With some encouragement from good friends, I filed this morning to run for the newly outlined Congressional District 4 (CD4) US House of Representatives seat. CD4 covers much of Western Utah, Draper, Riverton, Bluffdale, Tooele, Sanpete County, Lehi, Pleasant Grove, Highland, Saratoga Springs, Eagle Mountain and my town of American Fork.

In coming weeks, I will meet with delegates in these areas to explain my bid for national office.

The federal government has its hands in so many pies that it seems there is an inexhaustible supply of issues we can and should address as part of campaign policy discussion. Here are just a few:

1. Housing

A high priority for me is to lower the cost of living, especially housing and healthcare, although I will not stop there. The federal government has been implicated in Utah’s housing affordability crisis in more ways than most politicians will admit. The seizure of Utah’s unincorporated public lands in perpetuity by the federal government as a prerequisite to being granted statehood, as well as denial of the benefits of the 1830 Preemption Act and the 1862 Homestead Act effectively guaranteed that we would be locked out of our lands and have no place for an inheritance. This contradicts the equal footing doctrine in its enabling act. (Did you know squatters in the Midwest in the United States used to be able to purchase up to 160 acres at $1.25 an acre? Not in Utah!) Affordable housing is not achieved by cramming more people into higher density housing built by wealthy developers in lockstep with politicians. The Utah pioneers understood the pattern: go somewhere there is plenty of space, and build a town. A day’s journey apart was typical. Half acre residential lots were the norm, with plenty of space immediately surrounding each city. Did I mention that freeway congestion and commute times will go way down as we decentralize our state?

If elected, I will be an advocate for Utah’s property rights, including our right to inhabit our lands, the vast majority of which are currently sitting empty. I will be a true voice for federalism.

2. Inflation

I believe in your right to your own property, without an asterisk. I am unapologetically opposed to the Federal Reserve and inflation. There are possibilities for local municipal and state governments to hedge against inflation by passing laws that establish gold and/or silver to be their legal currencies. However, only the federal government may mint coins, and they have been derelict in this responsibility for generations. The solution to inflation is not crypto or complicated financial schemes. The solution is simply to uphold and enforce Article 1 Section 10.

I do not subscribe to the theory that all taxation is theft, but inflation is theft. According to public reporting, the effective inflation rate since 1913 exceeds 3,000%, meaning that a $100 note hidden under your great-grandparents’ mattress in 1913 has retained less than $3 worth of purchasing power. I do not subscribe to the theory that all taxation is theft, but inflation is theft. Inflation already saps roughly half of the value of your retirement account before you can ever access it without additional tax penalties.

3. Parents need to be in control of their children’s education

I am also without apology opposed to public schools and the extortion that federal funding mechanisms and withholding of funds continue to play in dictating curriculum, school choice and local educational possibilities. Eliminating the Federal Reserve and inflation, and unlocking our public lands will liberate parents’ schedules and pocketbooks to provide the education their children want and need. We should not take these constitutional to be a lost cause. We need to be moving in that direction or else they will become lost to us.

4. Healthcare

For affordable healthcare, the solution is simple: Undo everything the Affordable Healthcare Act did. More generally, reverse insurance mandates and regulatory controls that are not strictly pursuant to actual delegated powers in the Constitution. I am not seeing where in our state or national Constitution it says the government should or can tell you whom you can go to for “discounted” healthcare or set pharmacy prices.

5. Restore Defendant Rights

More than half of the text of the Bill of Rights is devoted to protecting those who are suspected, accused, or convicted of a crime or other wrongdoing. The purpose of these protections is not to keep criminals from ever being punished — it is to prevent the government from seizing unlimited power over life, liberty and property. Thomas Jefferson said that “Trial by jury is the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its Constitution”. I have learned that this is true! Juries hold the unique power to nullify the acts of all three branches of government in the most consequential venues. I highly recommend Suja Thomas’s book, the Missing American Jury. Plea deals and pretrial diversions prevent criminal cases from ever being heard by a jury. A crucial overlooked consequence of these practices is that in such cases, we are never making the government prove anything before an impartial jury. 99% of Criminal cases are no longer tried by a jury. Where they are allowed, they are sorely limited by unconstitutional jury instructions.

Once our government becomes judge, jury and executioner, it is game over for all of us.

The States–especially Utah–and the federal government are installing a police state in a hurry. This process needs eyes on it, and voices to cry out before it is too late. I have written up my findings on this site at the state level, now it is time to shine a light on what is happening in our federal government.

A brief bio

With extensive experience reviewing the Utah legislature’s bills in recent years and testifying in committees, I have learned why the Utah government operates the way it does.

I bring 10 years of experience as a volunteer precinct and poll worker and multi-time elected delegate to represent my neighbors in republican government.

I bring completely fresh perspectives that are informed predominantly from the United States Constitution and the other writings of the founding fathers, rather than picking policy talking points from the national parties. Nothing makes me happier than to see people take our constitution seriously rather than treating it merely as an idol to give lip service to when convenient, and disregard as old fashioned when it is inconvenient.

I am reminiscing now about the times I interviewed my current US Senator John Curtis, then running for the US House of Representatives, about the impacts that his pseudo-amnesty policy for illegal immigrants would have on Utah housing prices. His response was priceless: “I don’t know of anyone who is concerned about that problem.” Never mind that five of my Utah siblings had just been looking for an extended period for affordable housing in Utah, but had mostly given up for the time being, despite all of them earning plenty to deserve housing by traditional standards.

I only lament leaving behind the contest for Senate District 21 with Brady Brammer, but I trust his Republican challenger Kelly Smith will give him a run for his money.

Where to go from here

I hope you will take the next step by attending your precinct caucus meeting on March 17th. You can find your location at precinctportal.org.

