thoughts for 2025, by State Senator Phil Hart

January 25, 2025

ARTICLE II DISTRIBUTION OF POWERS

Section 1.  Departments of government. The powers of the government of this state are divided into three distinct departments, the legislative, executive and judicial; and no person or collection of persons charged with the exercise of powers properly belonging to one of these departments shall exercise any powers properly belonging to either of the others….  Idaho Const. art. II (1890)

The Legislature of Idaho is not an equal branch of state government; it is the weakest of the three.  The framers of the 1787 United States Constitution intended the legislative branch to be the strongest.   We see this in Federalist Paper No. 51:

“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”  Hamilton or Madison, The Federalist No. 51, (1788).

The legislative branch is the People’s branch of government.  According to Federalist No. 51, government’s power is the “power surrendered by the people.”  And we know from the Declaration of Independence that government gets its power from the consent of the governed.  The sovereignty of our nation, and our state, resides in We the People.  It would make sense that since the sovereignty of government resides in the People, that the Peoples’ branch of government should be the strongest.

The sovereignty we are talking about is actually given to us by God.  What God has given, only God can take away.  However, in Idaho, the Administrative State dominates state government.

“For the Lord is our judge, The Lord is our lawgiver, The Lord is our king; He will save us.” Isaiah 33:22.

Many believe Isaiah 33:22 was the inspiration for our form of government conceived by our founding fathers with power divided into legislative, executive and judicial branches.  Using the terminology of Isaiah 33:22, the role of the king is to implement the law, and the role of the judge is to hold everyone accountable to the law.  The role of the lawgiver is to make the law.   This makes the law-giving branch of government the dominant of the three.  In our system, the law-giving branch is the Peoples’ Branch of government.

The Idaho Constitution, ratified in 1890, is patterned after the United States Constitution.  It intended for the legislative branch, as representatives of the people, to be the dominate branch.  Back in 1890, the issues legislators needed to deal with were simpler and fewer.  In 1890, the ‘common schools’ that the legislature is constitutionally mandated to provide for included only first grade through eighth grade and school was in session only three months in a year.  Now it includes kindergarten through twelfth grade, junior colleges, four-year colleges, a nine-month school year, and we now argue if pre-kindergarten should also be included.

In 1890, when Idaho was founded, the legislature was considered part-time and met only every other year.  The population of Idaho at that time was 88,548.  Issues that Idaho’s Legislature must deal with include things that no one would have imagined decades ago like girls that want to be boys, boys that want to compete in girls’ sports, foreign drug cartels operating in our state, growth issues for a population that is expected to double in 25 years, and so on.  Being a legislator in Idaho is now a full-time endeavor.

Legislator pay raise

In 2024, Idaho legislators earned $19,913 per year.  There are insurance and retirement benefits that go along with the job similar to what any other large employer would provide for its employees.  (Idaho legislators are classified as state employees.)  There is also a per diem that out-of-town legislators get for living expenses during the legislative session in Boise.  However, there are no paid holidays nor paid vacation.  During the legislative session, we work through all the holidays; every week is a 5 day work week.

The way Idaho legislators cope with a full-time job with only part-time pay is to work on the immediate issues and rarely get to the less urgent.  The bills one must pay to keep a roof over their head dictate that time must be spent on the legislator’s other day job.  Though a bright line between what gets done, and what doesn’t get done doesn’t exist, history has shown that many issues get ignored.

A large proportion (75 percent) of the Arizona and Colorado respondents said they spend at least 70 percent of a full-time job on legislative work, and over two-thirds of Missouri and Oklahoma legislators made the same claim.  None of these legislatures is considered full-time by the standard measures, supporting our argument that there is more time devoted to the job [as legislator than] by mere session length.  Kurtz, Moncrief, Niemi, Powell, Full-Time, Part-Time, and Real Time: Explaining State Legislators’ Perceptions of Time on the Job, 322, 326, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2006).

In the same study quoted above, the authors received 2,982 completed questionnaires from state legislators, including 46 from Idaho.  Across the 50 states, legislators reported that they spent 67% of a full-time job equivalent on their legislator activities, with Idaho legislators reporting their efforts constituted 59% of a full-time job.[2]  Ibid. at 327.

The Idaho Constitution requires that the Governor give a State of the State address to the Legislature each year.  It has become customary for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to also give an annual State of the Judiciary speech to the Legislature.  But when was there ever a “State of the Legislature” speech given?  Never, that I know of.

In accounting, you often get better results when you monitor something.  An item not monitored tends to be an item ignored. Today the “State of the Legislature” is rarely looked at in totality.  This is reflected by the relative strength of the Idaho’s Legislature compared to the other two branches.

As a percentage of the state budget, the legislative branch gets 0.15% or 1/662^nd of the pie: $21,000,000 for the Legislature compared to $13,887,600,000 for all of state government.

In the entire history of Idaho, there has never been a judge impeached, yet the Legislature has the power to do so.  Nor has there ever been a constitutional officer impeached in Idaho history.  Yet the Legislature has the power to impeach.  This is not because all judges and all constitutional officers are above reproach.  An Idaho legislator is not equipped to take on such a huge task with such a puny salary and no administrative support staff to help in that effort.  The impeachment power lies dormant because of a lack of resources.

When a bill gets signed into law that is unconstitutional, unless it is challenged by the citizenry in court, it gets ignored.  In the last 20 years, the Health and Welfare budget has grown from $1.622 billion to $5.455 billion for a compounded growth rate of 6.3% , but there is not enough legislative oversight to try and get it under control.  Legislators are bogged down with immediate demands and are unable to address the longer-term issues.

The mission of the Idaho Legislature is to preserve the checks and balances of state government by the independent exercise of legislative powers, to adopt a system of laws that promote the health, education, and well-being of Idaho’s citizens, to preserve the state’s environment and to ensure the wise [and] productive use of the state’s natural resources, to carry out oversight responsibilities to enhance government accountability, and to raise revenues and appropriate monies that support necessary government services, all in a manner so as to inspire public trust and confidence in elected government and the rule of law.  Legislative Council, Strategic Plan, Legislative Services Office, November 10, 2005.

This mission statement above is excellent, but its implementation is not up to par.  The disconnect occurs because there are not enough resources allocated to the legislative branch to carry out the mission.  That the Administrative State dominates should not surprise anyone.

The position of legislator takes over 60% of my time and pays $19,913 (2024) per year.  Given that I have bills to pay and must work in another profession creates a pile of unfinished business.  Most Idahoans think their legislators get paid well over $100k a year and have an office staff of 2, 3 or 4 employees.

With no administrative staff for individual legislators,³Idaho Legislators exist in a state of perpetual embarrassment as we are unable to do the things that our constituents rightfully expect us to do.  Constituents feel forgotten when our non-existent staff fails to reach out to them with either questions or solutions to their issues.  This situation doesn’t serve anyone well.

Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation

Last October, there was a proposal presented to the Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation to increase legislative pay to $37k a year while taking away part of the legislative session’s per diem.  The proposal was a non-partisan package put together by House and Senate leadership.

However, this leadership proposal got a lot of push-back, mostly from public policy lobbyists who see it as a fundraising opportunity.  Ultimately the Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation voted to give a $5,087 annual increase raising a legislator’s annual $19,913 salary to $25,000 a year.

The Citizens Committee for Legislative Compensation’s authority is found in the Idaho Constitution at Article III, Section 23. The people of Idaho authorized this authority to be added to our Constitution by approving it in the General Election of November 2, 1976.

The six-member committee is made up of 3 members appointed by the Supreme Court and 3 members appointed by the Governor.  A review of the resumes of the current members reveals an impressive group with lots of real-world experience.   The mechanism for a legislative pay raise is 100% within the domain of the Citizens Committee, who puts a pay raise in place by notifying the Idaho Controller of what the new salary is beginning on the first day of the new term, which occurs in December of even numbered years.  The Controller then issues paychecks to legislators, as they do for all those who work for state government.  The Citizen Committee’s report has the force and effect of law, as it doesn’t need anyone’s approval to be implemented.

Legislators don’t vote themselves a raise.  However, by concurrent resolution, legislators may vote to give themselves a pay cut, but only if done so by the 25^th legislative day of the new term.  Legislator pay raises have been handled this way in Idaho since 1976.  The next opportunity to adjust legislator’s salaries will come in November 2026.

‘“It’s all relative, of course,” Moncrief³said. “Legislators in low-population states where the legislature only meets a couple of months [a year] do not need to be paid six figures.  But virtually all political scientists who’ve looked at this issue would agree, I think, that most legislators are underpaid for the work they do.”  His co-author, Squire, suggested that at a minimum, legislative pay be pegged to the state’s median household income.

Malhotra said Americans’ suspicion of political institutions puts lawmakers in a bind.  “It’s really irrational,” he said.  “We don’t want to equip politicians with the resources to do their jobs, and then we blame them when things don’t work out the way we want.”’  Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, How Much Should State Legislators Get Paid?, FiveThirtyEight, (Apr. 7, 2016).

Some critics think legislators shouldn’t get a pay raise unless there is a LGBTQ club in every high school and “no questions asked” taxpayer funded abortion on demand for everyone.  Another group says legislators shouldn’t get a pay raise until state spending is deeply cut and the sales tax on groceries is eliminated.  Idahoans wisely created the non-partisan Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation to insulate the process from such political manipulation.  Those dis-satisfied with the current process may want to run a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation.

