What shone through most in Senate Pro Tem Kelly Anthon’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee on Monday was his contempt.

Contempt for the counties who were concerned about his slapdash bill’s ambiguities. Contempt for the police and sheriffs who raised concerns about the bill’s workability.

“I’m stunned,” he said, after they had testified against Senate Bill 1442, which was introduced in the committee only on Thursday.

The bill would impose a host of reporting requirements on both refugee resettlement organizations and law enforcement agencies — despite the fact that they have nothing to do with one another. One section of concern to law enforcement would require all agencies in the state to begin issuing biannual reports, with the first due six months from now. These must include “crime statistics related to illegal aliens arrested in Idaho, including the number of illegal aliens investigated, apprehended, detained, and transferred to federal officials.”

This raises obvious practical problems for police. Anyone a police officer speaks with is arguably part of an investigation, and police don’t know the immigration status of everyone they talk to. Everyone they pull over for speeding has been detained. Are they supposed to figure out the immigration status of every single person they talk to or pull over and compile it in a report? These were reasonable objections.

“There’s challenges there I think people are overlooking,” Idaho Fraternal Order of Police President Bryan Lovell told the Idaho Capital Sun last week. ”When you’ve got law enforcement agencies that are speaking out over and over and over it seems like this session, that you can’t just put these impossible parameters in place … they’re not listening to the people that are actually working these systems and doing it.”

Lovell, who testified against the bill, is a career law enforcement officer who’s been the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office for many years, and who was just last month named officer of the year. He isn’t some radical activist. Neither is Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, who gave similar testimony, and who was most recently in headlines for riding on horseback around an FBI and immigration raid in Wilder.

The Idaho Association of Counties raised equally reasonable objections: The bill declares that they could lose state funding if they don’t comply with the law, but who’s going to decide whether a county has complied? Exactly what funding would be withheld? What is the process? Is there an appeal? What happens if the state wrongfully withholds funding?

“Local, county, and state law enforcement agencies that fail to comply with the provisions of this section may be subject to withholding of state funding,” the sum total of the guardrails someone follows Anthon’s admonishment to “read the bill” will find.

Anthon, his response dripping with contempt, brushed off those objections.

“The bill that I heard discussed is not the bill that’s before you,” he said.

“You have to read the bill,” he said over and over, like an angry parent chastising a lazy child.

Despite his repeated, condescending admonishment to everyone in the room that “you have to read the bill,” it felt like he hadn’t.

The objections from police were reasonable: How can you be arrested without being apprehended? How can you be arrested without being detained? So, given that the bill specifically requires reports to include those investigated or detained, it seems clear from the plain language that the bill would not be limited to those arrested, as Anthon claimed.

Why treat the police officers raising these easily understandable problems as if they were dishonest or stupid? That’s what Anthon did.

Anthon was so angry and so contemptuous, I think, because they were getting in the way of the bill’s purpose: the primary election.

Many Republicans don’t want to return to their primary without passing something like this to insulate themselves from attacks, or to have something to pound their chest about when talking to their base. Hence a host of slapdash immigration bills that have been introduced over the objections of the law enforcement agencies that will have to employ them.

The actual effect of the bill will be to create more desk time, more paperwork and less actual law enforcement.

It will mean taking officers off the street to try to compile this useless report — well, not entirely useless. It should be good for a few campaign ads at least.

“X stands shoulder to shoulder with Trump on immigration.”

Cops and counties will just have to figure out how to adapt, given this much more important priority.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.