MAGA loon Janice McGeachin is running for governor of Idaho, but what’s really scary is that she’s currently already serving as the state’s lieutenant governor. How did this happen? Maybe Idaho doesn’t actually have elections for that position and just fills it by picking names at random from a QAnon message board. We don’t know how Idaho works.
McGeachin is challenging incumbent Republican Gov. Brad Little, who’s terrible for different reasons. She went rogue last summer and banned mask mandates while Little was out of town — a true daytime soap villain move. She later earned Donald Trump’s pyrite endorsement after Tucker Carlson arranged a meet-cute. Little has never openly defied Trump, but that’s not enough for Trump these days. He demands total obsequiousness, and McGeachin delivers.
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This weekend, McGeachin appeared on far-right extremist Stew Peters’s streaming show. Peters told McGeachin that what he digs most about her is how much she loves Jesus.
McGeachin declared, “God has a plan for our state. And we will just need to grasp that vision, that plan that God has for our state and follow that and not be afraid to speak up for what we believe in.”
That’s seemingly harmless Christian conservative rhetoric, but this isn’t 1992, so she kicked it up a notch: “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho.”
Yikes! She’s apparently confused Jesus with a less-stable Rambo.
During her unhinged rant, McGeachin stared directly at the camera for a terrifying moment, as if she’d just been possessed by a (slightly more) evil version of herself from an alternate reality. Religious extremists always want to go full Old Testament with Jesus, who’s a more low-key New Testament character. He made water into wine. He didn’t just smash people in the head with wine bottles. He also healed lepers, and while he didn’t use a vaccine, his personal philosophy clearly wasn’t “let leprosy run unchecked so we can build up a natural immunity.”
The power of Christ has apparently compelled McGeachin to further diminish reproductive freedom in America. Monday, she demanded that Governor Little call a special session of the state legislature and remove all existing exceptions from Idaho’s already awful “trigger law” banning abortion. Idaho passed its current ban in 2020, which Little signed into law. Its oh-so-generous exceptions include rape, incest, and saving the live of the domestic infant supplier, or as we mammals like to say, “the mother.”
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McGeachin said she wants to “make Idaho a state where life is fully and unconditionally protected,” unless apparently there are complications during your forced birth. Then the state is down one domestic infant supplier, we suppose.
House Assistant Minority Leader Lauren Necochea, a Democrat from Boise, reportedly “reacted with shock to McGeachin’s position.” It’s as if she’s never met the lieutenant governor. She said McGeachin’s demands were “deeply disturbing.”
“It is unthinkable to force the continuation of a pregnancy with life-threatening complications,” Necochea told the Idaho Press. “And we should never force childbirth upon a victim of rape or incest, or anyone else.”
Necochea noted that the supposed exceptions are already bullshit because “most victims of rape and incest do not file a police report,” which the law requires. She added, “It’s my understanding that it’s also not common for police reports to be released mid-investigation.”
So, the exceptions are not much of an “exception” at all. Most Idaho Republicans understand this, so don’t want to give the game away by outright removing them. However, McGeachin stands firm in her zealotry: “I believe that life begins at conception, and no child should be killed because of the circumstances surrounding his or her conception. Of course I understand that there are rare medical emergencies in which it may be impossible to save the life of both the mother and the child. In such rare occurrences, a difficult decision may have to be made, but Idaho law must never allow for elective abortion masquerading as medical necessity.”
I fear we’re going to see many similar horrors from anti-abortion activists and politicians, who aren’t satisfied with just overturning Roe. Unfortunately, the GOP establishment has a fairly consistent record of folding to its extremist base.
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