This Citizens Committee has been criticized for “pulling the $25,000 annual salary figure out of the sky.”  Those who keep repeating this haven’t done their homework.  The $25,000 per year figure was presented as 40% of the median individual Idaho state employee’s income by one of the Citizens Committee members at the 36 minute mark during their November 6^th committee meeting.  The committee’s use of that number has a rational basis.

Whereas the leadership proposal was said to be 40% of the average Idaho household income.  Both proposals were attempting to provide a political justification which would peg a legislator’s salary to the people of Idaho.

A free market approach

There has been intense criticism of legislators who support a pay raise because “they knew a legislator’s pay was low when they ran for office.” Well, those same candidates also knew there was a Citizens Committee on Legislative Compensation in place to evaluate legislator’s salaries every two years.  Those who support the pay raise also support the process put in place by the people of Idaho in 1976.

However, I would hope that in the aggregate, Idahoans would want highly qualified people serving them in the Legislature and would be willing to pay a salary appropriate to attract such candidates.  This would be a free market approach.

A free-market approach to setting legislators’ pay would first delineate the requirement of the job, then assign to those requirements the qualifications necessary to perform the job, and finally look to the employment world to see what the pay rate is for that combination.

Idaho has 105 legislators who are responsible for setting a $14 billion dollar budget.  That makes each legislator, on the average, a project manager a $133.3 million project.  Legislators are a type of ‘Board of Directors’ for the state who establish policy, set the budget and to provide oversight for the entire state government, including its approximately 30,000 employees.  This is a lofty assignment and needs above average people to do an effective job.  What annual salary does the job market assign to this position?

If we looked at the issue the way a real estate appraiser values real properties, we could compare the current salaries of former legislators after they have moved on to other employment as compared to what legislators are paid today.

A former Representative from North Idaho recently resigned from the Legislature to take a job with Health and Welfare for $110,000 a year.  Another former North Idaho Representative now makes $122,742 with the Idaho Public Utilities Commission.  A former Senator is currently earning $162,240 a year as a director of an Idaho department.  Another former House member now earns $111,376 working for an Idaho functional board.  These salaries must be competitive in the free market, otherwise those former legislators mentioned above would work elsewhere.

The politics of fundraising

For some reason, giving Idaho legislators a $5,087 annual pay raise is a hill some are willing to “die on.”   The entire pay raise package for 105 legislators will increase the state budget by 1/25,000^th as a fraction of the entire budget.  It represents an 8% per year increase if compounded over the last four years while the country has been suffering under Bidenomics.  According to the Chapwood Index, a realistic measure of inflation, the Biden Administration has given us a 10% inflation rate on the cost of living since 2020.  (See chapwoodindex.com)

Among a few conservative political action groups, the pushback against this pay raise has been brutal.  With 1/25,000^th of the state budget at stake, what would you expect?  (The total amount in controversy for all 105 legislators is $534,000 on a budget of $14,000,000,000.)

These conservative groups call their methods “confrontational politics” where emotional arguments are made that anger the public.  But only partial facts are presented, and mitigating facts that would fully inform the public are withheld.  This deception is a form of lying.  All the while, legislators are intimidated with a narrative of ‘we’ll break your legs politically if you disagree with us’.  This is not an honorable process; it is mafia-style tactics.  (However, it must be an effective method of fundraising.)

None of the conservative groups who oppose a legislator pay raise have a plan to diminish the dominance of the Administrative State.  These conservative groups either favor a strong Administrative State and a weak legislative branch, or they are controlled opposition, or they are intellectually challenged and can only comprehend first order consequences.

Have Idaho legislators earned a pay raise?

Governor Little, in his 2025 State of the State address, said that He and the Legislature, have given $4.6 billion in tax relief in the last six years, which works out to about $800 per tax payer per year.  In 2009 I ran HB218, a bill that exempted new houses and duplexes in Idaho from installing building code required indoor fire sprinkler systems saving Idahoans tens of millions of dollars, and that was just me.  In 2007 I authored House Bill 82, a bill to eliminate the sales tax on food.  Since then, there have been other bill introduced to eliminate the sales tax on groceries.  Many Idaho legislators are constantly working to save Idahoans money.  We could go on for pages.

I support the current pay raise proposal, as it is the best we are going to see this term.  But in terms of strengthening our legislative branch of government, it has little impact.  The Administrative State will still dominate.

Other States

One critic claimed that the proposed pay raise to $25,000 per year would cause Idaho legislators to be the highest paid part-time legislators in the country.  This baseless claim has unfortunately been parroted several times.

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) does an excellent job collecting data on state legislatures.  However, its analysis of that data is not so good.  Legislatures should be divided into only 2 categories, full-time and part-time. (NCSL divides them into full-time, hybrid and part-time.)

A full-time legislature is a legislature that is in session year-round.  There are ten of them.  All other legislatures are part-time.

All of Idaho’s neighboring states have part-time legislatures

All of Idaho’s neighboring states have part-time legislatures.  These six states have constitutional limits on the length of their legislative sessions.  Yet, the complexity of the issues, and the sheer number of them make the legislator’s job full-time if he/she lives up to the expectations of the constituents.

The states that provide administrative staff assigned to individual legislators year-round free up the legislator to maintain their “citizen-legislator” status.  Legislators from states (like Idaho) with no individual support staff find themselves in a full-time job with a part-time salary.

The way we can carve out the work assignments such that the legislator can be a so-called part-time “citizen legislator” is to support that person with administrative help.  Eighty percent of states do just that.

To oppose this pay raise, in my opinion, shows a blindness to the greater problem, which is the dominance of the Administrative State.  How do legislators push back against a dominate Administrative State with so little fuel in the fuel tank; with no ammo in the ammo box; and with worn out troops who scramble everyday to do a full-time job on part-time pay?  Idaho legislators need more resources to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.  This pay-raise is needed.  And if you doubled the raise, or tripled it, we would still have a dominant Administrative State.  More work is needed before Idaho’s government becomes what the founding fathers intended it to be.

© 2025 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

Footnotes:

¹  Phil Hart is from North Idaho and served in the Idaho House of Representatives from 2004 until 2012.  In 2022, Phil was elected to the Idaho Senate, where he serves today.  Phil is a graduate of the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and of the University of Pennsylvania where he earned an MBA at The Wharton School of Business.

²  The survey took place in 2002.  All 7,382 state legislators in the USA were sent the questionnaire.  2,982 legislators responded including 46 from Idaho.  I (Phil Hart) served in the Idaho House of Representatives from 2004 to 2012.  I can attest that being an Idaho legislator in 2025 is much more time consuming than it was in 2004.

³  Idaho is one of ten states where individual legislators have no year-round support staff.

⁴  Professor Gary Moncrief is a retired professor of Political Science from Boise State University.  Professor Moncrief is a national expert nn state politics and state legislatures.  Dr. Moncrief has written 6 books and published 55 articles regarding state legislatures.

by Idaho State Senator Phil Hart

February 20, 2024

In our 2024 legislative session at the Statehouse in Boise, the bill that I have worked on the hardest is not a bill that I am promoting, it’s a bill that I am trying to amend.  Without at least three amendments, this bill is a train wreck.  I am talking about House Bill 406 (HB406), legislation that will create mandatory minimum prison sentences for trafficking in fentanyl.  One of the main concerns is that language of the bill is written so broadly that this bill will likely increase Idaho’s prison population so much that we will need to build a new prison.  The financial impact of HB406 is in the multiple of hundreds of millions of dollars.

My first objection to the bill is that it defines trafficking in such a way that moderate users of fentanyl are going to be classified as traffickers just because they had a three day to a five day supply of their drugs on hand.  These people will be sent to prison for three to ten years just for using the drug while having done nothing to traffic any drugs; although the charge will be “trafficking”.   Without HB406’s mandatory minimum sentences, a first offender would most likely go to drug court for a cost to the tax payers of $13,000 a year.  Instead, with the passage of HB406, Idaho tax payers will be paying $90,000 to $300,000 to warehouse these people.

The flood of fentanyl coming across our southern border is being done on an industrial scale, and it is going to take a military operation to end it.  This bill is being promoted as a way to go after the Mexico drug cartels, but HB406 won’t even create a speed bump for the real drug kingpins.

(Pictured here is Cochise County Arizona Sheriff Mark Dannels, center, with Senator Phil Hart, right, and Johnothan Alexander on the left of Live Border News, November 27, 2023, Sierra Vista Arizona.  Cochise County and Santa Cruz County to its west see 25% of the fentanyl coming across it’s border with Mexico.)

A mandatory minimum statute ties the judge’s hands and forces him to sentence a defendant to a term in prison that the legislature determined the length of.  Never mind that the judge is close to the case and can make a determination as to what is best for the defendant and best for public’s safety.  Mandatory minimums were first used in New York beginning in 1973.  Michigan implemented them in 1976 and Florida in 1979.  These three states, having seen their prison populations explode upward and their costs go through the roof, have abandoned their earlier policies of mandatory minimums for a mix of rehabilitation programs for some, and prison sentences for others.  They also learned that the “traffickers” they imprisoned were generally the low-level mules who transported drugs to get a cut of them for free to support their drug habit.  The kingpin traffickers would not get caught.  These three states came to the conclusion that warehousing non-violent offenders for years was a poor use of tax payer’s money.  Reforms followed.

