ST. GEORGE — No matter what the result is of the June 25 Republican primary for the 2nd Congressional District between the incumbent and her challenger, the ultimate victor will go into the general election with less than a year of experience in an elected position.
Six months after she was sworn into office, Rep. Celeste Maloy faces off against military green beret and tech CEO Col. Colby Jenkins.
Despite less than half of a year on the job, Maloy told St. George News during a phone interview it’s fair to judge her on six months of work.
“I think if they look at what I’ve done in the last six months, they’ll have to admit that I’m doing a really good job, especially for a super freshman,” Maloy said, noting that she has introduced 10 bills – twice the number her predecessor Rep. Chris Stewart introduced in the last three years – and has had one of her bills pass the House.
On the opposing side, Jenkins, talking with St. George News at the headquarters of parent company Canyon Media in St. George, said Maloy has failed on what he says are core Republican issues of controlling spending and limiting government. He said Maloy’s legislation output is just the “basics.”
“Why are we giving accolades for just doing your job? For me, the differentiation is I’m going to fight for our water and land,” Jenkins said. “I’ve been in combat. I’ve been in the corporate world. I haven’t just spent my entire career as a bureaucrat in government, and that’s a key contrast in this race.”
Before being elected in a special election last November to replace Stewart, Maloy, 43, was the chief legal counsel for Stewart for four years after serving as a deputy Washington County attorney and lead attorney for the Washington County Water Conservancy District. Born in Cedar City, which is her current place of residence, she was raised in the small eastern Nevada town of Hiki, about 95 miles west of St. George, before going back to Cedar City in 1999 as an agricultural graduate of Southern Utah University.
Maloy has lived off-and-on in Beaver, Cedar City and St. George since then, according to residential records. Since she started working for Stewart and on to her congressional term, she has also maintained a residence in Arlington, Virginia. The exact status of her residency and voter registration status was made an issue by opponents in last year’s special election and has also been brought up by Jenkins in this election.
After his 1999 graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Jenkins, 48, commanded special forces teams in the Afghanistan War and hostage rescue and anti-drug operations in South America. In 2007, Jenkins joined the civilian world – as a liaison and advisor in the Pentagon – before going on to be a manager at Google and the CEO for the St. George-based education mental health platform SchoolPulse. He is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Born and raised about 80 miles east of Provo in Roosevelt, Jenkins has called the St. George area home since 2017, according to residential records.
The 2nd Congressional District includes the entirety of all five counties of Southern Utah as well as most of the rural, western counties of the state as well as a small portion of Davis and Salt Lake counties. The primary election is set for June 25 with ballots being mailed to voters starting Tuesday.
The following are responses to questions asked of both candidates on issues facing Republican voters. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
What are the three main goals you hope to accomplish in the next two years as a congressperson?
Jenkins: The No. 1 issue throughout our district, all 13 counties, is close the border. What are you gonna do to close the border? So that’s the first priority.
Next to that, building as a team so that we can function efficiently is I need to be able to work to remove any legislative obstacles, provide funding needs that (former) President Trump and the new administration will need to close and secure the border.
Priority one after that would be making sure that I’m building that barrier, pushing back on the federal government overreach into our water and land issues here, specifically here in St. George and the Northern Corridor, making sure that I can get that back on track.
Maloy: As far as (the) big picture goes, I want a smaller, more accountable government. So I’m focusing on things like streamlining federal permitting and more transparency, more accountability out of government and restoring the balance of power between the executive and legislative branch.
As far as local issues go, all politics are local. And especially in Utah, where the federal government manages the majority of our land, our local issues really do have a federal nexus all the time, and they shouldn’t, but they do.
So I’m also really focused on spending time with local elected officials, finding out what federal issues they have, and helping them work through these processes while I’m also working to simplify these processes to make life easier for our local elected officials.
What do you think you can do in Congress that would have an effect here in Southern Utah, especially when it comes to the water situation?
Maloy: I say all the time that asking a member of Congress about water issues is kind of a trick question because the state has jurisdiction over water, and the state should have jurisdiction over water.
That being said, the things our local governments are doing have a federal nexus. And when it comes to, especially, long-term water planning in Utah, it’s going to take federal programming and probably federal dollars to get a lot of these things done.
Jenkins: Those core issues here that drive Southern Utah are water and land. Those are critical. And first, I need to make sure that I vote for President Trump, that I support him, and unlike my opponent who didn’t vote, let alone vote for President Trump, the Trump administration can count on me for that support.
I will be willing and ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the new … administration, the new director of the BLM, the new EPA director and leadership to make sure that things that the Biden administration has handcuffed our district with here in Southern Utah that we can turn those back.
There are many here in Utah calling for less federal control over the open land in the state. What is your opinion of the Bureau of Land Management and is it time to rethink the federal protection of open spaces that started in the early 20th century?
