Notes From The Floor

Bad Mussels & Betsy's Ugly Tie

Today on our first bill we had a long delay on the pea and lentil commission while several members of Republican leadership slowed things down so Senator Cameron could get back to the floor to vote. Senator Davis described how much Senator Cameron appreciated peas and lentils and the lentil commission. Senator Stegner extolled the virtues of lentils, their fiber and flavor and protein. The delay was effective enough to get Senator Cameron on record as voting Aye with the rest of us.

We met early today at 9:30 and so blazed through many bills. Two I was the floor sponsor for, meaning I was assigned or offered to take the bill in committee and to present and argue for it to the full Senate. I also asked questions about the $5 Kayak/Rubber Raft Mussel Tax bill as well. I wish I had voted no. Someone voted no. I don't know who. I know that the mussels are a threat and that rubber rafts COULD conceivably carry the young mussels, but it is hugely unlikely, especially as I remembered how few boats ever leave the state to be infested where the dangerous invasive mussels actually live. I voted yes, tugged along in the long roll of yes votes.

The bill was not an ideal solution for raising money to pay for education, enforcement and inspections of the motorized boats that are most likely to carry mussels. However Betsy Russell has donned an ugly tie, so the end is near and I suspect we are getting to the point where more and more imperfect legislation will be set before us, rushed with the force of time and the daily cost of our staying here in this building. What $30,000 a day did I recall?

Hate, Spit & the Word Gay

A few weeks back I asked people to post signs on their cars, homes and places of work that said in big letters, "Protect Our Gay Friends, Amend Idaho's Human Rights Act." The word gay was particularly big, maybe 7.5 inches wide by 4 inches tall. You couldn't miss it.

My partner Carol and I put one of these paper signs in the back side window of our car. We are gay people and it would be surprising if anyone living around us had not noticed by now that we are gay. Yet still I guess I was taken aback when one morning after we posted the little paper sign, that someone clearly spit on that window of our car. And if a day or two of the spitting was not enough, I drove to a meeting one night and someone put an obscene little flier on my windshield. I admit some places I started parking lately, I wondered if the car would be safe. I knew we would have to take the sign down to go to my mom's place near Challis.

This is all to say that I do recognize that perhaps I was asking too much. That even I might forget how much anger or hate or cruelty there is in the world, that I would ask people to open themselves up to hate, especially straight allies or gay people in rural areas where there is so little safety, that I would put anyone at risk bothers me.

I figure I have grown isolated living in the north end. But if I am isolated to what happens, my legislative colleagues are far more so. They might not see the gleeful cruelty or seething in Bryan Fischers web posts and missives. They might not have visited the web sites where people talk about me as a gay person and about guns in threatening ways. They might not have read the recent email to me saying I should leave Boise because there are people who moved here from places like California to get away from gay people like me. The email was a bit more harsh in its language. I won't quote it.

In essence I reel with trying to comprehend how many of my colleagues do not believe discrimination happens while all around them it does and I only wish they would put one of those big gay signs on their cars and see what happens.

But I don't want to ask that. I don't want to ask that of anyone. So I found better signs. They say "Human Rights for ALL: Amend Idaho's Human RIghts Act." I don't think they will put anyone at risk. As a nation we do believe in Human Rights. As a state the vast majority know people need them. I feel better asking people to post these signs. I think more people will. I know I was asking too much with the other ones.

It was like with talking to one of my colleagues about how best to go about passing the changes to the Human Rights Act we need in order to protect gay people. He said we needed to find a way to do it so that we don't have to say gay, or sexual orientation or gender identity. I'm thinking it is a bit hard to write a law that won't mention the people it is supposed to protect. There is a lot of room for misinterpretation there. If anyone has ideas I'll take them.

Short of that, it is just going to have to become a bit more safe to say the word gay. A lot more people are going to have to say the word (kindly) or wear those signs that say gay someday. Straight people too, until it gets more safe and normal for all of us to see people be OK with the word gay. For the word gay to be boring would be ideal. For now I have the signs that say "Human Rights for ALL" and don't say gay in big letters. Because we are not there yet.

You can get a sign to print for your car or house. While the words don't have the force of law, with time they can show more people care, ordinary people everywhere around Idaho. That's what matters. And I feel pretty sure that, even without the word gay, people will know what we mean.

