By Leslie Wolff, MVLA Contributor, March 1, 2025
Greetings Liberty Lovers,
The College of Southern Idaho hosted a Legislative Forum on Saturday, March 1st in their Fine Arts building. The forum was well attended for what looked like an opportunity to hear from our State Senators and Representatives from Legislative Districts 24, 25, and 26. Senator’s Zuiderveld, Kohl, and Taylor were in attendance, as well as Representatives Hostetler, Miller, Leavitt, Clow, Pohanka, and Nelsen.
CSI President, Dean Fisher, was the moderator for the meeting and when he welcomed everyone, he stated that CSI was hosting this town hall for our representatives to give an update on how the state legislature session was going. For the first half of the forum, he gave each of the nine legislators five minutes to introduce themselves and speak about the session. The second half consisted of President Fisher picking and choosing from written audience questions. Simple enough, or so you would think.
It did not take long before half of the audience exposed why they were really there… to shout, boo, hiss and yell expletives at the true-conservative, liberty-minded representatives. They waved signs and red pieces of paper to express their dislike of many of the different representatives’ views on any given topic. Beside a few frail attempts from President Fisher to keep the audience quiet, the outbursts and heckling lasted the entire hour and a half with security and other CSI administrators doing nothing to keep order. It was rude and they felt their opinions were the only ones that mattered.
When the question-and-answer period came, the topics revolved around a few key issues: the School Choice Tax Credit bill that Governor Little recently signed, the continuation of the Launch program, repealing the Grocery Tax and the Convention of States. President Fisher “exercised his prerogative” and asked a purely self-serving question for himself and his colleagues. Since the House had already voted, President Fisher used this opportunity to put the good Senators on the spot and asked how they would vote on allowing Idaho community colleges to raise the tuition after being frozen since 2018.
Senator Taylor, being the Democrat that he is, stated he would vote yes, which is no surprise. Senators Kohl and Zuiderveld both stated they would probably be voting no. President Fisher did not seem pleased, so his last comment on the subject was that he would be emailing them. The majority of the audience is for anything that our Magic Valley Miracle legislators are against, and vice versa. The audience wants to continue to pay taxes on groceries, pay higher taxes for the Launch program and community college, but in no way want anyone to receive a tax credit for exercising their freedom of school choice. They don’t care if the blood they receive for a medical procedure has the Covid mRNA in it and do not want anyone to have the opportunity to have vaccine-free blood either.
They do not want the 10 Commandments nor religion in our schools and were not pleased to hear from Senator Zuiderveld that the ability to have religion in our schools is already in statute. And last, but not least, the audience wants a Convention of States.
At the end of the forum, it was hard for me to tell if I live in the red, conservative State of Idaho or the socialist Republic of California that I escaped from nine years ago.
