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Melissa Davlin: A historic vote to remove House Majority Leader Megan Blanksma from her leadership position could have big consequences for the rest of the session.

Tonight, Representative Blanksma joins us to discuss the vote and what she thinks led up to it.

I'm Melissa Davlin.

Idaho Reports starts now.

Hello and welcome to Idaho Reports.

This week, representative Megan Blanksma joins us to discuss the vote to remove her as House majority leader.

Joint Finance Appropriations co-chair Wendy Horman gives us some insights into the behind the scenes budget fights that became public over the last few days.

And Minority Leader Ilana Rubel shares her thoughts on how the dysfunction might affect the rest of the legislative session.

But first, let's get you caught up on a tense week at the state house.

On Wednesday, House members had a lengthy debate on the maintenance budget for the judicial branch.

The debate came just days after a majority of JFAC members voted to introduce new competing budgets that included more of the ongoing funded needed, funding needed for projects and programs that state agencies currently run.

Those committee members had expressed concerns that the original budgets passed with a new appropriations process were missing critical operational funding and included far too many programs and omnibus bills.

Supporters of the new budgeting process said this allows members to more closely scrutinize budgets.

Those opinions were echoed during Wednesday's debate.

Rep. Britt Raybould: This path of collapsing multiple budgets into single budget bills is reflective of what the federal government does with its budgeting process.

We decry frequently how budgeting happens in Washington, D.C., that it is not transparent, that it allows things to be slipped in under the cover of, well, everything's in the bill and it's all got to go.

That is not a process I want to see adopted in the state of Idaho.

Rep. Heather Scott: In the past and up to this point, we've had big bloated budgets.

They've been all or nothing.

Every single want of an agency, every single need of an agency was all put into one budget.

This is the first time since I've been here in ten years that we're actually going to at least take that one big budget and turn it into two.

And we can put it into two categories, What does the agency need, and what does the agency want?

Ultimately, the House narrowly voted to pass the original budget.

Notably, Representative Blanksma was the only member of leadership to vote against the budget and by proxy the new process.

On Thursday, the House session started with a surprise motion to retain House Speaker Mike Moyle, in other words, a vote of support.

The motion came with little debate or commentary from visibly frustrated House members and ultimately passed unanimously.

Rep. Dan Garner: It is a sad day for Idaho when we come to this point where we're wasting time on this motion when we should be doing the business of Idaho.

I urge you to support this motion and our whole leadership and move on.

Rep. Brent Crane: Roll Call Shows 69 Ayes 0 Nay 1 Absent excused, The majority having voted in favor of the motion, the speaker will be retained.

Right after that vote, Republicans went into caucus.

A few hours later, they announced that they had voted to remove Representative Megan Blanksma as majority leader.

Here to discuss that vote is representative Megan Blanksma.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Rep. Megan Blanksma: Happy to be here.

Was this a surprise for you?

I don't know if it was a surprise or not.

It's been obviously, if you've been watching the session's been difficult and there's been some challenges.

There have been disagreements among leadership on how things were going and how we were operating.

And I think that is part of what was going on.

Can you expand on those differences in leadership?

Yeah, well, I think that it's always my responsibility to represent my constituents of District 8.

That's always the responsibility.

And I felt that some of the things that were happening as far as legislation moving forward and processes that were changed, weren't you weren't contributing to the welfare of the constituents of District 8.

And I had some concerns and I was vocal about those concerns.

Are you talking about the changes to the budgeting committee because you were the only member of leadership who voted against the budget during that big debate on Wednesday.

How big a part was that in this vote and in this conflict?

Yeah, I think that was when it all came to a head, more than anything, I think there were other underlying issues.

But yeah, I had some pretty serious concerns about what they called maintenance budgets that I firmly believed that were not maintenance budgets.

And what I thought a maintenance budget should be is that you fully fund to last year's levels for ongoing, you know, so keep the lights on.

Right.

And when you looked at and look at these budgets, they don't do that.

There are some significant holes in them.

And you will notice, however, I did not stand up and debate.

I just voted no because as a member of leadership, I felt that I didn't need to be making that point on the floor.

That was one part of it.

You mentioned that there were other things.

What were some of those policy differences?

Well, I think there's policy differences and operational differences.

