Op-Eds

Amid all the disruptions and frightening statistics, there is good news: We are going to defeat COVID-19. And the most important part of that sentence is the word “we.” The time is going to come for political debates — important and contentious debates — about the United States’ response to this coronavirus outbreak.

The FBI improperly spied on the Trump campaign in 2016. We must ensure the bureau can’t do it in 2020 or ever again. Because if the FBI can unfairly target a presidential campaign, imagine what it can do to regular Americans. Here’s how we know what happened. In December, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a 478-page report detailing over a dozen “serious performance failures” in the FBI’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to intercept the communications of President Trump’s campaign supporters. Horowitz identified “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in the applications to

The second best news out of Washington this week is that the Trump administration is crafting an executive order to rewrite the General Services Administration’s architectural and design guidelines for federal buildings. The proposed rule, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” would finally drain the Swamp of its embarrassing fetish for eyesores.

For more than 40 years, the United States and Iran have had a troubled relationship. Because of the Iranian regime’s insistence on spreading terror throughout the region and its efforts to develop nuclear weapons, multiple administrations have considered a broad range of options — both military and diplomatic — to counter these threats.

Within hours of learning that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani had been killed by a U.S. missile strike, I issued a statement calling Soleimani’s death “a big victory for the safety of the American people.”

On Jan. 15, 1999, near the end of the second day of the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, Impeachment Manager Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., made a lengthy presentation during which he referred to the senators in his audience as “jurors” no fewer than six times.

For three decades, education reformers have tried to improve our nation’s schools by injecting “choice” into the public square. These debates often turn contentious, pitting advocates on one side of “school choice” against the other. It’s time for a new chapter in how we think about education.

When most Americans hear the phrase “public lands,” they tend to think of national parks, forests, monuments, and wilderness areas. Utah is blessed with breathtaking examples of such lands, including Arches National Park, Dixie National Forest, Dinosaur National Monument, and High Uinta Wilderness area. Every Utahn I know supports the continued protection of these national treasures.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, the whole world hoped it meant a new era of cooperation and friendship with the Russian people. Almost 30 years later, however, our relationship with Russia is almost as strained as it was during the Cold War. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine 2014, and it continues to prolong humanitarian crises in Libya, Syria and Venezuela. Russian agents stole emails from the Democratic National Committee, hacked voting machines in some states and accessed voter data files in others.

When we get to a certain age in life, our personal relationships become essential to our care and well-being. We often rely on the help and support of family and friends, neighbors, and community organizations to do things we can longer do by ourselves.