By Jeff A. Pierson, Oct. 14, 2025, from his Substack
Representative Jack Nelsen serves Idaho’s Legislative District 26, which includes parts of Blaine, Lincoln, and Jerome counties—a region that bridges the conservative agricultural communities of the Magic Valley with the more progressive enclaves of the Wood River Valley.
When Representative Jack Nelsen says, “Constitution First, Party Platform Second,” it sounds noble at first glance. But on closer inspection, the slogan reveals less about principle and more about pride. It is not a declaration of constitutional fidelity; it is a disclaimer, permission to ignore the commitments he made to the voters who trusted him to represent Republican values.
The U.S. Constitution is not a personal license to reinterpret public trust. It is a covenant that binds officials to uphold both the rule of law and the promises they make under its protection. It is a document that restricts government. When Nelsen ran as a Republican, he asked voters to trust that he shared their convictions: faith, family, limited government, and the protection of children and parental rights. Yet when those values came to a vote, he repeatedly chose to stand apart.
By opposing parental rights legislation such as House Bills 239 and 352, Nelsen contradicted both the U.S. Constitution’s recognition of parental authority under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Idaho Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, which affirms that all political power is inherent in the people. Parents have the first and natural right to direct their children’s education, a right that government may not usurp. His votes placed bureaucratic discretion above that constitutional hierarchy.
When Nelsen voted against House Bill 230, which sought to protect minors from indecent exhibitions, he ignored the state’s constitutional duty to promote public morality and protect the welfare of children. The Idaho Constitution grants the Legislature the authority to preserve the public peace and safety. Refusing to extend that protection to minors under the pretense of constitutional independence inverts the very purpose of lawmaking.
His opposition to House Bill 59, which protected the rights of conscience for medical providers, conflicts with both the First Amendment and Article I, Section 4 of the Idaho Constitution, which guarantee the free exercise of religion. The Constitution was written to prevent government coercion in matters of faith, not to authorize it. By voting against conscience protection, Nelsen sided with state control over individual conviction.
Even his vote against prohibiting government mask mandates, House Bill 32, undermined the constitutional principles of limited government and personal liberty. Both the U.S. and Idaho Constitutions restrict the state’s power to compel behavior without clear and lawful necessity. Nelsen’s position empowers bureaucratic overreach rather than constraining it.
But independence without integrity is not courage; it is vanity. The Constitution does not authorize self-rule by elected officials; it demands accountability to the people and to the principles that gave rise to their election. When Nelsen refused to sign the Republican Party’s Integrity in Affiliation form, he was not defending the Constitution. He was defying the transparency it requires and denying the moral order that sustains it.
Republicans are supposed to believe in both the Constitution and the platform built to defend it. The Idaho Republican Platform is not a set of shifting slogans. It is a moral framework rooted in constitutional liberty. It affirms parental rights, conscience rights, and the sanctity of life. It rejects government intrusion and ideological experimentation. These are not partisan whims. They are the lived expression of what Idaho Republicans believe government ought to protect.
If Representative Nelsen does not believe in those principles, he has every right to run as an independent. But what he cannot do, without violating the spirit of both honesty and integrity, is run as a Republican, reject the platform that defines the party, and then hide behind the Constitution as if it were a mirror for his own reflection.
Nelsen himself told a radio interviewer, “I don’t consider myself a Republican or a Democrat.” That confession might mean something if a strong, liberty-based conscience were behind it, but it is not principled, articulable independence; it is detachment defended with word salad. The people of District 26 did not elect him to fight against their rights. They elected him to be accountable.
Integrity means standing consistently on real, liberty-based principles, not on vague statements or moral compromise. The Constitution deserves defenders who see it as duty, not as cover for self-justification or mediocrity. District 26 deserves representatives who keep their word. And the voters deserve more than liberal talking points. They deserve a representative who fights for families, faith, and freedom.
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