What's Going On in the Idaho GOP?

Is this what unity looks like?

Note: This post is going to go into some inside baseball regarding the Idaho State Republican Party. As you will see, the details are mostly superfluous, because the main story is about how a clique of old guard politicos is trying to sabotage the party after losing control last summer. Read on:

On Saturday, December 3, 2022, Idaho Republican Party 1st Vice Chair Daniel Silver convened a meeting of the party’s Judicial Committee at a library meeting room in Boise. The issue at hand was a petition presented to the Idaho GOP Central Committee in which sixty-one signatories called into question the residence of the Idaho GOP National Committeeman Damond Watkins.

The petitioners believe that Watkins has moved out of state and has therefore vacated his seat. Watkins and his defenders claim that he was on temporary assignment and still technically resides in Idaho. The specifics of the petition were not the subject of the meeting, however. Rather, it was called because two complainants - Bingham County Chairman Dan Cravens and Region VI Vice Chair and Caribou County State Committeeman Trent Clark - claimed that Chairwoman Dorothy Moon had acted improperly in referring the petition to the State Central Committee.

The gang’s all here

I was not at the meeting myself, regretfully. I spoke to several people who were, and they agreed that it was a mess. 2nd Vice Chair Mark Fuller pointed out that Silver had been sharing his opinion about the Watkins petition for several weeks, and therefore could not run a fair meeting. The committee voted on a motion to remove Silver as chair of the meeting and it tied 8-8 along the usual establishment/liberty lines. Silver exercised his option to break the tie in his favor, even though a tie would have left the status quo anyway.

The first oddity about this meeting was the timing. Chairwoman Moon had initially scheduled the Central Committee meeting to hear the petition on December 3rd, but after some pushback from party delegates who would have had to travel from Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello, or Idaho Falls, she agreed to reschedule it for January 6th, when the entire state committee would be in Boise anyway for the winter meetings.

This is all well and good. Why then did 1st Vice Chairman Silver schedule his Judicial Committee meeting for December 3rd, causing the same people to have to make the same trip? Additionally, he chose a location - a branch of the Boise Library - that closed at 2pm. The committee had barely gotten through debates over the agenda before they were kicked out of their room, so nothing was accomplished anyway - the meeting will conclude on January 6th after all.

The second oddity regarding the meeting is that, as far as I understand the state party bylaws, the Judicial Committee’s role is to hear appeals that are made after a decision by the party chair. Clark claimed that Moon’s referral of the petition to the Central Committee was a decision in and of itself and was liable to be appealed, but this seems like semantics. As I talked to various people involved in this affair, I came to understand that the proper order of events would have been for the complainants to wait for the Central Committee meeting in January and then object at that time, if they felt it necessary.

After Cravens and Clark made their complaints, Chairwoman Dorothy Moon had a chance to respond, and I heard from numerous people who were in that room that it was a barnburner of a speech, exposing the complainants for this charade of political hackery. A crowd of Treasure Valley conservatives who had gathered to observe the meeting applauded when she finished.

The crowd, you understand, recognized the subtext of this meeting. It was not about the residency of Damond Watkins, nor even about a disagreement over the state party bylaws. This was about the same thing it has been since the State Convention last July: the fact that conservatives led by Dorothy Moon now control of the party.

The jilted establishment wing of the Idaho GOP has no better avatar than Trent Clark. He has given a lot of time and energy to the Republican Party over the years, serving in numerous roles including State Chairman from 1998-2002. I met Clark at the 2022 Convention in Twin Falls when I sat on the Resolutions Committee that he chaired. I said at the time that I thought he was fair, and proved a good teacher regarding how to run a meeting according to Robert’s Rules. I found the experience interesting and valuable.

