Dumb of the week

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

It’s been a long time since we’ve written about former District 1 Rep. Heather Scott in these pages. Rep. Scott moved over to District 2 in 2022 after a new legislative map redrew a portion of Bonner County from District 1 to District 2. We have largely been free of her nonsense ever since.

Readers might remember Scott for posing with a Confederate battle flag at a 2015 parade in Priest River. Reps. That same year, Reps. Caroline Nilsson Troy, R-Genesee, and Don Cheatham, R-Post Falls, reportedly witnessed Scott climb up on her desk in to examine a small, black object that dangled from a thin wire from the ceiling, claiming it was a “listening device” before cutting it off with a knife she had on her (it turns out the object was part of the Capitol Building’s fire suppression system). 

Scott also once commented that female House members only advance to leadership positions if they “spread their legs.” During the pandemic, she called Idaho Gov. Brad Little “Little Hitler” and likened his stay-at-home order to the policies that led to the Holocaust. 

Once, prior to a candidate’s forum sponsored by the Reader, Scott took to Facebook to warn her followers from attending because the forum was a “trap” that would make Republican lawmakers look foolish because the answers they gave to questions would be reported in the newspaper. 

Scott once triggered a special legislative session of the Idaho Legislature after killing a bill that would have brought the state into line with federally mandated child support rules because she and other like-minded lawmakers feared it would lead to the practice of “Sharia Law.” She also claimed white nationalism is “no more than a Caucasian who [is] for the Constitution and making America great again.” 

Finally, Scott’s name appeared as many as 20 times in the 108-page Washington House report on former-Washington Rep. Matt Shea in which he was labeled a “domestic terrorist” for his anti-government rhetoric. She also attended the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by followers of anti-government activist Ammon Bundy in 2016.

Perhaps in an attempt to return to her “greatest hits,” Scott made national news again last week for introducing a bill that she claimed would keep human flesh and bone out of the food supply. What’s more, the cannibalism bill appeared to be based on the proposal of a reality show prank. 

House Bill 522 would expand Idaho’s existing criminal cannibalism law to prohibit any person from “willfully provid[ing] the flesh or blood of a human being to another person to ingest without such person’s knowledge or consent.” It’s worth noting that Idaho’s cannibalism law already outlaws the willful ingestion of the flesh or blood of a human being.

On the House floor, Scott noted that she had introduced this totally-not-satire bill to prevent human composting and to ensure that fooling people into eating human flesh is not “normalized.”

“I know this seems a heavy topic,” Scott said. “It might seem kind of gruesome. It kinda is.”

Scott apparently heard in 2019 that Washington state had started human composting, “and that disturbed me,” she said. “So I wanted to address this because what I didn’t want to see is bags of compost with human bone fragments. I didn’t want to see that in my Home Depot stores.”

What Scott is referring to (we think) is that Washington became the first state in the country to legalize “human composting,” which is an environmentally-friendly burial practice that does not involve bagging or consumption of human remains, nor is composted human material used in food production. 

Scott said that she “watched a video of some food show,” on a flight where contestants were told that human flesh was a possible ingredient in the food they would be eating.

“I thought — this is going to be normalized at some point,” Scott said. “The way our society is going, and the direction we’re going, this is going to be normalized.”

The show, however, was most likely a decade-old episode of David Spade’s prank show Fameless, which used improv comedy to test “how far real people will go to be famous.” The 2015 episode showed a contestant serving sausage that the chef claimed was “human flesh,” but later informed the contestant it was a prank. 

We hope Rep. Scott avoids watching reruns of Squid Game, because the laws she’ll try to write after that one will be truly astounding.