"We Dissent!"

[Major Hogwash]

38. The GOP wanted to outlaw any dissent that would take place here against fracking.

They would outlaw Democrats serving in the state legislature if they could get away with it.

I found out about that Republican-sponsored bill about a week after your story was in the New York Times. It seems that some of the Republicans that serve in our state's legislature can read, too.
After hearing about the bill, I asked my representative, who is a Democrat, what she thought was going on. She said that she thought that the former US Senator from Idaho, Larry Craig -- yeah, that Larry Craig -- had made some phone calls back to Idaho from his Washington office, where he has his energy policy advising company located.

Craig is from Payette, the county seat of Payette County, located on the Idaho/Oregon border in Western Idaho. The bill that the Republicans sponsored in the energy committee to prevent local communities from interfering with natural gas companies' desire to start fracking here was a companion bill that they wrote that allowed for a natural gas company to begin fracking in Payette County later this summer.

The Republican representative who sponsored the bill in the committee was the Republican representative from Payette County. The only problem was that the property that the natural gas company wanted to start their fracking project on was that representative's farm. Yet, he didn't reveal that pertinent information to the energy committee when he introduced his bill to that particular committee.

That started a short brouhaha over whether he had violated any ethics after his bill allowing for fracking was passed by the House in the state legislature. So, the Republicans agreed to have a bipartisan ad hoc committee, made up of 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats, look into the issue. The House Republicans fought off a call for a separate, independent, politically disinterested and unattached, ad hoc committee to be formed to look into those allegations. As was expected, the ad hoc committee made up of politicians concluded with the Republicans announcing that no ethics violation occurred as a result of that Republican representative not revealing to the committee that it was his own property that he wanted to allow the fracking to begin on this summer.

The most serious problem is that his farm in Payette is situated very close to the Snake River, so there is a real concern that chemicals used in the fracking process will leak or leach into the Snake River. So, lawsuits are expected to be filed later this spring by the Snake River Alliance, and other environmental groups, to get a federal judge to issue a restraining order to prevent the natural gas company from starting the fracking project to begin with, in order to examine if the law the state's legislature passed last month to allow fracking is even constitutional.

Since no environmental impact study was requested by the state to examine the possibilities of any adverse effects on the Snake River's water quality, the state may have violated the state's constitution to protect the residents of the state itself by not demanding an independent environmental study. Supposedly, as can be expected in similar fracking cases like this, the natural gas company that wants to start fracking here claimed that they have already conducted an extensive environmental study, and they found that no adverse effects will occur as a result of their own fracking project.

Another serious problem is that the Snake River flows through the border states of Oregon and Washington. So, a fracking project like the one proposed, may have adverse environmental impacts on those 2 other states as well, without them seeing a nickel's worth of profit for the state of Idaho allowing for fracking so near a federal waterway, such as the Snake River.

Although the natural gas company in question has assured Republican representatives that their fracking process is safe and environmentally sound, no independent environmental impact study was conducted by the state.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the same thing that the mining companies told the state when they started extracting silver and lead out of the ground in Northern Idaho over 50 years ago resulting in the 2nd largest Superfund Environmental Waste site in the entire country.

Supposedly, the Republicans in the state legislature said that Idaho state couldn't afford to pay for a state-ordered environmental impact study at this time. That's probably because they were too busy trying to pass a $36 million dollar tax cut to benefit corporations and the wealthy citizens that will file for tax returns with the state next year.