320,000 is a LOT of signatures
>> Bryan Schott: And we're going to sing an original song that interestingly enough, was
written by no one. Hit it.
This is Special Session and I'm your host, Bryan
Schott of Utah Political Watch. I
have to apologize. There was no episode
last week. I'm sorry for that. I was
waylaid by my lawsuit against the
Utah State legislature for denying me
a press pass last week. Two legislative staff
are had to sit for sworn
depositions in the case. I did the same thing last
month for my deposition. I can't really talk about what happened
in the deposition just yet, but I will say
that some of the answers that they provided
were kind of eyebrow raising. I'll
talk about it as soon as I can, but I can't just yet.
That's what they call in the business, a tease. I
did get a nice note from one of the listeners that I want to share here, sort of a
testimony, if you will. And I won't identify
them by name, but they write, driving to Snow Basin this morning
with my 8 year old. And I told her we're going to listen to
a political podcast as we drove. She said, not
the Hinckley Report, it's so dry. He replied,
no, it's the Bryan Schott one. And she replied, oh, good,
he's funny. So, uh,
this podcast eight year old approved.
If you have nice things to say to me or want to drop me some
hate mail, you'll find my email in the show notes. Feel free to reach out
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Okay, enough of that stuff. Let's get to the news stories from the last
week.
320,000 is a big number,
especially when you're gathering signatures. The
coalition of labor unions known as Protect
Utah Workers, they needed to get 140,000
signatures, just a little bit more than 140,000
signatures statewide in order to put the
referendum to overturn the union busting bill
on the ballot. And this week they turned in
320,000 signatures.
Now, that doesn't mean all of them are going to count. They have to be
verified by local county clerks.
Everyone has to be a registered voter and the
signatures need to match. But that
320,000 number is a
big number. They also have a couple of other thresholds
they have to hit in order to make sure that they get on the ballot.
They have to get signatures from 8% of
voters in 15 of the state's 29
Senate districts. That's a pretty high threshold to meet. And the
reason lawmakers say they did it is to
make sure that support for
overturning a law through a referendum
has a broad support across the state. But
the real reason they did it is because that's a very, very hard thing
to do and it makes it harder to put a referendum
on the ballot. So the signatures all
have to be verified by the county clerks and the
lieutenant governor and then everyone who signed the
petition, all of those valid signatures, their names are going to be
put online and we'll see an effort, uh, probably
a well funded effort to people
to take their name off of the petition
to a signature rescission effort. Uh,
it's happened before, but it wasn't really for a
referendum. It was more for a ballot
Initiative Back in 2018,
the Count My Vote ballot initiative, which would have gotten
rid of Utah's caucus convention system. They
qualified for the ballot, they got enough signatures for the
ballot, but opponents had a rescission effort
and they were able to get enough people to remove
their signatures from the ballot in
a couple of senate districts in order to
make it so it didn't qualify. So this is not out
of the woods yet, but that 320,000
is still a very big number.
And it sends a message to
Utah lawmakers that shows
wide opposition to the law
that they passed, which was HB267. And
that bill, if you'll remember, the union busting
bill, it removed or eliminated the
right of public workers in the state to
collectively bargain for wages and working
conditions. Uh, they did all public
workers, although the main target was the Utah
Education association and was retribution for their
opposition to amendment A,
uh, which would have changed the way that schools are funded in the state,
changed the constitutional earmark for school funding
and for their lawsuit challenging the school vouchers
program. Program or the Utah Fits all scholarship, that was the
main target. But they included all public employees
into this bill. And if you remember, there was
massive opposition to this bill during the
session. Union showed up for the committee hearings
and when it was up on the floor and there was a
compromise in the works, but at the last second
it fell apart. And I talked about this before, one of the
reasons why is that unions
had agreed to take a neutral position on the
compromise, but their members kept calling,
leaving emails and calling lawmakers and they just
didn't want to hear it. They did not like the outrage that was coming their way
over this legislation. So they decided to ditch the
compromise and pass the bill in its original form. But they
didn't get 2/3 in both the House and the Senate, which
leaves it open for a Referendum. So that's where we're at.
