Idaho is awash in the corrupting sludge of political money

The Idaho State Capitol on March 21, 2021. (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

Idaho – like the rest of the country – is drowning in political money. The corrupting influence of all that cash, most of it untraceable as to its origin, is hiding in plan sight. 

By general agreement at least $1.5 million in “dark money” – the money of millionaires and billionaires who are trying to create political outcomes, while keeping their fingerprints off the policies that are often very unpopular – sluiced into Idaho this year to buck up mostly rightwing candidates and advance issues like privatizing public education.

The vast amounts spent on legislative lobbying attempting to engineer the transfer of public funding to private schools again fell short this year, but the aim is obvious: destruction of the wholly American idea of a public school system that serves every child, while helping create a civil, educated population. 

A look inside the big bucks and key players in Idaho’s 2024 primary election spending

History tells us the money will be back in even bigger and potentially ever more effective amounts. 

It was precisely 50 years ago, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, that Idaho did what in hindsight was a remarkably progressive thing in trying to address what was then perceived as a threat to small “d” democratic government. In 1974 Idaho voters, in overwhelming numbers, passed what supporters dubbed the “Sunshine Initiative,” mandating registration of lobbyists and reporting of campaign contributions and expenditures. 

The chief driver behind that initiative, an advocate of open and transparent government, was a seemingly unlikely champion. John Peavey was one of Idaho’s largest sheep and cattle ranchers, not a profession one immediately associates with progressive political policies. John was also a Republican, a decidedly progressive Republican the likes of which no longer exist. 

Peavey, a dynamic and influential fixture in the Idaho Legislature for nearly 25 years and the architect of the Sunshine Initiative, died last week at age 90. His entire political career was spent, frequently in the minority, in the state Senate. His only run at statewide office came in 1994 when he lost to C.L. “Butch” Otter in a race for lieutenant governor. 

Few Idaho legislators have left a bigger mark on the state’s public policy. 

Peavey was the rare politician who actually wore the garb of a rancher and looked natural doing so. He long ago abandoned the Republican Party of his youth when his ideas about government transparency and environmental protection clashed with the constant rightward drift of the GOP. (Peavey’s mother, Mary Brooks, was a Republican Idaho state senator and later director of the of the United States Mint, appointed by Richard Nixon, while his grandfather was Idaho Republican U.S. Sen. John Thomas.) 

“I have always thought of John as the quintessential progressive,” said Rod Gramer, a former political reporter who now heads Idaho Business for Education, one group battling the forces of the vast monied interests bent on destroying public education in Idaho and across the country. “John represented politics in a different era,” Gramer told me, “when there were some fighting for reform.” Peavey also played a pivotal role in forcing Idaho’s historic adjudication of Snake River water rights and, unthinkable today, championed a “bottle bill” based on Oregon’s long-standing law. Along with his wife, Diane, the Peavey’s founded the annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival in Blaine County. 

Gramer, who reported on Peavey’s efforts to create transparency around money and lobbying in the 1970s, has more recently written authoritatively about the vast money that now routinely pollutes our politics. Two conclusions emerge from his analysis: the big money is buying legislative support for unpopular ideas and virtually all the money being spent originates far beyond Idaho.

“These pro-voucher groups are based out of state and have ties to some of the richest people in the country,” Gramer wrote in the Idaho Capital Sun in April. “The American Federation for Children is based in Dallas and was founded by billionaire Betsy DeVos. Yes. Every Kid is based in Arlington, Virginia, and was founded by billionaire Charles Koch. Young Americans for Liberty is also based in Virginia.

“Even the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which holds the stated goal of abolishing public education in Idaho, has ties to out-of-state billionaires. The IFF is one of two Idaho ‘affiliates’ of the State Policy Network, which is financed by dark money provided by some of the wealthiest people in the country. The IFF’s political action committee has launched a vicious campaign against the pro-public-school legislators.” 

When John Peavey courageously bucked his own party to push for campaign finance disclosure and lobby registration 50 years ago he faced monumental push back. One of Idaho’s worst ever attorneys general, Robert Robson, brashly predicted that Peavey’s efforts “will dry up campaign funds, and without funds the parties can’t operate.” Robson, an erratic right winger not unlike the current attorney general, said disclosure would lead to audits in “every county and legislative district.” 

Such wild, and wildly inaccurate, attacks on political sunshine saw the Idaho Legislature repeatedly turn down Peavey’s legislative efforts. After yet another defeat during the 1974 session, Peavey took the issue to voters. That move was prompted, in part, Idaho Statesman columnist Ken Robison wrote after 78% of voters endorsed the Sunshine Initiative, because corporate lobbyists for the then-extremely influential Morrison-Knudsen Company helped kill a land use planning law Peavey also supported. 

The new, voter backed law, Robison wrote, “is a threat to the powerful and durable coalition of Idaho corporate money and influence and the Republican state party organization.” Robison confidently predicted the new level of disclosure “will bring that influence more into public view.” 

And for a while it worked. Idaho’s secretaries of state generally applied the law fairly, if not always aggressively. Candidates and lobbyists, fearing bad press for failing to disclose, generally took the law seriously. Unfortunately the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of decisions beginning in 1976, has systematically opened the floodgates of cash that now make John Peavey’s idealistic aspirations for half a century ago seem almost naïve. 

The last time Idaho saw such an influx of outside political money was during the historic 1980 U.S. Senate campaign between Sen. Frank Church and Congressman Steve Symms. So called “independent expenditure” committees flooded the state with cash, modest by today’s standards, to smear Church and elevate Symms, a radical Republican endorsed by the John Birch Society. 

It is little surprise that as a congressional candidate in 1974 Symms was an outspoken opponent of the Sunshine Initiative, in part perhaps because national groups were grooming him to eventually challenge Church, which he did successfully in 1980, bolstered by out-of-state cash. 

The state’s Republican Party, now completely dominated by a new generation of Steve Symms-type ultra-right wingers, is guided by its newly re-elected chair, Dorothy Moon, who wears her Birch Society credentials as a badge of honor. 

If you think uncontrolled money from secret sources is a good for democracy, you’ll love Idaho where it’s increasingly impossible to tell who is pulling the strings. It’s time for another John Peavey to demand reform. 

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