“In New York, the “buyer’s remorse” was almost immediate.  One of Governor Rockfeller’s closest aids, Joe Persico, helped push the bill through the legislature.  Looking back, Persico said, “I concluded very early that this was a failure.  It’s filling up the prisons with first time offenders.  This was obviously unjust – and not just unjust, it was unwise; it was ineffective.”[1]

Another aspect of HB406 that qualifies it as a train wreck is the language that provides that any mixture of any materials will be deemed to be pure fentanyl if it contains just a trace of the illegal drug.  For example, today getting caught with one fentanyl pill will send you to drug court for 6 months, but drop that pill into a quart of water and now you have a combined substance of one gram of fentanyl plus 899 grams of water.  However, the statute will say it is 900 grams of fentanyl and you are going to prison for 10 years as a trafficker.

Sen. Hart in Douglas Arizona (Cochise County) at the Mexico border November 26, 2023

Two weekends ago, I met with 22 recovering drug and alcohol users.  One of them told of how he was prosecuted by the federal government for fentanyl possession.  The Fed’s sent his fentanyl pills to a lab where they determined that 10% of his pills were fentanyl, and the other 90% was filler.  He got prosecuted for possessing a quantity of fentanyl that represented 10% of the weight of his pills.  If the federal government can determine an exact amount of the drug, why can’t the state of Idaho?  It is not because dummies live in Idaho.  Idaho leads the nation in the number of patents issued per capita.[2]  In Idaho, we can do better.

Lastly, section 3 of the bill creates a new crime called “Drug Induced Homicide”.  The crime occurs when someone dies of an overdose and another person was sharing that drug with them.  The surviving party will be charged with this low-level form of murder.  There doesn’t even need to be any intent to kill.  If you were there, and you both partook of the same drug, you can be found guilty of this statutorily defined murder.  I am told that the lack of “intent to kill” is a constitutional defect in the bill.  The experts that I am listening to believe this will be challenged in court.  Most likely the challenger will be someone who is charged with this “drug induced homicide” and will use a public defender as their lawyer.  On the other side of the case will be the state of Idaho defending its statutes.  For this case, tax payers will be paying for both sides of the case.  Oh, what a poor use of tax payers’ money!  It would be better to amend the bill and use language that is not guaranteed to end up in court.

I believe this new law, with its expanded definition of what constitutes trafficking, will add hundreds of additional inmates to Idaho’s prisons.  Because our prisons are already full and we are storing prisoners in other states, it will also add to the cost of transporting our inmates around the country.  House Bill 406 will add $100,000,000’s to Idaho’s budget, and we will have to build at least one new prison paid for with higher taxes.

© 2024 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

Footnotes:

[1] Greg Newburn and Sal Nuzzo, Mandatory Minimums, Crime and Drug Abuse, James Madison Institute, page 2.

[2] United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patents Per 100k Residents by State, 2005-2010, June 8, 2011.

by ID State Senator, Phil Hart

May 26, 2023

“Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.”  —Mark 9:42

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Arizona/Mexico border at Seabee Arizona.  I had been there before, in 2008 and 2013.  The purpose of my visit was to see firsthand the circumstances surrounding the wave of illegal immigration flowing north across our southern border.  I agree that today it is a wave and that it is out of control.  As I write this, Title 42 is expiring, and predictions are that it will get worse.

The situation has gotten significantly worse since I was last at the border in 2013.  Before, illegals would sneak across the border and hike across the Arizona desert in the darkness until they were 30, 40 or 50 miles north of the border.  At their pickup points, they would shed their desert crossing clothes, put on a change of clean clothes and try to fit in as if they had always been living in the pick-up point community all along.  Or they would get picked up in their clean clothes and taken to places further north.

Now there is no sneaking across miles of Arizona desert.  Instead, the illegals (women and children) just cross the border and once they are inches north of the wall, essentially, they have a Disneyland E ticket to the USA.  Our Border Patrol picks them up, takes them to a sorting facility, and sends them on their way to parts further north into the USA with a plane ticket or bus ticket paid for by U.S. Taxpayers.

Where I was on the border, Trump’s wall was obviously newly constructed.  At the time of my 2013 visit, there was a shorter and more lightly constructed wall at this location, but the new Trump Wall is taller, stronger and more difficult to cross.  Oh, that is where the wall was continuous.  But there were also plenty of holes in the wall.  I saw 6-foot-wide holes where a section of wall was missing.  I also saw 75-foot-wide gaps in the wall at locations that get flash floods from desert monsoons.

There is no excuse for any of these gaps in the wall.  On my day job I work as a civil and structural engineer.  I could design a wall that would secure our border yet allow for monsoon sized flash flooding to pass through the wall while keeping illegal aliens out.

While on this remote 6-mile section of the border for two and a half days, I saw over 100 illegal aliens appear out of nowhere on the border, and shortly after being discovered, get processed by our U.S. Border Patrol.  The first group I witnessed illegally entering were 12 women and children in the late afternoon.  We found them hanging around just 5 feet north of the border wall.  No need now to travel 50 miles further to the north and act like you fit in.  All they must do is get north of the wall and they are in.

At this location on the wall, the terrain was hilly and there was a nicely built new gravel road running parallel to the wall.  The 12 illegal aliens were milling around looking bored.  When the Border Patrol van appeared over the hill immediately to the west traveling in our direction, these 12 illegal aliens straighten up and got in line as if they were waiting for a municipal bus!  They were obviously coached that the U.S. Border Patrol was their friend and ally.  In reality, U.S. Border Patrol is law enforcement, and these people were committing a crime of illegal entry into the USA.  It is an upside-down world at our southern border.

The last group I saw were 64 illegal aliens from Guatemala, all women and children.  These 64 women and children appeared out of nowhere just north of the 30-foot-tall structural steel border wall at our remote location.  They were all dressed the same, they acted the same, they all seemed to be from the same economic and social class, and they saw our U.S. Border Patrol as their Disneyland E ticket provider.   Just an hour earlier we had driven past this spot on the border, and no one was there.  Then suddenly, in the middle of the night, 64 women and children appear, and only one of them spoke English.

This is a coordinated operation taking place.  It is organized.  At the location of the border I visited, the on the ground organizers of this illegal alien invasion are the drug cartels.  I understand the aggregate amount of fees they get for transporting illegal aliens across the border is more than they get from drug trafficking.  Add to that the fees collected for sex trafficking and sex slavery, and we are talking tens of billions of dollars, all occurring under the nose of the United States Government!

At other border locations, non-government organizations (NGOs) are getting the illegal aliens across the border.  The NGO’s even have staging areas and are also making money off of the U.S. Taxpayers.  These people heading for the border are not politically persecuted, or religiously persecuted refugees that we offer asylum to.  They are economically motivated immigrants.  However, many of them are going to end up as sweatshop workers with part of their paychecks skimmed off by the cartels, or their social welfare payments are skimmed, and their outlook is to be forever stuck in an underprivileged class.

Worse yet, some of these border crossers will be trapped in sex slavery or will have their organs harvested.  One member of our team on the border has witnessed a surge of children crossing the border immediately ahead of satanic holidays.  Entering the United States with the aid of the cartels does not provide for a prosperous future for these people.  This is a humanitarian crisis.

Those we discovered just a few feet north of the border wall were all women and children.  I understand the males are hoofing it through the desert carrying drugs.  We located a few food and water drops many miles north of the border that are used to refresh and feed the males making their way through the Arizona desert.  These food and water drops consist of a 55-gallon barrel full of water and another 55-gallon barrel with food.  Those who replenish the food and water claim they are helping vulnerable women and children.  But these days, only the drug runners are hiking through the desert north of the border.  Corruption of local officials seems to placate this process.  Otherwise, the drug runners would be arrested.

Complaisant in this, and a facilitator of the entire process is the media.  Most people believe they are informed on local and national events if they watch the nightly news.  But the media is lying by the practice of omission.  Let’s say it how it is, the mainstream media is a co-conspirator aiding and abetting the invasion of the United States.

The responsibility to solve this problem ultimately rests with We the People.  It is from our personal sovereignty that we delegated to the county, state and federal government that gives these three levels of government the authority to do what they are supposed to do.  But if these government entities prove to be incompetent, or act in a way that is treasonous to We the People, we are justified in taking back that delegation of authority.

The ultimate judge of our actions is the One from which we got our rights.  That would be “Nature’s God” as Thomas Jefferson referred to Him in the Declaration of Independence.

© 2023 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

by Idaho State Senator, Phil Hart

March 15, 2023

After 50 years of prayer, protests and 60 million aborted babies, Roe v. Wade has finally been overturned.  The basis for its demise was that in an honest look at Roe, support for the Roe decision could not be identified.  It had no foundation.  The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), whose opinion was written by Justice Alito.  In that decision Alito wrote “As we have explained, procuring an abortion is not a fundamental constitutional right because such a right has no basis in the Constitution’s text or our Nation’s history.” Dobbs at 77.

There was no basis for Roe, and it took our Supreme Court fifty years to reverse itself.  But it actually did not fully reverse itself, what it determined was that abortion was not a federal issue.  Roe was overturned, but that did not eliminate the practice of abortion, nor make abortion illegal.  What it did was to make abortion an issue for the states.  “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion.  Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.  We now overrule those decisions and return that authority of the people and their elected Representatives.” Dobbs at 79.

