John Curtis is happy, even though he is a U.S. senator. And although his demeanor is as mild as an Indian summer in October, the Republican has done something comparable to poking a puma with a short stick.
After a business career, Curtis became mayor of Provo, Utah’s fourth-largest city, then served three terms in the House. He could be as unhappy as former executives often are when they find themselves waist-deep in the molasses of legislative processes.
Curtis, however, takes seriously the congressional duty to exercise oversight of the executive branch. So, in this second year of his first term, he has written a letter to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R), chair of the Judiciary Committee.
In it, Curtis notes the collapse of public trust in government, and one reason for this: “members of presidential families using their names and proximity to the President to advance private business interests.” The remarkable seediness of the two most recent presidential families has provided a target-rich environment.
There was Hunter Biden. Now there is Donald Trump Jr.’s “acceptance of significant gifts,” including “a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island,” Curtis writes, provided by a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. There are also Trump Jr.’s “active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting” and “significant financial and advisory ties to prediction market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions.”
Curtis’s letter urges Grassley to subpoena these two presidential sons to testify in order to “establish the facts, determine whether existing ethics, disclosure, or anti-corruption laws apply, and identify reforms necessary to prevent the presidency from becoming a vehicle for private enrichment by those closest to it.”
Including, presumably, presidents. The current one in his second term has traded more securities than all members of Congress combined.
The poet Don Marquis (1878-1937) said: “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” Curtis’s letter is like that.
Grassley has spent 51 of his 93 years on Capitol Hill mastering the art of dusty responses to awkward specificities. He replied to Curtis’s letter not with a letter, but with comments to a reporter who posted them on X:
“I think the fact is that it takes time, and if you were going to ask me when you’re going to have a hearing, there’s no way I could answer that today.” And Grassley made this self-refuting promise: “I’m going to take his request seriously and sit down with staff and see what we can do.”
Translation: Go away. Curtis’s letter is, however, a wholesome declaration of senatorial independence. It is an affirmation that politics is a team sport only up to a point — the point at which legislative responsibilities supersede party loyalties. Without this, the Madisonian equilibrium — the checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches — collapses.
It has collapsed. Those who created the constitutional architecture in 1787 neither anticipated nor desired what existed by 1800 — a party system. It took another century for party loyalties and presidentialism to eclipse Congress’s institutional pride and dilute its jealous protection of its primacy.
The great issues of the 19th century — tariffs for revenue, the disposal of public lands, the confinement, or not, of slavery — were ruled on by Congress. Debates there were widely disseminated for a public of avid newspaper readers.
Curtis has taken a risk. The federal government touches everything. Its executive branch, wielded by someone gifted at nursing grudges, could torment Utah. The federal government owns 64.4 percent of Utah’s land, second-most among the states (Nevada, 80.1 percent). Also, drought and development have put extraordinary pressure on declining water resources, giving fresh pertinence to an old Western axiom: “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.” The West has booming, and thirsty, metropolises.
Curtis, who was not born yesterday, knows that all the Republican senators willing to offend the poked puma could share one bowl of the Senate restaurant’s bean soup. But he also knows that a not-negligible number of them have indicated that they are glad he wrote his letter.
When he is no longer a senator — may that day be long distant — he says this will have been “one of my proudest moments.” If emulated, an accumulation of such moments could produce the rebirth of a healthily rivalrous relation between presidents and Congress.
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