How much did it cost to get this on the ballot? Well, almost
$3 million so far. I went and looked
at some of the donations and national unions, local
unions poured in as of last week,
2.6 million, doll.
The effort. Now some of that was through in
kind donations, but a lot of union workers
from outside of Utah joined the effort. The
national education association and 13 different
state level teachers unions sent people here
to work or provided remote assistance from
staffers. They traveled from Hawaii,
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland.
The National Education association is the biggest
contributor to the referendum push. They donated more
than $1.8 million to this.
And that was as of last week. I haven't looked at the latest updated
numbers. 1.5 million of that went directly
to the signature effort. They did a
$500,000 down payment for the
professional signature gathering firm to go out and
get these signatures and then the balance was just a little
over a million dollars. Other national unions
kicked in some money as well. The, uh, American Federation
of State, county and Municipal employees, known as AFSCME,
they put in $250,000. It was
$10,000 from the International Brotherhood of Electric
Workers. Lot of branches of the Utah Education
association get involved with
time and some donations. And then there were
other, uh, unions that got involved. But this is not
over yet. Now that the signatures have been
gathered, then the effort to try and
invalidate or remove enough of those signatures
to keep this from qualifying is underway. So
we're not out of the woods yet, but
320,000 signatures is a
significant number. They think that may be the highest number of
signatures ever gathered for a referendum.
And they're probably right.
There was a really interesting economic juxtaposition
earlier this week. Lawmakers, legislative
leaders, Governor Spencer Cox had a big press
conference to celebrate the fact that they were
named the state with the best economic
outlook for the 18th straight year.
That ranking came from the American Legislative Exchange
Council, also known as alec. ALEC is one of
the most influential conservative groups in the
country. One of the things that they do, if you're unfamiliar with
this group, is they create model
legislation that lawmakers then
run in their home legislatures
around the country. In fact, in 2019 there was
an investigation by a number of news
outlets and they found out that at least 10,000
bills, uh, were copied from ALEC's
model legislation were introduced
nationwide over an eight year period
and more than 2,100 of those were
signed into law. And that happens here all the time.
Utah, there's big supporters of alec,
Senate President Stuart Adams is on
their board of directors. They had their annual meeting
here in Utah back in the summer of
2021. So the ranking came in
their rich States, poor states
report. And Utah had the best economic
outlook for the 18th straight
year. And this, this best economic outlook, it's
what's best for businesses. Okay, you need
that. ALEC is very pro business. Um,
one of the reasons why is that Utah's minimum wage is at the
federal minimum wage, which is
$7.25 an hour.
Utah is a right to work state, meaning that workers
cannot be required to join a union
as part of their employment or
as a requirement for employment. In fact, ALEC
praised the union busting bill
HB267 that lawmakers
passed earlier this year. We just talked about it as part
of the referendum effort. So those are some of the reason
why Utah is ranked so high as the best
economic outlook. But at that very same event, Governor Spencer
Cox, uh, said that he has instructed
state agencies to start planning for
a possible recession, uh, in case there is
an economic downturn. And why is that? Well,
it's because of President, uh, Donald Trump's tariffs
that came on Liberation Day that have just thrown
the market and the world
economy into chaos right now.
Now, Cox did not say that those tariffs were one of the reasons
they were looking at a recession. But if you look at all of the economic
indicators and the predictions, you see the big
banks, you see JP Morgan, you see
Chase, they're all raising their
forecast for a possible recession to
60%, 70%. And the only reason why
that number keeps going up is because of President
Donald Trump's tariffs. You really have to wonder whether
lawmakers were wise to push ahead
with another tax cut this year
that mostly benefits the top
income earners in the state. They reduced
Utah's income tax rate by
0.5%. I've told you about this before.
