Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:22 a.m. April 14 with additional comments from Blaine Conzatti and the Idaho Attorney General’s Office.
Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden on Wednesday issued a press release to publicly dispute a claim by Idaho Family Policy Center President Blaine Conzatti regarding Wasden’s legal defense of the state’s new abortion law, styled after a similar law in Texas.
The law, Senate Bill 1309, passed the Idaho Legislature this session and was signed into law by Gov. Brad Little on March 23. Little said he believed the law, which allows family members of abortion patients to sue the patient’s health care provider, used a flawed mechanism and was likely to invite court challenges.
A week later, a regional chapter of Planned Parenthood filed suit over the law.
The Idaho Supreme Court on Friday paused the law’s implementation, as it considers the legal challenge.
Conzatti claimed in an article posted on the policy center’s website, and in a mass email to the policy center’s subscribers, that “the Idaho Attorney General cut a deal with Planned Parenthood, in which both parties agreed to let the court temporarily block the law in exchange for slowing down court proceedings.”
That was false, Wasden’s office said in the news release, adding, “Conzatti has since apologized to the office for the false representation.”
Conzatti on Thursday told the Idaho Capital Sun that Wasden’s own characterization of what happened is...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...