Full disclosure, I am not a wealthy man. I do not believe a person should have to be a millionaire or garner funds from a national party super PAC to run for the US House of Representatives. National Party campaign funding for a congressman would constitute a pretty clear conflict of interests in my mind, as it enables control of the state through outside interests. For these reasons, I am relying on the caucus and convention system to get the word out through the grassroots. I have also declared intent to gather signatures, much as I loathe the signature track, because it will afford further opportunities for grassroots engagement. If you would like to help by volunteering to gather signatures, my only ask if you do volunteer is that you speak to my campaign positions to promote better voter acquaintance. For this purpose, I am making a printable flyer available, as well as for pickup upon request by email at stewart.seth. a.gmail.com. You can also be trained as a volunteer signature gatherer if you would like to help on that front.

If you would like to make a donation, I will have an account set up shortly. Note that to comply with FEC requirements, your donation must include your legal name and address together with the amount, otherwise it cannot be accepted. Any contributions made without this information will be refunded.

Utah’s SB 109 (2026) sponsored by Senator Todd Weiler eliminates the cause of action in “alienation of affection” cases. What this would is that the state government no longer recognizes marriage as a contract worthy of protection. At its core, marriage is a private contract and a religious rite. As a private contract, it is governed primarily by contract law. Since the earliest days of civilization, marital contracts were enforceable in courts of common law. By eliminating the private right of action to uphold marital agreements, SB 109 directly violates Article 1, Section 10 of the United States Constitution and its prohibition against any state law that impairs the obligation of contracts.

In the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Monday morning on February 23rd, Senator Weiler claimed that marriage traditionally treated women as chattel, mere property of a husband. The state’s response to this is to treat both the husband and wife and their children as tax chattel, to be reassigned and divided through alimony, child support, custody arrangements and restraining orders, irrespective of the terms of the private contract of marriage, leaving aggrieved partners with no truly representative recourse for the breakage of marital vows.

The fact that this bill is continuing the Utah legislature’s momentum and precedent of erasing protections on marriage is not an endorsement of its character. In 2019 the Utah legislature passed HB 40, which removed criminal penalties for adultery and sodomy. At the same time, SB 43 decriminalized fornication. Senator Weiler is correct that in 1987, the State of Utah effectively became a no-fault divorce state by its inclusion of the “irreconcilable differences” condition as a supposedly legitimate prerequisite for divorce, nullifying the marital contract without due process.

Senator Weiler further stated that the scope of this statute extends not only to adulterous romantic partners, but also to anyone else who interferes in the marital relationship between husband and wife. This broad negation of the right to sue should increase our apprehension about categorically forbidding common law suits to protect marriage, because it would grant anybody absolute civil immunity for interfering destructively in a marriage, including therapists, religious leaders, friends, extended family members, educators, and so on.

Among the arguments leveraged by its sponsor to promote this bill is a claim that many divorce proceedings are frivolous, inefficient, expensive and burdensome. Divorce is certainly not free of human cost–but is that any excuse to avoid responsibility to hear cases? The Supreme Court decided in Cohens v. Virginia (1821) that it would be “treason against the Constitution” for a court to refuse jurisdiction it constitutionally possesses. Eliminating the private right of action to enforce a contract is abdicating jurisdiction in legitimate cases, and therefore fits the censure of the Supreme Court.

If it is alleged that a given case is frivolous or petty, the only body on Earth authorized to make that determination is the authorized finder of fact which, when requested by either party in civil cases above a modest threshold of value, is a jury. What could be more valuable than the marital relationship? SB 109 continues Utah’s trend of usurping power from juries and prevents the people from having free access to our courts, in open violation of Utah Constitution Article 1 Section 11.

If SB 109 passes, marriage contracts will become unenforceable in the state of Utah, eliminating much of the legal incentive for marriages to form in the first place. This bill places marriage on a lower footing than commercial contracts, which are still enforceable to a degree within the state. To state it bluntly, Utah no longer recognizes the private contract of marriage at all, but instead has redefined it as a tax status and a determinant in administrative proceedings to be exploited, controlled and monetized by the state.

You can watch the most recent committee hearing on SB 109 here:

https://www.utleg.gov/event-streaming/committee/20545

You can read the text and track the status of SB109 here:

https://le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/static/SB0109.html

I invite you to write your legislators immediately to protect marriage by urging opposition to this bill. You can contact them by scrolling to the bottom of the page at le.utah.gov.

A very strange thing happened in Utah’s 2024 election cycle: Three prominent candidates for state and national office won the Republican nominating convention, and yet somehow did not appear on the November general election ballot. How can you win a nomination, and yet not even appear on the general election ballot?

The answer? SB54, a signature gathering nominating route introduced in the 2014 legislative session. This gave deep state candidates an easier way to ignore the choice of delegates and the voters who elected them. There is a solution to this problem, and it comes from studying the Constitution more carefully than we have done. We’ll get to that, but let’s return to the 2024 election shenanigans.

In all three cases, the candidates who were displaced by signature gathering were more closely aligned with the principles of republicanism, while the candidates who were substituted in their places are more left-leaning. This is SB54 functioning as intended. It is a form of vote laundering, where voters put in red ballots and get blue candidates out of the machine. This is a devious move that does not faithfully represent the will of the electorate.

Utah’s original nominating method for these offices always consisted of a delegated election known as the caucus and convention, ever since it gained its statehood in 1896. It has long been recognized as the authorized representative mode for choosing candidates. In 2014, the Count My Vote initiative succeeded at installing SB54, which created a signature gathering alternative route to the ballot that enables candidates to bypass the nominating convention by hitting a certain threshold of signatures. Signature gatherers are usually paid, and the number of signatures required places this method squarely beyond the reach of grassroots candidates who do not have deep pockets or do not already enjoy widespread name recognition and media connections, which makes it a pay-to-play scheme. The signature gathering method replaces a competitive election method with a non-competitive one. But even this is still not the worst of it.