I have a different view than some of, there are 70 of us in the House, and we all represent districts, and our vote is our own, and it's our job to represent them.

And I think that when we get caught up in trying to tow the line or not looking at what our district is and not representing our district, I think we start running into problems.

You're implying that there's some strong arming going on within leadership, Am I?

Maybe, reading between the lines here, do you have concerns about the way speaker Moyle is is running the house?

I'm not here to call anybody out.

I am here because you asked me to be here, and I'm happy to do that.

I think that, you know, we really just need to remember that the vote that you have on the House floor is for your district and that's who you should support.

I can think of so many times when, you know, Speaker Moyle was majority leader and we had House Speaker Scott Bedke where those two voted differently from each other.

So many major policy issues.

He was never voted out.

He stayed in that position for many, many years.

What's the difference here?

Is it just policy or were there other factors?

I think there were other factors, but I don't know that it's worth going over them.

What happened happened, and you just go forward the best you can.

Did Launch play into this or was that just one of the many policy differences that you had?

Oh, I think that's definitely one of the many policy differences that we have.

I think Speaker Moyle's made it clear that he doesn't support Launch, doesn't support funding Launch and doesn't like the fact that it even hit the House floor and that it moved.

He's been very vocal about that.

And in 2023, you were the sponsor of that for viewers who don't remember.

Do you think this jeopardizes Launch, re-upping Launch this year?

I think that Launch has always been in jeopardy because the speaker is not in favor of Launch.

And I think that the governor has a lot to do to get Launch funded, and that's going to have to be on his shoulders to make sure that one of his policies moves.

Can you give us an update on that or are you as involved this year as you were last year?

Well, I think that that is another gaping hole in the Ed budget, right?

When you see the Ed budget that will come across the floor, it does not fund Launch.

And if you look back, I believe it was the special session where we said we were going to put $80 million into an in demand careers fund.

Right.

That was policy that was set.

Now, there is some discussion about not putting that $80 million in, even though it was, you know, policy that was done.

Now Launch was the result of that policy.

But I the fact that the policy is not funded even though it's in statute, I, I have difficulty with.

After that vote with so many of your fellow caucus members that you've worked with for so long, do you feel a sense of betrayal?

It's politics.

I think that you do your best and you just keep moving forward.

And if you're going to get caught up on things like you've been wronged or harmed or betrayed, you're not going to do very well.

With that in mind, are you going to run for reelection in District 8?

I want to represent my constituents.

And so right now, my plan is to run for district 8.

I've always said, you know, you do the best with what you have.

And that's what I'm trying to do.

And I plan to run for reelection and I plan to run hard.

And I think that I have done my best for my constituents.

And that's important.

Representative Megan Blanksma , thank you so much for joining us.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

That budget fight continued on Friday morning with a debate over the original public schools maintenance budget, with sparring over both the process and the budget itself.

Ultimately, that bill passed 53 to 14.

Joining me to discuss is Representative Wendy Horman.

Representative, thank you so much for your time today.

Were you surprised?

I want to start with what happened on Thursday.

Were you surprised at the leadership vote?

Rep. Wendy Horman: I was surprised it reached that point.

But honestly, things had been bubbling for a while.

Years, definitely before session.

I think we've reached a point in our political discourse where we think it's okay to disparage others, and there's some active campaigning going against sitting legislators right now, that I think has played into what is happening in the House right now.

Specifically with the removal of Representative Blanksma as majority leader.

Yes.

From your perspective, how much did the new budgeting process and concerns over that process play into that vote?

I think it's a symptom and not a cause.

And what do you mean by that?

I mean that levels of political discourse and civility where we're attacking one another outside of session, before we get to session.

Some new lines that were drawn in the sand with new caucuses and new groups and new PACs definitely have been playing into everything that's happening in the House right now.

And so I think the budget conversation became a symptom of that division.

I think the leadership conversation became a symptom of that division as well.

You know, you bring up new PACs that go after sitting incumbents.

And this is something that, you know, Speaker Moyle, when he was majority leader in 2012, was involved in very similar political action committees that were targeting incumbents.

Are there different factors here that led to representative Blanksma's removal and not Moyle's removal at the time?

I guess I didn't know it was Speaker Moyle.

I thought it was the sitting speaker at the time.