Breaking Our Schools

I'm trying to understand the ideal school in the mind of Tom Luna, Butch Otter, John Goedde or Bob Nonini. These men are the four most powerful education policy makers in the state of Idaho, none have ever been public school teachers and I'm pretty sure that at least four of them don't even believe in traditional public schools. But what they believe we should have instead of our current system of free public education mystifies me.

Tom Luna has advocated for vouchers so that more kids can attend private schools. He must feel private schools do a good job. I've taught in private schools and public schools. I can tell you a key difference. Some of the best private schools in the state tend to have far smaller class sizes and more money for field trips and travel to ensure kids get hands-on experience so that they can finally figure out how all those words in their text books apply to the real world. Yet here we are this year with proposals that specifically cut field trips out of public school budgets and slash funding so far that many districts, already struggling, will have no choice but to lay teachers off and increase class sizes just to keep the lights on and the buses running.

This morning we met in the attic again before JFAC. The staff passed around color coded packets of paper representing three different proposals for funding public schools. There was the depressing-enough pink proposal from Democrats Wendy Jaquet and Shirley Ringo, who tried to do as little damage as possible given the budget situation. Then there was the "wisteria" purple proposal which tried to make a 5% personnel cost reduction for schools on top of stealing an extra $20 million in state dollars to use for other projects besides education. A yellow (code name "daisy") packet was supposed to represent the compromise which in itself was a grim mimic of Tom Luna's budget proposals including a two year phase out of early retirement and a massive cut in transportation for Boise schools.

There was no winning with this budget and this set of motions. But the votes fell entirely on party lines. Republicans had made a back room deal to actually put forward only one set of motions, including stealing the extra $20 million from schools to use on other projects, and failing to challenge Governor Otter on the $44 million in discretionary stimulus funds he wants to spend on roads and sewers. When the 4 to 16 votes were all called, it was clear that our current education leaders have a very sinister plan for our schools.

John Goedde has been recorded as saying, in essence, that public schools have failed. Bob Nonini has put forward some of the most anti-teacher, anti-public school legislation our state has seen. Butch Otter is sitting on $44 million in stimulus he could use to keep schools from laying off teachers and dooming kids to classrooms stuffed to the gills, frustrated and clamoring for help from single exhausted teacher. But he won't.

If there were ever an argument for saying that Republicans are not fit to lead our state on education, this year is it. After a decade of living so close to the bone that there is nothing left to cut, these cuts we are making this year could really leave a generation forever set back in its progress toward learning, its skills and enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge, its access to teachers who value what they do for work and, for decades, have given everything they've got to make sure kids learn in spite of the condition of our schools. This year, with the incredibly ugly set of priorities our four Republican education leaders have displayed, I can only believe they hope to finally once and for all break our public schools.

An Un-Do

Yesterday morning Senator Keough, a soft spoken, well respected long time JFAC member and co-chair, made a motion that we re-open the budget for the Office of Species Conservation. She explained that she rarely supports doing this. She doesn't support "Un-Dos."

Last week I'd joined Rep. Ringo and 8 Republicans in voting for a substitute motion to cut two staff from the Office of Species Conservation. The move was wildly unpopular in my district since the office mostly administers grants to private land owners to help them comply with the federal Endangered Species Act. My childhood home of Custer County is one of the largest beneficiaries of these grants. There in the mountains, ranchers and farmers along the many forks of the Salmon River get funds to hire local contractors to install fish screens and other contraptions on irrigation ditches along the river banks and tributaries where endangered salmon spawn and smolt often swim and face sudden death in pastures and alfalfa fields.

So, yesterday, Senator Bert Brackett made a motion to restore staff to the Office of Species Conservation and as I did last week, I seconded his original budget motion for the office. Bert looked sad and apologized to the committee for not explaining adequately how important the office is so that the committee might have supported his earlier motion. He owed no apology.I told him so and apologized to him and the committee for abandoning him to vote for Senator Siddoway's motion to cut the budget. There is a respect we owe each other to let our colleagues know when we change our minds having said at first we will support them. It is about your word. I take it seriously. Not all do.