Abortion is now a state issue.  The pro-life states will limit abortions to a narrow set of circumstances if not ban it altogether.  The pro-choice state will likely maintain the status quo that existed under Roe.  However, what might happen, is that the entire issue could get tied up in federal court slowing down, or frustrating, the implementation of the Dobbs Decision.

In order to prevent the thwarting of the of the Dobbs Decision by lawfare court filings, I am running a Joint Memorial in the Idaho Legislature which calls on Congress to help facilitate the implementation of Dobbs in the several States.  House Joint Memorial 2 is a resolution focusing on the logic and the conclusions of Justice Alito and the “Dobbs Decision.”  You can read the memorial here:

https://legislature.idaho.gov/sessioninfo/2023/legislation/HJM002/

In this case, because the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is a state issue, judicial controversies regarding abortion belong in state courts.  The Supreme Court also ruled that the original foundation upon which the “Roe v. Wade” decision was based could not be defended.  Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, and pro-life proponents had long argued that there was no defendable basis for the court’s decision.

Our Joint Memorial quotes multiple times from the Dobbs Opinion regarding the Court’s position that the abortion issue belongs in the states.  The Opinion goes so far as to say, “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to those (the states) legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.”  Dobbs page 65.

Prior to the Dobbs ruling, abortion was legal in all fifty states.  Now, a number of states, like Idaho, will end the practice of abortion.   However, there is a chance that lawfare lawsuits could slowdown the implementation of the Dobbs Decision.

The Supreme Court is the only court created by the Constitution.  All of the other federal courts were created by Congress.  What Congress creates, Congress can control.  It follows that Congress has the power to limit the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts.  At Article III clause 2 of the United States Constitution, we find the language “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

This Joint Memorial, if passed by both the House and the Senate of the Idaho Legislature, requests that Congress pass a law that limits the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts from hearing abortion cases concerning state legislative power to legislate on the abortion issue.  If the lower federal courts are prohibited from hearing these cases, such cases will end up in state court.  At the state level, judges are chosen by the people; unlike the federal level where judges are appointed for a term of “good behavior” which usually works out to be a life appointment.  In other words, the people of the states will have selected the judges who will hear abortion cases, exactly as Justice Alito reasoned in the Dobbs Decision.

Such an act of Congress will allow the people of each state to finally choose what laws they want in their state concerning abortion, and they will have chosen the judges who hear their abortion cases.

Our hope is by narrowing the spectrum of courts that can hear abortion cases, we will streamline the implementation of the Dobbs ruling resulting in more babies being born and fewer abortions taking place.

If you want to see the curtailment of abortion, please share Idaho’s House Joint Memorial 2 with your state legislator.  Encourage him or her to run the same memorial in your state.  If we can get more than a handful of states to promote restricting the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts from hearing abortion cases related to state legislative authority, Congress may actually do it.

© 2023 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

Idaho State Senator, Phil Hart

January 4, 2023

Early in 2022 a federal court in Oakland California ruled that Canadian Grey Wolves, imported from Canada by the federal government, needed more protection so that their numbers could increase.  Evidentially the lower 48 states need more wolves.  If the powers of the federal government are limited to those powers delegated by We the People to the government through the Constitution, where did the federal government get the power to introduce wolves into the several States?  And how do we figure out how many wolves are enough?  See Defenders of Wildlife vs. United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Case No. 21-cv-00344 JSW, Northern District of California.

However, for those of us who live in the “Central Rocky Mountain States” (Idaho and Montana), our state governments are in control of the wolf populations, not the federal government.  Back in 2011, management of the newly introduced Canadian Grey Wolves was perpetually tied up in court.  Wolf numbers were exploding in Idaho, where I was a member of the Legislature.  We had a wolf  emergency on our hands.

That year, 2011, I authored House Bill 343, which would have given our governor authority to declare a wolf emergency.  After HB 343 passed both the House and the Senate, but before the bill arrived at the governor’s office for his signature, Congress took the wolves off of the Endangered Species List, but only for the “Central Rocky Mountain States”.  Congress did this by attaching a paragraph to an appropriations bill with the wolf language included.  Once the wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List, management of the Idaho wolf population transferred from the federal government to our state government.  The same was true for Montana as Idaho and Montana were part of the same “wolf study.”  When management of our wolf population became our responsibility, we no longer needed to declare an emergency, we just needed to get to work managing wolves.

The goal of HB 343 was to use emergency powers to allow our state government to manage the wolves that the federal government introduced into our state.  Congress evidently did not want the show down that HB 343 was going to create.  Congress went even further and restricted the jurisdiction of the federal courts from hearing any cases challenging the this action by Congress.  See United States Constitution Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 “…with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Given what the federal court just did regarding wolf management, it is worth revisiting my article Federal Wolves – States Rights as a case study as to how states can asserts their rights and powers in dealing with the federal government.

The original article follows:

Today (April 16, 2011) there are many issues that confront our political institutions. We are living in interesting times. For state governments the big issues are balancing budgets and federal government encroachment. And for the state of Idaho, the face of federal government encroachment is that of a Canadian Gray Wolf.

Under the authority of the Endangered Species Act, in the mid-70’s Washington D.C. bureaucrats began to contemplate the introduction of wolves into parts of the so called lower 48 states. The reason that this was even a possibility was because the original settlers of the country, who had lived with wolves, decided to get rid of them. Such people will tell you that wolves are a menace, and dangerous on top of that.

Over the objections of the Idaho Legislature, the governor of Idaho, and Idaho’s congressional delegation, in 1995 the federal Fish and Wildlife Service introduced 35 Canadian Gray Wolves into central Idaho. A like number of wolves were introduced into Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, just across the Idaho border.

The plan was to protect this population of Gray Wolves such that their numbers would increase to 300 and at least 30 breeding pairs across the three state region of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. The Idaho Legislature, with a gun to its head, agreed to this scheme in a 2002 Wolf Management Plan it ratified; while at the same time passing a resolution stating that its real desire was to remove the wolves from Idaho all together. The DC bureaucrats were going to introduce the wolves no matter what the state of Idaho wanted; and the negotiated 2002 Wolf Management Plan reflected Idaho’s effort to at least have a say in the process.

Idaho is really not anti-wolf. We liked our Idaho Timberwolves. At the time of the federal wolf introduction, Idaho had about 80 Timberwolves, and they were increasing in number. The Idaho Timberwolf weighed about 85 pounds at maturity. It ran in packs of two. It survived off of small game. And they were very skittish around humans. At least two members of our House of Representatives saw these Timberwolves prior to the introduction of the Canadian Gray Wolf by the federal government. We could have managed the Idaho Timberwolf back to so-called recovery levels

The Canadian Gray Wolf was introduced as a “nonessential experimental” species as defined by the Endangered Species Act. The ESA only allows the introduction of an “experimental species” when the original native species is extinct. But the Idaho Timberwolf was not extinct; we had about 80 of them. These Timberwolves were documented by recognized experts. No problem for the federal government, they just solved that dilemma by lying. Consequently, the introduction of the Canadian Gray Wolf into Idaho was based on fraud.

It gets worse. Under the original agreement Idaho was to have 100 wolves with 10 breeding pairs (our share of the three state total of 300 wolves with 30 breeding pairs). That goal was achieved in about 2002. Today, nine years later the Canadian Gray Wolf is still listed as “endangered”. The wolf issue has been tied up in endless lawsuits promoted by the environmentalists. Demonizing the wolf opposition and litigating on the issue has proved to be a money making machine for these left of center folks. Each time the environmental advocacy groups file a pro-wolf lawsuit, they rake in the bucks and contribute to the mismanagement of the wolf introduction process.

Unlike the Idaho Timberwolf (which is now probably extinct having been either wiped out by or assimilated into the Canadian Gray Wolf population) the Canadian Gray Wolf weighs about 140 pounds at maturity. We have some close to 180 pounds running around the state at the moment. The Canadian Gray Wolf runs in packs of up to twenty wolves. For every one animal they kill to eat, these Canadian wolves kill about three more just for the fun of it. The biologists call it “sport-reflex killing” or “lustful killing”. The Canadian Gray Wolf is a killing machine.

For those who are willing to take an honest look at the wolf issue, the fact that wolves are a menace and are also dangerous to humans is undebatable. There is over five hundred years of recorded history of wolf – human conflicts in Europe and Asia. Worldwide, wolf attacks continue today and occasionally humans are killed. These facts are denied by the environmentalists.

But potential attacks by wolves on humans and their destruction of property in the form of livestock depredations, which harms the ranching and farming communities, is only a secondary problem. The most significant problem is a more latent one, yet more dangerous. It is that of communicable diseases carried by the wolves. Given what wolves do for a living, it is easy to understand that they could be carriers of disease. And these diseases can be contracted by humans, pets, livestock and other big game animals.

A recent study revealed that 63 percent of all wolves examined in Idaho were carriers of the hydatid disease caused by tapeworms. These tapeworms end up in the feces of wolves and can be spread to humans by direct contact with a wolf or by becoming airborne when the feces dries. The hydatid disease will develop cysts in humans, and when those cysts attack the organs it can be fatal. Once infected, it can take up to twenty years for the disease to develop.

Any Idahoan who hikes in the woods, has wolves frequent their property, or who hunts wolves and handles the carcass could get the disease. And this is just one disease of dozens that the wolves in Idaho carry. These diseases could also be spread to domestic dogs who then spread the disease to humans.

