The congressman from the 3rd District is Republican Jason Chaffetz, a visible and media-savvy young conservative elected in 2008. Read More
The congressman from the 3rd District is Republican Jason Chaffetz, a visible and media-savvy young conservative elected in 2008.
Born in Los Gatos, Calif., Chaffetz (CHAY-fits) grew up in Arizona and attended his senior year of high school in Colorado. His family’s politics were Democratic, and they boasted one notable tie to the party: His father’s first wife, Katharine Dickson, would later enter the national consciousness as “Kitty” while she stumped for votes with her second husband, Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. During college, Chaffetz was named an honorary co-chairman of the Dukakis campaign in Utah in 1988. Growing up, Chaffetz had a passion for soccer, but he switched to football when his high school discovered that he made a decent placekicker.
He won an athletic scholarship to Brigham Young University, where he converted to Mormonism and began what he views in hindsight as a natural gravitation toward the political right. After college, Chaffetz worked in public relations, first as an executive for Nu Skin Enterprises, a company that sells skin care products, and then at a firm he started with his brother. In 2003, Chaffetz took a brief hiatus from work to volunteer for Republican Jon Huntsman Jr.’s gubernatorial campaign. When his campaign manager abruptly resigned, Huntsman asked Chaffetz, who had barely any political experience, to replace him. After the election, Chaffetz served for one year as the new governor’s chief of staff.
Although his residence in Alpine sits just outside the 3rd District, Chaffetz sensed an opportunity in early 2007 as perennial discontent with incumbent Republican Rep. Chris Cannon simmered within the Republican ranks. (The Constitution requires only that House members live in the state they represent, not in the district.) Chaffetz entered the race in October, at a steep disadvantage in both cash and name recognition. Chaffetz criticized Cannon’s support of President George W. Bush’s proposal for a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, both deeply unpopular in the conservative district. He called for immediate deportation of all illegal immigrants and the construction of tent cities, ringed by barbed-wire fences, to detain those who had committed crimes while in the United States. His staunchly conservative platform played well at the state Republican convention in May, where he came 10 votes short of the 60% needed to win the GOP nomination outright.
Bush and most of the state’s Republican establishment endorsed Cannon, although Huntsman stayed neutral. Cannon attacked Chaffetz as an opportunist and raised more than $840,000. Chaffetz, by contrast, spent less than $200,000. In the low-turnout June contest, he stacked up big margins in the district’s population centers in Salt Lake and Utah counties to win by a whopping 20 percentage points. Although Chaffetz came under fire nationally from some Japanese-American interest groups for his advocacy of tent cities, the outcome of the general election in this crimson segment of Utah was never truly in doubt after the primary. Chaffetz won with 66%.
In the House, Chaffetz typically votes the conservative line but is occasionally unpredictable. He was one of 36 House Republicans who refused to back the December 2010 deal extending the Bush-era tax cuts, contending the move would only contribute to the national debt. Earlier that year, he was one of just seven GOP lawmakers to unsuccessfully require that funds for military operations in Afghanistan be spent only on withdrawing troops. He quickly developed a reputation for his media accessibility and quotability, appearing in a CNN video project highlighting his freshman year and giving numerous interviews to publications, TV stations and websites. He also regularly posted videos on YouTube, collected thousands of followers on Twitter and agreed to a televised leg-wrestling match with conservative talk show satirist Stephen Colbert. (Chaffetz lost.)
During the acrimonious debate over raising the cap on the nation's debt in the summer of 2011, Chaffetz became a chief sponsor of the “cut, cap, and balance” proposal favored by deficit hawks that passed the House. This plan, which was ultimately tabled by the Senate, included a spending cap and a proposed balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. When President Barack Obama and congressional leaders agreed on a compromise plan to raise the debt ceiling, Chaffetz voted against it. “This is not even two days worth of deficit spending,” he said of the deal.
Chaffetz has been an active member on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He got a bill through the House in 2009 to bar primary scanning at airports using whole body imaging machines, which he considered unnecessarily intrusive. He later was involved in a confrontation at Salt Lake’s airport after trying to avoid an image scanner. He also was an outspoken opponent of the District of Columbia’s 2009 legalization of same sex marriage. In 2011, Chaffetz took over the chairmanship of the panel’s subcommittee on national security and introduced bills that would allow for the firing of federal workers who were delinquent paying taxes and bar such individuals from receiving government contracts or grants.
Chaffetz cruised to re-election in 2010 over Democrat Karen Hyer, a Brigham Young University professor. The more interesting question was his future political plans. He hinted at a primary challenge in 2009 to Republican Sen. Robert Bennett, who subsequently lost his seat after angering tea party activists. Chaffetz then said he was considering a primary matchup to prevent GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch from winning a seventh term in 2012.
In early 2011, with strong tea party backing, Chaffetz began testing the waters, holding town hall meetings outside of his congressional district and holding discussions with political allies about a challenge to Hatch, who tea party activists considered highly vulnerable. But in late August, Chaffetz decided against a run, fearing that a primary battle with Hatch would be a “multi-million dollar bloodbath.” His decision was a blow to the tea party, which was left without an A-list challenger for its top Senate target in 2012. Chaffetz does have leadership aspirations in the House and said that they were a factor in his decision to forego a Senate bid. “Do I anticipate and hope that I keep on that leadership track? Absolutely,” he said.