Ironically the Director of the Office of Species Conservation got up after the motion and before we voted nearly unanimously to add two new staff back into his budget. I think he hoped to persuade the committee that he is a good guy and that his office deserves the existing attorney and 7 other staff. In any case, he, the director of the Office of Species Conservation, whose work it is to help protect endangered species, smiled at the committee in anticipation of our vote, proclaiming the Endangered Species Act the most draconian law in the nation.

Boxes & Neck Ties

I think it is time to put on big ugly neck ties and get this legislative show on out of town. Downstairs the brown packing boxes have been delivered. Still flat, they occupy a part of the hallway on the first floor.

Crocuses have faded and my spinach is a green fuzz across the garden, having miraculously survived the freezes and frosts.

One of my afternoon committees has gone "call of the chair" or adjourned until further notice. The bills yet to come are ones I dread. So I think it is really time for the neck ties. We have less than a week more of budget setting. 7 am meetings, lunch meetings, 4 pm meetings for just a little longer. In total we may be two, three or some say four weeks from finished depending on how serious the governor is about vetoing bills to get his tax and fee increases on top of his nifty new compromise of $82 million in GARVEE borrowing and tens of millions in federal stimulus. The governor is amassing one heck of an empire of roads.

And we are cutting education..........

We'll be paying for the GARVEE debt for a long long time, even when we can least afford it ... mostly to widen a stretch of Nampa-Boise freeway that could never be wide enough. I voted no this morning with a hand full of conservative Republicans. But it passed anyway. I'm not much of a borrower. Especially with the economy so volatile. This is a good time to pay things off and get back closer to the black.

I need to track down that tie. Time get us all headed in the direction of home.

Horrible Power

No where in the legislature is our power as legislators more evident than on the Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee. There more than anywhere we are like godzilla-sided toddlers roaming across the landscape of government, too tall to see the detail of what's below, too big to look in the windows and figure out through the course of a year what's really going on. We rely on staff and I picture them some days like all too generous parents, gently trying to keep us from doing damage while providing us with everything we need in order to do what we will do each day.

With a single motion we can unexpectedly lay people off as we did with the office of species conservation last week. In my pink onesies I burped out the final deciding yes vote and they were gone.

With a single motion we can build a bit of a fervor around something and kill a whole agency as we did with the women's commission this morning. The $23,000 agency is gone. I was the only Democrat to vote yes for getting rid of it. My reasons were very different from my colleagues who claimed budget constraints and duplication. I voted to eliminate the Women's Commission because it is an absurd joke to expect a $23,000 agency with one part-time staff person to achieve pay equity and end disparities in the status of women in Idaho. Ending inequalities is not supposed to be like playing house. I don't think we as a legislature should get to put forward this agency to help us pretend this state government really cares.

Bad Motions

I got in trouble for wearing a band aid on my forehead yesterday during floor debate. Perhaps it was recognized as political statement on behalf of fellow teachers rather than as a real sterile dressing designed to protect a wound.

Today we came to the attic of the old courthouse where the Joint Finance Committee meets at 7 am on budget setting mornings. We gather with coffee or orange juice around several big folding tables where the heat rises. Typically we share our “motions” or give each other a bit of fair warning as to where each of us proposes that a budget should be set. How many employees will we give an agency? How much for rent and utilities? Any replacement items, new computers, cars, servers? And what money are we cutting? Where will funds they do get come from? From the federal government, a dedicated fee, a grant or from the big $2.4 billion state tax bucket called the general fund?

This morning we had to make a decision we have been putting off while the world adjusted to what the more than one billion in stimulus funding will mean. We had to decide how much to cut state employee pay. There were seven motions or proposals. In the heat of the attic in this big old cement and stone building anything seemed possible. As we passed out the motion sheets in that room that used to be part of the county jail, the options seemed to contract.

By the time we got to our committee room in front of the cameras our choices were down to three. Three bad motions made on the table in that comparatively cold and empty room. All three motions proposed to cut state employee costs by 5%. The worst one of these passed. It cut every state employee’s pay by 3% and then mandated 2% more in employee cost be cut through furloughs, keeping positions vacant and if necessary through layoffs.

The House members were lock step for this motion and its 3% salary reduction and 5% net cut in personnel funding. Why in any rational way they would want that, I do not know. We could have given more room for agencies to use furloughs more or vacant positions. We could have used dedicated funds or stimulus funds to keep it at 4% or even 3% total personnel cuts. But leadership in the House has been twisting arms for weeks. I’m not sure what any state employee ever did to them or if it is just that those particular Republican leaders need to keep hating government, even when government is our tax dollars, people’s jobs, people’s lives.