In 2002, the Idaho Legislature agreed to manage a population of one hundred wolves. We now have somewhere between 800 to 2,000 wolves. The wolf population is out of control. And experts predict unacceptable consequences to the people of Idaho and their livestock, pets and the big game resources of the state. As the Canadian Gray Wolf consumes itself out of its natural food sources, it will turn to those areas inhabited by people for something to eat. There are already areas of Idaho where the big game numbers are so diminished that the big game herds are now in what is called a “predator pit”, a condition where the number of animals left in a herd are not enough to sustain that herd given the depredation rate unless there is aggressive human management.

Today, wolves are increasingly visiting areas occupied by humans. They have been seen numerous times within the city limits of small towns. Wolf kills have been found as close as three miles from the Statehouse located in Boise. The experts say that wolves are becoming habituated to the rural and urban fringe areas of Idaho. When this occurs, the experts tell us to expect the worst.

Idaho has an emergency. And according to the Idaho Constitution, the first and foremost duty of the state government is found at article I, section 1, “All men… have certain inalienable rights, among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing and protecting property, pursuing happiness and securing safety.” Both the legislative and executive branches of state government are empowered to declare an emergency.

For some of those who live in rural Idaho today, all of those rights referred to in article I, section 1 of Idaho’s state Constitution is now at risk, or has already been completely taken away. Those who have wolves frequent their neighborhoods have lost the quiet enjoyment of their property and are physically at risk. Idaho has an emergency, and we need to reduce the number of wolves in Idaho.

“The promotion of safety of persons and property is unquestionably at the core of the State’s police power….” Kelley v. Johnson, 425 U.S. 238, 247 (1976).

When the states met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they met as individual sovereign states, each of whom possessed all the power of any sovereign government on planet Earth. In the process of drafting the Constitution, they delegated portions of their sovereignty to the federal government through the express language of the Constitution. And just to make it clear as to what the limits of that delegated power was, they included the Bill of Rights the Tenth Amendment of which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the state, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The police power of the sovereign has been retained by the states, and in no way has it been shared with the federal government. And when lives, peoples’ safety and the protection of property are at risk, our state government has a duty to exercise its police power and protect Idahoans and their property.

Historically, when both state and federal courts have had to rule on the state’s exercise of its police power and that state’s authority to declare an emergency, they have handled the issue with kid gloves. The United States Supreme Court said:

“We deal, in other words, with what traditionally has been known as the police power. An attempt to define its reach or trace its outer limits is fruitless, for each case must turn on its own facts. The definition is essentially the product of legislative determinations addressed to the purposes of government, purposes neither abstractly nor historically capable of complete definition.” Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26, 31 (1954).

How can you define an emergency? You can’t define it, and the courts know it. There are an infinite number of possibilities of what can constitute an emergency. This gives state governments wide latitude to address an emergency when they find themselves in such a condition.

Worldwide, there are several hundred thousand gray wolves. From a global perspective, the gray wolf is not threatened. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Canadian Gray Wolf has been categorized as “nonessential – experimental.” This is the lowest category in terms of importance that can be given to a species by the ESA. In any balancing analysis that might be made judicially, something that is “nonessential” is not going to trump the necessity to protect the life and safety of American Citizens.

This being the case, any declaration of an emergency by the Idaho state government would end up in state court if judicially challenged. It is the state courts that have subject matter jurisdiction over the exercise of a state’s police power, and the protection of persons and property. Federally, the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts is defined at 28 USC 1331 and 1332, and the exercise of a state’s police powers is not found there.

“An emergency declaration on the part of a state to protect the life, safety and property of its citizens is simply outside of the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts.” So said Dane vonBreichenruchardt, president of the U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation.

Mr. vonBreichenruchardt was the architect and legal mind behind the successful District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) gun rights case where the United States Supreme Court affirmed our individual right to keep and bear arms. He was also a significant contributor to House Bill 343, Idaho’s Wolf Emergency Declaration legislation passed overwhelmingly by the Idaho Legislature in the closing days of its 2011 session.

Anyone who might wish to challenge the exercise of Idaho’s police power used to protect Idahoans from the out of control number of Canadian Gray Wolves will have to exhaust their state administrative remedies before they go to court as required by section 3, paragraph 2 of HB343. In doing so, they will need to comply with Idaho’s Administrative Procedures Act and prove that (a) Canadian Gray Wolves are not a carrier of any disease that threatens humans, livestock or other big game animals, (b) there is no potential for human – wolf conflicts, nor (c) livestock – wolf conflicts, (d) the presence of Canadian Gray Wolves does not diminish property values (which would be a constitutional “taking” since these are governmentally introduced wolves) or (e) that the number of big game animals is not significantly impacted by the presence of the Canadian Gray Wolf.

These are federal wolves, as it was the federal government who introduced them into Idaho over our objections. They told the state of Idaho that the wolves would be considered recovered when we had a total of 100 wolves in Idaho. Now we have between 800 and 2,000 wolves and the situation is out of control.

Idaho’s wolf emergency is a state issue. And in this situation, the state of Idaho has both a duty and the authority to protect its people and their property. House Bill 343 lays out the facts, the argument and the authority to do so. And the governor can devise a process, outlined in an executive order, that is dignified and methodical in confronting this emergency. Now is the time for Idaho to exercise its sovereign power, expressly retained by states as evidenced by the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

© 2023 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

By Phil Hart,
Candidate for the Senate of the Idaho Legislature

May 3, 2022

After crossing the continental divide at Lemhi Pass, and then passing through the Weippe Prairie, the  Lewis and Clark expedition descended down a south facing slope to the North Fork of the Clearwater near present day Orofino.  On September 26, 1805 they arrived at what is now called “Canoe Camp” where the North Fork of the Clearwater River meets the main body of the Clearwater River.  There they spent the next 11 days carving 5 canoes out of large Ponderosa Pine logs.  All my friends are wondering, did Meriwether Lewis and William Clark need a permit from the state of Idaho before they cut down these 5 large Ponderosa Pine trees?  Let’s examine the law.

The first question to determine was whether the use of logs was a commercial use, or a personal use?  One would think that it would have been a commercial use, as Lewis and Clark were hired to make this expedition and the purported purpose of discovering a route of commerce between the mouth of the Missouri River and the Pacific Northwest.  However, any benefit from commerce would be decades away, and the unofficial purpose of the expedition was to claim the land for the USA.  So was it really commercial?  We will probably never be able to figure out whether the use of the log canoes was a commercial use, or a personal use.

However, if today, a few Idahoans wanted to re-enact the Lewis and Clark expedition, we can examine the law in light of their circumstances.  Most likely these Idahoans would reenact the Lewis and Clark Expedition strictly for fun, as they probably had better paying day jobs.

Our starting point is the Forest Practices Act found at Idaho Code Title 38, Chapter 13.  We find the purpose of the Act at paragraph (2) “To encourage uniform forest practices implementing the policy of this chapter, and to provide a mechanism for the harmonizing and.… implement and enforce the laws and rules relating to federal, state and private forest land…”

To harmonize means “agreement or accord; conformity, to make the same.” Black’s Law Dictionary, 8th edition.  Since Idaho’s Forest Practices Act was implemented in 1974, let’s see what the prior Federal law was that Idaho’s law was trying to “harmonize” with regarding the personal use of timber.

In the Federal law we see at Title 16, section 477 Use of Timber and Stone by Settlers “The Secretary of Agriculture may permit …. the use of timber and stone found upon national forests, free of charge, by bona fide settlers, miners, residents, and prospectors for minerals, for firewood, fencing, buildings, mining, prospecting, and other domestic purposes…”  This statute was enacted by Congress in 1897, and is still in effect today.

Going back to the Idaho Forest Practices Act we see at I.C. 38-1303 (1) “Forest Practice” means (a) the harvesting of forest tree species….

(2) “Forest land” means federal, state and private land growing forest tree species which are, or could be at maturity, capable of furnishing raw material used in the manufacture of lumber or other forest products.

(4)  “Harvesting” means a commercial activity related to the cutting or removal of forest tree species to be used as a forest product. A commercial activity does not include the cutting or removal of forest tree species by a person for his own personal use.

(5)  “Rules” means rules adopted by the board pursuant to section 38-1304.

The take away from these definitions is that the personal use of forest tree species is not a commercial use and is not “harvesting”, but at the same time it is recognized as an ongoing activity. Now let’s take a look at the rules, know as Idaho Administrative Procedures Act (IDAPA).

At IDAPA 20.02.01.010 DEFINITIONS, we have at (28) “Harvesting. A commercial activity related to the cutting or removal of forest tree species to be used as a forest product.  A commercial activity does not include the cutting and removal of forest tree species by a person for his own personal use.” (7-1-21)T

Going a few pages deeper into the regulations we find at IDAPA 20.02.01.07 “Types of Operation for which Notice will not be Required.  (b.) Non-commercial cutting and removal of forest tree species by a person for his own personal use.” (10-14-75) and at .06 “Notification Exception… (b.) Non-commercial cutting and removal of forest tree species by a person for his own personal use. (7-1-21)T

If you are not sure what that means, you can refer to Sutherland on Statutory Construction, the premiere authority on interpreting statutes and regulation.  Sutherland has a section called “The Plain Meaning Rule” which says when the meaning of a statute is plain, you go with the obvious meaning.  In other words, when the language says you can cut and remove trees for your own personal use without notice to the state, that is what it means.

