Idaho senators send bill to ban business medical intervention requirements for amendments
The Idaho Senate State Affairs Committee on Wednesday sent a bill for amendments that would expand a ban on medical mandates by private business and state and local governments.
The amending order allows wide amendments to bills. State lawmakers on the committee made the move for Senate Bill 1023, by Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, after business association representatives expressed concern over the bill's wide-ranging definition for medical interventions.
Some worried it could even affect hand sanitation requirements.
'This bill goes too far, by mandating businesses submit to the whims of their employees. We do not understand the language. And we believe that while it was thought out, we believe that perhaps there was some haste in how it was written,' Alex LaBeau, president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, told the committee.
Foreman's bill, called the 'Idaho Medical Freedom Act,' would modify an Idaho law passed in 2023 that banned business and state and local governments from requiring COVID-19 vaccines as a condition of employment or to provide products or services, including entrance to venues.
In addition to proposing to extend the ban to schools, the bill would broaden the law to include medical interventions, which it defines as 'any pharmaceutical or biological agent or product designed to alter or restrict the biological functioning of the body.'
Foreman only briefly spoke about his bill. Health Freedom Defense Fund President and Founder Leslie Manookian, who Foreman said wrote the bill, spoke at length about the need for the bill.
'The right to make one's own medical decisions is not granted by the government. … It is a sacred, God-given inalienable right — woven into the very fabric of our constitutional republic,' she told lawmakers. 'It's amazing to me that we have veered so far from that original intention that we even have to talk about this today.'
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Before voting to send the bill for amendments, several Republican senators on the committee said they agreed with the bill's intent but worried its language needed to be refined.
'These are God-given rights to our personal freedoms,' said Idaho Senate President Pro Tem Kelly Anton, R-Rupert, who added that lawmakers will look at the bill with the business community to see if it can be clarified.
All but two senators on the Senate State Affairs Committee supported a motion to send the bill to the amending order, where any lawmaker can propose amendments.
Committee chair Jim Guthrie, R-McCammon, and Idaho Senate Assistant Minority Leader James Ruchti, D-Pocatello, voted against the motion.
In the meeting, Ruchti, the only Democrat on the committee, said the legislation 'seems like it's putting us in a race to bring back the diseases our grandparents worked so hard to eliminate.'
After the meeting, Guthrie told the Idaho Capital Sun he'd prefer a new bill be redrafted instead of sending it to the amending order.
'I don't disagree with the intent and some of the premise of the bill. But sometimes — because the 14th order is a very different process — I think there's enough fatal flaws in the bill that to try to fix it in the 14th order is problematic,' he told the Sun.
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