OPINION: Here’s what Idaho lawmakers really care about

When it comes to spending $545,300 to leverage $16.3 million in federal food aid to hungry kids, Idaho’s state Senate can’t be bothered.

But if the question is whether to allocate $533,700 on themselves, these same state senators have no such reticence.

On March 28, the state Senate voted 25-10 against using federal cash to provide $120 per child across three months through the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer program.

Just the day before, the Senate voted 31-3 to add four positions to the legislative staff serving the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee.

This legislative panel operates on a lean budget and its staff traditionally has been stretched thin. If a few more employees can do a better job of reviewing contracts, take a critical eye to the effectiveness of agency consolidations, study how state employee pay increases are implemented and analyze Idaho’s technology infrastructure, all to the good. Those are complicated questions and citizen lawmakers need the best answers they can find.

What’s a prudent investment when it comes to their own staff becomes an undue burden when it involves 136,000 youngsters who live in households making less than two-thirds the state’s median income and already rely on free and reduced lunch and breakfast during the school year.

If the choice of where to spend a half-million dollars were up to you, what would you do? Muddle through with the committee staff you already have? Or deny help to a family whose summer food costs suddenly expand beyond its means. Perhaps parents will defer other bills like rent or utilities. Or they may get by with cheaper, less nutritious types of food. Others may simply do without. At minimum, you have a lot of children who will go through the “summer hunger gap” uncertain about where their next meal is coming from.

Said Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton: Extending money to hungry kids only breeds more social welfare dependency.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, senators,” she said. “But this is something that I feel is creating a problem because it is creating the environment of putting kids on welfare so that they continue to want to be on it.”

To the contrary. The best remedy against future welfare dependence is a good education. And key to a good education is a child who is properly nourished.

By the way, Nichols voted to expand the legislative staff.

Said Sen. Cindy Carlson, R-Riggins: Get a job.

“We’re sending the wrong message to parents and kids that we’re going to keep providing for everybody without needing something in return,” Carlson said. “And I believe that the message we need to be sending is we all need to work for what we get.”

Here’s betting that Carlson knows the child labor laws in effect since the Great Depression keep most Idaho schoolchildren out of the labor pool. But is Carlson aware that there are proportionately more needy children in her backyard than elsewhere in the state?

On average, 11% of Idaho’s households live below the federal poverty line. That compares to:

13.6% in Clearwater County.

11.8% in Idaho County.

16.2% in Latah County.

16.2% in Lewis County.

14.6% in Nez Perce County.

Like Nichols, Carlson cared more about expanding legislative staffing than helping hungry children, even those she represents.

And intoned Sen. Brian Lenney, R-Nampa: The program would be a “permanent expansion of the welfare state.”

Actually, Lenney and his colleagues with the Idaho Freedom Caucus were peddling the fraudulent talking point that 100% of kids — regardless of personal circumstances — would be entitled to this help if they attended a school where as few as a quarter of the enrollment qualified for free and reduced lunches.

How many senators were lulled into voting against the program — and might have been persuaded to reverse that vote had they been provided with the facts — will never be known. Within 2½ hours of the Senate vote, the budget committee revised the bill, killing the summer EBT program, without asking the public’s help in debunking Lenney’s inaccurate claim.

Wouldn’t you know it?

Lenney also voted to expand the budget committee’s staff.

Here’s one more tidbit, courtesy of the Idaho Statesman’s Bryan Clark.

Of the eight Republican senators who serve on the budget committee, only Julie VanOrden, of Pingree, voted to help these struggling families. The remainder —including co-Chairperson C. Scott Grow, of Eagle — voted no.

Not one of the GOP Senate members on that committee voted against expanding their staff, however. With the exception of VanOrden, who was absent that day, they all voted yes.

Strange priorities these lawmakers have, wouldn’t you say? — M.T.