Of yesterday’s 8-1 vote in favor of his state health insurance exchange bill, Gov. Butch Otter said this morning, “I was grateful yesterday to see the vote come out of the Senate committee.” He noted that every Republican on the panel voted in favor of the bill. “I can’t tell you how difficult of a position I’m in,” Otter said. “I wanted nothing to do with Obamacare. I was proud of the fact, and bragged about it … the fact that Idaho was the first to sue, to pass legislation to initiate a suit against Obamacare. … We exhausted all of those remedies from court.”

Otter said that early on, “I made a promise that unlike a lot of other states, I would not use … an executive order to do that. The Legislature would, and they wanted to be, part of the process.”