“Where the language is plain and admits of no more than one meaning the duty of interpretation does not arise” §45:2 Sutherland Statutory Construction.

On my day job, I work as a structural engineer and have been doing that work for 45 years.  Since I started in the field, I have engineered over 700 log and timber framed structures, mostly homes.  I’ve also functioned as an architect on over 50 log and timber structures.  I am aware of at least 35 log homes that were built using free timber from state or federal lands.  In 1996 I did the same, and built a log home using timber from state land.  My local sheriff disagreed that the timber could be used for free and turned a report into the prosecutor’s office to pursue the issue.  A week later the prosecutor told my attorney “I think Hart is right, and I am not touching this case with a ten foot pole.”

Well, the bureaucrats must have thought “We can’t let him do that.” and demanded that I pay triple for logs because I didn’t “enter into a contract nor get a permit from them.”  My attorney responded “Show us a sample of the contract or permit and Mr. Hart will pay your demand.”  If we examined the regulations further, we would discover that there was no contract or permit that covered the non-commercial taking of forest tree species by a person for his own personal use.   Instead of producing such a contract or permit, the response was more bullying and I ended up losing a civil case in court.  When I reached out to the state’s attorney set up a payment plan to pay the judgment, the bullying stopped and all I heard was crickets.

So my conclusion is that neither Lewis and Clark, nor those who might re-enact their trek through Idaho today need get a permit nor enter into a contract with the state of Idaho if they want to cut down a large and marketable Ponderosa Pine on state land and crave it into a canoe for their own personal use.  But let me end with this caveat, in my 1996 case the prosecutor dropped his investigation because the law was on my side.  But by then the culture had changed and the arguments used in the civil case were not based on the black and white letter of the law, but were emotional in nature.  I lost that cultural war, and you might too.

© 2022 NWV – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

By Rep. Phil Hart

My observation is that the Corona Virus is real; after all, the back of a can of Lysol says the spray from such a can will kill it.  I think Covid-19, which is the 2019 edition of the Corona Virus, is real too; as I got sick from it.  The first two weeks of January, I was in Europe at a place with many Chinese visitors, most of whom were wearing masks.  One minute everything was normal for me.  The next minute mucus was pouring out of my eyes, a condition that went on for days.  Two weeks later I was very sick with flu like symptoms, but I recovered to write this article.

We are now into this Corona Virus “Pandemic” for over two thirds of a year.  What have we learned about Covid-19 so far?  We have learned that it is highly contagious, in that a lot of people “get it.”  But of those who “get it”, 65 percent of them are asymptomatic.  We have learned that there is no other virus like it, so that before its arrival, there was no “herd immunity” among the human population as no one had “seen” this virus before.

We also have a track record as to the mortality rate of the Covid-19 virus, which can be compared to other historical pandemic events.  The Black Plague, which originated in central Asia 1346, and came to Europe by way of the trade routes to the Black Sea, then to the Black Sea’s Crimea Peninsula, and next to Constantinople 1347, where the Black Sea joins the Mediterranean Sea.  The Black Plague killed sixty percent of Europe’s population.

In 1918, the Spanish Flu broke out in the United States and quickly spread around the world.  Out of a world population of 1.8 billion, 500 million people were infected and sick from it and reportedly 40 million died.

If we compare these two pandemics to today’s world population of 7.7 billion, the Black Plague would have killed 4.6 billion people, and the Spanish Flu would have killed 171 million people.   According to the World Health Organization, as of the end of July 2020, 695,000 people worldwide have purportedly died from the Covid-19 Corona Virus flu.  Is this a pandemic?

In the United States, American’s life-expectancy is 75 years.  With a population of 330 million people, if everyone lived exactly 75 years to the day, 4,400,000 Americans would die each year, 340,000 would die each month and 12,050 would die each day.  This is normal life.  We all live and eventually die.  Death is part of life.  In the New Testament we find at Hebrews 9:27 “…it is appointed for men to die once, but after this comes judgment.”

If we take the 695,000 world wide deaths for the first seven months of 2020, and we annualize that number, we get 1.2 million.  However, nearly everyone who has died with the Covid-19 bug has also had two or three other serious medical issues.  And lately, it has been the practice to list Covid-19 as the sole cause of death even if the person was killed in an auto accident.  But even so, 1.2 million deaths from Covid-19 as compared to a 2020 number of 4.6 billion deaths from the Black Plague and 171 million deaths from the Spanish Flu we can see that the Covid-19 pandemic is not a pandemic at all.

After the first seven months of 2020, there have been 154,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States.  Annualizing the death numbers of 154,000 deaths in the United States to a full year we get 264,000.  Comparing 264,000 Covid-19 deaths to the expected 4,400,000 people who will die each year in the USA “from normal life” and we see we don’t have a pandemic in the USA either.

What makes the Covid-19 virus unusual is that, according to “experts” it is a combination of five other viruses’ and something no one had even seen before.  This makes it highly contagious to vulnerable people, because they have not developed a natural immunity.  There are credible professionals, including Dr. Yan who used to work in the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab in China, who say this virus was man-modified.  It would be energy well spent to investigate these claims, and if true, hold those accountable for its creation as a way to prevent the future release of other man-made, or man-modified viruses.  Any state, county or city with an investigatory agency should be looking into this issue.

Emergencies are largely undefined in law.  Which makes sense, as the possible number of scenarios as to what could constitute an emergency is infinite.  During my eight years as a member of the Idaho Legislature, I authored one emergency bill that caused the United States Congress, three days later, to pass legislation giving our state what we needed to extinguish our emergency and avoid the lawsuits that would have followed.  My legislation must have been on target, otherwise Congress would not have acted as it did, even going so far as to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear cases on my bill.

In  Idaho, and our Legislature wisely defined in statute what constitutes an “extreme emergency” at Idaho Code 46 – 601.

“State of extreme emergency” means: (a) the duly proclaimed existence of conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property within the state, or any part thereof, caused by an enemy attack or threatened attack; or (b) the duly proclaimed existence of conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property within the state, or any part thereof, caused by such conditions as air pollution, fire, flood, storm, epidemic, riot or earthquake, insurrection, breach of the peace, which conditions by reason of their magnitude are or are likely to be beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment and facilities of any county, any city, or any city and county.

This code section provides criteria as to what the affects of an extreme emergency are.  This includes “conditions by reason of their magnitude are or are likely to be beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment and facilities of any county, any city, or any city and county.”

On March 25, 2020, Idaho’s governor issued a Proclamation declaring a State of Extreme Emergency.  This included a “stay at home order” which applied to everyone.  Five months later, various counties and cities have added mask ordinances, social distancing ordinances and other criteria as to which business can be open and which must be closed.  Yet nowhere in Idaho has the Covid-19 infection rate been so bad it has been “beyond the control of the services, personnel, equipment and facilities…”  In other words, there is no emergency.

There is no emergency.  We do not have sixty percent of the population dying as in the 1340s when the Black Plague swept through Europe.  We do not have 28 percent of the population sick and two percent of the population dead as we did between 1918 to 1920 from the Spanish Flu.  Current data shows that the overall affect of the Covid-19 flu to be less than that of the average annual influenza virus.  There is no emergency!

If there is no emergency, then state governments, county governments and city governments are without any authority to exercise emergency powers.  After all, it is just common sense that before you can declare an emergency, you must have an emergency.

The stay at home orders, the closure of businesses, the requirements that people wear masks, stand 6 feet apart and so on have all contributed to a slowing of the economy.  Businesses have failed.  People have lost jobs.  Investments have gone bad.  Suicide is up.  Alcohol consumption is up.  Domestic violence and sexual abuse has increased all as a result of the non-emergency emergency.

These negative effects on peoples’ life and property, caused by the “lock-down” decisions of government actors, are a type of “constitutional taking,” and all those affected are entitled to compensation.  In the 1946 case of United States v. Causby, Causby’s chicken farm was affected by the use of a nearby airport by military aircraft.  Causby’s chicken farm was directly under the final approach for one of the airport’s runways.  The aircraft passed so low over the Causby property that his chickens often committed suicide because they were frightened by the low-flying aircraft.  The government did not “take” the Causby farm, the court said,

“As a result of the noise, respondents had to give up their chicken business.  As many as six to ten of their chickens were killed in one day by flying into the walls from fright.  The total chickens lost in that manner was about 150.  Production also fell off.  The result was the destruction of the use of the property as a commercial chicken farm.” United States v. Causby Et Ux., 328 U.S. 256, 259 (1946).

The Causby’s land was not outrightly taken from them, only the value was diminished; yet the Supreme Court said that a “constitutional taking” had occurred, and the Causby’s were entitled to compensation.

In the current Covid-19 hysteria, businesses are not taken, but millions of peoples’ lives and property have been diminished by the actions of government actors and the use of emergency powers during a non-emergency.  It is my opinion, because these “takings” occurred as a result of emergency measures imposed without a real emergency, that the government actors who created this situation are personally liable for the effects.

Oh, we have a lot of people proclaiming there is an emergency.  But where is the beef?  All of this Covid-19 hype constitutes “form over substance.”  The virus is real (I know, I got sick from it), but the response is a hoax.

The governor of Idaho must agree as he suddenly thinks that Idaho needs a law on the books giving Idaho government officials immunity from their “Covid-19 actions.” He just called a special session of the Legislature in the hopes the Legislature will pass such a bill.

