The Rest of the Week

In 1956 H.L. Mencken said, "Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right." I was to see this in actuality throughout the rest of this week.



I got up the next morning and caught the bus at the same time and fell asleep almost as soon as I got sat down. On Tuesday I went to several committee meeting and by far though most boring of the meeting was the Revenue and Taxation committee. The only bill that I thought was worth anything was HB0023 which proposed to force counties, cities, townships and districts to lower taxes when they no longer needed that money and had a surplus.



After this meeting I then went to the senate floor and listened to the second reading of about ten bills. The two that stick out in my mind was one to limit what kind of ATVs are street legal and how big their wheels can be and the other dealt with areas where gangs hang out.



The following day I spent most of my time working in the office running bills and reading bills. I also spent time researching a bill that proposes Expedited Partner Therapy which allows a person who has chlamydia or gonorrhea to also get prescriptions for their partners.



On Thursday I spent a good deal of the day researching the benefits of full-day kindergarten versus half-day kindergarten and the statement made by Gov. Huntsman that children in Utah who were enrolled in Full-Day kindergarten were doing six times better. I also went to the house Health and Human Services sub committee meeting and the bill covering Criminal Abortion that I needed to listen to was circled till Friday.



Overall the experience that I gained this first week of my internship left me looking forward to the rest of the session. However this optimism was also tempered by the realization of something that Winston Churchill said, "Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party."