In politics, you’re either on message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Ignore the Distraction.
If you had to recap the week in Utah politics… what would you say was the most important thing that happened?
If you judge by the headlines you may say the answer is clearly the Legislature passing a pair of resolutions relating to critical race theory and gun rights.
You also might also say it was the Governor going head-to-head with legislative leaders over whether it not those issues would be addressed in special session.
In years past, the governor was the only one who could call a special session and, in doing so, sets the narrow scope of what can be on the docket. That changed a few years back when Utah voters amended state constitution to allow the legislature to call itself into special session under certain circumstances.
Governor Cox opted to leave out two issues the legislature had requested be on the table. He wrote a rather lengthy letter to explain that, though he doesn’t disagree on the issue, he deemed it better suited for the general session than a special session.
Those two issues (opposing the teaching of Critical Race Theory and establishing Utah as a Second Amendment Sanctuary) don’t fall within the scope of what the Legislature can use as a reason to call itself into special session so they instead took the rare path of calling an “extraordinary session.”
What is an extraordinary session you ask? Well, so did I.
It’s when the only one chamber calls itself in to session. And in this case, both chambers called themselves, individually, into session… to pass resolutions on the two aforementioned issues.
Quite extraordinary, indeed.
Back to my original question: What was the most important thing that happened this week? If you said the special session scope battle or extraordinary session resolutions… sorry, no points for you.
The most imprint thing was actually the one with the biggest price tag. What the legislature really did this week was vote to accept about $1.7 billion in federal funds and begin the process of appropriating that money for the kinds of things you can only do with that kind of cash including improving our water and technology infrastructure and tackling housing issues.
But you likely heard less about that.
By the way, it’s not entirely your fault that you may not have been paying attention to the right thing. The media was also fascinated with the resolutions, as well.
Too often, we – the consumers of media and the media itself – get distracted by the politics and forgets to look at the policy.
So, what’s the lesson?
It’s easy to get distracted. The story grabbing the headlines isn’t always the thing you should be paying attention to and it is all-too-rarely the thing that actually impacts your life.
It gets worse when we pay too little attention to the policy and get dazzled by the spectacle of politics.
In the end, the House and Senate passed resolutions taking a stand against Critical Race Theory (which is not taught in schools in Utah) and in favor of establishing Utah as a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary.
A quick civics lesson: a resolution is basically a fancy press release. It doesn’t really do anything. It’s not a Bill. It doesn’t change the law.
But while everyone was up-in-arms on both sides – those who think Critical Race Theory is indoctrination and that guns are days away from mass confiscation – and those who think gun laws are in need of some fine tuning and that history should be taught warts and all – actual governing was being done whether you notice or not.
There are those in government who actually want Utahns to know about some really important things they are doing. But the smart policies are no match for the distraction of the moment.
And on the national level there are those who have learned to use the distraction to keep you upset about relatively trivial or even completely made up issues specifically so you won’t see what they are doing where it does make a difference.
Learn to detect political misdirection for what it is and you’ll not only be a better citizen, we”l be on our way to being a better country.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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