What most don’t realize about SB54 is that it is not even the heart of the problem. What SB54 does is it installs an additional lever to trigger a direct democratic primary. (How is the primary democratic? Because primaries use a direct popular vote. Direct popular votes contrasts with delegated election methods like the caucus, which are also called republican or indirect elections.) Other methods such as threshold requirements on the nominating convention already existed to trigger a direct democratic primary. SB 54 took even that decision out of the hands of the delegates and placed it in the hands of politically connected people with a lot of money.

What most people don’t realize is that the direct democratic primary wasn’t always the nomination method used in Utah. It was added in 1934 as part of the Progressive Movement. Quite the Republican move, eh?

SB54 is therefore a late stage symptom of a deeply embedded underlying cancer in a highly deceptive vote laundering scheme.

The practical effect of SB54 and direct Democratic primaries is that real republican candidates cannot win, by design. The election method (not the party label!) determines the kind of candidate elected. Count My Vote exploited this fact by pretending that the differences between candidates chosen through indirect elections and direct elections proves that delegates are “out of touch” with the voting public. Any rational person has only to read Article 1, Section 2 and Article 2 Section 1 of the United States Constitution and the accompanying explanatory Federalist papers to realize that the fact that different representational methods produce different kinds of candidates is a feature of a constitutional republic, not a bug.

It is harder to form conspiracies in government when the motivations and accountabilities of elected officials are meaningfully different across offices. Otherwise the separation of powers confers no benefit. In the words of the founding fathers, rival ambitions must be made to counteract each other. The modern party system presents only an illusion of such checks and balances, which were long ago dismantled, and in recent years the party animals behind this Orwellian scheme have been increasingly exposed due to their audacity and failure to abide even by their own lately contrived rules.

So that history shows that we have a blue election method glued onto a red one, where the blue one is given special powers to override the red one. In factual terms, nearly every candidate has been elected in the deep red state of Utah for nearly the past 100 years has been a democrat, because the system is rigged to produce democrats while beguiling the people into thinking they are getting republicans. This is a primary reason behind the contention in our elections today.

At the national level, we find the same things have been happening ever since the modern two-party system took control in 1854. Only the schemes differ slightly in implementation, but the effect is the same. The practical upshot of this is that nearly every candidate elected at the state and national level today is a democrat with a lowercase d. This explains why we are being led by a uniparty, and how the corruption got to be so bad. It is because the checks and balances in our government were erased. Vote laundering is rampant today at both the state and national levels, and this effect preceded SB54 by more than a century. SB54 just adds one more lever to the toolbox to trigger the trapdoor of partisan direct primaries and dispose of candidates the deep state doesn’t want in office.

The solution to all of this therefore requires more than a direct repeal of SB 54. That is absolutely necessary, but they Count My Vote initiative will continue to fire its ammunition against the partisan nominating process, continuing to play the old tired line that delegates are out of touch.

It turns out the United States Constitution answers this objection perfectly. The message of Article 1, Sections 2 and 3 and Article 2 Section 1 is clear: Separate out your colors. Stop mixing your laundry. Don’t put dye in your detergent. To translate the metaphor, the Constitution mandates different election types for different offices and branches of government. This is the only way to restore checks and balances in our elections.

Article 2, Section 1 specifies indirect or delegated elections like the caucus and convention for executive branch officers, and Article 1 Section 3 specifies legislative elections for the Senate, and Article 1, Section 2 specifies direct popular vote elections for House Representatives. I call these the red, white, and blue election methods of our American Republic. The same principles can be applied at the state level almost trivially.

In this way, democrats will be happy because they can directly elect democrats to the House of Representatives. Republicans will be happy because they can elect republicans to executive branch offices a delegate system. Local offices will begin to matter more in the public’s eye, since they will provide the electors for the state Senate.

Best of all, the people in government will have a hard time agreeing on things, especially things that would be nasty to any of us. By constitutional design, all three of these groups must substantially agree to get laws passed under most circumstances. And we the people can go on living our lives without being at each other’s throats because of a deceptive French revolutionary and Leninist dialectic that once divided us, but divides us no more.

I recently watched Daniela Cambone’s interview with G. Edward Griffin, the author of the book The Creature from Jekyll Island. In the interview, he made several connections that I had learned for myself before encountering his assessment.

He exposed the duality of Communism and Nazism, showing that in practical terms, they are identical. I had previously come to the same conclusion, that they are two heads of the same beast.

I had also associated it with Lenin’s pamphlet on Bolshevism, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, in which he describes his Progressive Movement as consisting of controlled opposition.

I had never heard anyone else arrive at these same inferences until watching this interview with G. Edward Griffin. I highly recommend it, you can watch it here:

We can take this further by analyzing and discovering how the American political system became corrupted, and how to reverse the corruption.

The modern American political system originates with the French Revolution, not the American one. The political spectrum of ideology to divide the people against each other is used universally in Communist revolutions.

This has led me to investigate what the modern party system replaced. I have asked around, and even the most seasoned Republicans have no memory of any other system of elections than the one gatekept by partisan primaries and popular vote general elections for every office. This is because the partisan direct primary was glued on to Utah’s ‘s caucus convention system in 1934 as part of the progressive Movement. I asked Senator Mike Lee about this and he had no awareness of it.

I live in Utah and I regularly participate in the Republican party’s caucus system and have been elected multiple times as a delegate. In this process, and as a computer scientist with the graduate degree, I have debated my peers on the subject of election methods, analyzing them for fairness in representation. This led me to the stunning conclusion that the two-party system of today is a natural outgrowth of the 12th Amendment, which installed plurality or first-past-the-post voting, eliminating the more approval-centric method mandated in the Constitution’s original electoral college.

I’ve created a website for this at ConstitutionalVote.org.

I recently witnessed a major bait and switch in an election in my state. The governor’s election, the United States Senate election, and the attorney General election in 2024 in Utah involved a signature gathering nominating petition that displaced the grassroots convention. This process and ended up substituting a more Democrat-leaning candidate in the place of the Republican nominee. The Republican nominee didn’t even end up with his name on the November ballot, but ran the most successful statewide write-in candidate campaign in US history. 

