By Wayne Hoffman, Idaho Freedom Foundation
April 5, 2022
True to form, lawmakers are trying to impress you with a handful of breadcrumbs from the 2022 legislative session, including a small tax break and some pro-life and pro-gun legislation. It’s an election year, after all, and people in office will do their best to make it sound as if their lawmaking made Idaho more conservative than when they arrived in Boise.
The breadcrumbs are just a cover for the real story of what happened during the winter in Boise: How special interests and the media conspired with elected officials to grow government and keep individuals and families under the state’s big boot.
The Legislature and Gov. Brad Little passed a bill to fully fund the continued social justice indoctrination programs on our college and university campuses and increasing spending on higher education by 7.5%. This rewards the schools for defying the Legislature’s instruction last year to cut radical left-wing programs. The Legislature also refused to do anything to fully prohibit the well-documented existence of critical race theory and the sexualization of children taking place in our public schools, all of which has been ignored by the legacy media.
Lawmakers rejected proposals to expand education choice and protect parental rights. Apart from a small cut to the budget for the Idaho Commission for Libraries budget, lawmakers did nothing to stop the exposure of children to obscene materials and the grooming of youngsters into accepting gender fluidity.
Instead, lawmakers signed on to Little’s idea of expanding government-run education by enacting “free” full-day kindergarten, before- and after-school programs, and more summer school programs.