Over the last six months I have followed Clark and read his weekly editorials. Since the transfer of power last July, these editorials seem to have gotten more and more jaded. On October 7th, Clark wrote a piece called “The Optimistic Conservative,” cherry picking quotes from Governor Brad Little and Chairwoman Dorothy Moon to portray the former as an optimist in the vein of Ronald Reagan and the latter a pessimist with zero to offer. Of course, I would counter that Little had the luxury of campaigning from his office, Biden-style, as IACI and their allies carried him across the finish line with nary a debate, while Moon is correctly recognizing the peril our country faces today.

But that’s neither here nor there. Trent Clark is as entitled to his opinions as anyone else, and I believe that his years of service to the Republican Party mean we should at least hear him out. However, he seems to spend more energy attacking people in his own party than those on the other side.

On December 2nd, Clark wrote an essay titled “GOP ‘Rules’ Reveal Grand Hypocrisy”. In this one he derided Republicans who disagree with him regarding how to organize the primary as idiots who have never heard of John Locke. This is the sort of rhetoric that I have come to expect from many outspoken establishment figures. Rather than engaging us as fellow travelers, fellow Republicans, they attack us as extremists, losers, and rhetorical terrorists. They are all too happy to find common ground with progressives who leave the Democratic Party while trying to ostracize anyone in their own party further right than Governor Little.

In his Twitter bio, Clark says that he is “Concerned that true "conservatism" has been hijacked by drug dealers and crypto-peddlers.” At least that’s what it said the last time I read it; as I was editing this piece for publication Clark blocked me on Twitter for reasons unknown. (Edit: Clark explained what happened in a comment below: “…the Twitter account is blocked for everyone because it was one of those "you've now created an account on Twitter" that I never intended. My original account @TrentLClark1 is still active.”)

On a recent Facebook post, Clark said:

On Thursday the single greatest underwriter and donor to Republican causes in the history of Idaho called out a "secret alliance" who is destroying the Republican Party. They pretend like they own the name "Republican."

It’s ironic, since Clark and the establishment think they own the name “Republican”. Trent Clark and his ilk believe that they are the sole masters of the Republican Party, the sole determinants of what it means to be a Republican, and the sole gatekeepers to politics in Idaho. They believe that any group of people not on board with their agenda, no matter how numerous, are a secret alliance that is trying to destroy the party.

In reality, the Republican Party has fluctuated between various positions since its founding in 1854, and there has been a tug of war between a moderate establishment and a liberty insurgency since at least the end of World War II.

Establishment figures like Trent Clark call the liberty wing RINOs, while the liberty wing calls them the same thing. It is a perfect application of the classic meme of the two Spider-men pointing at each other:

The establishment needs to take their own advice and unify for the sake of the party and for the conservative movement. The man lauded by Trent Clark as “the single greatest underwriter and donor to Republican causes in the history of Idaho” is Frank Vandersloot, who notoriously instigated former Idaho GOP Chairman Tom Luna’s ill-advised lawsuit against the Bonneville County Republicans. He recently made a speech calling for unity once more, but of course he only wants unity on his own terms. Men like Vandersloot and Clark have run the Idaho Republican Party so long that they have perhaps forgotten that power flows upward, not downward.

As my friend Ryan Spoon said on Twitter:

You might rightly ask why I seem to be piling on Trent Clark specifically in this piece. Well, he pretty much started the chain of events that led to the doomed meeting at the Boise Library. On August 11th, he sent an email to Chairwoman Dorothy Moon demanding to know why she or someone else in the Idaho GOP leadership had been “sending threatening and harassing communication to Idaho’s duly elected representative on the Republican National Committee, Damond Watkins.”

The following month, he reiterated his demands, and concluded with what can only be described as a threat to take legal action: “As was re-iterated at the time of your own election, it is unfortunate when following the Rules is compelled only through action of an Idaho Court. Let us hope it remains so.”