Speaker Denny at the time.

Yes, because they definitely came after me as a candidate.

So I remember that vividly.

You know, there are ways to disagree without being disagreeable.

But when we are going after fellow colleagues outside of session in ways that are maybe derogatory or less than civil, certainly has impacted our environment in the House this year.

You know, bringing it back to the Budget Committee, you saw your own revolt last week while you were absent actually, with new budgets being introduced and passed by a majority of the joint committee members.

Did that move surprise you?

Yes.

I was shocked to hear what had happened in my absence.

I was out ill and recovering.

So I was shocked.

I would never have dreamt in a million years of pulling a surprise motion on Madam Chair Bell or Chairman Youngblood.

There's certainly room for disagreement in the Joint Finance Appropriation Committee, and it's always a legislator's prerogative to bring a motion that they have not disclosed to others, but to not make the chairman aware of that is not normal.

And we discussed this a little bit last week on the show.

But for those who missed it and who aren't quite familiar with it, the Budget Committee, as we went over earlier in the show, had already passed maintenance budgets under the new process, but a majority of members voted to introduce new budgets and they were essentially competing budgets.

I haven't ever seen anything like that before where there were competing budgets without one pulled back first.

Do you think that will affect your relationship with the committee moving forward?

I hope not.

I have spoken to almost every person at this point.

There's one I haven't had a chance to speak with yet, but every one of them has come to me, helped me understand what they were trying to do.

And and you're seeing today that they're taking those budgets that they had previously agreed to support and voted yes on and now carrying them on the House floor.

So I believe the healing has begun.

The only way to maintain, you know, it's a mark of our character of how we treat other people.

And I think the golden rule applies here, and that's how I'm working with the members of my committee is trying to have those conversations so we can move forward.

We focused just now on the education budget because that generated a good amount of debate and questioning specifically for you.

But we saw a number of budgets pass over the past couple of days in both the House and the Senate.

Those original budgets, not the the new substitute budgets.

All ten maintenance budgets have now passed the House, most on a party line.

Public schools had three Republicans vote no on those budgets today, otherwise straight party line.

I think we have, though we started explaining this process last fall, we had meetings about it in November phone conversations in December, caucus meetings, explaining the difference and showing it.

Change is always hard.

And we can explain and explain and explain and talk.

And as you know, it was a party line vote coming out of JFAC the very first time on all of these.

And so it wasn't until after that that I began to hear rumblings about possibly flipping their votes to go against these.

So I did go meet with each person and try to understand why there was some of the same drama around JFAC rules and that was going on between House and Senate leadership, which I was not a party to.

So Senator Grow and I were trying to navigate some choppy waters with everything that was going on.

But I think we are headed in the right direction now.

We focused a lot on this one part of the budgeting process in which you have the maintenance budget and then you, the committee, and then the legislature as a whole considers line items separately.

That's just one of many changes that you implemented this past year, and we've gone over that multiple times on the show.

But generally speaking, was this too much change too quickly?

I don't believe it was.

We again communicated starting last October with an email, had meetings about it in November.

Did an interview with KTVB this week sometime, and a random citizen said to Joe Paris, after 20 years, JFAC is finally exciting.

So, you know, some people are excited about that, others are not.

But we this was always intended to be an iterative process where we're going to take certain steps at this stage, and then we'll take additional steps.

For example, our JFAC staff did a study and revealed that only about 19% of all the money that we spend in Idaho gets a look during legislative session.

That's not okay.

We don't have public testimony in JFAC, that's another flaw in our system.

So there are additional steps that we will be taking to make sure we're fully taking care of the taxpayers money.

So this summer, we'll be looking that 81% Going systemically through each agency's base budget to find out exactly what's in there.

In the meantime, one of the really exciting parts of the changes is our new budget website.

You can find that from going to legislature.Idaho.gov and clicking on budget information.

You can see revenue.

You can see spending, you can see federal funds, you can see audit findings.

You can see transparent Idaho.

You see where every dime is going in every state agency.

So those are some of the exciting changes as well.

One of the main concerns from your colleagues was that there are going to be some critical ongoing programs that don't get funding because they weren't included in that first round of maintenance budgets that lawmakers can say, you know what, we set this budget and we can go home now.