So I feel awful. I tried to make a motion that was only so slightly better than the motion that we did pass. It was a band-aid for a gaping wound.  Our Democratic votes are band-aids on gaping wounds in a state government run by people too often angry at living in a nation increasingly blue and progressive. We serve here at the mercy of a political party increasingly hateful toward cities, astoundingly favorable to big industry tax breaks and deregulation at the expense of the families, farms and small businesses upon which our economy and unique existence as a state depends.

Some days, while I love my colleagues as individuals, the politics get so sad and ugly that I feel like a twig in a big red river flowing ever more quickly toward the edge of the earth.

Role of Government

One of the pages is playing the bag pipes. Legislators are clapping and foot tapping outside the Senate chambers. Many JFAC Senate members have been up with budget staff trying to understand how we ended up with a 5% state employee reduction after all the work we have done to blend stimulus dollars into the budget and keep us from laying off people state wide. But the governor seems to be saying that since so many state workers are in Boise, he'd rather spend the money on highways. The House leadership has buckled down on their members to try to cut deeper into all parts of what the state does. The old starve the beast mentality, as if childhood health care, teachers in class rooms and people making sure that our drinking water does not get contaminated are some evil entity because they are paid for with tax dollars. This is the work of the state which we as tax payers pay our taxes for. We expect this of state government because we don't want a country in which the very wealthy get the kobe beef education, water and health care and the rest of us get the grizzled, greasy, big mac patty version. We know our state and nation are stronger if our people are well educated and have the skills they need to use their ingenuity to advance our economy and care for their families. We know crisis is expensive, that letting something simple go untreated because you can't afford care, means more cost for government and taxpayers down the line.

So we clap and the bag pipes play while the battles go on behind the scenes.

What is the role of government? How much can we cut before efficiency becomes inadequacy? How much costly crisis do we create when we underfund basic essentials and when let class sizes grow?

Bicycles on Highways

Pleeeeez Mr. Hammond and Mr. Governor, do you really think that all the people forced to ride bicycles because they can't afford or can't drive a car live in the North End? What do you think people in Middleton or Shoshone or Post Falls do when they don't have the money for gas or car repairs? Does it really help these people that you still propose to raise registration fees to as much as $120 after spending every penny of the stimulus you can, borrowing hundreds of millions through GARVEE and raising gas taxes to build more roads.

Mr. Governor your people talk about bike lanes like they are a luxury item. Have you ever tried to ride to work on a rural highway, especially one where the transportation department has eliminated bike lanes and further narrowed shoulders at your request. I grew up in Custer County and I am not talking about he North End of Boise, I am talking about trying to figure out how Idahoans get to work when they don't have a working car.

It might be OK if you'd dedicated some funding to making sure there was some bus or van or some public transit in every community, but you and people like Mike Moyle say public transit doesn't work. What do you mean? Doesn't work for you because you can't imagine leaving the comfort of your giant new pick up truck to ride a bus? What if you had no choice?

What choices to Idahoans have left? Walk, bike, hitch hike? What about kids in rural communities? They walk and bike along state highways everyday. Are bike paths a luxury for them? How many kids and adults in Idaho die on highways every year because they have no safe place to walk or ride? I  bet someone knows.

All for Roads and Roads for All

Headed into the Joint Finance Committee where arms have been twisted so the Governor can cut State Employee funding by 5%. Every dollar he can funnel into the world of concrete and asphalt is going there. As if the road construction industry's boom alone will revive the economy while we lay off state workers, make them take deep furloughs, cut teachers and teacher's aids, grow class sizes and weaken our ability as a state to serve people when they need it most. An economy needs small businesses and I'm wondering where we are working to help them. Little home energy efficiency companies, tech companies who scan documents and do data entry will boom, but not because Governor Otter wanted them to. The strings in the stimulus are accountability measures. Congress tried to make us prepare a bit to avert an energy crisis, be more efficient and independent finally as a nation in healthcare and energy. But this governor wants to tax us more for roads, borrow more for roads, spend all the stimulus he can on roads while his Superindendent of Public Instruction cuts deeper and deeper into Schools with every passing day.

