Dear Senator Curtis (R-Utah): Please Speak Up . . . I Can’t Hear You*

You’ve Declared that “America’s Founding Principles” Serve as Your “Guide.” Which Ones are Those?

Dear Senator Curtis:

I preface my questions with a fundamental: your office as a United States senator came with this Oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

(Emphasis added.)

Your official website gave me new insights into what motivates and what matters to you as Utah’s newly-elected junior United States senator. Of significance — to me, anyway, as a Utahn you campaigned and were elected to serve — is your published testimonial that “America’s founding principles” serve as your “guide.”

My hope for answers from you — and the honest kind, not talking points and bromides of the sort most of your colleagues use to shield themselves from unhappy constituents — is as sincere as are my questions to you. The Official Biography gives me some hope for answers by proudly proclaiming your congressional “office earned recognition as the best in Congress for constituent accountability and accessibility” in 2023.

Your Biography which, in many ways, could grace the website of any senator from any party in its generality,[i] however, does not reveal near the granular insight into your positions as does the running list of your votes in the Senate, which your website also graciously includes. That level of transparency is refreshing.

As we witness a unitary executive and his unelected quarter-billion dollar campaign donor along with the latter’s team of pubescent incel hackers orchestrate the rapid, systematic destruction of the United States as a constitutional republic, and Congress quietly cedes him Article I power, I am genuinely curious which of America’s founding principles are the ones serving as your guide.

Given your unwavering votes to confirm the most dangerously unqualified, anti-democratic and, frankly, repulsive cabinet nominees in U.S. history — to include Kash Patel as Director of the FBI who lied during confirmation testimony about his published enemies-of-Trump hit list, among other egregiously disqualifying behavior; Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence who, for obvious reasons, was also the Kremlin’s top choice; Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense who is demonstrably immature, inept, and impaired; and Robert Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services whose conspiracy-filled, worm-addled brain calculates to increase mortality and reduce life expectancy in the United States — I have difficulty chalking up your silence as “fiddling while Rome burns,” so to speak, or simple complacency.

Congress’s silence, including yours, has more the stench of complicity — “standing back and standing by,” to borrow a phrase.

My quibble is not so much with policy (although I ask you a few policy questions below). I care less about partisan politics right now. My concern, as is that of many of your constituents across the political spectrum, is the structural demolition of a government founded on what you affirm are the principles which serve as your guide as a United States senator.

There is a design, a mechanism written in the constitutional order, to create and to eliminate government agencies, to pass and to abolish all sorts of laws and regulations, to increase and to reduce spending. By my reading, that’s Article I stuff, currently being largely and arbitrarily employed by a unitary executive as, again, Congress fiddles mostly in silence. By all appearances, you and your colleagues have ceded those structural mechanisms to a wrecking ball with no check, no balance, and no voice in opposition. Your resounding silence makes you complicit.

Is it because you agree with the policy ends that you willingly avert your eyes to clear executive overreach?

Are you holding your tongue out of fear of physical violence — against you or your family — wrought, for example, by an extra-legal vigilante militia formed by pardoned Jan. 6 convicts?

Is it a lust to hold onto power?

A fear of being primaried?

If it’s any of those things, the citizens of Utah, and the United States, frankly, deserve your resignation. Senator Curtis, you have been honored with outsize power as a United States senator. With that power comes commensurate responsibility. As the scripture counsels, “For unto whom much is given, much is required.”

So please be very specific. Please identify which of America’s founding principles guide you and the context in which they undergird a constitutional republic and liberal democratic values in the United States, assuming that’s what you meant. I don’t mean to presume, but could you have meant that the citizenry has a right to self-government and to resoundingly reject tyranny? That the Constitution was designed for self-government by creating three independent branches of government, each to serve as active, vocal, and necessary checks on the others? Unlike your colleague, the senior senator from Utah, I’m guessing you did not mean as “founding principles” that only white, well-to-do men, landowners preferably and likely slaveholders, should have any say in government while the women and farm animals, along with the slaves, are considered chattel.

I’ve looked back over some of America’s founding principles. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America seems as good a place to start as any. The Thirteen States rejected “the King of Great-Britain” with his “History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” In tyranny’s place, the Thirteen States declared that “to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Declaration of Independence.

The unitary executive’s unconstrained, unchecked, and clearly unbalanced actions that step well into Congress’s constitutional domain resemble those on the Declaration’s long list of despotic measures from which the thirteen states declared their independence — and fought a war.

