‘Make Congress work again,’ say Celeste Maloy and Kathleen Riebe in 2nd District debate
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The Republican and Democratic candidates for Utah’s vacant 2nd Congressional District seat promised to be problem solvers if elected, during the general election’s first and only televised debate Thursday night.
While finding plenty of overlap between their views, Republican primary winner Celeste Maloy and Democratic State Sen. Kathleen Riebe made great pains to contrast their approach to governance with that of the dysfunction that currently characterizes the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Congress is struggling right now. Things aren’t going smoothly,” Maloy said at the top of the hourlong broadcast. “We really need somebody to get in this seat who knows how Congress works, who knows how to work with people and who already knows this district.”
Maloy hopes to fill the seat left vacant by her former boss, Chris Stewart, whose resignation was effective Sept. 15. Maloy served as Stewart’s chief legal counsel from 2019 until her decision to run for Congress on his advice.
Drawing on a career as a soil conservationist and public lands attorney in southern Utah, Maloy’s message of reducing inflation, cutting federal spending and counteracting government overreach won her a majority of delegates in June’s Republican Party nominating convention and a plurality of Republican voters in September’s special Republican primary election — and was her refrain in Thursday’s subdued debate.
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A schoolteacher and current state lawmaker, Riebe has framed herself as a fiscally-minded moderate in touch with the issues affecting regular Utahns. Despite the tall odds of flipping a district that reelected Stewart by 25 percentage points in 2022 and voted for Donald Trump 56% to 39% in 2020, Riebe believes her focus on kitchen table issues will be enough to cross partisan boundaries.
“As a person who has a job every day, who shows up every day, I can bring that to Washington. It’s our job to legislate, it’s our job to work together and it’s our job to find solutions,” Riebe said during a media scrum after the debate. “That’s why I’m going there because I think I can bring that kind of commonsense with me.”
Crises at home and abroad: Avoiding a shutdown and aiding embattled allies
The debate, hosted by the Utah Debate Commission at the Eccles Broadcast Center at the University of Utah, focused on what are seen as two of Congress’ biggest deficiencies: responsible spending and bipartisanship.
Moderator Mary Weaver Bennett, director of the Michael O. Leavitt Center for Politics and Public Service at Southern Utah University, asked the candidates about crises at home and abroad, paying special attention to U.S. funding of Israel and Ukraine and the House’s struggle to pass annual spending bills amid Republican infighting and another impending shutdown in November.
To avoid a government shutdown, Maloy said she “would be willing to work with Democrats, find common ground and work towards the common goals that we all share as Americans instead of focusing on the things that divide us which I think is what has been happening.”
Riebe echoed Maloy’s prioritization of results over partisan loyalties, saying she would be willing to work with “anyone that would keep the government open.”
“There are a lot of things that Republicans and Democrats agree on,” Maloy said. “We want a budget, we the government to function, we want America to be strong we want to defend our system of government.”
But the two candidates also made a point of articulating how their principles led them to different conclusions on today’s most contentious issues, including welfare reform, deficit reduction and foreign aid.
Maloy said her openness to a bipartisan spending bill to avert a shutdown was contingent on it decreasing topline spending, while Riebe said spending cuts should never come “to the detriment of safety and security across the globe.”
When pushed on military aid for the conflicts raging in Ukraine and Israel, Maloy disagreed with the premise that the two were connected, saying it was wrong for President Joe Biden to request that funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the southern border be tied together.
Maloy said America owed its biggest ally in the Middle East monetary support and deference as it decided how best to react to unprecedented terrorist attacks by Hamas. But further support for Ukraine’s war against Russian aggressors, Maloy said, should depend on increased accountability and transparency from Ukraine amid worries that America is depleting its weapons supply.
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In her responses, Riebe focused on the awful civilian toll of both wars, saying the U.S. had an obligation to provide continued humanitarian aid even as it seeks to bring both sides of either conflict to the table to find a diplomatic resolution.
The clearest disagreements between the two candidates, however, reflected longstanding differences between their respective parties.
To address the countries spiraling deficits, Maloy prescribed reforming Social Security to ensure solvency and deregulating energy and housing industries to decrease inflation and allow a growing economy to shrink federal budget shortfalls.
Riebe, on the other hand, said Social Security must be preserved in its current form, that a growing debt requires the country’s more wealthy residents to shoulder a greater tax burden, either by increasing tax rates or allowing corporate tax breaks to expire in coming months, and that the federal government should play a greater role in providing grants to make housing more affordable for new families.
But in their closing appeals, both Maloy and Riebe made a similar case, that they were the ones that would bring collaborative problem-solving back to Washington, D.C.
“I’m asking you to send me to Congress so that I can start working across the aisle. I’m asking you to send me to Congress so that I can start finding people who want to get the work done,” Riebe said. “We are not seeing that happening right now.”
Reibe and Maloy will face off at one more event, an unofficial debate on Nov. 7 at Utah Tech University.
Two weeks later, on Nov. 21, a general election will take place to decide who will fill the remainder of Stewart’s congressional term. The winner will only get a short break before she needs to start campaigning again for a reelection bid in 2024.