Jenkins: The Antiquities Act definitely is ripe for review, and the BLM is a prime example of bureaucratic overreach where the legislative branch has ceded authority to the unaccountable bureaucrats. And so, for me, that’s where I can start pulling the threads of funding because whenever you pull on funding, then people’s heads start to pop up and say, ‘Oh, who’s pulling on me?’
Frankly, I’m hopeful that just electing President Trump, I know … having a new director of the BLM will be night and day, and so it’ll be incumbent upon me to make sure that we are tight, that that person knows my first, my middle name, and my last name, and so that they’re intimately aware with what our issues (are) here.
Maloy: It’s definitely time to rethink it. That’s a big-picture idea that would take a lot of cooperation from a lot of people around the country who don’t actually face this problem. The high percentage of public lands we have affects about seven western states and some of those are blue states now, and they’re not super interested in doing anything about it.
So, if we want to totally rethink federal lands, we’ve got to go out and evangelize to some of our friends and neighbors in other parts of the country. As long as we have the federal government managing so much land in our state, we need to be holding them accountable and keeping them within their boundaries, keeping their authority as small as it can be, and creating policies that encourage them to work with local governments and not ignore local governments.
RECA, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, is about to expire for downwinders. Is there a time where downwinders have had enough time to seek compensation if extending it results in more government spending?
Maloy: Extending RECA is essential. It is set to expire later this month. We’re working on extending it, but we’re working on extending it so that it’s the right size to fit the problem.
Part of the reason it’s tough to get done this year is because there are bills out there that do throw too many categories of people into the same bill. What we have right now is some people who are saying, ‘Well, we should extend RECA to include a lot of states, including states in the Midwest and a lot of people and a lot of diseases that we don’t necessarily know are linked to radiation.’
This is where we’re going to have to be really careful how we do it. We’ve got to make sure that the problem the solution addresses is the actual problem. If you throw too many people on the lifeboat, it’s going to sink.
Jenkins: We certainly need to limit government spending in all quarters. We don’t have any breathing room to continue to be spending money that we don’t have.
But in this regard, similar to Social Security, similar to the promises we’ve made to our veterans, we have to honor those promises.
It’s important that we have a periodic relook so that we’re not just funding people who may not have any claim to it anymore, but we need to honor the promises that we’ve made.
Southern Utah, especially the agricultural areas, sees a great deal of undocumented immigrant workers. There is currently a proposal to use the National Guard and the U.S. military to round up undocumented immigrants and detain them. What are your thoughts on this proposal?
Jenkins: I think we certainly need to go back to where we were with Trump. The remain-in-Mexico policy needs to be reinstituted. The catch-and-release policy needs to be closed (and) stopped because we need legal immigration. We all want legal immigration. We’re not doing anyone favors by allowing the border to be wide open (where) illegals come across and now live in the shadows.
But in terms of rounding up and catching, we certainly need to deport all the illegals that have come across, but we begin with those who are committing crimes. We don’t just catch and release, catch and release. We start with those who are clearly on our radar right now and deport them.
And I’m confident as that starts to happen, the caravan of people who are coming from south to north will pump the brakes when they start to see that that the tenor, the tone, the incentives to come here have changed.
Would you support the use of the U.S. military on U.S. soil?
Jenkins: I’d have to take a close look at that. That not necessarily … there’s different authorities. There’s the active duty forces and then certainly the National Guard. I’m in the reserve now. So yeah, it depends on what the governors deem as a threat to their borders.
Maloy: I think our first focus needs to be getting the border under control. They’re talking about any other immigration fixes while our border is still wide open is just a waste of time. So I don’t even want to weigh into that right now.
The first thing we need to do is get control of the border. Let’s turn off the faucet before we try to address what to do with people who are already here.
Potentially, the president you will be working with will be Donald Trump. Concerning the verdict last week, what do you think it says about the current state of the judicial system? What would you say in response to someone who says a convicted felon should not be president?
Maloy: I thought this was a politically motivated prosecution, and I do. It’s a novel legal theory, and it seems very politically motivated.
I’m hopeful that it won’t stand and that people who selected Donald Trump in the primary to be their nominee will be able to vote for their nominee on the ballot in the fall. And that really is a political question, not a legal one.
Jenkins: Our Constitution allows him to still run, so I stand and support the Constitution.
It’s unreal how anyone with a logical mind can look at that verdict with a straight face and say, ‘Yeah, that was fair.’ You have a judge who donated to Biden to stop Trump’s campaign. How are we even allowed to proceed? And so we’ve certainly allowed ourselves to become a banana republic in terms of the judicial system.
Updated 2 p.m. Tuesday, June 4: Story corrected that Jenkins did not work for Sen. Orrin Hatch.
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