Can a Hike Heal Washington? Utah’s Next Senator Thinks So

Curtis chose to field questions on the Lake Mary Trail above Brighton Resort in Big Cottonwood Canyon. Curtis hosted his first hiking meet-and-greet on Mount Timpanogos the year following his election to represent Utah’s 3rd Congressional District in 2017.

What has now become an annual tradition for Curtis started out as a way to help voters and activists understand his views as a fiscal conservative who prioritized clean air initiatives after he was elected mayor of Provo in 2010.

“I knew that we had tons in common, and that if we would get out on a trail and just enjoy each other, the nature, that we would tend to focus more on what we had in common than what we differed on,” Curtis said.

Curtis believes “everybody should have to be a mayor before they go to Congress.” His time as Provo’s chief executive taught him that most problems can be solved with one-on-one conversations, Curtis said. With his constituent hikes, Curtis has attempted to bring this ethos to the House, and hopes to do the same in the Senate.

But this kind of face-time between lawmakers is becoming increasingly rare, he said. In its place, Curtis sees a growing temptation for elected officials to perform for a camera rather than cultivate relationships on Capitol Hill that lead to policy becoming law. If lawmakers take a stand against legislative leadership and catch the attention of social media and cable news, they are rewarded by a boost in small-dollar donations, Curtis said.

These incentives were all too apparent during the past legislative term when GOP representatives took turns torpedoing efforts to follow regular order in the spending process, Curtis said. The way he sees it, Congress will function more seriously if it takes a “Brighton hike” approach over a “cable news” approach to policymaking.

“Your ability to just talk frankly, and let your partisan walls down just a little bit is enhanced so dramatically,” Curtis said. “Everything about the Washington, D.C., environment builds those walls up.”

Looking away from Brighton’s north-facing slope covered in golden aspens, Curtis listed the things that keep him up at night: national debt, the peaceful transfer of power and the emerging unity between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

If he had to isolate one issue as the most immediately concerning, it would be an escalation of tensions between Israel and Iran, Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan — where he served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and learned to speak Mandarin fluently.

“I’m very, very concerned about our relationship with China,” Curtis said. “It’s at a tipping point, and if it tips the wrong way, it’s not going to be good for us, it’s not going to be good for China, it’s not going to be good for the world.”

With situations escalating across the globe, Curtis says the proximity of global warfare is the most neglected topic in American politics. On Monday, Russia proposed record military spending as it makes territorial gains in its war with Ukraine. On Tuesday, Iran launched a missile attack against Israel, almost ensuring a direct response in the rapidly expanding war in the Middle East.

The United States is “clearly, clearly, clearly” not prepared to handle the growth of these conflicts in a way that secures American interests, Curtis said. One of his biggest worries is that the country will be caught unaware by a massive cyber attack “that could decimate our electric grid.”

Americans must be willing to break from the “momentum of prosperity” that prevents the country from making sacrifices to shore up its national security, Curtis said. He pointed to the blowback Congress received when his committee voted to advance a bill that would force China to divest itself of TikTok.

“We’re enabling the ease of an enemy disrupting us by that unwillingness to damper that prosperity,” Curtis said.

Conversations with economic experts have led Curtis to believe that there is an unnervingly short runway before the world’s confidence in America’s borrow-to-spend behavior runs out.

With $35.5 trillion in debt, and interest payments that now exceed defense spending, Curtis worries it is only a matter of time before people stop buying U.S. treasury bonds, the country becomes unable to service its debt and the dollar loses its reserve-currency status around the world.

“Having just complained about calling everything a crisis, I do believe the debt is a crisis. We’re in crisis,” Curtis said. “Every day we don’t do anything about it, it gets harder to get out of.”

To right the country’s sinking fiscal ship, Curtis said Congress must make structural reforms to its budgeting process to discourage massive omnibus spending packages and encourage more careful and transparent appropriations of American tax dollars.

Curtis said he has a proposal that is gaining traction among House lawmakers to mimic Utah’s baseline budget, where lawmakers agree at the beginning of each year that if they can’t pass a new budget, the previous year’s budget will be renewed without any spending increases.

This removes the threat of a shutdown which is often used to push through wasteful spending and will incentivize actual negotiations on important spending items, Curtis said. While this likely would not result in immediate slashes to spending, Curtis said it would change the spending culture in Washington, D.C., enough for the debt to slow, and then stop, its exponential climb.

“I think everybody would feel comfortable if the trajectory was down, even if it was very slow,” Curtis said.

*This interview originally appeared in Brigham Tomco’s article in the Deseret News. You can read the full article here.