I will grant that Clark is passionate in his defense of Damond Watkins, and that’s fine, but he is clearly using this as an opportunity to attack a fellow Republican that he absolutely despises. I guess this is no surprise. In my July 20th piece describing the angry fallout from the conservative tsunami at the convention I wrote:

In a public post on Facebook, former Idaho GOP Chairman Trent Clark accused the incoming leadership of “co-opting the Party's good name,” singling out new 1st Vice Chair Daniel Silver as the lone officer standing against such tomfoolery. Mr. Silver admirably clarified his own positions: “I want to be clear that I do not believe the other members of the executive team are the enemy or power-hungry liberals.” (Mr. Clark subsequently edited his post to remove some of the more incendiary language.)

Unfortunately, Daniel Silver also comes across badly in this affair, in my opinion. On October 15th, he sent an email to the Central Committee denouncing the petition, calling it invalid and demanding it be withdrawn. If the petitioners did not comply, he threatened to convene a meeting of the Judicial Committee to “discuss the tactics used against Damond Watkins.”

I am not an expert in the bylaws, but preemptively calling a Judicial Committee meeting appears to follow neither the letter nor the spirit of the rules. Indeed, Kootenai County Chairman Brent Regan wrote an email to the executive board in November, carefully parsing the bylaws to demonstrate that the Judicial Committee, being inferior to the Central Committee, had no power to convene of its own accord for a matter that was yet to be determined.

In the same email, Silver complained that Chairwoman Moon’s decision to call the meeting for December 3rd put a burden on delegates from far away, yet he himself would end up calling the Judicial Committee meeting for that very day even after Moon moved hers to the previously scheduled winter meetings on January 6-7. Silver dragged more than a dozen members of the committee to Boise on a Saturday in December for a meeting that proved pointless anyway, as they ran out of time to conclude their business.

I had high hopes for Daniel Silver, despite knowing his associations with the establishment, so I am disappointed that he has joined this unfortunate crusade.

In the end, the issue of Damond Watkins’ residency is just a MacGuffin. A petition was submitted to the central committee, and if it is baseless, then in their wisdom they will dismiss it. Personally, after reading both sides’ evidence, I would give Watkins the benefit of the doubt, accepting his word that his time out of state was always meant to be temporary, and that Idaho remains his home. On the other hand, if I were him, I would have nevertheless resigned. Watkins has been National Committeeman for nearly ten years; there is no reason he cannot step down and allow someone else to carry the torch for a while.

No, the issue here is the inability of some people to accept that the Idaho Republican Party elected conservative firebrand Dorothy Moon as chair. In spite of public calls for unity no matter who captains the ship, there are apparently some who would burn it to the rudder rather than see it piloted by the wrong people.

It’s time to stop the nonsense.

• Stop calling pointless meetings for no other reason than to sow discord against Dorothy Moon.

• Stop kneecapping our freshman legislators just because they defeated your favorite career politician in the primary.

• Stop attacking people to your right with more vigor and verve than you do people to your left.

• Stop trying to gatekeep the Republican Party. This goes both ways: the liberty wing must recognize that Brad Little was duly elected governor by the people, and the establishment wing must recognize that Dorothy Moon was duly elected chairwoman by the Idaho GOP.

There is room for disagreement within the confines of our party. Should Republicans support legalizing marijuana? Where should we draw the line in restricting abortion? What role, if any, should government play in protecting the health freedom of the people? How many taxes should we cut?

We can and should have these debates, and more. But I grow increasingly frustrated with those who would burn the party to the ground simply because they don’t like the people in charge. This is the attitude of sore losers, the sort who preach unity only when they are in charge, but are unwilling to act with humility when they are not.

Unfortunately, I doubt that the establishment figures sowing this discord will heed my advice. They have clearly declared us the enemy. “They never give up power,” one person at the meeting told me. “They’re doing it on purpose.”

Ronald Reagan told us nearly sixty years ago that every generation must fight for liberty or lose it forever. While I relish the fight against the socialist Democrats, I hate when we are forced to defend ourselves from people in our own party as well.