Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Terri Pickens Manweiler raised a salient point Friday during a statewide televised debate with her GOP rival, House Speaker Scott Bedke.

On Bedke’s decade-long watch, the Idaho House devolved into even more extremism. How is he not responsible for that? And why would that recommend him for a promotion?

“My opponent sat back in the House with his gavel and stayed silent while the minority of extremists became the loudest voice in the Legislature,” Pickens Manweiler said. “And he thinks that’s earned him the gavel in the Senate. It has not.”

The House speaker is without equal in the Legislature. The various committee chairmen and chairwomen serve at his pleasure. He controls his own panel, the House Ways and Means Committee, where he can launch or kill any bill he pleases.

Some of Bedke’s predecessors in that job were people with sharp elbows — T.W. Stivers of Twin Falls, Tom Boyd of Genesee, Mike Simpson of Blackfoot and Bruce Newcomb of Burley. All of them relied on coalitions to remain in office but Bedke seemed more passive and more accommodating.

For instance, there was the “Bedke rule.” Coined in 2016, it meant that the speaker would block expanding Medicaid or any other kind of health care to Idaho’s working poor unless it could win with Republican votes alone.

“I’m more comfortable having a plan that (the Republican caucus) is comfortable with,” Bedke said at the time.

That all but gave the Idaho Freedom Foundation wing of the caucus a veto over any plan. The result was legislative paralysis. Only after Idaho voters took matters into their own hands and passed a ballot initiative was Medicaid expanded in Idaho.

Compare that to the plight facing Newcomb in 2003. Passing an adequate public education budget during a recession required a temporary boost in the sales tax, which faced opposition within elements of the GOP. Passage required forging a coalition with House Democratic leader Wendy Jaquet of Ketchum. That could have put Newcomb’s tenure in peril, but he did it anyway.

Much as he did on Friday, Bedke explained his approach in terms of the need to retain a majority of GOP votes for his own leadership post: “To think that the speaker can singlehandedly put a stop to everything that he or she doesn’t like is to be a one-term speaker.”

Bedke wasn’t a mere bystander to some of this. At times, he joined in.

Pickens Manweiler cited examples:

• House Bill 666, which would have subjected librarians to criminal prosecution for “disseminating material that is harmful to minors” had the Senate not bottled it up. Bedke noted he was absent from the House vote. But as Kevin Richert of Idaho Education News observed, Bedke said at the time: “There were things about the remedy that I did not like, but I would have voted for it.”
• Lifting Idaho’s ban on carpool lanes. The Senate unanimously voted for it. Bedke’s House Transportation Committee refused to even give it a hearing.

Not mentioned by Pickens Manweiler was a third episode. Late in 2020, Bedke joined in the drive to pressure Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden into endorsing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to steal the presidential election. Paxton proposed to toss President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in four battleground states, thereby throwing the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the rules gave the GOP the upper hand.

Not mentioned by Pickens Manweiler was a third episode. Late in 2020, Bedke joined in the drive to pressure Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden into endorsing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to steal the presidential election. Paxton proposed to toss President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in four battleground states, thereby throwing the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the rules gave the GOP the upper hand.

Wasden refused, a decision that was validated when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Paxton’s ploy.

Speakers are not powerless when it comes to the direction of their caucuses. Boyd, Simpson and Newcomb didn’t mind promoting Republican legislative candidates they found to be responsible while marginalizing the handful they did not.

So why did Bedke promote two of his chamber’s more cringe-worthy members — IFF darling Ron Nate of Rexburg and the morally bankrupt Priscilla Giddings of White Bird — to the powerful and prestigious Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee where they tried to sabotage budget bills?

Maybe because Bedke got what he wanted — longevity in office

But his choice carried a price — and he can’t escape a large share of responsibility for what followed.

— M.T.