A GOP lawmaker supported an immigration crackdown. Her husband paid a price.

[Zorro]

The call came as Tom Zuiderveld was driving last month, just minutes from his home on five verdant acres of Southern Idaho’s agricultural heartland. It was his district manager, relaying that three of the dairies he sold synthetic oil to had refused to continue working with him.

Zuiderveld felt blindsided — he had known the dairy owners for years, and the accounts represented 80 percent of his income. But it wasn’t about his performance, the manager explained on the phone and in a later email. It was about the politics of Zuiderveld’s wife.

Glenneda Zuiderveld is a Republican state senator and member of a far-right bloc that was pushing for strict immigration laws. Idaho’s dairy industry, which powers the economy of the Magic Valley region anchored by Twin Falls, depends on foreign-born labor and fiercely opposed the measures.

To the Zuidervelds, the rupture was simple retaliation that illustrates just how bitterly personal American politics has become — an “ambush,” Tom Zuiderveld said, that cost the couple as much as $125,000 in commission a year. To the businesses, which are dominated by Republicans in this deep red state, the moves were fair game in an essential effort to protect the nation’s third-largest dairy industry.

“We live in a free country, and we can actually do business with whoever we want to,” said Arie Roeloffs, owner of Riverbend Dairy, which in April became the fourth to cut ties with Zuiderveld, who is his wife’s campaign treasurer. “What his wife is doing in the state legislature are things that I don’t agree with. And he stands behind her.”

https://wapo.st/4eqX5xi