In that process, he petitioned the Utah courts and ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States because of irregularities in the signature gathering process, and systematic unfairness in the State’s interference in the partisan nominating process. I read his entire petition. This led me to uncover what the party system replaced. What I found is that elections in America today exactly mirror the false government described in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. 

The Supreme Court even agreed that if you change the election method, you change the kind of candidate that gets elected. It took me finally speaking with a more Democrat leaning voter in my state to realize the importance of the fact that the Constitution originally mandated different election methods. This acted as a check on government. 

They were delegated elections for the offices of President and vice president, legislative elections for the Senate, and popular vote elections for House Representatives. I refer to these three election methods as the red, white, and blue elections. The Founding Fathers intentionally diversified the methods of representation for the various offices of government, so that rival ambitions would be made to counteract each other as one of the more effective checks against tyranny. The reasons for these different methods are outlined in Federalist numbers 10, 62, and 68.

In practice, what does this mean?

It means we have a uniparty in control.

All of the election methods have been homogenized. 

Republicans generally feared national popular vote, but through bound elector laws and the majority of states, practically speaking, we already have national popular vote.

Without legislative elections for the Senate, bicameralism loses its meaning. Senators are merely House Representatives with a longer term and slightly different responsibilities. 

One of the greatest myths taught in public schools is that separation of powers by itself guarantees checks and balances. This is like saying that a gang of bank robbers is guaranteed not to rob a bank merely because they have selected one member to be the safe cracker, another to act as a lookout, and a third to be the getaway car driver. 

True structural checks and balances are missing, and they have been missing for generations.

This is why no matter who we vote for, communism and fascism continue to be installed, taxes increase, and the unaccountability of government soars to new levels.

The Supreme Court agreed that a party does not have a right to have its endorsement printed on government ballots, but still managed to excuse it by framing it as a quid pro quo delegation of power. Political parties properly wield no more authority in elections than your local tennis club, yet they are given free advertising space on government ballots, courtesy of taxpayers. This literally meets the definition of criminal electioneering, where candidates are advertised at a polling place.

This fulfills Orwell’s warning that “some animals are more equal than others”.

Practically speaking, every elected official at the State and national level is a democrat with a lowercase d. Democratic elections are the easiest to game through political advertising and bottomless campaign spending. You can see easily how this connects with the Federal Reserve and the welfare state, where politicians are essentially buying votes through their campaign promises.

Americans are not meant to be Republicans versus Democrats. All Americans are meant to be both democrats AND republicans (lowercase d, lowercase r), through our participation in both kinds of elections. In reality, there is no contest between true democracy and true republicanism. What the party system did is it removed the checks and balances from off of government and placed them on the people, limiting our representation in government and gatekeeping it through the national parties.

And there you have the Leninist dialectic.

The controlled opposition he bragged about through communism and fascism is embodied in the American party system.

It gets even worse. It is not limited to a two-party system, but includes the Hegelian blend that spawns a third party using the fallout when it has arrived at the endgame. Nayib Bukele implemented exactly this strategy in El Salvador to usurp the sole management of government under a single party, which meets the the condition of tyranny described in Federalist number 47. Donald Trump has openly declared his intent to follow this strategy, as has the third party sponsor Elon Musk. The notion that they are not allied across this three-party system is a myth held to by the ignorant and desperate.

I am currently running for the Senate in my state, on a platform of returning to the constitutional system of checks and balances and removing party endorsements and other partisan machinery from elections and the legislative process. My model is simply our forgotten Constitution.

I have been writing and making videos for a while now on my YouTube channel on this subject (YouTube.com/@TruthFromEarth).

There is a very noteworthy spiritual component to this as well, which directly indicates that every human being is empowered to stop the Communist fascist dialectic before it can get into office, and to roll it back when it has taken over.

The doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that Lucifer during the war in heaven– the first election we know of– made a proposal claiming to ensure the salvation of all mankind. The doctrine says that Lucifer tried to destroy our agency, which is freedom. Latter-Day Saint Doctrine also teaches the duality of agency and accountability. Competing theories suggest that he either proposed to force us to be good, or to erase the consequences of sin. However, consistency with doctrine and everyday experience reveal that he uses both methods.

There is a self-repeating nature to it as well, which lends itself naturally to third parties ad infinitum. If the last fake cure didn’t work, there is always a temptation born of desperation to believe that the next one will. This is the partisan politicians system of hollow promises and revenge. If this sounds like the Hydra of Greek mythology and the Creature from Jekyll Island, I don’t believe that to be a coincidence. In short, it is never possible to eradicate communism or fascism by chopping off its heads or by aligning with any of the controlled “opposition” parties. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, even though an infinite number of schisms can be invented. The fractal pattern of false dichotomies and trichotomies never ends. The devil’s favorite game is darned if you do, darned if you don’t. The only way out is not to play the devil’s game, but instead build a civilization on the basis of truth and virtue.

Communism is based on a promise of do-goodery, embodying false compassion.

Fascism promises security through a police state, embodying false justice. Despite distinct promises, both lead to the same end. They are two heads of the same beast.

The common thread is a refusal to reconcile justice and mercy, which is what the Savior Jesus Christ accomplished through His atonement, and also what our own Divinely inspired Constitution requires.

In other words, the government of the devil denies the atonement of Jesus Christ. It accomplishes this most effectively by forfeiting property rights and defendant rights in the name of some ostensible good that is deliberately blinded to other good following the pattern of temptation in Matthew chapter 4, divorcing truth from truth. Amendments 4 through 8 in the Constitution spell out in law how to love your enemies. Sir Thomas Moore wrote that such safeguards of law are indispensable to our own self-preservation.

In every instance in Scripture where a multi-headed beast is mentioned, it is in reference to an evil empire or kingdom. There are some ancient apocryphal prophecies on this subject as well, warning that the fact of infighting among the heads does not prove that they are virtuous or independent. 

