[Vision2020] "One of the Zaniest Members of Congress"

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

A happy warrior dies flouting guvmint regulation

Jim Fisher

Helen Chenoweth-Hage was a political anomaly.

The former U.S. House member from Idaho's 1st District, who died in a Nevada automobile accident Monday, combined squinty-eyed, nearly conspiratorial views of the official establishment with an open, friendly manner that disarmed people on the other side of the political fence.

Unlike many of her fellow ideologues of the right -- especially including the leaders of the 1994 Republican tsunami that seized control of Congress and swept her into office -- Chenoweth-Hage did not treat Democrats or liberals as enemies. She acted as if they were mistaken friends.

As a result, people who knew her personally had a hard time accepting that she was really one of the zaniest members of Congress. She flirted with anti-government militias, even suggesting the federal government had done something to invite the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. She criticized government land ownership and management, seeking to disarm federal land agencies' law enforcement officers. She explained the scant number of dark-skinned people in northern Idaho by pointing to the region's cool climate, discounting its reputation at the time as a haven for racists.

And despite her history of living and working among members of one of Idaho's great Indian tribes, the Nez Perce, she maintained a studied ignorance of tribes' special legal relationship with the United States. She talked as if government's treaty obligations to tribes could be wiped away with an easy assertion that every American should be treated the same.

Once in a meeting with Lewiston Tribune editors, she defended an Idaho ballot initiative authorizing discrimination against homosexuals by repeating the conservative talking point that gay men and lesbians should not be given "special rights." When asked what special rights they either had or sought, she of course could name none.

It could have surprised few who knew her that this happy warrior was not wearing a seat belt in the vehicle from which she was thrown on a Nevada highway, or that she was holding in her arms an infant member of the family she married into. Providence rescued that baby from Chenoweth-Hage's refusal to honor Nevada requirements of both belts and child-safety seats. She herself died as she might have wished, minding her own business while expecting Uncle Sam to do the same. -- J.F.