Study after study after study shows that most
of the money that is used to pay for those tax
cuts goes to the top
20%, the top 1%, really, of
income earners in the state. While those at the middle
and the bottom, they see maybe 8 to
$12 a month in tax
cuts. And those tax cuts are probably another reason
why al really, really high on
Utah's economy. But if we do hit a recession,
you're going to have to wonder whether or not that was the
best move, whether it was wise. You hear
lawmakers all the time talking about how Utah is the best
managed state in the union. If we have to have a special
session and start Cutting budgets. A lot of people
are going to be pointing at that tax cut, whether fair or not,
and saying, was that really the best thing
to do? Because you have to remember that income
taxes can only pay for public education,
higher education, and social services. And there
are mechanisms in place to make sure that
if there are any cuts to the education budget, it will
be very, very minimal. There are a number of rainy day
accounts and other protected accounts for
public education. So I don't know if schools are really
going to feel it. And that tax cut,
you know, criticism of that, if there's an economic
downturn, I don't know if that will be a fair criticism. What
will happen in the long run, though, is
if we have an economic downturn or a recession
and you start to see unemployment go
well, that's going to hurt people's ability to pay
income taxes. And if income tax collections go
down, then you can start to criticize the tax
cut, because as I said before, income taxes pay
for education in the state for the most part. And so
if you see those income tax collections start to
drop because the economy turns sour, then
you can point at those tax cuts and say, was that really
the best thing to do? But until that happens, it's not
really a fair criticism.
I reported on Thursday that
Utah freshman Congressman Mike Kennedy was
part of a Republican congressional delegation that
visited El Salvador and the notorious
seacot prison where the Maryland man
who was wrongfully deported
is being held. And that visit came just one day
before Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen visited the
country and was blocked from trying to meet with
Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Nobody knows
if he alive or not. The Trump
administration has been ordered to facilitate
his return by the Supreme Court, but
they're refusing, arguing that he has
alleged ties to criminal gangs, although
there's really not a lot of proof to support that
contention. I reached out to Kennedy's office
to get comment or chat with him about the visit.
They did not return those
requests, but I did find a picture of him online
along with the rest of the US Delegation meeting
at the US Embassy in El Salvador, Salvador. This
is the same trip. And I don't know if you saw these pictures,
but this is the same trip where one of the
other people involved in it. That's, uh,
Republican Representative Riley Moore from
West Virginia. He posted selfies from inside
the seacot prison, giving the double
thumbs up pose, uh, in front of these
cells filled with hundreds of
inmates. The brutal conditions for
prisoners inside of Seekot has earned it
the nickname of hell on Earth. The
that holds up to 40,000 prisoners
and there are reports that they're
looking to double that capacity. This
is a really, really brutal prison. And there is at least one
person from America, Kilmar Abrego Garcia,
who came to this country fleeing gangs who wanted to kill him. He
was given protected status, but the Trump administration
deported him in what they admit was a clerical
error. And he. But even though they say it was a mistake,
they're refusing to do anything to return him
to the United States or get him out of that prison. But at least
one Utah member of Congress, Representative Mike
Kennedy, has been inside seacot, and as of
Thursday afternoon, he's not
talking about it yet.
It could be something, it could be nothing. But it did
make me scratch my head a little bit.
I reported this week that former Utah
representative and now Fox News host Jason Chaffetz,
ah, took the remaining $130,000 he had
in his federal leadership pack and
moved it into a state level pack.
His federal pack was called American Victory
and he moved all that money into the Utah
Victory pack. Chaffetz's reasoning behind
the move is that it's simply a cost cutting
measure. He has to file financial disclosures both
for the federal pack and for the local
pac. And moving it all into one pack
makes some sense because then he only has to file one thing and pay
accountants, one organization. But
there are some advantages for him to do this and a few
drawbacks as well. But the timing is really, really
interesting because his federal PAC
has not taken in any money since 2020.
It's really done nothing. All he's done through it is
spent money on compliance, making
sure that his reports are filed correctly, accountants,
and then he's paying one of his former staffers, uh, for some
communications work. So the cost cutting thing there makes some
sense. The shift to a state pac, which he really
started to ramp up last year, makes you wonder
if he's thinking about running for
an office here in the state. Specifically, Governor
Chaffetz loves to flirt with the idea of running
for governor. He was mentioned as
someone who was lying it in 2020 and then
again in 2024. That makes some sense. He
started his political career running the campaign
of John Huntsman Jr. When he first ran for
governor and then he was his first chief of staff before he
go run for Congress when he defeated Chris
Cannon. The advantage of moving to a state
pack for Chaffetz allows him to take
unlimited donations into that
entity. Uh, a federal PAC, you're limited to a
$5,000 donation from an
Individual in Utah, there are no limits. You
can give however much you want to whoever you
want. In fact, last year, he pulled in some pretty big
donations. He got $20,000 from
George Glass, who was the ambassador to
Port Portugal in the first Trump administration. And
now he is Trump's nominee to be ambassador to
Japan. That's a $20,000 donation.