I mentioned your outsize power in the United States Senate. Let me clarify. The current majority in the Senate represents nearly 24 million fewer citizens than those represented by the minority caucus with 53 senators representing 155,129,628 and 47 senators representing 179,106,295 respectively. As a senator from a state with a population less than 9% that of California, for example, your vote in the Senate counts exactly the same as that of Adam Schiff. If we were to apply democratic principles, your voting influence has an eleven fold impact on behalf of your constituents and the country at large as compared to that of a senator from California. Granted, U.S. senators from Wyoming have even greater influence. So while you speak for the citizens of Utah — or at least were elected to do so — your vote has significantly broader impact.

In that influential position, you are a member of key Senate committees whose work and Article I responsibilities are under direct assault by the executive. While he and his Heritage Foundation schemers flood the zone, so to speak, I direct most of my few remaining questions to the work of specific committees on which you serve. They dip into policy advanced by Congress which is under direct executive assault.

The constituents you serve are entitled to know exactly where you stand on every issue. And if your answer is that you throw up your hands, express no view, and leave it to the courts to decide whether the executive’s conduct is unconstitutional, you abdicate your own responsibility and violate the oath you swore to uphold the Constitution. (I just saw you on Meet the Press doing precisely that.)

Foreign Relations Committee

Given recent reporting that the current executive was targeted as a Kremlin asset — which could explain a few things — do you agree the Senate, including the Foreign Relations Committee on which you sit, should immediately conduct an investigation into the allegations by bringing in the Former Intelligence Officer Who Claims the KGB Recruited Trump to testify? See also ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years — ex-KGB spy.

· If not, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If so, say it louder.

Do you agree that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator who caused the war with Russia?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

Do you agree with the unitary executive’s alignment with Putin over Europe, reversal in who counts as friend or an adversary, and plan to withdraw the United States from the NATO alliance and dismantle the international order?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

Do you agree with the executive’s apparent plan to turn the United States into a predatory state, his demand that Ukraine turn over “mineral wealth” in yet another of his extortive, transactional quid pro quos, his demand that Denmark relinquish Greenland, his attempt to coerce Canada to become a 51st state, and his demand that Panama relinquish the Panama Canal?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

See Who Will Stand Up to Trump on Ukraine?; ‘​The World Is There for the Carving’; I’m a former U.S. intelligence officer. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine will have terrible consequences

Do you agree with the executive’s USAID cuts, including the apparent violation of the Government Impoundment Act of 1974?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

See Trump’s USAID cuts are anti-Christian at the core; Trump’s USAID cuts threaten women’s empowerment program; How USAID cuts hurt American farmers; Shutting down USAID makes the U.S. less safe; Experts warn of threat to global health as US freezes overseas aid; USAID cuts threaten Amazon forest and fuel drug trade concerns; Cuts to USAID hurt American agricultural research; USAID cuts threaten America’s most successful global health campaign.

Commerce Committee

Do you agree that the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau should be shut down?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

Do you believe the executive’s efforts to shut down CFPB violates constitutional separation of powers?

· If not, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If so, say it louder.

See CFPB Shutdown Violates Separation of Powers; Musk Wants to Delete the CFPB to Enrich Himself. It Gives a Green Light to All Corporate Scammers

Environment & Public Works Committee

Your biography boasts that as a congressman you “founded the Conservative Climate Caucus,” and “built an international reputation for advancing American energy solutions that unleash U.S. clean fuels, strengthen the economy, enhance national security, ensure energy independence, and reduce global emissions simultaneously.” Official Biography. The executive has attacked nearly every aspect of the U.S. effort to confront rising temperatures, and effectively gutted climate policy in one month.

Do you agree with what he has done, including the January 20, 2025 Executive Order once again withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement?

· If so, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If not, say it louder.

See ‘Viciousness’ of Trump’s climate attacks stuns even his critics

Just a couple more questions:

Do you support enforcement of the Government Impoundment Act of 1974?

· If not, say it loud enough so we can at least hear it.

· If so, say it louder.

Do you agree that the media is the enemy of the people?

If so, say it loud so we can at least hear it.

If not say it louder.

I will leave for another day the unitary executive’s dismantling of the military’s independence to be replaced by loyalists, DEI, firing federal employees en masse, and the coming loyalty test for all remaining federal employees which, as you know, will be, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” and “Was it stolen from Trump?”

I look forward to answers to my questions, preferably spelled out in detail on your official website.

Sincerely,

A constituent and registered Republican (so my vote in the primaries has the possibility of making a difference).

R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe

*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.

[i] For example, “he tackles tough issues with innovative approaches, inviting all to the higher ground of common ground. He believes that big ideas, innovation, and consensus can drive transformational change. Senator Curtis is dedicated to crafting principle-centered policies and achieving real results for Utah and America. He leads critical conversations, convenes thoughtful leaders, fosters inclusive collaboration, develops sustainable solutions, and provides a vision of what is possible.” Sen. John Curtis’s Official Biography.