Policy, Philosophy & Thoughts

For more than five decades, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act has carried a promise that should be pretty simple: every child deserves a real opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed. Not just the children who live in the right ZIP code, speak the right language, come from the right family, or happen to fit neatly into systems that were designed with students like them in mind. Every child deserves that opportunity, because education is not simply another government prog

Utah legalized medical cannabis because patients fought to be treated like patients. We should never allow the system built from that victory to drift backward into treating them like suspects, revenue sources, or problems for regulators to manage. I was directly involved in drafting Proposition 2 and the Utah Medical Cannabis Act that followed. My position on this issue is grounded not only in principle, but in hands-on experience with how the system was built, how it was ch

You’re going to have to bear with me for a minute, because this is going to require a little Heather Cox Richardson–length setup— not because I got lost on the way to the point, but because the point is bigger than a bumper sticker. To understand why Utah should begin building a spaceport in the West Desert, we have to connect a NASA capsule landing in the dirt, Hill Air Force Base, lunar mining, freight rail, the Great Salt Lake, public education, and the economy our grandch

My environmental vision starts from a premise that is both moral and practical: we are stewards, not owners. The land, water, air, and ecosystems that sustain life in Utah were not created for short-term extraction or political convenience. They were entrusted to us, and our responsibility is to pass them forward in better condition than we received them. That responsibility does not belong to one political party, one generation, or one ideology. It belongs to everyone who ex

I am a military veteran and a gun owner, and I support the Second Amendment. I also believe firearm safety is a serious responsibility— not a slogan, not a culture-war prop, but something that has to be lived. I do not see a contradiction between those positions. I see the whole point. Camp Williams, 2010. On the range with the Utah Army National Guard, where I qualified on the M16 alongside the soldiers I served with. This is where my respect for firearms was sharpened— in t