He got another $20,000 from David
Lizzenby, who started the For Life Research
MLM. $10,000 from Kevin
Pritchett, who owns King's Camo here in Utah. And
Trump's former National security advisor, Robert O' Brien shipped in
$5,000. That's all last year. And he's
given out some money to local
Republican candidates, which is one of the
main reasons why you have. Although, as I said,
most of the money he's been spending over the past few years has been on
administrative costs. During the 2024
cycle, he gave just $5,000 total
to Utah's congressional delegation through
his federal PAC. $5,000.
Overall, Senator Mike Lee got the most at $2,000, and
he wasn't even up for election. In fact, the only person he
did not give money to was Blake Moore. The
state PAC gave about $4,700 to
various state and local candidates and some
local county Republican parties. So ch
raise a lot more money from less people
through the state pack, and he'll still be able to donate
to federal candidates using his state pac.
The limits of what he can give will still
apply, but he can take in more money. And if
he pulls the trigger and decides to run for governor in
2028, he can take that money and then transfer it
over to a campaign account. So there's not a lot of downside.
The only negative for him is this would take a federal
run for him off the top table. When he was in the House, he
mused about possibly running for U.S. senate when
Orin Hatch retired. Uh, that never happened.
Moving his money from the federal PAC to the state PAC means he would have to
start over if he wanted to run for a federal office,
because you cannot take state money and transfer it
to a federal campaign account. But you can take federal
money and transfer it to a state account here in
Utah, so it can flow only one way. Now,
Chaffetz might have a hard time running for
governor. If you remember in 2017, he had
just won reelection. And then he shocked
everybody by announcing that he was stepping down, that he
was retiring. He ended up getting a job with
Fox News. And I ran into him earlier this year
at the Salt Lake County Republican convention. And
he's, he's got a great gig. That is a
really good gig. He was a little bit haggard because
he said he had to get up, uh, early in the morning for a Fox News
hit. But it's a pretty great gig.
He's on Fox News, he's authored some best
selling books, he hosts a podcast that's
actually pretty good. I've listened to a number of episodes and it'
not a bad show. So you have to wonder why
he would want to run and he would have a hard time convincing
voters that he wouldn't quit on them again. Because he
did quit in 2017
triggered the first special election in the state
in almost a hundred years. That was the one that was won
by then Provo Mayor John
Curtis, who went into Congress and now
Curtis is in the U.S. senate. So that's a big
hurdle. And I don't know if Chaffetz would do that, but at least
he made a move that makes running for
governor in 2028 at least a
little more likely. You'll remember Governor Spencer Cox said
he's not going to run for reelection in 2028, so
this will be his last term in the Governor's mansion. It's going to be
an open race and the Republican primary race for the nomination
could be a knockdown drag out. There are a lot of people
looking at it. We know that Phil Lyman says he's going to
run again. It's pretty clear that House
Speaker Mike Schultz is planning on running
for governor in 2020. Chaffetz
gets in the race. That would be an interesting addition. And then you'll
see a few other people you're not even thinking of try to
jump in. So 2028 is going to be
a wild election year here in the state
with an open governor's race. Could we see Chaffetz?
I don't know.
But this move made it at least a little more likely.
So we all know that Senator Mike Lee is buddies
with Elon Musk. They interact all the time on
Twitter, been photographed together.
They've spent some time together. Senator Mike Lee, when
he launched his based Mike Lee
Twitter account back in 2022, he
spent a lot of time tweeting at
Elon Musk just hoping to get his attention. He
finally did. Leon Musk. I don't know how much they actually hang out,
but they interact online all the time.
And that's why I wanted to talk about this story. There was an
article in the Wall Street Journal this week.