I’ve made a video on the subject unpacking this and other prophecies that align very well, including commentary from Joseph Smith that identifies the kingdom in the last days that would oppress and destroy many lives.

The Savior warned Joseph Smith–the first United States presidential candidate to be assassinated–that although we hear of wars in foreign countries, the enemy is combined and is seeking to destroy our lives and overthrow our freedom in the United States of America and to use the fall of America as the springboard to total world domination (Doctrine and Covenants 38:12). This was given in the early to mid-1800s, while the modern party system was forming.

I believe there is an irresistible message of hope in all of this. What I have learned means That we do not have to place our trust in broken systems. We do not have to continue the fruitless process of infighting or assuming good intentions on the part of politicians. 

It means we can win the war for the freedom of all nations in the same way that we win the war for the freedom of our own souls: by trusting in and following the Savior, Jesus Christ, not strawmanning our opponents and never giving into the lie that justice and mercy cannot be reconciled.

Our Constitution reconciles them, the Scriptures reconcile them, the prophets reconcile them, and we are forgetting the very means, purposes, and benefits of Union. United we stand, divided we fall.

We are in fact not powerless. 

The party system is a parasite. It cannot survive on its own. It will wither and die if we stop feeding it, just like the creature from Jekyll Island.

Utah House Bill 330 is not a narrow liability clarification as advertised, despite the clever cover story by Rep. Colin Jack that it was harming the poor electric companies because of existing regulatory policy and judicial overreach.

In lines 36–45, it creates an affirmative defense whenever harm results from conduct, an omission, or a condition that was “authorized or required” by statute, rule, permit, license, or order—placing government permission with multiple heads firmly on the scale in civil cases. In lines 46–50, liability is frozen at the moment conduct occurs or a condition “initially arises,” permanently blocking remedies for long-term or later-discovered harms, even if the authorization is later repealed or found unconstitutional. In lines 62–64, the defense applies regardless of theory—negligence, nuisance, strict liability, or otherwise—and in lines 65–66, the bill explicitly abrogates the common law wherever it conflicts. Tying civil remedies to permission effectively repeals the common law, closes the courthouse door by statute, and undermines open courts and the Article I, Section 10 guarantee of civil jury trials.There is a further poison pill: if a safeguard is not expressly enumerated, it is treated as waived—a get-out-of-jail-free card that collapses civil liability unless the government itself is the plaintiff. Equity exists so courts and juries can correct injustice when rigid rules cause harm, yet this bill pre-decides the outcome for government-allied actors regardless of evidence or injury. Subsection (2) reverses the burden of proof, forcing plaintiffs to disprove immunity. Though called “not immunity,” in practice this affirmative defense is nearly dispositive. It cements sovereign-style immunity and reduces accountability to permission—“I was just following orders.”

The Utah legislature just recommended a bill that erases the probable cause requirement and enables warrantless search and seizure of CHILDREN from Utah homes.

Actually, there are two bills, HB 105 and SB 124 and they are word-for-word identical. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, they do this multiple-head approach when they want insurance that the bill will pass.

Let’s see exactly what they did. The bill defines a new warrant class, an “investigative warrant”:

(b)The juvenile court may issue an investigative warrant authorizing a peace officer or a child welfare caseworker to view a child, view a child’s home environment, examine a child for signs of abuse or neglect, or interview a child regarding the child’s health, safety, or welfare, if it appears to the juvenile court upon a verified petition, recorded sworn testimony, or an affidavit sworn to by a peace officer or child welfare caseworker, and upon the examination of other witnesses if required by the juvenile court, that there is probable cause to believe that:

(i)there is a credible threat to the child’s health, safety, or welfare;

(ii)it is necessary to view, examine, or interview the child to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare; and

(iii)the peace officer or child welfare caseworker has made diligent efforts to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare by other legal means but has been unable or not permitted to view, examine, or interview the child to ensure the child’s health, safety, or welfare.

Let’s break it down simply enough for anybody to see what this is. The first paragraph uses a lot of fancy language with little or no concrete meaning: “verified petition”, “recorded sworn testimony”, etc. Verified by whom? This is not defined. Recorded? Empty. This bill is already using scam language.

The Bait and Switch

Notice in condition (i) that the bill literally says “there is probable cause to believe that there is a credible threat”. Probable and credible are two completely different standards of evidence. “Credible” simply means “believable”. Something that has a 5% chance of being true might be believable, but it is not probable. Probability has a specific, mathematical meaning. It means that more than 50% of the time, you are right. This is measurable and hence enforceable. If officers are wrong more than half of the time, they can be held accountable for being too aggressive and violating people’s rights.

Also, there is a category error here. “Probable cause” does not refer to just any old thing being probable; it refers very specifically to the completed or ongoing commission of an actual crime being probable–and even then, not just any crime. The warrant must be supported “by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”. That is, if the officer cannot articulate what the nature of the alleged crime is and what specific contraband would confirm the probable cause he claims to have, and if he is not right more than half of the time, he cannot enter with the weight of law on his side. Probable cause never meant anything else under the Constitution.

Condition (ii) in the bill is unenforceable, especially when “safety” and “welfare” can be and usually are broadly defined by governments. A gang of bank robbers can “have probable cause to believe that it is necessary” to rob a bank. A rapist can “believe that it is necessary” to assault someone, even “for her own good”. This provision does not lend any due process or robustness to the claims. There is no check or balance added here, just subjective and unmeasurable belief.

Condition (iii) amounts to this rhyme from the nursery tale:

Wolf: “Little Pig, little Pig, let me come in!”
Pig: “No, no, not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”
Wolf: “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”

That’s what this bill is. It allows forced entry into the homes of Utah parents and guardians, with only a piece of paper that says that someone in the government believes there is a “credible threat”, that it is “necessary” to check on the child, and that they’ve already tried to get in through less invasive means.

