Op-Eds

The president cannot expect the Senate’s full cooperation at the same time that he does violence to Congress‘ constitutional prerogatives. In response to the president’s unconstitutional actions, the Senate must adopt a new threshold for confirming his nominees. Simply put, there is a new standard for Senate confirmations.

As published by the Deseret News: This year America will celebrate the 225th anniversary of our Constitution.  Its legal framework of checks and balances, enumerated powers, and individual rights has […]

In drafting the Constitution and establishing our nation’s system of government, the Founding Fathers carefully instituted a system of checks and balances among the three coequal branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial.

To combat the President’s shrewd political scheme and give Americans some level of economic certainty, Republicans in the House and the Senate must move swiftly to enact a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut.

Not all balanced-budget amendments are created equal, as the American people are about to find out. The recent deal that raised the debt limit and created the so-called supercommittee mandates that both houses of Congress vote on a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the federal budget.

The American agricultural industry is critical to the stability of our nation’s economy. Unfortunately, few Americans are willing to work in many agricultural jobs, and outdated visa laws prevent business from attracting temporary foreign workers to fill the shortage.

President Obama has spent weeks telling Congress to pass his flawed second stimulus bill, which he erroneously believes will put Americans back to work with another round of wasteful government spending on bloated programs and failed investments. Noticeably absent from the president’s agenda, however, is a significant push to tap more of our vast natural resources in order to expand domestic energy production and achieve energy independence for the first time in decades. To simply ignore the potential that lies beneath American soil is to handicap the nation’s economic future.

During August, I had an opportunity to see up close and personal just how damaging the prairie dog has been to certain portions of southern Utah. Both public and private lands have been affected and Utahns are right to demand that local and state officials do something about it.

In consecutive weeks, President Obama has presented two painfully unserious and economically misguided proposals. The first, his $450 billion “American Jobs Act,” is another stimulus proposal, based on the ill-conceived notion that more government spending is the answer to what ails the economy. The second is the president’s plan to raise taxes by $1.5 trillion on American job creators. Both plans are a far cry from “winning the future,” as the president claims on the campaign trail.

President Obama began and ended his speech last Thursday by correctly identifying America’s unemployment problem as a crisis that deserves urgent action by Congress. After two and a half years, it’s encouraging that the President finally recognizes the true magnitude of our job shortage. Unfortunately the President’s proposal was a predictably disappointing iteration of the failed economic prescriptions he offered in 2009.