Rob Bishop: “Mr. Speaker, when I was a young State legislator in my second term, actually I was still in my twenties, so you know…”

“Mr. Speaker, when I was a young State legislator in my second term, actually I was still in my twenties, so you know that was a long, long time ago, someone once came to me with an idea of doing some PR by doing what everyone wants to do, and that is to eliminate useless legislation. I thought this is great. This is going to be a great stunt that I can use to eliminate some useless legislation. I picked a statute still in the Utah code still on the books which required the State of Utah to fund a summer encampment for every veteran of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and, since when this was written, it also said the Great War. Since there were no veterans alive, I thought this was an ideal situation to try to pass, and I introduced the bill. The unfortunate thing is, even though this bill was supposed to do nothing, when it went to the committees of jurisdiction, there was this impending desire on the part of legislators to make the bill actually do something.”