The bill’s sponsor has claimed that this is not a forced removal warrant. That is hardly consolation when a fake warrant could be used to obtain a “more real” one, effectively eliminating the requirement to obtain a real warrant in the first place. It normalizes illegally obtained evidence, and greatly increases the hazard of planted evidence. There is no real check against it.

Notice that there is also no qualification given to the source of the threat. The government can allege that a child was being threatened by a so-called climate emergency, by a television ad being played in their home, or literally any condition they could try to rationalize as a “credible threat to the child’s health, safety, or welfare”, and use that as an excuse for deadly force to extract the children. “We’re from the government and your parents’ radical religious views threaten your welfare“. Promises, reports and statistics from the past are hollow. When you ease up on checks and balances or give a government new powers, it is only a matter of time before those powers are abused.

They admit that this is a different warrant class by asserting that the “investigative warrant” is not the same as a warrant that would be required for forced removal of a child. However, this is almost identical to the tactic used in last year’s HB 273, which uses warrantless searches and fake digital surveillance warrants to obtain massive amounts of private information using arbitrary dragnet reverse keyword searches of people’s Internet histories, and then uses that illegally obtained information to go and get a “real” warrant. Warrant requirements by design protect people against unreasonable search and seizure. Forcing access to information before satisfying the threshold of probable cause is a complete inversion of due process. The fact is, those are not real warrants. They are unaccountable suspicions. The sponsor of that bill was Representative Ryan Wilcox.

There is at least one more troubling feature of the bill:

(d)A peace officer or a child welfare caseworker who is executing a warrant under Subsection (3)(a) or (3)(b) may request other persons to assist in executing the warrant.

Who are those “other persons” they might recruit? Mercenaries? Foreign nationals? The WHO? The UN? Are they deputizing neighbors? There is no telling in advance.

Combine this with the new law enforcement officer masking requirement bill SB136, and we’re getting very close to the territory of armed, unidentified burglars demanding that you let them access your children or else.

There is a 0% chance that all such encounters will be bloodless. This bill violates constitutional evidence requirements, needlessly endangers parents, children, officers and caseworkers, all to force access to homes and children without even requiring evidence (let alone probable cause) of a crime. This is a literal child trafficking bill.

Speak against it in tomorrow’s hearing at 2 p.m. in the House Judiciary Committee:

https://le.utah.gov/committee/committee.jsp?year=2026&com=HSTJUD

Links to the bills:

https://le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/static/HB0105.html

https://le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/static/SB0124.html

It’s high time I posted to my site the petition for a writ of certiorari that I submitted to the United States Supreme Court last year. It has often been taught in schools that judges in the United States have the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution, and that their opinions should hold the weight of law.

In my case, District Court judge Denise M. Porter lied to me by telling me that she was “bound to follow the precedent” rather than allow constitutional challenges of law to be heard and decided by a jury, or to allow a jury to hear a criminal case like mine at all.

Here’s what my research actually uncovered:

1) Judicial opinions are not law: binding precedent has no constitutional authorization.
Binding precedent is the lethal force behind Roe v. Wade and state analogues that have killed at least 100 million unborn children. Article III grants courts judgment in cases, not lawmaking power. Marbury v. Madison erred by deciding outside the res judicata after jurisdiction failed, and Cooper v. Aaron completed the usurpation by falsely declaring Supreme Court interpretations to be “supreme law of the land.” Article VI makes the Constitution supreme, not judicial interpretations. Courts may publish opinions, but opinions bind no one beyond the parties to a case. Contrary to the claims of Hutto v. Davis, Stare decisis (Latin for “let the decision stand”, the doctrine behind binding precedent) is merely doctrine; it does not follow from court structure because lower courts and juries can choose to acquit or rule more favorably, eliminating the path for appeal. Therefore it cannot be true that lower courts must be bound to carbon copy the decisions of higher courts merely because an appellate hierarchy exists. Binding precedent violates oaths to support and defend the Constitution.

2) Stare decisis and the “presumption of constitutionality” invert popular sovereignty.
These illegitimate doctrines shift the burden of proof from government to citizen, allowing unconstitutional acts to persist by inertia rather than justification. Errors compound across generations because courts obey precedent instead of the Constitution itself. “Presumption of constitutionality” is invoked by prosecutors to presume the acts of the legislature to be constitutional, completely erasing checks and balances and the separation of powers. This contradicts the presumption of innocence and the right of a jury to decide matters of law and fact and to nullify unconstitutional laws, which is the true pattern for nullification. Without juries deciding all criminal verdicts, judicial review is practically nonexistent.

3) Rights are systematically denied by relabeling, which the Constitution forbids.
Government may not evade trial by jury or other due process protections by changing labels (criminal / civil / administrative / infraction etc.). Substance governs over form by virtue of guarantees on rights and the limited enumeration of powers. Government entities cannot be plaintiffs in civil controversies by definition. There is no such thing as an Article I Court.

4) Judicial discretion to refuse cases where jurisdiction exists violates constitutional duty.
Once jurisdiction attaches, courts must decide the case. Cohens v, Virginia held that “We have no more right to decline the exercise of jurisdiction which is given than to usurp that which is not given. The one or the other would be treason to the Constitution.” There can be no such thing as discretionary jurisdiction per the Constitution itself, making the 1925 Judiciary Act null and void.

5) Trial by jury has been functionally erased without amendment.
Civil and criminal jury trials now occur in about 1% of cases, down from 100% just over a century ago, due to plea bargaining, administrative diversion, and “minor offense” doctrines, not constitutional change—eliminating the jury as the people’s primary check on the power of all three traditional branches of government. Plea deals violate the 5th and 8th Amendments by extorting defendants to witness against themselves on the threat of excessive statutory punishments. The purpose of plea deals is to kill the jury and reverse the burden of proof. The end result is a police state that never has to prove anything and has unlimited prosecutorial power.

