BOISE, Idaho — This article originally appeared in the Idaho Press.
Longtime Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo blamed the nation’s ills on Democratic President Joe Biden in a debate against two challengers this week, maintaining the nation was much better off two years ago – and would be again if Republicans were back in control.
“Think back to just before President Biden took election and the Senate and the House went totally Democrat,” Crapo said during the televised “Idaho Debates,” in which he faced off against Democratic challenger David Roth of Idaho Falls and independent Scott “Oh” Cleveland of Eagle. “We had the strongest economy that we’d seen in probably all of our lifetimes.”
Roth countered, “I remind you that we are coming out of a tremendous mess left by the last administration and their mishandling of the pandemic.”
“We’re coming out of one of the worst pandemics in 100 years – our country saw things that we haven’t seen since my grandmother was a little girl,” Roth said. “And we have to expect that there is going to be some pains coming out of that.”
Cleveland, an investment adviser, said, “In my opinion America is still great but clearly headed in the wrong direction, and the reason is this: Our leaders, including career politicians like Mike Crapo, are failing miserably at serving the best interest of everyday, average Americans.”
Both Roth and Cleveland criticized Crapo’s “no” votes on popular, successful legislation including the PACT Act, a major expansion of veterans’ health care and benefits including coverage of conditions related to toxic burn pits; and the CHIPS and Science Act, which prompted Micron Technology to announce a $15 billion new plant in Boise.
But Crapo said he was pushing back against a strategy of Democratic leaders to load up proposals that Republicans favor with additional spending that they don’t. “Chuck Schumer has been consistent on this,” Crapo said. “Whether it’s the PACT Act or other acts that have been pushed through, when he sees one that has Republican support, he adds a boatload of new spending to it and puts the Republicans in the position of voting ‘no’ on things they support, or of authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending.”
“He’s got us in a bind,” Crapo said. “We either vote against it and get this kind of questions, or we vote for it and vote for another $200 billion of his spending. I voted against the spending spree.”
Cleveland said, “Sounds like a lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda to me.”
Roth said, “We know that in the Senate and in Congress, bills are often compromised. Not everybody gets everything that they want, and sometimes things go through that they don’t want. But we can’t allow those veterans to continue to wait for that much-needed critical care simply because there’s something in that bill that Sen. Crapo doesn’t agree with.”
“What I’m hearing from Sen. Crapo is that he’s unwilling to compromise, no matter what the level of good is, if there’s anything about the bill that he doesn’t like,” Roth said. “And unfortunately, that level of refusing to compromise is why we have so much obstruction and so little getting done in Washington.”
Crapo said, “The solution here is to give the Republican Party and a Republican Senate the control over the agenda, so that we don’t continue to see Biden, Schumer and Pelosi driving this runaway spending, driving these open borders, and causing the difficulties that we’re all talking about today.”
But he took a different tack when asked about dam-breaching, calling for collaboration. While Idaho GOP Congressman Mike Simpson has floated a concept plan to breach the four lower Snake River dams to restore salmon runs, while also investing billions into offsetting impacts ranging from power generation to transportation to tourism, Crapo said, “I don’t support proposals to have a congressional cram-down of dam breaching.”
“Salmon are an icon in the Pacific Northwest and we do need to preserve and strengthen them,” he said. “I’ve been engaged in this battle for years. The bottom line here is … there are multiple stakeholders and multiple interests across the Pacific Northwest who have very different positions on this issue. What we need to do is the thing I’ve been advocating for a decade now, and that is — get the various stakeholders together and work out a compromise position, a consensus plan that can reach the kinds of solutions we want to achieve.”
He noted that he successfully did that with his Owyhee Initiative regarding wilderness.
“And we can do it when we get people together,” Crapo said, “because people across Idaho support the salmon, and many of them support the dams. There are win-win solutions that we can find, where we can build the political consensus to move forward. If we just have a congressional cram-down right now, whatever happens, it’s not going to be permanent. There will be political opposition, there will be court battles, there will be continuous warfare over this issue until we get together and build consensus-based solutions to the issue. That’s what we need to do.”
Cleveland said he thinks it’s a “mistaken belief” that breaching the four dams would restore the salmon, and he opposed the move. “I’ll be honest with you, I think things are OK,” he said.
Roth called it “a complex issue” with “a lot of moving pieces,” and said, “I do think we need to do something, and I would look at every option … in order to save the salmon and offset those economic impacts.”
In their 90-minute debate, the three also debated issues ranging from abortion and same-sex marriage to prescription drug pricing and inflation. Crapo strongly opposed any election reforms that would come from the federal level, including the pending Bipartisan Electoral Count Act, saying only states should address those issues.
Asked what he’s voted for to help Idahoans struggling with inflation, Crapo said, “Well, there haven’t been any bills on the Senate floor that have tried to do that, because Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have controlled the agenda.”
Roth praised the recently approved Inflation Reduction Act, which included investments in clean energy, prescription drug pricing reforms and more, but Crapo said it did nothing to reduce inflation.
Cleveland said if elected as an independent, he’d refuse to support any federal spending, including raising the debt ceiling, “until that (southern) border is closed to my satisfaction.”
He also said, “We have no business spending money in Ukraine. Our country is rich. It is the most powerful economic engine on earth. And there is plenty of money to go around in this country, but we’re aiming at the wrong things.”
Roth, executive director of the Bonneville Youth Development Council, cited his experience working on youth drug problems, housing and hunger. “I have real-world, on-the-ground experience working with the problems that everyday Idahoans face,” he said. “We talk about the drug problem, we talk about housing – these are all areas that I have direct experience in and solutions that are working. … We’ve been looking at essentially the same leadership for over 30 years in this state and what we’re doing simply is not working.”
Crapo is seeking a fifth six-year term in the Senate, after previously serving three terms in the House. Before that, he served in the Idaho Senate, where for four years he was the Senate president pro tem.
He faces a total of five challengers in his reelection bid; not present at the debate were Libertarian candidate Idaho Sierra Law of Pocatello and Constitution Party candidate Ray Writz of Coeur d’Alene. Law didn’t meet active campaign criteria for inclusion in the debate, and Writz didn’t respond.
The Idaho Debates are co-sponsored by the Idaho Press Club, the League of Women Voters, and Idaho’s public universities, and air statewide on Idaho Public Television.
Betsy Z. Russell is the Boise bureau chief and state capitol reporter for the Idaho Press and Adams Publishing Group. Follow her on Twitter at @BetsyZRussell.
This article originally appeared in the Idaho Press, read more on IdahoPress.com.
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