I don't know if you saw it, but it is super
gross. The headline is the tactics Elon
Musk uses to manage his, quote,
legion of babies and their
mother. And I felt like I needed to take a
shower after this story. We all
know that Musk has at least 14 children
with four women. That includes the pop musician
Grimes. There's Chavon Zillis, who was an executive
at his brain chip implant
company, Neuralink. The most recent one was concert
conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair.
But this article says that there are people close
to Musk who believe the true number of his children
is much higher than we even
know. And in this article, it talks about how
Musk basically uses X
Twitter, the social media platform that he
turned into a cesspool, in order to approach
women and ask them if they would like to
have his babies. This article is just
all kinds of gross. Musk refers to his
office offspring as a legion, which is a
reference to the ancient military units that could
be thousands of soldiers. When Musk
was dating St. Clair, he wanted to have
as many babies as quickly as possible. So he
suggests they hired surrogates so that they
could have more babies together as quick
as possible. In fact, one of the text messages the Wall
Street Journal saw from Musk said, to
reach legion level before the
apocalypse, we will need to use
surrogates. Musk believes that
civilization is going to collapse because
of population decline. Birth rates are
going down across the world, and he wants to
correct that by, quote, helping
seed the earth with more human beings of
high intelligence, which just so happened to be his
offspring. Bleh. You've probably heard of the
pronatalism movement where people say
civilization will crumble if people don't start having more
children. In fact, in 2019, long
before he was a professional Twitter troll, Senator
Mike Lee went to the Senate floor and said
that the solution to fixing climate change
is for people to fall in love,
get married, and have some kids.
Because he says if m. If you make more people,
that means more markets for more innovation
and more babies. Means people will be looking
towards the future and they'll want to solve climate change. So
Lee was a proto pro
natalist before the IDE idea
started to gain traction on the right
now. One of the weird things about pronatalism is that
the people who believe in it want to implement government
policies and cultural solutions to
fix the problem for people to have
more babies. Of course, that doesn't mean anything like,
you know, making it so people can afford homes
or reducing the risks of climate change.
No, none of that is what we really want to do. We just want to
find ways to, to have more kids. In one part of
this article, it talks about how there was a
cryptocurrency influencer named Tiffany Fong,
um, and she was covering the downfall of crypto
tycoon Sam Bankman Fried. When
Musk started liking and replying to
her posts on Twitter. And
her interactions went through the roof because
Musk has more than 200 million
followers, almost 220 million followers.
And so she started getting more attention
and, and that led to her making money on
social media. In fact, she apparently made like
$21,000 in one two week period
because of her interactions with Musk. And
right about that time is when Musk sent her a direct
message asking if she was interested in
having his child. Kind of direct. I don't know if that's the
approach that I would use, but again, then, I'm not the richest
man in the world. Now. Fong didn't
take him up on his offer because she
wants to have children in a more traditional way,
is what she. But she was worried that turning him
down was going to hurt her earnings. And
once Musk found out that Fong had told people about
his request, he unfollowed her
and her engagement dropped a ton. In
2023, Musk started dating St. Clair. And
you'll remember her, she's the one who started a huge firestorm
over this when she was trying to get Musk
to acknowledge, uh, the paternity of their
child together. And she was working for the
deeply unfunny Babylon Bee at the time or
the company that owns Babylon Bee. And he frequently
talked about having children. St Clair was the person
who had the custom made black Make America
great again hat that Musk was wearing that was
in the gothic font that he wore all the time in the
later stages of the campaign. She was the one who made that for
him. He wore it everywhere. This article is just
chock full of gross little details here.
It says in November, Musk responded to a
selfie that St. Clair sent him by
texting back, I want to knock you up again.
You should go read it. It talks about the lengths that
Musk goes to to keep the number of children
secret so that they don't get a lot of attention, they don't put
his name on the birth certificate when they're born.
Um, he really just wants no public acknowledgment that he
is their father. Right now, as I said, we know about
14 of them, but people close to Musk say it's a lot
more. And I think it's relevant to talk about this article
because of just how close he is to Senator Mike
Lee. Because you know what they say, you are the
company you keep.
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