6) The modern administrative state and “police power” regimes are entirely fictitious judicial fabrications.
Neither federal nor state constitutions grant general police powers nor do they authorize agencies exercising combined legislative, executive, and judicial authority. Cases like Jacobson v. Massachusetts (which upheld a vaccine mandate) assume such power by assertion, not enumeration. The deception was wrought through a careful misquote of Federalist No. 45, stating that the powers of states are “numerous and indefinite”. Indefinite does not mean unlimited; it only means they are not defined in the federal Constitution. States are required to hold themselves to their constitutionally enumerated powers the same as the federal government. This is the true meaning of federalism and the 10th Amendment.

7) Congress had already attempted to redefine marriage in the mid 1800s during the rise of the modern two-party system, at the behest of the Republican Party and its quest to eradicate Biblical marriage. Evidentiary standards were altered; an entire religious sect was banned from serving on juries in the trials of their own peers, and defendants were convicted over mere rumors and forcibly separated from their families, violating bill of attainder and ex post facto prohibitions. This complete obliteration of Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment and other due process and structural guarantees proves the maxim that if you allow government to trample on First Amendment guarantees of religious freedoms, all of the other rights will fall like dominoes. The religion’s founder was murdered over allegations of plural marriage, which neither state nor federal governments have authority to redefine nor forbid, marriage being a religious rite.

Below you can read my petition as submitted to the Supreme Court to unpack more details and explanation of these findings, or watch or listen to a video of me reading it:

Utah H.B. 126 “Micro-Education Entity Facility Amendments” does significantly more than merely modernize facility and safety requirements for small educators. It eliminates natural growth options for such educational businesses.

The bill negatively affects school choice. Cost to enroll a child in a nature-based homeschool or homestead school, or any other small educational business could increase by a thousand dollars or more annually with this new requirement. It hampers truly private educational institutions that compete with state-sponsored education by requiring them to lease or purchase expensive commercial property even if they don’t need it.

The key change in the bill is that transition from small home-based education to larger “micro-education entities” is no longer gradual. Once a group is reclassified as a micro-education entity, commercial building, fire, and other requirements apply immediately, and residential use is no longer allowed.

The bill forbids retrofitting residences for micro-educational use, which means that the cost to run and grow an education business organically would increase significantly, potentially shuttering and preventing the formation of many legitimate and home-grown education businesses.Groups trying to scale, professionalize, or expand their educational offerings face a much steeper jump in cost and compliance, often requiring commercial space sooner than expected. The cost of such compliance would require very significant jumps in tuition and fees for students.

By hampering the economic viability of small businesses, the bill unfairly favors corporations with government or other deep-pocketed backing–just like many other bills in this session that squash private enterprise under myriad excuses. Unregulated education groups are also more likely to come under scrutiny or be reclassified in the future as competing with state-sponsored educational initiatives and therefore become subject to an ever increasing regulatory creep.

HB 126 doesn’t ban homeschool or co-ops—but it makes scaling small education efforts costlier and more sensitive to regulation and future legal status changes. It fundamentally changes how education groups are treated once they grow or formalize into a business entity, effectively limiting their growth and interfering with the free market conditions guaranteed under Article 12 Section 20 of Utah’s Constitution.

As to its primary effect, it really isn’t about safety — it is about crushing the growth of independent competition in the educational space by imposing industry-targeted facility requirements in the name of safety. Please join the committee hearing on Monday, January 26th at 2:00 p.m. to help salvage our right to educational independence:

https://le.utah.gov/committee/committee.jsp?year=2026&com=HSTPOL

https://le.utah.gov/~2026/bills/static/HB0126.html

I just got off the phone with the Utah County clerk’s office about the missing middle names from the candidate filings this year. The supervisor to whom my question was raised informed me that they had been instructed by the Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson’s office not to allow any candidates to file a declaration of candidacy with the full middle name for any state office, unless an exceptional circumstance detailed in last year’s SB54 candidate filing legislation was met, and that this was the way the new legislation was being interpreted by the Lt. Governors office.

The county officer said that all County offices were still allowing middle names to be included on the Declaration of candidacy, but she could not grant an exception for state offices since they are under the direction of the Lt. Governor’s office. Several other candidates have expressed disgust over this new requirement as well.

You can see in the 2024 candidate filings that there are dozens of candidates whose filing includes a middle name. In this year’s filings, while some candidates have a middle initial, the only candidates who have a middle name are those who use it in place of their first name or have a nickname.

You can compare them here:

https://vote.utah.gov/2024-candidate-filings/

https://vote.utah.gov/2026-candidate-filings

If anything, this change has made our candidate names on the ballot *less* reflective of their real, legal names.

It’s barely been 24 hours since filing for office and the process has already given rise to a new needed legislative proposal to correct a major error installed by a bill during the 2025 legislative session, which I am going to call SB54 2.0 (you’ll see why).

On Thursday, I filed to run for the Utah State legislature, and I tried to include my legal middle name on my Declaration of Candidacy. I had originally filled it out with my middle name and I was told that I had to redo it since it is copied verbatim onto government election records (I had included an extra comma by mistake).

Later, when I tried to include my legal middle name as I was refilling the form with an clerk’s officer, I was told that I would have to fill out an additional form and go through an additional process to have my request satisfied.

Perhaps the worker was mistaken or misunderstood my request, but I understood this to refer to the Name Affidavit form, which requires the signatures of five people who know you to vouch for the name you are known by. I did not have time to gather a sufficient number of family and friends just to have the government recognize me by my full legal name (which it already knows). The form is redundant in my case, and there is no wording in the candidate manual that states or implies that any such additional effort is required to be recognized by your legal middle name or to have it included on the ballot. The claim that I would need to fill out this extra form is simply nonsensical. (You can download the full manual here).

Intentional or not, correctly understood or not, this omission traces back to a very poorly worded law passed last year that does not appear even to handle the default, sensible case.