Deducting Property Taxes

If you own a home and you've already done your state taxes, you might want to look into getting a form to file an amended return... you may be able to subtract more from the the amount of income the state taxed you on this year.

Over the last few weeks, we amended a House bill one way and then back the other way in an attempt to decide what was better for tax payers. We call it "going to the 14th order" here in the Senate when we amend a bill. Senator Hill as chairman of the Senate tax committee patiently spoke first for and then against letting more people NOT pay income taxes on the money they spend on property taxes.

Obviously this is good for modest income homeowners who might not be able to deduct a bunch of charitable donations on top of big mortgage interest, medical bills and the like. What it does though is take $2 million out of budgets that will mean deeper cuts in state employee pay, lost jobs or larger class sizes in schools or college classrooms.

Not a fun choice for any of us to make. As a property tax payer who does not have enough spending to itemize, I might have benefited from a yes vote. As a member of the budget committee who has watched the knives fall into place, slicing through parts of state budgets that Idahoans depend on for jobs and medical care... I was one of ten Democrats and Republicans who couldn't vote yes.

I'm still torn. Most the time it is clear as the desk in front of you, on occasion though some people gain while others clearly lose. But as you sit there on the Senate floor and the Senate secretary calls your name, you have to choose one word: yes or no.

We Can't Do it Alone

Carol and I ran up in the foothills this morning. Frozen sandy trails thread up along ridge tops for miles. We found ourselves in snow, brilliant white in the sun, cold on our tennis shoes.

Rough week trying to decide where to go from here as human rights issues appear so clearly to be slipping backward in Idaho.

There is irony in all this. Bryan Fischer says my election to the legislature means there is no problem with discrimination in Idaho. I had to laugh and then cry this morning on the trail running behind Carol on the frozen ground because that is so much like saying that, because we elected a fine man who happens to be black as our 44th president of the United States, that it follows logically that there is no longer racism or racist people in the United States, that we can just take black people out of Idaho’s Human Rights Act or federal anti-discrimination laws because no American will ever again perpetuate acts of racism, violence or discrimination against black people in schools or businesses or anyplace in our nation ever again.

....

So to that end I am going to ask a favor. If you care that gay people are ever fired from our jobs, denied raises or promotions, kicked out of our apartments, are harassed as teens and made unwelcome in school classrooms anywhere in this state, please do something about it this year.

1.    Email your friends these two links and ask them to help. 
Support your gay friends: http://www.4idaho.org/HumanRights/
POST THIS WINDOW SIGN: http://www.4idaho.org/vote/OurGayFriends-WindowSign.pdf
2.    Post a “Protect Our Gay Friends” Window sign in your car, house or workplace.
3.    Let YOUR three state legislators know that you feel it is time to end discrimination against gay people in employment, housing and education.
4.    Write a letter to the editor.
5.    Get involved this year when there is a chance to help an organization on this issue. (Show up, donate, take action.)

.....

It kills me that my work on sentencing or health care may suffer because it is not really the role of a legislator to be a community organizer. It kills me that some of my colleagues have said I have to make a choice, be a gay activist or have no future in politics in Idaho. Really I have no choice.

I think of the straight people I meet who clearly care and want to help.

The burly firefighter who told me he buttonholed Senator Fulcher at a recent reception to say firmly but politely how upset he was as a constituent that Fulcher had opposed the Human Rights act. I think of the man who came to me to talk about health care issues and, as he was leaving, mentioned how wrong it was that some radio talk show hosts were say such awful things about me and gay people.

I think of my friend Emilie Jackson-Edney and her wonderful conversations about gender identity with Senator Coiner.

I think of Mountain Goat, the blogger in Canyon County whose partner fears being fired from her job. I know this woman only by her pen name and her posts and I picture her these days settled next to a radio watching the hate stream out day after day because she knows someone has to say that this is wrong. She is so right. How can we as a state stand by when others incite violence and hate. Why are we not outraged? Or maybe we all are outraged and we don’t know how to express it.

Well, I’m offering some ways to express it. And I’m asking for your help. Because I can’t do this alone. The tiny cluster of under-funded, human rights oriented, non-profit groups who have worked on these issues for over a decade and have three staff between them, they can’t do this alone.

