HART: Not a real folk hero

The Idaho House Committee reviewing the ethics complaints against Rep. Phil Hart has decided to drop them after his resignation as vice-chairman of the Transportation Committee. This "slap on the wrist" by that Republican-dominated institution leaves Hart as arguably the most powerful legislator in Boise - a man whom even the mighty IRS and the State Tax Commission cannot bring down.

He has successfully played the hapless victim card of the "biased liberal media" and now emerges as a string-puller in the Idaho House. In 2009, he personally recruited two men to serve as his proxies in the Legislature: Vito Barbieri, who was elected last fall to the House, as was the new Sen. Steve Vick. The recent nullification health bill has his fingerprints all over it, and with his state-wide connections established during the Ron Paul presidential campaign he can bring political pressure to intimidate his reluctant colleagues in virtually every legislative district. He now can work behind the scenes if he so chooses. He does not need to personally introduce a single bill.

I know what I am talking about because I helped create the movement which he has hijacked. I am truly grieved that his former Constitutionalist Party colleagues have used their xenophobic and nativist "Freedom Festivals" to make him into some sort of folk-hero.

They have effectively moved the Idaho Republican Party, and thus Idaho, south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Their political grandstanding does nothing to solve the genuine fiscal and economic crisis we are facing.

JAMES STIVERS

Desmet