removing the so-called ‘Blaine Amendment’ language:
This vote follows the pattern predicted by the map almost perfectly. On the other hand, we have the narrowly successful vote to back a Constitutional Convention of the States to pursue a balanced budget amendment:
This is an unusual pattern for Idaho, one of the few cases of a ‘horseshoe’ alliance of the ends of the spectrum, the right worried that such a convention might exceed its charter and trample on natural rights, and the left presumably concerned that the convention would actually enact its charter.
The most impactful vote was probably that on conforming Idaho taxation to the changes in Trump’s OBBB, as it has an immediate $155 million effect on state general funds. However, it was a straight party line vote, so little to see here. With that exception, few of the votes to date have significant budget impact. That will change when spending bills begin to emerge from JFAC. In previous years, voting blocs on spending measures have closely aligned with those that appeared in voting on policy related matters. Will that rule hold? Stay tuned…
About Tim Oren
Tim Oren retired to Idaho after a 30 year career in Silicon Valley. Here he gardens, home-brews, teaches kids to shoot, and has applied his well-aged statistics degree to subjects such as educational funding and results, Idaho legislative race targeting, and now legislators' voting patterns. He is a contributor to the Idaho Freedom Foundation and a number of Idaho candidates.
