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Editorial: Concerns of a fringe few putting Idaho child support at risk

Sun., May 3, 2015

An alarmist former Muslim walks into an Idaho luncheon and puts $205 million in annual child support payments and $46 million in federal aid at risk. In response, Gov. Butch Otter calls a special session for May 18 to end this joke.

“It’s the deadbeat parent that we’re after here, and it’s our responsibility to hold them responsible,” Otter declared.

It’s the phantom menace of international mandates that nine easily spooked legislators were after. But there are hopeful signs that some of them have been talked off the ledge.

This is only the eighth special session in state history, but none of the others had such a bizarre catalyst. In the final day of the regular session, Reps. Thomas Dayley, Lynn Luker, Shannon McMillan, Kathleen Sims, Janet Trujillo, Don Cheatham, Ryan Kerby, Ronald Nate and Heather Scott voted against changes needed to align the state with federal rules on how to handle child support disputes that spill over into other countries.

An international treaty allows enforcement of child support laws when deadbeat parents flee their home nations. But the nine lawmakers were worried the treaty would somehow allow foreign countries to dictate matters in Idaho. That’s simply not true, and legal experts told them so. Nonetheless, on a 9-8 vote, the bill failed to make it out of committee after it had sailed through the Senate on a unanimous vote.

All 50 states need to adopt the changes to ratify the treaty, but Idaho is the only one where this has been controversial.

Before the fateful vote, Rep. Vito Barbieri, who isn’t on the relevant committee, invited Shahram Hadian to speak at a Statehouse luncheon. Hadian, a Chattaroy pastor and former Muslim, told the assembled lawmakers about Islam’s “culture of death” and its desire to set up enclaves in Idaho from which they would apparently perform nefarious deeds.

Afterward, he was asked to assess the child support bill, and he subsequently laid out the case that it would “open the door to the application of foreign law in the state of Idaho.” The attorney general’s office and the state Department of Health and Welfare patiently rebutted all of the fears, but to no avail.

Otter says a new version of the bill he’s working on with legislators should be finished and posted online before he leaves for a trade mission to Peru and Mexico. Four of the holdouts have said they are optimistic that changes will satisfy their concerns.

Meanwhile, the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee adopted a resolution Tuesday night that opposes child support legislation. If these North Idaho Republicans were to get their way, the state would lose the federal administrative and computer resources essential to managing $205 million in child support and $46 million in other federal aid, including $30 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants.

For the sake of Idaho’s children, they must be ignored.