We all need your help this year because if we don’t have your help things will keep getting worse, not better. And like you, I just can’t bear that.

Economic Quandaries

The Senate chamber is empty but for Senator Dick Sagness next to me and the voice of secretaries in the back rooms. Outside, spring froze and is again thawing.

It is Friday. The place emptied early. JFAC this morning was about the economy. How can anything not be. Or maybe for sanity we should all find something that is not. It is an oppressive force in here but more so as people around the state try to plan for next month or next year.

There is a danger in that hesitancy to plan. If we are employed and so save our wages and pay off debt, the businesses around us suffer. We don't go down to Jim's appliances to replace the refrigerator that is turning the milk sour, or decide to suffer with the clothes dryer that takes four hours to dry a pair of jeans. We wait, not knowing if we will have a job to pay off that credit card bill.

But in the long run, our savings, or more critically our lack of credit card debt, makes our families more stable. We pay less in interest and fees. This is very hard on Jim's Appliances. But if it and other businesses do OK with the help of those who are still spending, if the employed go to local shops where their dollars circulate better in the local economy, then when the clouds break a bit and we breathe again, less debt hanging over us, a bit of saving to buy that refrigerator with, the economy will rise with all that "pent up demand." We will all benefit as families across the nation end all that "waiting as long as we possibly can to buy what we really need to buy."

For those traditional economists who say we need to personally borrow more so we can spend more now. I say that will only perpetuate a problem at the root of our economic woes. Americans are smarter than that. We recognize that we can't keep running up personal debt at this rate and not fall off an edge some day. The minimum wage can not stay as out of whack with the cost of living as it has been.

Yes, millions are without jobs, hanging on by that thread of little unemployment checks. They may be lucky to pay for food and rent and doctor bills, and are not going to be the ones buying new refrigerators or saving money. But roughly ninety percent of American workers still have jobs. We will make this economy suffer while we save and pay down debts, but when we are ready, this revived middle class may again become a middle class that sets to work to fill and even create new jobs in manufacturing, energy efficiency and alternative power generation.

I sit at my desk in the empty Senate and I know this is an economic quandary of epic magnitude. Who will suffer and pay for the rearrangement of our economy? Will it be families spurred simply to borrow more to buy more things? Or will it be the box stores and restaurant chains we abandon for corner groceries and little diners? The banks and mortgage brokers? Importers of foreign made goods? The credit card companies? Someone will pay. Things will change. If our determination is to hunker down and support the little shops and growers and appliance stores right around us, then local places may not be the ones to go under. We may see a trend away from generic downtowns where the food and shopping is so nearly identical that one might be in New York, LA, San Francisco, Boise or Chicago and not even know it. We may see the rebirth of an era where cities have character and people take pride in what local people make and sell.

That could happen. But it depends on what we do.

Regardless, huge things are happening around us. Banks may go under. More stocks could fall to nothing. But eventually we all do have to replace the hot water heater, the furnace or the car. If we save or at least owe less, we may feel we can do more than that. Maybe we will even save enough to put dollars back into banks, some will start new businesses. The ground will thaw. As a nation we have huge resources, huge ingenuity. Millions work very hard and if we pay them enough to live on and ensure they don't fall behind every time they need a doctor; if we take the weight of providing health insurance off the shoulders of business and families, we will endure. I'd place a bet even, that if we do these things, pay off some personal debt, buy more locally, fix our health care system, invest as a nation in manufacturing and energy, we will thrive.

Crazy Highways

Here's what's crazy: By my best reckoning Idaho is getting over $15 million it could have spent on public transportation statewide. It can only buy infrastructure with this money, nothing but buses, bus stops, material stuff like that. No drivers, no gas, no operating costs to pay drivers to make the buses go anywhere if we buy them.

At the same time the Speaker of the House (I'm sure with a bit of strategic help from Mike Moyle and his leadership team because Lawence Denny is the man, but he is not the arm twisting type) the Speaker has said no hearing on any local option authority legislation. No hearing to let voters in local communities around the state decide if they would like to tax themselves to fund something urgent that we as a state legislature just won't give them money for.

