One of 73 Republican Freshmen elected to Congress in the November 1994 landslide, Rep. Helen Chenoweth
is a conservative from Idaho who epitomizes the stand-alone spirit of an earlier America.
“I think it is great!” Republican Helen Chenoweth tells Insight about the shutdown of the
federal government in an interview at her Capitol Hill office on day two of the face-off between
President Clinton and the Republican leadership.
“I think it is great,” explains the soft-spoken, very civil but nonetheless feisty representative
from Idaho’s first district, because “it shows the resolve we are functioning under to bring
this president around on the budget.”
The remark comes as no great surprise. In the year that she has served in Congress, the
57-year-old Chenoweth has emerged as one of the most visible of what she likes to call the
“unusual” class of 73 Republican freshmen elected to the House in November 1994.
“What makes us unusual.” says Chenoweth, suggesting that the term applies equally to her as to
other freshmen, “is that to most of us achieving is more important than a career inside the
Washington Beltway.” And the goal they set out to achieve, according to Chenoweth, can be
summed up as “bringing accountability back to the federal government.”
Surely, no one can question her resolve. A long shot in her congressional race last year
(Chenoweth’s previous political experience included a job as a congressional chief-of-staff and
work for the Idaho Republican Party), she nonetheless won the primary by defeating three
Republicans --one a popular lieutenant governor. Then in the general election she won by 53
percent over the Democratic incumbent --a man a Lou Harris poll predicted would trounce her by
12 percent or more in a landslide.
It was a victory won despite the label “extreme on abortion,” which was pegged on her during the
campaign. Never mind that Chenoweth opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and
concern for the mother’s health, hardly an extreme position.
It was won too in the face of the opposition’s efforts to paint her as some kind of a
nut --”the far right” was the phrase frequently used --on almost every issue from the
environment to gun control, accusations Chenoweth wisely handled by ignoring them while playing
herself with gusto to the hilt. “I am mainstream in Idaho,” says Chenoweth, one of the founders
of Family Forum, a nationwide organization supporting family values.
The candidate attended fund-raisers that included a sockeye salmon bake --thus feasting on an
allegedly endangered species. She was quoted in the largely liberal media as saying that the
one genuinely endangered species these days was the “Anglo-Saxon male.”
Then, after she was elected, this politically incorrect woman let it be known that she prefers
the title “congressman” to being called congresswoman. Idaho, she says “is like American was
100 years ago,” and she doesn’t want it changed.
Her district, which runs in western Idaho form the Canadian border to the border with Nevada, is
home to such radical separatists as the Aryan Nation, and to right-wing militia groups whose
members have expressed support for Chenoweth, a fact that led the Idaho Statesman, the state’s
chief newspaper, to dub her the “poster child” of the militia movement.
Chenoweth is no advocate of violence, she insists. But she refuses to buy her way to
respectability by denouncing everything the militia stands for. “I will never distance myself
from anyone who simply exercises the right to free speech, the right to assemble, and the right
to keep and bear arms,” she says.
It’s a statement that opponents see as full of code words supporting far-right extremism.
But what it really contains is Chenoweth’s faith in the U.S. Constitution to guarantee freedom
when that Constitution is strictly interpreted as she believes the Founding Fathers intended.
Her concern that the Constitution remain intact led Chenoweth to vote against the wishes of the
House of Republican leadership earlier this year. The issue was the line-item veto that
bestowed on the president the power to eliminate sections of bills he didn’t like, then sign
the amended bill into law. For Chenoweth, the line-item veto is a “clear violation of the
separation of powers between the legislature and the executive.” The line-item veto, she says,
is a power “this president or any president should not have.”
This fall The Progressive magazine named Chenoweth on of the 10 dumbest members of Congress, a
gratuitous cruelty the far-left magazine could have dispelled with a short conversation with
the lady congressman.
Chenoweth regards Thomas Jefferson and Margaret Thatcher as model advocates of limited
government. But the 19th century French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) holds
a special place in her pantheon of conservative thinkers. Chenoweth hands out paperback copies
of Bastiat’s The Law to visitors at her office. It is a passionate but closely-reasoned book
by a man who profoundly rejected what he regarded as the French Revolution’s bequest of the
false notion that government can solve all problems and create heaven on earth.
Having examined in Revolution and what followed in France, Bastiat condemned writers and
politicians who “look upon society as an artificial creation of the legislator’s genius.”
In all philosophies of government that claim to “improve” mankind or “do good” you will find
“the idea that mankind merely is inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality, and
prosperity form the power of the state,” writes Bastiat.
Says Chenoweth, “The [American] government was originally set up so that there were very few
controls on lawful people.” But that’s changed, she argues. Now “we are moving in the
direction of controlling institutions” whose “aim is to move [America] in an egalitarian
direction where everything will be predictable and very controllable,” and no one steps out
of line.
The tall, slim Chenoweth, a grandmother of six who looks a decade younger than her 57 years,
was born on a farm near Burlingame, Kan. “My father worked six days a week but Sunday always
took the family to [the local Baptist] church.” she says.
Chenoweth fired a rifle at the age of six: “My mother’s .22. She took me out and started
training me.” she says. The future Idahoan grew up on a dairy farm in Oregon where her father
moved the family after a brief stay in Los Angeles. He decided, she explains, “the best place
to raise us was the country. I grew up close to the soil.”
Indeed, Chenoweth describes herself as an ardent environmentalist, properly understood: “I like
to be in the back country. We gain strength from being alone in God’s country,” she says.
She wants to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to give it “more specific goals.” When it was
first debated in the early 1970s, she notes, the big issue at hand was to halt the declining
population of the Bald Eagle, the national symbol. “Golly, who wouldn’t be for that?” she asks.
But now the list includes “a snail from Idaho the size of No. 1 buckshot. A coffee grain.”
She also laments the environmentalists who want to reintroduce the grey wolf and the grizzly
bear to populated areas of Idaho: “You might as well bring sharks to the beach,” she says.
The congressman is sponsoring a bill that would require federal law enforcement officials to
get the written permission of local sheriffs and other municipal officers before making arrests
in that sheriff’s county. It’s a bill, she says, that she’s letting “cook...percolate. The
longer it cooks, the more support it’s getting.”
Her race for a second term will be “tough,” she says. Problems involving financing of her 1994
victory have surfaced, including a debt of $20,000 her former campaign manager says she owes
him. And Bill Mauk, chairman of the Idaho Democratic Party, has said he is going to file a
complaint with the Federal Election Commission over a $40,000 loan Chenoweth took out from an
Idaho bank to help pay for the race. She has taken a second mortgage on her home to pay off
debts and silence critics.
But the lady congressman thinks her big problem in the 1996 election will be the liberal smear
that she is some kind of far-right kook. her liberal critics continue to try to make her look
as extreme as possible, she says. Dan Williams, a Boise lawyer who may become her Democratic
opponent next year, has been quoted in the press labeling her an extremist. Other Democrats
have said that mainstream Idaho regards her as a “nut case.”
That may be a mixture of sour grapes and wishful thinking on their part. Observers in Idaho
tell Insight that support among her admirers in the state remains firm --and that the label of
“extremist” doesn’t work there as it might on the East Coast.
Bastiat’s The Law ends with this admonition, which might sum up Chenoweth’s approach to
government, as well as the thoughts of may of her constituents: “And now that the legislators
and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end
where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an
acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.”
