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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Eye On Boise

Rep. Trujillo pens child support op-ed that’s cut-and-pasted from Rep. Luker’s…

Well, here’s the weirdest one of all. Like a number of other lawmakers on the House Judiciary & Rules Committee, Rep. Janet Trujillo, R-Idaho Falls, sent a guest opinion on the child support enforcement mess to her local newspaper this week; it was published on Wednesday in the Post Register under the heading, “Due process and privacy;” you can read it here. In it, Trujillo wrote, “Holding the bill was about protecting the due process and privacy rights of our citizens, and protecting the integrity of our state’s ability to study and analyze issues independent of the coercive threats of the federal government.”

One problem: That sounds familiar. It’s actually, word-for-word, what Rep. Lynn Luker, R-Boise, wrote in his earlier guest opinion, which was distributed by Cindy Agidius under the auspices of the House Majority Caucus, though she later said it didn’t represent the views of the caucus, just Luker’s views. Trujillo, like Luker, was one of the nine committee members who voted to kill the child support enforcement bill on the final day of the legislative session.

In today’s Post Register, in the “Cheers and Jeers” column on the newspaper’s editorial page, the paper wrote that Trujillo “cut and pasted several paragraphs from a piece written by a colleague, Rep. Lynn Luker, R-Boise, and passed them off as her own. That’s plagiarism.”

“Trujillo doesn’t see it that way,” the paper added. “After being informed that her column bore a striking resemblance to Luker’s, Trujillo wrote in an email, ‘Not plagiarized when you have permission to use.’”

Wrote the newspaper, “Trujillo can’t explain in her own words why she was willing to risk millions of dollars that help feed and clothe hundreds of thousands of Idaho children. That’s not representation. It’s misrepresentation.” You can read editorial writer Corey Taule’s full “Cheers and Jeers” column here.



Betsy Z. Russell
Betsy Z. Russell joined The Spokesman-Review in 1991. She currently is a reporter in the Boise Bureau covering Idaho state government and politics, and other news from Idaho's state capital.

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