BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Idaho Republican Party will consider 31 resolutions at its three-day convention beginning Thursday, including one already adopted by Texas Republicans that President Joe Biden is not the legitimate leader of the country.
The resolution from Idaho in the deeply conservative state that Donald Trump won with 64% of the vote in 2020 is nearly identical to the resolution from Texas that passed last month, stating: “We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election ; and we hold that Acting President Joseph Robinette Biden was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”
Both the Idaho and Texas resolutions contend that the secretaries of state circumvented their state legislatures, even though both states have Republican secretaries of state.
Former Idaho Chief Justice and former Republican state attorney general Jim Jones called the resolution rejecting the 2020 presidential election results “nonsense,” noting that multiple courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, rejected attempts to overturn the decision. choice.
“(The Idaho Republican Party) has gotten so caught up in conspiracy theories, pointless culture war issues, that they have ceased to function as a meaningful political party,” he said. “We have to get away from this authoritarian streak that has infected the Idaho Republican Party, as well as a good part of the nation, because it is absolutely tearing our country apart.”
The Idaho resolution goes further than the Texas resolution in that it falsely claims that audits found the vote count for the 2020 election to be fraudulent in Wisconsin and Arizona.
In Wisconsin, claims of voter fraud have either been dismissed by the courts or rejected by the state’s bipartisan election commission.
In Arizona, where Republicans submitted a fake voter list, Trump supporters hired inexperienced consultants to conduct a discredited “forensic audit.” FBI agents investigating events surrounding Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss recently subpoenaed the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, who orchestrated a discredited review of the election.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump ally, even accused Idaho of enabling voter fraud. But the Idaho secretary of state said a partial recount of the ballots validated the accuracy of the 2020 results.
Among the other resolutions proposed by the Idaho GOP this week is one calling for not recognizing “imagined identities,” a resolution targeting transgender people.
Multiple resolutions involve voting, several of which focus on people who are not considered Republican enough to vote in the Republican primary.
One resolution, titled “Resolution to Protect Rural Representation,” calls for changing Idaho’s state election system to a national-style electoral college, a process that sometimes leads to candidates winning without receiving a majority of the vote.
Trump, for example, in 2016 defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by winning more votes in the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by some 3 million votes. The system proposed for Idaho would count electoral votes from counties. Such a change in Idaho would require changing the state constitution.
Among the other resolutions proposed by the Idaho GOP this week is one calling for not recognizing “imagined identities,” a resolution targeting transgender people.
Another proposed resolution calls for the privatization of Idaho Public Television, a longtime goal of far-right Republicans.
The Idaho Republican Party will also elect officers during the meeting. First-term incumbent President Tom Luna, who served two terms as state schools chief, is being challenged by Republican Rep. Dorothy Moon. Moon ran unsuccessfully in the Republican primary in May for secretary of state, claiming the 2020 presidential election was rigged and Biden was not president.
Idaho’s top Republicans, who would be considered far-right in many states, have dominated the state for three decades. But they have become targets of far-right members of their own party and labeled RINOs, Republicans in name only.
The May primaries were mixed for the two groups, and the power struggle is likely to continue at the convention.
In the primary, first-term incumbent governor Brad Little trounced Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, and most other statewide races went to Idaho Republicans. But Raul Labrador, a Tea Party favorite during his eight years in the US House of Representatives, defeated five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, well known for a strategy of simply calling balls and strikes that often he annoyed his Republican colleagues when he gave them advice they didn’t want to hear.
Several far-right lawmakers in the House lost their seats, but the Senate became decidedly more conservative with major losses including the co-chairman of the legislature’s powerful budget-making committee.
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This story has been updated to correct that the convention starts on Thursday, not Wednesday.