Reasons to vote no on Prop 1

PLUS: Labrador on Medicaid fraud, Risch on nuclear power and veterans benefits, AND a sneak preview!

DA ROSA: Prop 1 Is Wrong for Idaho

Idaho isn’t voting on a health policy footnote. It’s stepping onto a battlefield that’s been forming for more than thirty years. In 1991, the sociologist James Davison Hunter gave this fight its name — the culture war — and found that America’s real divide no longer runs between denominations but through a single question every faith and every family eventually has to answer: does moral truth come from somewhere fixed and outside us, or does it get rewritten every generation to fit the times? Abortion sits at the exact center of that question because it can’t be answered halfway. Either an unborn child carries a claim on us that no statute can dissolve, or that claim is negotiable, revisable, subject to a majority vote in a legislature or at a ballot box. Prop 1 doesn’t just pick a side in that argument. It writes one side’s answer into Idaho law and forecloses the other.

This is why the fight over Prop 1 will feel outsized to the actual policy language, and why it should. Angelo Codevilla saw this pattern before — he compared the modern American reckoning over abortion to the reckoning over slavery in the 1850s, when the country discovered that some questions can’t be split down the middle because both sides recognize, correctly, that the resolution defines what kind of country this becomes.

Press releases

• Attorney General Labrador urges Congress to pass the STOP FRAUD Act

• Sen. Risch introduces legislation to support America’s nuclear industry

• Sen. Risch introduces bill to improve veteran access to disability benefits

Video of the day

Nick Freitas examines an ideology he calls “third-worldism,” an unholy alliance of Marxism and racial and religious grievances that has become the animating force in the Democratic Party:

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