The most glaring example would be public transportation. No state dollars go there. No local funding source exists because local governments are not allowed to ask voters what they want to fund and how they want to fund it. The state dictates that. So since Mike Moyle, a single man from Star, elected to a powerful position by an increasingly conservative Republican caucus, since he is still not a fan of public transportation, the entire state has no way of funding public transportation operations.

So, no matter how long the people of Nampa wait in traffic, no matter how long it takes some days to get from Boise to Star or Eagle, if we have no money to operate a bus with fuel and a driver, we can not use the stimulus to solve the problem of Nampa to Boise buses running at capacity, or a bus system so poor it does not even run after dark, in early mornings or on weekends. Who can depend on a system like that? Who can afford to miss the bus to work or a job interview when the next one does not come for an hour or so?

So, instead of using the stimulus to allow little cities around Idaho to fund new van pools or real bus systems; instead of putting more buses on that corridor between Ada and Canyon counties we will instead replace old buses and then go on as we were, infinitely widening freeways and overpasses between Nampa and Boise. We will spend billions on that stretch of highway because a few powerful people don't personally like or believe in public transit. We will waste millions infinitely and futally trying to unclogg a clogged stretch of freeway, money that could be spent to fix rural roads from Soda Springs to Sandpoint.

I would think my rural colleagues would be more annoyed about that.

Leading the Senate in Prayer

The Constitution aside, every day before the Senate we are led in Christian prayer. Hank Webb is our Chaplain. He has a wonderful accent, warmth and gentle kindness which makes me smile every day.

Our Democratic leaders have asked that the prayers be more universal to all faiths and at very least ecumenical in nature, but it seems still that the Chaplain has been instructed to give a Christian prayer which ends with "In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord." While Chaplin Webb is gone this week, a few Senators have led the prayer. I was asked by my caucus to lead the invocation this morning. Those of you who know me may think that is funny. But how could I pass a chance to speak to the body of the Senate about values, belief, humanity and what we as a state should aspire to.

Please join me in a moment of reflection or prayer.

Let us be thankful for the kindness of strangers, their compassion and generosity.
Let us see abundance not only scarcity.
I ask, let us see in this difficult time the strength and beauty in one another’s eyes, the pain in the story of the man we would condemn, the suffering of the woman we would judge, never having walked in her broken shoes.
Let us love this land, its expanse of tilled soil, pungent, its farms aging, tilted sage-covered hills, canyoned deserts and peaks of cold granite and snow.
Let us love the beauty of its wild as those whose ancestors first set foot here loved and respected the land as the source of all life, food and spiritual strength.
Let us seek the difficult path of judgment to discern whether there is freedom without justice, liberty without restraint, whether the pursuit of happiness is afforded equally and we have been judicious in the exercise of the powers we are given.
For what great society can celebrate the freedom to amass riches while others starve?
What people would not extend the tithing and generosity of our faiths to the world at large?
What exalted leaders in good conscience can choose which brother or sister, son or daughter is worthy of justice and freedom from prejudicial acts --and which is not?
Let us look up from our day, as we as a nation and state face the difficult months or years ahead:
May we choose the path that helps those who will struggle in loss. 
May within us we find compassion and the generosity that makes us a nation strong enough to endure the greatest hardships as one, as a people who refuse to be divided by petty politics, generous and gentle, unified in purpose and in strength.
May we seek that all will prosper.
……..Peace be with you.

Rights and Freedoms

No small number of Republican lawmakers have Democratic wives. They are fabulous and in some cases outspoken and lead the legislative ladies on adventures to places some of the Republican women otherwise might never go.

One legislative husband, Skip Smyser, former law maker himself and lobbyist but not a Democrat has done more for Human Rights education in the legislature than I will ever do in my lifetime. He rents out the Egyptian and gets lawmakers together to see a movie each year. This year it was Amazing Grace a film about ending the British slave trade. Actually it is very much a movie about the legislative process as men in powdered wigs battle in a chamber that makes even Idaho's house of Representatives look sedate and dispassionate.

Skip's movie nights kill me emotionally. I sit eating candy and cry as discreetly as I can possibly manage. Other law makers cry too. Progressive law makers say kind things to me after. My socially conservative friends instead quote the few lines from the film that keep them sternly entrenched where they are on the other side of any Human Rights issues at hand. Talking afterward it is hard to believe they saw the same movie I did. But they did and I can only hope that later in dreams more will come back to them, that they will soften and see something like the shadow of pain in the eyes of others for a brief moment in time.