Candidates like myself intending to do the logical thing by including their legal full names are treated as exceptional cases who require additional documentation and processing. When this is thrown at them last-minute such as when they are filing on the last day, and they have even been informed in advance that there is “nothing more they need to bring with them or do” to file (I called the county clerk’s office in advance to verify this), time does not remain to go and gather the requisite signatures from acquaintances in order to be handled as an “exceptional” case to include one’s middle name on the Declaration of Candidacy.

Especially for candidates who are not government insiders or media celebrities, inclusion of the full name is crucial. In the Internet age, candidates will be unfairly disadvantaged when they are represented contrary to their wishes only by their first and last name on an official government ballot, because many if not most voters will resort to Internet keyword searches to find information about candidates. Without enough disambiguation of the full name, large portions of the search traffic that was meant to find them will instead be absorbed by public figures and media reports about different individuals having the same name, making campaigning more costly for challengers. Such memory-hole behavior can come from anywhere, and it can constitute very real out-of-state media influence in our elections, whether we are honest about this reality or not. I find it very difficult to believe that this statute was not constructed with this awareness.

This is not a complaint about the general nature of Internet searches for individuals by name nor is it a lament that I did not do more things to become infamous on the Internet during my adolescent years, but it is a specific complaint against the Utah statute which has been construed to deauthorize inclusion of a candidate’s middle name in the government filing materials and the government ballot, when the government already knows that legal middle name and it should be as easy as writing it out in full on the Declaration of Candidacy.

My website for candidacy in this race is my full legal name with a .com at the end. (SethAndrewStewart.com). Not being allowed to include my middle name constitutes a very material unfairness and systemic prejudice against candidates like myself who do not already enjoy extensive media coverage and name recognition.

This is also not to say that candidates who do not have a middle name are being treated unfairly by government, it is the unwillingness to recognize disambiguating information that the government already has in its possession such as the candidate’s full legal name, whatever that might be, that is problematic.

It is also simply not the case that candidates never included their middle names in their candidacy filings. In 2024 there were numerous candidates who went by their full legal names including their middle names, and apparently did not have to file anything extra to do so: https://vote.utah.gov/2024-candidate-filings/

This year’s bizarre treatment of middle names appears to be a completely new thing that traces back to the 2025 filing name requirements bill (numbered “SB54”).

I have read the law in question and it appears to be extremely misleading, extremely authoritarian, or woefully undercomplete at best in its omission of the most sensible default case, which makes it understandable how an election worker could easily misapply it to a candidate who is only requesting that his full legal name be included on his declaration for candidacy and on the general election ballot, when all of the prescribed “exception” cases for handling middle names require an additional form or additional triggering condition.

Here is the “base case” of this law, laid out:

20A-6-109. Appearance of candidate's name on ballot -- Name variations -- Appeal.

(1) Except as otherwise provided in this section, an election officer shall ensure that a candidate's name appears on the ballot with the candidate's legal first name, followed by the candidate's legal surname.

What follows deals only in exceptional cases with affirmative authorization language such as “may”, as in you “may include a middle initial under such and such circumstances” and curiously fails to treat the most basic, obvious case of a person simply wanting to be known by his or her full name.

Such narrow construction nonetheless does not appear to authorize an elections officer to refrain from putting the candidates legal middle name on the Declaration of candidacy, but that is apparently how it was interpreted and applied in my case. This is a massive source of confusion.

You can read the full text of the current law here: https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title20A/Chapter6/20A-6-S109.html

It does not require a huge change to the law to get this glaring omission addressed, either. I propose that the wording be altered expressly to permit the inclusion of the candidate’s full legal name including any or all middle names or any valid subset of it in the proper ordering, without having to require an exception or additional form. Any name that can be demonstrated to be or is already known on government records to be commonly associated with an individual ought to be permissible on a Declaration of Candidacy without further question or processing. Even if it was just an election officer misinterpreting the law or misunderstanding a candidate’s request, the law should certainly be updated to avoid giving false instructions or misleading county employees.This statute creates a de facto default memory hole that causes a serious disadvantage for candidates who do not already enjoy widespread name recognition and media coverage.It demonstrates that the actual effect of the 2025 legislation is opposite the sense of what it was publicly advertised to do–to “to ensure only accurate legal names go on the ballot, or nicknames under certain circumstances.”

Part of the rationale?

To kick “Satan” off the ballot:

https://www.ksl.com/article/51257950/utah-to-limit-candidate-nicknames-on-ballot-after-lucifer-justin-case-everylove-qualified-last-year

You can’t make this stuff up.

Here is the 2025 SB54 bill text:

https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0054.html

For as well-meaning as it may have been, omission of the obvious default case makes it extremely easy to misconstrue, and has already been weaponized to deny fair ballot access to challengers, even if inadvertently.If this was only a mistake on the part of the elections officer, I will demand a speedy remedy because this is a material omission. If it is construed that this is what the law “means”, or in any case, the law should be amended to eliminate confusion on the subject.

It is also not the case that the government necessarily has to collect filings for candidacy in the first place nor print ballots or place names on them. (Indeed, this is part of my earlier legislative proposal, to eliminate filing fees for candidacy. I thought about filling out a writ of impecuniosity but I think all that would establish is that I don’t meet the government’s poverty threshold, no matter how little money I can actually spare relative to basic living expenses in Utah).

In the early years of the American Republic, candidates did not file with the government, they simply announced their candidacy to the public and voters would write the name of their desired candidate on a slip of paper or use another method to indicate their support. How did they survive?

Maybe decomplicating our elections is the right way to go.

Maybe this sounds like a silly complaint from the perspective of the general public, but I have found there is no better way to find out what is broken in our system than to go and claim and exercise our rights, petition for redress and see which trapdoors open to swallow you and which logs get thrown on your train tracks. You’ve got to experience it for yourself, it’s an adventure of a lifetime.

Go ahead and try this out: Type in your own name in a search engine as though you were researching yourself as a candidate to get an idea of what others will see when they go to do the same.

And now, since you made it to the end of this article, here’s some free bacon:

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