Editors Note: This article was originally published in the Aug. 16, 2023 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
Maloy, Hough match wits on problems facing nation, approcahes and solutions
One attendee said it best: There wasn’t much daylight between the two Republican candidates who showed up to debate each other last week in Delta.
Celeste Maloy and Bruce Hough are both competing to win the party’s primary election Sept. 5 to replace Rep. Chris Stewart in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District.
Both were hosted last Friday at Delta High School’s auditorium by the county Republican Party for an hour-long debate and discussion in front of about 30 or 40 local voters.
Becky Edwards, a third candidate vying for the seat, was conspicuously absent from the event.
Nonetheless, the candidates in attendance engaged in a healthy debate involving multiple subjects, few barbs traded between them.
Kim Cropper, the county GOP chair, was joined on stage by Commissioner Vicki Lyman, as the two moderated the debate. The candidates were allowed opening statements and then fielded about eight questions picked by the moderators for the first half of the event. During the second half, audience members were allowed to ask questions and then the candidates were allowed closing statements.
The candidates alternated on whom would answer questions first, each allowed some time for a rebuttal should they feel the need to respond to something their competitor said. Only once or twice did Maloy and Hough engage in any substantial back and forth.
This happened about midway through the first half when the candidates were asked to weigh in about the amount of taxpayer funding going to support Ukraine’s defensive efforts to combat invading Russian forces.
Hough said he didn’t think the U.S. would be in the position it is—leading NATO efforts to buttress Ukraine in its life and death struggle—if the current administration hadn’t botched the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Beyond blaming President Joe Biden for the hasty mission, which indeed cost several American and countless Afghani lives but was also negotiated before Biden even took office, Hough used the topic to attack Maloy’s voting record.
“That botching getting out of Afghanistan, which was horrifically bad, costing American lives, leaving thousands of people stranded, was because we had Joe Biden in office. And we had one of our candidates (presumably Edwards) who actually voted for Joe Biden. And my dear competitor here didn’t vote at all,” Hough said.
Maloy felt compelled to respond when it was her turn to answer the question.
“I did sit out the last two federal elections. I was working as a staffer in Washington, D.C. My residency was in Utah and I didn’t want anyone questioning my out of state ballot. I thought it would be a better use of my time to stay focused on the work I was doing for this district,” she said, referring to her work as a natural resources legal counsel in Stewart’s office.
She added that she didn’t think she’d be running for Congress then and probably should’ve just voted.
She returned to the subject of Ukraine and said she thought it was a noble effort, but one that required greater transparency and vigilance from this nation not get embroiled in a quagmire.
“I hope we’ve learned from history and we’re not going to get caught in a quagmire in another country where we don’t know what our mission is or when we’ve accomplished it,” she argued. “So we need to have an exit strategy. We need to know what success looks like. We need an accounting of all the dollars and all the equipment we’ve sent to Ukraine.”
In one of the few instances where one of the candidates chose to use their allotted rebuttal time, Hough returned to Maloy’s voting record.
“Actually, Celeste didn’t vote in six of the last 10 elections. And here’s the thing. She could’ve voted in Virginia,” he said at one point.
He also returned to the Ukraine question and said the U.S. was now forced to support Ukraine since other adversaries were watching closely to gauge our ability to commit to the effort long term. He specifically noted China’s interest in the conflict.
Maloy responded again to the voting barb afterward, saying she couldn’t vote in Virginia because she didn’t live there. “That would’ve been a fraudulent vote,” she said.
An exchange over climate change and corporate America’s embrace of ESG—an investing rationale where a company’s environmental, social and governance policies reflect values beyond simple profit-taking—also presented an interesting exchange, mostly in what wasn’t said.
The candidates were asked by the moderators directly if they believed climate change was real. Tacked onto that important query was a second question about their feelings about ESG.
Hough strongly opposes ESG and said he would urge the Securities and Exchange Commission to take legal action against private companies who embrace the progressive business philosophy.
“We shouldn’t be subjected to somebody else’s idea of what is important and what isn’t,” he said. “It’s basically wokeness on steroids.”
Maloy was more circumspect. She agreed it was a “huge problem,” but also said she wasn’t comfortable with government legislating what values to which the business community should adhere.