However, the whole idea of sovereign immunity should be foreign to our American system as it is based on the concept that “the King can do no wrong.”  In the old European system, the one we fought a war to throw off, the King claimed he was God’s representative to the people and that he had a “divine right to rule.”  Gosh, who could argue with the king when he spoke for God?

In his well written article entitled “Against Sovereign Immunity,”  Erwin Chemerinsky’s first sentence in this article states “Sovereign immunity is an anachronistic relic and the entire doctrine should be eliminated from American law.”  Chemerinsky goes on to say,

“Sovereign immunity is inconsistent with a central maxim of American government: no one, not even the government, is above the law.  The effect of sovereign immunity is to place the government above the law and to ensure that some individuals who have suffered egregious harms will be unable to receive redress for their injuries.” Against Sovereign Immunity, 53 Stanford Law Review 1201, 1202 (2001).

The affect of providing any government actor immunity from suit is to deny the due process of law provision of the constitution where the Fifth Amendment states that “No person… be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”  But it also denies the supremacy clause of the Constitution when we raise the English common law relic of sovereign immunity above the whole of the Constitution thereby violating constitutional provisions.

Appropriately, Chemerinsky also quotes founding father James Madison, “If people were angels, there would be no need for a Constitution, but there would be no need for a government either.” The Federalist No. 51 at 322 (James Madison)(Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961).

When the Covid-19 immunity bill is presented to the special session of the Idaho Legislature, I hope all 105 legislators will not only vote “NO” but will also vote “HELL NO!”

I naively thought the Covid-19 non-emergency would eventually pass, and life would get back to normal.  After all, we are in the summer months, and the average person is healthier this time of year.  But it hasn’t.  Instead, more Covid-19 restrictions on our daily life are popping up here and there like a wack-a-mole game.

If our county commissioners, our city council members, our health agency board members and the myriad of other government actors continue to ignore the reality that the Covid-19 numbers of hospitalized and deaths are no more significant than an average flu season, We the People need to organize in our Corporate and Sovereign capacity as the Militia.  Since day one of this Republic, each and every adult Citizen, who is eligible to vote, is a member of the unorganized Militia.  We the People are the Sovereigns.  The number one responsibility of the Militia is to enforce the Laws of the Union.  And we have seen in this article, how the Laws of the Union are being violated every minute of every day by those who took an oath to defend the Constitution.

For a detailed discussion as to how We the People can lawfully organize into Militia units, please see Dr. Edwin Vieira’s books entitled Constitutional Homeland Security; The Sword and Sovereignty: The Constitutional Principles of the “Militia of the Several States”; and Thirteen Words (The Second Amendment).  Dr. Edwin Vieira has a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University, is a Harvard Law School graduate and today believes that organizing the unorganized Militia is our path back to constitutional government.

© 2020 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

Once upon a time there was a collection of radicals, who were highly educated in the natural law and the errors and successes of past political and economic systems.  They were American Colonists with names like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, et. al.  They believed that each man was uniquely created by God and could have a personal relationship with the Creator if  he or she chose to do so.  This mind-set also caused these men to reject the idea that God only spoke to men through either the Pope or the King, and that the political theory of the “Divine Right of Kings” was a scam used by kings to justify their dictatorial form of government.  Claiming their divine right, kings would claim they represented God to the people and that all their policies were God ordained and therefore infallible.

Instead, these radicals reasoned that if each of them were uniquely created in God’s image, not only were they all equal before God in the spiritual sense, but that every man was also equal politically.   Back in the 1700’s such thinking was radical compared to the status quo.  They also believed that men were capable of governing themselves and writing their own laws.

In 1775, the “Divine Right of Kings” form of government clashed with the “all men are created equal” way of thinking when the King’s government imposed a tax on tea in the American Colonies.  The amount of the overall tax burden was small, only about 2%, but the way the tax was imposed on Americans was highly offensive to them.  American Colonists objected to any tax being imposed on them that they did not approve of through representation in the legislative body imposing the tax.

Americans further objected to being forced to purchase the taxed tea only through governmentally approved outlets.  In fact, these passionate and thinking Americans were so opposed to this construct they successfully boycotted the entire scheme and the tax on tea had to be withdrawn.  Ultimately a war was fought over these conflicting political theories and much blood and treasure was expended in order to resolve the conflict.  During the War of Independence, Americans would cry out “No Taxation without Representation”.

What replaced the “Divine Right of Kings” in the newly formed United States of America was a Constitution that recognized that every man had equal standing in the new government.  This new governmental system utilized democratic processes, representing  We the People, to run the government.  The new system also recognized that men are fallible, as all men sin and fall short of the glory of God.  One characteristic of this new Republic was that a citizen’s rights were more important than what might someday be the appetite of a mob.

The Declaration of  Independence listed 27 grievances against an abusive King; and the new Constitution recognized that political leaders might be so bad that they might need to be removed from office through an impeachment process.  Our system of reoccurring elections also allows for bad actors to be removed from office.  This was a huge change from the previous system where the King claimed he represented God and that his policies were therefore infallible.

Believing that all men are sinners, the founders of  America chose to limit the power and size of government such that at the beginning America had a limited form of government, limited by what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “the chains of the Constitution”.

How is that working out for us today?  Not so good I would say.   Referring to the CIA’s World Fact Book, we see that the government of the United States is the biggest government  in the world at $3.893 trillion in budgeted annual expenditures.   China is second at $2.897 trillion.  Japan is third at $1.931 trillion.  And Germany is fourth at $1.484 trillion.   Recently demonized Russia isn’t even in the top 10 at $286 billion per year, just one fourteenth the size of our budget.

In fact, in all of recorded history, the government of the United States is the biggest government the human race has ever seen on Planet Earth!  Uncle Sam is Biggest Brother.  How did this happen with a Constitution that guarantees us a limited form of government?

The simple answer is that our government ignores our Constitution.  More accurately, what it does is lure us away from our God-given rights as guaranteed in our Constitution with benefits and privileges such that we leave our common law and constitutional rights behind in the rear view mirror in exchange for cradle to grave governmental security.

We have come full circle and have made government our God through a modern version of the Devine Right of Kings.  However, instead of being up front about this new scheme, instead we are tricked into joining a new political overlay that uses familiar sounding terms, like “citizen of the United States,” which is a statutorily created entity subject to Congress’ authority and  unable to object to the rules and regulations pertaining to the benefits and privileges being sought after.  This constitutes a political overlay that has caused the original Republic and its Constitution to go into hibernation.

All of us have left the jurisdiction of the Several States, where Congress’ authority is limited, and instead joined the “public rights” jurisdiction where Congress has plenary power.  Most of us have no clue as to how all of this works.

Instead of relying on our God-given natural rights, memorialized in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, we chase after “public rights” created by a bleeding heart Congress anxious to make us subject to its authority as we indulge in tax payer funded benefits.  Congress has created a “right to food stamps”, a “right to unemployment benefits”, a “right to low interest loans” if you are a student, a farmer, and first-time home buyer.  There are rights to farm subsidies, grants, and of course bailouts for those too big to fail and too big to jail.  (For a discussion of  “public rights” see  Kuretski v. C.I.R., 755 F.3d 929, (D.C. Cir. 2014.))

In reality, these “public rights” are not rights at all, but government granted privileges.  The United States Supreme Court has ruled many times that those who chase after a privilege have no standing to complain , object or otherwise defend any right, as there is no such thing as a “right” in the universe of privileges.

A big government, who takes care of us from cradle to grave, is also a government that has become a defacto god.  We are now right back to where we were before the War of Independence, except the tax rate and the size of government has increased an order of magnitude compared to that of 1775.  The ancient Divine Right of Kings is very much alive and well today.

© 2018 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Phil Hart: northskiguy@yahoo.com

When the Republican Presidential Primary season started, I personally had no clear favorite of the seventeen candidates, and at that time I knew little about Donald Trump and didn’t care for his (dynamic, hyper, potent) alpha male style. I did have what amounted to three favorites, who in my mind, were all tied for second place. Those were Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson. (I had a strong bias toward Senator Rand Paul, having been a Ron Paul delegate to the 2008 GOP National Convention in St. Paul Minnesota.)

I believe that with Senator Rand Paul, we have a genuinely solid libertarian conservative who walks the walk and talks the talk. With Senator Paul ‘what you see is what you get’; and the underlying man is as decent and honest as men come. But in this era of turmoil, I don’t see Senator Paul up to the task of being CEO of the USA as we move through a period of globally engineered chaos.

Initially Senator Cruz impressed me with his aggressive defense of constitutional and moral issues, mostly based on his tip-of-the-spear rhetoric. But upon further investigation, I ended up with serious concerns about Cruz’s connections to Goldman Sacs, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bush family. After the voter fraud episode in the Iowa primary where the Cruz campaign put out the word that Dr. Carson had dropped out, it appears that Ted Cruz is ethically challenged. And lastly, because Senator Cruz was born in Alberta, I don’t believe he is constitutionally eligible to be president in the first place, notwithstanding all the arguments to the contrary.

