Idaho

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

Bryan Kohberger, the man accused of stabbing four Idaho college students to death, could face a firing squad if convicted.  At his arraignment Monday, Kohberger “stood silent” when asked to enter a plea, leaving the judge to formally enter a not guilty plea on the suspect’s behalf. A trial is scheduled for October 2.  The prosecution has sixty days to notify the court if they want to pursue the death penalty — and because of a new Idaho law that goes into effect on July 1, the state could administer the death penalty by firing squad if lethal injection drugs are not available.  Idaho governor Brad Little signed the law on March 24 after it passed both chambers of the Idaho Legislature.

For many conservatives in liberal states, 2020 was the year they finally upped sticks. Stringent lockdowns, Democratic commitments to defund the police and a bad-blooded presidential election combined to make a compelling case for relocation. Californians have fled to Texas; Florida has become a year-round home, and not just a seasonal destination, for a flock of north-eastern exiles. In Oregon, conservatives are taking things a step further. Rather than moving themselves to a red state, they want to bring a red state to them by redrawing the borders of neighboring Idaho.

A nonbinding, off-season ballot initiative in rural Oregon isn’t normally the most viscerally exciting of events, couched as they generally are in terms agonizing over whether to ‘note’ or ‘reaffirm’ a past proposal, or to ‘endorse’ or ‘refer’ a more recent one for further consideration. But just the other day, out of the tepid depths of yet more interminable debate on local timber-harvest regulations, or supplemental sport-fishing laws, something of genuine significance happened. The voters of five Oregon counties let it be known that they would like to secede from their state and join Idaho instead. ‘This election proves that rural Oregon wants out of Oregon,’ Mike McCarter, spokesman for the Greater Idaho movement, said in a statement.