“I think we need to be really measured in what the government response to that is,” she said. “Because I don’t want to start down a road where the government is telling private companies what their values can be.”
In the end, neither candidate addressed whether they believe climate change is real or not.
On most topics put forward during the debate, the candidates mostly agreed, though sometimes their approaches to problems differed.
For example, the first question of the night was about whether the country was “a big mess” and what was the number one challenge the nation faces.
Hough said political polarization and divisiveness represented the biggest challenge and he agreed the country was a mess because of it. He said he would represent a more cordial tone and tenor should he be elected to Congress. That if Congress could tamp down the political rhetoric, then the nation’s political discourse would also improve.
Maloy said she though the country was also in a mess, but she cited government overreach as the cause.
“Most of the problems that people want to talk to me about they actually stem from the federal government being involved in something it shouldn’t be involved in,” she said. “We need the federal government to stay in its lane.”
The candidates also agreed the border and immigration policy was a mess—in two ways. First they both agreed stricter border controls were essential. But they also agreed the federal government’s visa policies for workers was untenable.
Hough said he’d like to see more militarization of the border and that those seeking asylum should only do so by entering legitimate ports of entry. Doing anything else should result in immediate forfeiture of the right to seek asylum he said.
Maloy said the nation should work to control who and what are coming across the borders and into ports. She also said the country’s visa policies should be streamlined as businesses are suffering from lack of labor.
“At the same time, I’ve sat in meeting after meeting with Utah businesses, a lot of them ag businesses, that can’t get the visas that they need and that’s harming our Utah economy,” she said. “So I think the answer is we have to solve both of those problems at the same time. We’re failing all the way across this equation.”
Hough agreed.
“We actually need workers. We’re losing workers,” he said.
A few times, state issues came up that both candidates said Congress was near powerless to intervene. One was water. A question was asked about cities attempting to drain the aquifers of rural communities. Maloy was quick to point out that water in Utah is managed by the state and that state elected officials were accountable to voters on that topic, not members of Congress.
A question from an audience member about changes to the state flag elicited a similar response.
Both candidates addressed government spending. Hough said during his opening statement that he was running mostly because of the country’s $31.4 trillion debt and the burden it will have on his children and grandchildren. When asked later what spending cuts he would make if it were solely up to him, he said he’d eliminate any agency or federal spending program not specifically authorized by the Constitution.
He also said he would prefer a system of block grants to states to cover the various needs of citizens, thus eliminating the need for some agencies altogether. In a separate question about bloated government, he said he supported labor attrition—not replacing retiring bureaucrats—as a means to cut spending.
Maloy said she favored more realistic solutions than her opponent when it comes to cutting spending. She said all government agencies are created by statute and as they grow and take on more programs they begin to operate outside their mandate. She said one “doable” method of managing this is to examine each agency and simply cut programs that are not statutorily supported.
“So I would take the statutory authority that created an agency, compare it to what an agency is doing and defund anything that’s outside that statutory authority. It would solve a lot of the overreach problems. It would solve some of the spending problems,” she said.
When it was the audience’s turn to ask questions, many focused on constitutional questions, such as gun rights but also about topics such as term limits and even age limits.
Both candidates favored term limits. Hough supported an outright Constitutional amendment. Maloy said she could be talked into term limits with some qualifications. She said term limits could actually hand more power to unelected bureaucrats, so some other qualifier needed to be in place to manage that. Hough said he was in favor of limits on bureaucrats—no more than 10 years in one agency or position.
As for age limits, Hough said he supported cognitive tests—a popular position given the number of octogenarians in Congress and the White House. Maloy said she didn’t trust the government to perform such tests, that the electorate, voters, were the ultimate check against filling the government with aging leaders.
After the debate, the Chronicle Progress asked why Edwards didn’t participate. Attendees pointed to an Aug. 4 news report in the Deseret News, which cited an Edwards campaign statement calling the debates “our opponent’s campaign events.” Edwards participated in official state GOP debates, but Maloy had earlier challenged her opponents to appear with her in all 13 of the district’s counties. Hough took up the challenge, while Edwards refused.
Learn more about the candidates by visiting their websites: celesteforutah. com; brucehoughforcongress.com; and, beckyforutah.com.