My third “second place” favorite was Dr. Ben Carson. He seems like a courageous and intelligent man who knew what he believed, and knew how to apply those principles to real world situations. I thought he had pure intensions to serve his country and serve the American People. I still think highly of Dr. Carson, but I don’t think Dr. Carson has the CEO experience that will be necessary to deal with today’s world-wide chaos, nor does he have that CEO experience which will help him kick butts and roll heads as needed to prevent America from declining into a third world “has been” destroyed by today’s institutionalized corruption found all throughout government.

Now that I know more, and as I look back on that that original field of seventeen candidates, I do have a clear #1 favorite. And for me, that #1 choice is Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has shown more courage than any of the other seventeen candidates, and he stands on his principles, even when his position is unpopular. In 2001, when the majority approved of the war in Iraq, Donald Trump took a public anti-war position warning about the dangers and foolishness of that war. Donald Trump also has come out against all the various “crony – capitalism” trade agreements that most of the other politicians support and which have been proven to be bad for America.

What other national figure is pushing hard to release the classified 28 pages of the 9-11 Commission’s report? Candidate Trump has promised, if elected president, to release to the public that 28 page document. Donald Trump is a New York City real estate developer, and he probably knew the World Trade Center buildings inside and out. He probably knows what really happened on September 11, 2001, a day that changed America for the worse. Donald Trump is a no nonsense man, and he won’t put up with the false paradigm. I expect a Trump Administration to undo the many losses of freedom we’ve experienced since then, and to effectively “make America free again.”

Candidate Trump should be heralded for calling out the democrat opposition for what she really is: corrupt, crooked, dishonest, lying, thieving, self-serving, and bad for America. Who among the other 16 candidates even comes close to Trump in speaking the truth about the opposition? Donald Trump is a courageous man, the most courageous of the seventeen candidates, and it is no secret that he may be risking his life running for public office.

Which other candidate is calling the establishment and the election process corrupt and rigged? Only Donald Trump has the courage to say what he says. And the media? He is also calling them some of the worst people on Planet Earth. Most Americans know this to be true, but only Donald Trump as the courage to state this in public.

Donald Trump is a Nationalist, and he will do what is best for America. It appears to me that his nationalism is actually part of his DNA and is engrained in his thinking. He was the only candidate of the seventeen who has been brutally honest about the real affects of NAFTA, the WTO and the TPP. As a successful businessman, he instinctively knows what will make America’s whole economy successful, and what will be harmful to it. He has the real world experience of having people on a payroll that needs to be funded week by week. He sounds like an economic guru who wants to reinvigorate our economy so that every American can buy a condo or own a home. (Would you expect anything less from a real estate developer?) His approach will be different than the status quo in that he understands people must work at good jobs to own a home and that it will not be a “give away” as it is with the democrats.

Some people are successful in business because they are single-minded and focus on only their business. They are like a greyhound chasing a rabbit, and are driven only to the goal (making money). Donald Trump is a proven multi-tasker, having had a variety of career successes across the board including being an author, promoter, philanthropist, community activist and now political candidate. (I also appreciate that he is a graduate of America’s top business school, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where I also received my MBA.) The 50 Best Business Schools in the World, Business Insider (Dec. 14, 2015).

Of all of the original seventeen candidates, Trump (fittingly) trumps them all in his ability to function as a CEO. With the change we desperately need to restore our Republic, it is going to take strong CEO experience to make decisions, provide leadership, persuade people, and have the guts to tackle vexing problems.

President Reagan, the ‘great communicator’, campaigned on the promise of eliminating the Departments of Education and Energy, but it never got done. Trump, who is a man of action, says he is going to get rid of ObamaCare, get ride of Common Core, get us out of NAFTA, and the TPP, fix our immigration problem, protect the Second Amendment and so on.

Of the original seventeen Republican presidential candidates, I believe only Donald Trump has the chutzpah to do what he says. He has proven CEO experience. He knows how to get things done. (As a real estate developer, consider the number of Certificate of Occupancies he has gotten for ‘getting the job done’!) And now in hindsight, I see that his hyper-alpha male attribute is actually his strongest asset. Of the seventeen Republicans who ran for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump is my #1 choice.

© 2016 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

When I was a teenager, I used to read the print off of Human Events, a conservative weekly newspaper my parents subscribed to. It was in the pages of Human Events where I was introduced to many intellectuals and political leaders who later became my heroes. Congressman Ron Paul, a prolific writer, was among them. I can remember “Dr. No”, our affectionate name for Congressman Paul, standing alone on issue after issue, getting nothing done legislatively. Often he could not find a single co-sponsor to the many excellent bills that he proposed. Yet his constituents loved him, and sent him back to Congress over and over again.

Today I use Congressman Paul as an example as to why standing alone has value. Just look at the issue of central banking and the private Federal Reserve Bank. For decades, Ron Paul was a voice in the wilderness speaking out against the private Federal Reserve, and few people listened back then. But today the majority of Americans are aware that the Federal Reserve is not a government bank, and most Americans want it at least audited. Ron Paul’s voice in the wilderness from the 70’s and 80’s turned into a tsunami of skepticism regarding the Federal Reserve Bank; and as of this date, there is still more good fruit that will be gained from Congressman Paul’s decades of effort on this issue.

All political movements must have a number of moving parts; components of the whole. I learned from my own political journey, that getting things done politically was always a larger task than could be performed by one person. It takes a team.

The Liberty Movement is full of people who what to be left alone; such is the nature of the “liberty mindset”. We have a good number of intellectuals in the Liberty Movement, and this intellectual foundation is necessary for any movement to be successful. Ron Paul is one of our most valuable intellectual assets. But where we are weak, is in the number of people we have with direct government or political experience. Liberty-minded people generally don’t like to be part of the government.

Campaign for Liberty was a great idea of Congressmen Paul’s to train workers to fight in the trenches of political warfare. And his efforts there will pay the Liberty Movement dividends for many more years to come. But what a lot of “liberty-minded” people can’t visualize is how does one get from “Point A” to “Point B”. If we are honest, we will recognize this as a serious defect in the Liberty Movement.

Said another way, “How do we implement our agenda?” “How do we reach our goals?” “How do we restore America to the principles of our ancestors?” We have already won the intellectual debate in the minds of the people. Now how do we get the job done on the ground?

I suggest in 2016 we either recruit, or we support, or we get behind someone who will champion our values, and who also knows how to get from Point A to Point B. It is a simple idea.

In my own life, I competed in long distance running, cycling and alpine ski racing, which was all about getting from Point A to Point B as fast as you can. I must have learned how to do this from my father, who held the American record in the 5,000 meters, getting from Point A to Point B the fastest. In business it is similar. Eighty percent of all businesses fail in the first five years, as many people cannot figure out how to get from Point A to Point B successfully.

I am supporting Donald Trump for President. As I have listened to him these past few months, I am learning that he embraces many of my values, my principles and my goals. While Ron Paul was for decades sowing the seeds of Liberty, and gradually winning the minds of the People; Donald Trump was proving as a businessman that he is someone who knows how to successfully get from Point A to Point B.

As one who has been hugely successful in business, who has a lot of his own money, and has proven himself to be a successful CEO, Donald Trump is in a position to promote his own agenda free from the influence of special interests. Who else can do this? And it just so happens that Donald Trump’s agenda lines up pretty closely with mine.

In my own life, I’ve figured out how to get from Point A to Point B; and therefore I can recognize and appreciate this quality in someone else. And regarding Donald Trump as a candidate for President, I have a further bias in that both he and I graduated from the Wharton School of Business; him in ’68 and me in ’84.

Wharton has always been ranked in the top three business schools. While I was in the MBA program there, I had a cousin and friends in the MBA programs at the other two top business schools. I noticed at the other top schools, once you were admitted to their programs, whether you worked hard or goofed off, you got the diploma at the end of the program. Not so at Wharton; if you didn’t do the work, or you didn’t do it successfully, Wharton would flunk you.

Donald Trump must be good at problem solving; otherwise he would have flunked out of Wharton. He wants to audit the Federal Reserve Bank. (Thank you Ron Paul for sowing those seeds). He wants to get rid of Common Core. He wants to secure our borders.

He will get rid of Obama Care (the son of Romney Care). He will negotiate tough trade deals with our trading partners that will greatly improve what we have now. He’s a real estate developer from New York City and says he will deal with the events of 9-11. He probably knew the World Trade Center buildings inside and out, and probably already has his head wrapped around that issue. And lastly, Donald Trump knows how to get from Point A to Point B.

As a proven CEO from the business world, I believe a Donald Trump in the White House will kick butts and roll heads! Who else can the Liberty Movement support who has proven CEO experience and can guarantee to us they will kick butts and roll heads?

All that said, I support Donald Trump for President in 2016.

© 2016 Phil Hart – All Rights Reserved

• Idaho Constitutional Money Act of 2012, 4-4-12
• Why Ron Paul? 3-28-12
• House Bill 366, More Pretended Legislation, 3-7-12
• More On Ethics Panels, 2-22-12
• The Income Tax and Due Process, 2-11-12
• No New Tax, Remove the Footnote, 2-1-12
• Tax Reform for Idaho 8-14-10
• A Very Taxing Process 7-27-10
• Obamacare Income Tax Surcharge Unconstitutional 12-24-09
• The Murphy Court: Human Life has No Value 7-12-08
• Murphy & the Sixteenth Amendment 8-30-06
• Constitutional Income: Taxes on Wages & Salaries are Direct, Part 2, 8-20-02
• Constitutional Income: The Purpose of the 16th Amendment,  Part 1, 7-28-02