I know you can't guarantee that anything will pass.

Are you confident, though, that those critical pieces of funding will pass?

I am 100% confident that every request will be considered.

Whether it should be granted or not is up to the committee.

If JFAC ever sends a budget to the floor that has overspending in it or unnecessary spending of taxpayer money, we haven't done our job.

And so what I can guarantee is happening, and it's currently happening, that every request is being evaluated for its necessity.

And whether you know it's nice to have or need to have.

So as the committee makes those decisions, they'll put those in these secondary budgets and we'll send them to the floor.

If the floor votes them up or down, if they vote them down, we'll bring them back, sharpen our pencil and go back to work again like every other year.

This isn't a budget specific question.

More Looking at the Republican caucus as a whole and the relationship between the House and the Senate.

Do you think this dysfunction will affect how the rest of the session will play out and affect, possible legislation that we haven't seen yet?

I hope not.

I hope that the healing has begun this week and that we can remember that our duty is to serve the people of Idaho and not fight with each other.

And I saw that happening today in the House.

And I hope that's the process moving forward.

All right.

Representative Wendy Horman, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

And joining me to discuss her thoughts on the week is Minority Leader Ilana Rubel.

Minority Leader, thank you so much for joining me today.

You know, we just had a lot of conversation about the new budget process and the new budgets that did pass.

Your caucus, the Democrats in the House and your colleagues in the Senate on some of those budgets were the only ones to vote no, including on budgets you've traditionally supported, you know, like state board of Education, public schools.

You voted no.

Why was that?

Rep. Ilana Rubel: These budgets are not real, what they call maintenance budgets.

They've been sold as maintenance budgets, which are supposedly budgets that will, you know, meet the basic needs and keep the agency functioning.

And then they'll address the extra line items later.

That is not what's going on here.

These budgets that are being sold as maintenance budgets are not even skeleton budgets.

For example, the education budget we voted on today is nearly a 10% cut to the public education budget.

It does not include statutorily mandated items like the teacher raises under the career ladder, benefits packages, necessary funding for the School of Deaf and Blind.

It's a disastrous budget, but once it's passed, it opens the door to a lot of mayhem.

It opens the door to the potential that we just leave the building and adjourn eventually at the end of March or something.

And someone says, Well, we passed the education budget.

What's the problem?

We can leave now.

It also represents a profound shift of power.

We've never had a system like this ever.

We've had a very well working system of budgets for decades that has been completely upended this year and has never been tried before.

And we're taking a leap off the cliff.

And I was not ready to jump off that cliff and hope that there's a net down there.

What they basically did is they handed absolute power to the speaker who's, I'm, he's my friend, but they just made basically the speaker almost more powerful than the governor with this move of passing these skeleton budgets.

Because what that means now is when the other stuff comes in, the meat on the bones, the actual teacher pay, the actual, you know, having people to run the Department of Health and Welfare, all of these things, the speaker doesn't even have to hold those for a vote.

He has one man power to send any of those budgets to the Ways and Means Committee and make sure they never get voted on on the floor.

So, for example, Launch funds, which the speaker opposed.

Those are now carved up and left hanging in the wind.

They're not part of the core budget for any of these agencies.

So it has empowered one person to basically block just about any funding for any agency.

Just in terms of balance of powers I have serious concerns about that.

But we just opened up a really soft underbelly in terms of whether any of the basic functions of the state get met.

Whether any of those 10,000 kids that just applied for Launch grants to go to college and pursue training in welding and the like, you know, electrical engineering, all these things, whether they ever get that money, just became in very serious doubt with this new JFAC process and with the decision on the Republican's parts, even those who have grave doubts, to just hold their nose and go along with it.

Shouldn't lawmakers though be able to take a look at the meat on the bones and really examine those budgets?

I mean, that's how this was sold as a new, transparent way to look at the new spending.

Yeah, no, they always could do that.

I mean, that was always the case where they always had all the items in a budget.

The difference is that before you would see the budget as a whole and when you got the education budget, you got to look at everything in it, but you would actually look at the whole education budget and say, okay, these are all the things that are going into the education budget.

We're going to hear from the head of the Department of Education.

We're going to ask her questions on it.

It was actually very transparent.

Now, the head of the Department of Education, isn't even allowed to come in the room and make her case.

