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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoPlainText>Idaho: the land of the truly mentally unhinged legislators hell bent and determined to win the race to the bottom on the backs of already born children.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/negotiated-at-the-hague-a-child-support-treaty-falters-in-boise.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/negotiated-at-the-hague-a-child-support-treaty-falters-in-boise.html</a><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoPlainText><o:p> </o:p></p><h1><span lang=EN>Negotiated at The Hague, a Child Support Treaty Falters in Boise<o:p></o:p></span></h1><p class=byline-dateline><span class=byline><span lang=EN>By </span></span><span class=byline-author><u><span lang=EN style='color:blue'>KIRK JOHNSON </span></u></span><span lang=EN>APRIL 21, 2015 <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><img border=0 width=481 height=320 id="Picture_x0020_1" src="cid:image005.jpg@01D07C21.50533620" alt="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/21/us/22IDAHOWEB1/22IDAHOWEB1-master675.jpg"><span lang=EN><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span class=caption-text><span lang=EN>Taryn Thompson, right, with her daughter Faith. Ms. Thompson, a divorced mother in Kootenai County, Idaho, said she depended on child support.</span></span><span lang=EN> <span class=visually-hidden>Credit</span><span class=credit> Rajah Bose for The New York Times </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>POST FALLS, Idaho — It took five years for negotiators to work out the details of a multinational treaty on child support that would make it easier to track delinquent parents around the world. It took only a couple of minutes for a committee of the Idaho Legislature to endanger America’s participation.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>In a 9-to-8 vote in the closing hours of the legislative session, the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee killed a bill that state and federal officials had said was crucial to the finely crafted choreography of the <a href="http://www.hcch.net/index_en.php?act=conventions.text&cid=131">child support treaty</a> reached at The Hague. All 50 states must approve the mechanics of the treaty for American ratification to proceed, and 19 have signed off thus far.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>A major factor seems to be Idaho’s ornery streak, the part of the state’s identity that does not like the federal government — or, worse still, foreign governments — telling it what to do.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>In Boise, the state capital, members of the committee — which is dominated by Republicans, as is the Legislature as a whole — raised concerns about foreign tribunals, perhaps ones based on <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/sharia_islamic_law/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about Sharia.">Shariah</a>, the Islamic legal code, potentially making decisions under the treaty that Idaho might not like. At least 32 countries, along with the European Union, have ratified the agreement.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span class=visually-hidden><span lang=EN>Photo</span></span><span lang=EN> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><img border=0 width=475 height=317 id="Picture_x0020_2" src="cid:image006.jpg@01D07C21.50533620" alt="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/04/21/us/22IDAHOWEB2/22IDAHOWEB2-articleLarge.jpg"><span lang=EN><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span class=caption-text><span lang=EN>Preschool students in Coeur d'Alene. State legislators' decision not to act on a child support treaty could endanger federal money for Head Start.</span></span><span lang=EN> <span class=visually-hidden>Credit</span><span class=credit> Rajah Bose for The New York Times<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“I’m concerned about women’s rights in some of these countries,” Representative Heather Scott, a Republican member of the committee, said during a hearing on the <a href="http://legislature.idaho.gov/legislation/2015/S1067.pdf">bill.</a> “I’m seeing a problem,” added Ms. Scott, who ultimately voted along with eight other Republicans to table the bill without sending it to the full House for a vote.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>The stakes are potentially immense, both for child support recipients across the nation, who risk losing the benefits that the treaty protects, and for parents and children in Idaho — particularly poor ones — who will lose various federal subsidies unless legislators change their minds.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Federal officials said that $16 million in funding for Idaho’s child welfare system would be cut within 60 days, effectively dismantling the state’s child support enforcement arm, which can take steps like garnishing a parent’s pay. Another $30 million in block grants could dry up too, including federal money for Head Start, the preschool program for low-income children.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“People are realizing the dimensions, and it’s blowing wide open,” said Taryn Thompson, 35, a divorced mother in Kootenai County who depends on child support.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Idaho residents and political leaders, finding themselves in the spotlight, have reacted with anger and fear that children might pay the price, but also in some cases with a kind of prickly pride. Idaho, in the face of what felt to some legislators on the committee like bullying from the federal government, had hit right back.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>To Ryan Kerby, a Republican and first-term state representative, a good part of his vote came down to simple courtesy. He was not, he said, about to be told what to do by mostly nameless federal officials who had communicated their demands to the state, and then would not grant legislators more time to think about it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“You need to sign it, and if you don’t we’re going to beat the crud out of you,” Mr. Kerby said, paraphrasing the pressure he felt. “They were incredibly rude.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text id=story-continues-4><span lang=EN>Idaho’s governor, C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Republican, will almost certainly have to call the Legislature into a special session if the bill and the treaty questions are to be addressed again, legal experts said. Mr. Otter said at a news conference on Thursday that he was not prepared to do that yet.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Other Idahoans are just scratching their heads. The child support bill, through most of the legislative session leading up to the committee’s vote on the final day of work at the capital on April 10, had drawn little attention or controversy. The Senate passed it unanimously and without debate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“It’s an interesting issue because no one, even those in the room, seems to understand exactly what happened, and the long-term implications are so unclear,” said Shaakirrah R. Sanders, an associate law professor at the University of Idaho and an expert on constitutional law.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>The people with the most to lose are women who, through violence or a bitter divorce, have been left fearful of personally pressuring an ex-husband for child support, or even perhaps of being found by him. That is not uncommon here in Kootenai County, a mostly rural part of northern Idaho that has the highest rate in the state of what the Idaho State Police categorizes as “intimate partner violence.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“Yes, we in Idaho don’t like the federal government telling us what to do or not do,” said Deb Wheeler, 56, who works in Post Falls as an operations manager and is raising a 17-year-old son. She said her ex-husband pays his support reliably and would do so even without the state enforcement apparatus, but she has friends who are not so lucky. “This affects real people,” Ms. Wheeler said.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Some lawmakers said in the committee’s hearings on the bill that they were in fact trying to protect women in Idaho, who might have a child support case adjudicated under the treaty by a foreign tribunal that might not treat women as equals. Some singled out Shariah as a source of that fear.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Under the treaty — worked out by The Hague Conference on Private International Law, a global intergovernmental organization with more than 80 members — participant countries agree to enforce child support judgments across boundaries.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Thomas Dayley, one of the legislators who voted not to send the bill to the floor, said in the hearing that the federal government seemed to be threatening Idaho’s children by withholding money.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“It would be their choice, that they would deny us that money and they would say to our children, ‘no,’” said Mr. Dayley, a Republican.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>Idaho’s child support program director, Kandace Yearsley, testifying on behalf of the bill, disagreed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=story-body-text><span lang=EN>“I believe that the federal government feels like that we’re the ones telling our children ‘no,’ because we’re ones here that are making the decision that says we’re not going to participate,” Ms. Yearsley said.<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></body></html>