Tonight at the Dairymen's dinner, a colleague quoted to me a line from the movie Amazing Grace. It was about having to give up your freedoms because someone else is in a hurry to have government protect someones rights.

I had to grip my beer glass tight to really hear the assertion that slave owners gave up their "freedom" to make money off the labor of men and women they never paid a salary to. How do I fathom someone seeing that as a "freedom" to be taken from slave owners rather than as a thing they had stolen from some other human beings... I do not know. I do know that these are the same lawmakers who see Idaho's human rights act as a law that robs them of the freedom to fire whom they choose, a restriction on their business and beliefs that remains intolerable to them so far to this day.

Gifts and Promises

Last week the Potato Commission sent a box of potatoes to the House and Senate for each of us. A Technical training center from Cassia County gave us a beautiful laser- and router-carved wooden paper weight with our names carved into the side and an Idaho Quarter set in the top. At a lunch for the anniversary of the Idaho National Lab we were given a thumb drive and sticky note holder along with a mini nuclear waste barrel that functions as a squishy stress reliever/forearm exerciser.

We get gifts as legislators. I usually feel funny enough about them or the expectation of a promise or vote that I give them away to interns or statehouse staff. We did vote last week to pass a memorial commending the Idaho National Lab on its anniversary. I voted for it because it seemed to reflect the lab in a genuine rather than a wishful way. It was a good memorial. I'd vote for it even if I'd not been offered the nuclear waste barrel/stress reliever/forearm exerciser gift.

The anniversary lunch where we got the Lab's gifts was a blur of slides and very brief admirals and contractors speaking in front of a big back curtain. Normally these folks at the INL focus public presentations on the great promise of Nuclear Power and their mission to build the next generation of nuclear power plants. Anymore they seem to go to great lengths to avoid talking about all the radioactive waste buried and stored out there in the desert of South Eastern Idaho.

But at lunch, in celebrating that nuclear reactor technology was first tested and developed here in Idaho, celebrating our role in nuclear weapons production and nuclear waste storage, the lab did focus on waste and on the thousands of people who have labored for decades under often dangerous conditions to try and clean up what is one of the largest nuclear waste dumps in the nation.

I've met many people who worked out there at "the site" over the years. Most recently a fire fighter who I worry about after having heard what he has breathed and how he no longer fears that odd feeling of heat and gamma rays radiating off of spent fuel and high level waste.

I will be a big proponent of nuclear power when we do finally solve the issue of waste. We will need to figure out how to neutralize it, not just recycle part of it. We can't keep leaving the most highly radioactive remains to burn somewhere in a mountain or building or pool of water for decades, centuries or millennia. I hope our government continues to invest money in solving the puzzle of how to render radioactive materials harmless. I even hope our lab gets that job and does it well.

But to talk of building new nuclear power plants before that task is done is beyond my comprehension. To talk about how this energy is clean or carbon free when in truth it is mined, refined, processed, transported, reprocessed, stored, cooled, monitored, repackaged and labored-over using decades of fossil fuels, that makes no sense. We still have no idea what to do besides piling more radioactive waste next to every nuclear power plant we build in every city or town from New York to California. To revive the industry means billion in profits for a few and a gift of consequences for the rest of us.

Nuclear waste is a gift our state still keeps getting. Most Idahoans don't know it but the nuclear navy's nuclear submarines still send all their radioactive "spent fuel" waste here to Idaho. Dangerous materials so radioactively hot that they are literally deadly to behold. Three Mile Island has waste buried out there in the soil over our aquifer. Decades of taking other state's nuclear weapons waste have left the soil so hot in places that even now it catches on fire sometimes. Workers in big tents use robots and cranes to dig it up out of the soil and put it in barrels to become New Mexico's problem.

If we want more gifts, we will believe the industry when they promise us it is a clean and safe form of energy now. They say they have solved the issue of the waste by recycling part of it. But ask them where it all goes. All of it. Ask what precisely we are left with afterward and is this something Idaho wants or is it something we're hoping someday to pass guiltily on to some other state or community with our own hollow promises and wishful thinking.

That's another gift I will decline. I will leave that one, like I left the mini squishy stress reliever/nuclear waste barrel on the INL luncheon table.