She has been barred from it all.

She's not part of the question making process.

I think that's an interference with transparency.

But right now we have absolutely no idea.

We don't even know what the target revenue is for the state yet.

They did this budget in a vacuum.

The committee wasn't even involved in these baseline skeleton budgets.

It was just done by the chairs.

And the budget was passed without any clue as to what the whole is going to look like.

So it's kind of like, well, you know, you're going to start painting this wall without really knowing how big the wall is, what the house looks like, what the other things are in the room, what the furniture is, what any other color of any other wall is.

So I don't think that's more transparent.

I don't think that operating in a total vacuum where you have no insight into how the pieces are going to work together, that feels to me far less transparent and to just take a leap of faith that when you pass this little itty bitty budget, it's somehow all going to come together in some big whole that works.

Before we saw the big whole and we got to see the big whole and made sure that it worked before we voted on it.

That is the opposite of what we're doing now.

Thursday's leadership vote was mostly Republican inner caucus fight.

But from your perspective, how might this affect the rest of the session?

I think it's going to have some.

We already saw it have major repercussions on the floor today.

Yesterday, we had a vote on one of these maintenance budgets and a lot of folks in that building have very serious concerns about this process and the content and the fact that these budgets are not in fact, maintenance budgets, that they represent grave cuts that are going to seriously cut the services that people in Idaho depend on.

And yesterday, 31 people were voted against that budget.

It was very close.

It barely passed.

Then they went into caucus.

They fired the majority leader who had voted against that budget.

She was part of that crew that expressed concerns and that voted against that budget.

They went in, they ousted her.

They came out.

And it was a very different feel on the floor today.

All of a sudden, all of the people who had opposed it yesterday were just, you know, kind of bending the knee.

They were saying, I'm so sorry, I'll do what I'm told from here on out.

I'll never vote against these things again.

And we had this education budget come out, which again, nearly a 10% cut to the education budget with very basic needs not met.

And just about all of them voted for it.

So we saw night and day difference between one day they were willing to stand up and say, I have real concerns.

I can't vote for this budget.

Then there was the ouster.

Next day they come in and basically were like, okay, I'll do whatever majority leadership wants.

So that concerns me because, you know, I think I want to be in a place where people can vote their minds and vote their consciences.

I think that does that does the most good for the people of Idaho.

And frankly, as Democrats, we always have to work across the aisle, and we work, and it's not necessarily with moderates or with one subset or with the far right, we'll work with anybody.

And sometimes we form unexpected coalitions.

But it's going to be a lot harder to make good things happen for the people of Idaho if the members of the majority caucus are cowed and feel like they can't step out of line and you know, necessarily do the things that they would like to do and that they feel are right.

We have about 90 seconds left, but you have your own legislative priorities that you lined out at the beginning of the session.

How is this going to change your approach to getting Republicans on board for those priorities?

Well, I mean, we're going to keep doing what you know, fortunately, I'm very happy, we don't have the numbers, we don't have the numbers that I would like.

But at least we always get to vote our consciences and we don't have a woodshed in our caucus room.

But we you know, we will continue to make the case the best we can, we'll make it to the people of Idaho, we'll make it to the legislators in the building, and we will see what the outcome is this session.

I mean, I think the people of Idaho are not going to be happy if we emerge from this session with no functioning schools and without a functioning Department of Health and Welfare and without a Launch program and without any of the things that they count on.

And so we will make that case at every turn.

And if we don't get those things, we will make our case to the voters of the ballot box in November.

How are you feeling about your priorities at this point in the session?

I'm really concerned about some of those priorities.

I mean, I'm very concerned about Launch, which passed by one vote last year with the majority of Republicans voting against.

This is a transformative program that opens up incredible pathways of opportunity to potentially double kids income.

And I'm very concerned, it was a minority of Republicans last year who sided with the Democrats to do that.

If they don't feel comfortable doing that anymore, Launch may die.

We're going to have to leave it there.

We're out of time.

Thank you so much for joining us.

And thank you for watching.

We have so much more on what happened this week online, including a new school facilities bill.

Lots of details there.

You can find all of that at IdahoReports.org.

We'll see you next week.

Presentation of Idaho Reports on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the Friends of Idaho Public Television and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.