Democrats just won control of Congress.
The GOP establishment smells blood in the water.
And one RINO sellout is salivating over this plot to dump Trump.
A Utah Senator Wrote the Party’s Obituary Before the Votes Were Counted
US Senator John Curtis (R-UT) didn’t waste any time. Democrats were still popping champagne over their House and Senate wins when Curtis posted his own diagnosis on X.
“After the Biden era, Americans wanted an economy that worked for them,” Curtis wrote. “Instead, they received a hastily executed war, headline after headline of scandals, a ballooning $40 trillion debt, and unpredictable tariffs.”
His prescription came next. Curtis told Republicans it was time “to return to the principled conservative values that once defined us.”
Then he dressed it up with a Substack essay about Utah’s pioneer heritage and the Republican Party he remembers so fondly. In that party, Curtis wrote, “Leaders like Ronald Reagan championed limited government, free trade, resolute diplomacy and global leadership, and fiscal responsibility.”
Read that list one more time. Free trade. Global leadership. Somebody at the Chamber of Commerce probably framed it.
Curtis even paid the populist voters a backhanded compliment. “Many shrewd political minds found it worth abandoning these principles in order to win elections,” he wrote, adding that those minds were “largely right.”
So the working folks who flipped factory towns for Trump were useful. They just weren’t supposed to steer.
But Curtis saved his sharpest jab for Ukraine. Americans, he wrote, “saw the leader of the free world side with Putin over a strategic ally.” That line could have come straight off a neoconservative think tank’s fax machine, aimed squarely at Trump’s America First promise to end the war.
The Issue Curtis Steered Around on Purpose
Go through the X post and the essay from top to bottom. The war shows up. The debt shows up. Tariffs, scandals, and Vladimir Putin all make the cut.
The border never appears. Neither do illegal aliens, ICE, or deportations.
That’s a strange hole in a party autopsy. Exit polls showed voters still trusted Republicans over Democrats on immigration, 44 percent to 40 percent, according to Breitbart’s look at the numbers. Immigration gave the GOP one of its few bright spots on a dark night.
Maybe Curtis just forgot. Long essays wander. But a senator with his own immigration bill sitting in committee doesn’t forget the subject. He walks around it.
At the end of July, Curtis filed S.5197 with Democrat Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ). The bill lets state legislatures run their own migrant worker visa programs, starting at 5,000 visas per state each year plus extra slots from a national pool of 245,000, according to the Deseret News. Each visa runs up to three years, it renews, and it covers spouses and children under 18.
And the bill hides a bigger prize deeper in the text. The Deseret News reported that the measure opens a route to legal residency for illegal aliens who have lived in the country since the end of 2016, so long as they clear a background check and pay a $1,000 penalty.
That’s amnesty, and a $1,000 penalty only sets the price of admission.
Curtis pitched the whole thing as a favor to Utah businesses. “Our bill allows states to sponsor visas tailored to their unique workforce needs, while ensuring rigorous federal vetting and accountability,” he wrote when he rolled it out.
And it isn’t a new hobby. The Cato Institute traced the idea to a 2017 bill from US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Curtis carried his own House version as HR 5174 in 2019, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
But Utah Republicans have already moved on. Curtis modeled his plan on a guest-worker waiver from the 2011 Utah Compact on Immigration, a request Washington never approved. During the 2026 legislative session, Utah House Republicans voted to repeal that dead program, the Deseret News reported.
So the senator demanding a return to Republican roots wants Congress to dig up a scheme his own state’s Republicans just buried.
Reagan’s Own Attorney General Already Wrote the Ending
Curtis leans hard on Reagan’s name. He skips the one Reagan chapter that matches his bill best.
On November 6, 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Congress sold it as a trade: amnesty up front, followed by a crackdown on employers who hired illegal labor.
The amnesty showed up on time. The crackdown never really arrived.
Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s Attorney General, laid it out in a New York Times op-ed in May 2006, while Congress debated yet another amnesty. “Ultimately, some 2.7 million people were granted amnesty, and many who were not stayed anyway, forming the nucleus of today’s unauthorized population,” Meese wrote.
Those words came from a man who sat in Reagan’s Cabinet and helped sell the 1986 deal in the first place.
Now look at the Curtis pitch. Background checks. Penalties. “Rigorous federal vetting.” Every amnesty pitch since 1986 has come gift-wrapped in the language of enforcement, and the wrapping paper keeps ending up in the trash.
But the pattern runs deeper than one bill. Curtis won his Senate seat in 2024 after beating Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs in the primary, even though Trump endorsed Staggs and called Romney “one of the worst senators in the history of the Republican Party.” Curtis didn’t back Trump in the 2024 presidential primary either, CNN reported.
Back in 2021, as a House member, Curtis launched the Conservative Climate Caucus to coax Republicans toward climate legislation. Funny how that one didn’t make his nostalgic list of principles.
And his tariff complaint doesn’t hold up against the data. An Echelon Insights poll of Trump 2024 voters who now disapprove of the President found 15 percent pointed to the wars and Iran, while just 3 percent named tariffs. Curtis tossed tariffs onto his list anyway, because free trade is the real destination.
The war line deserves a closer look, too. Curtis never called the Iran war a mistake. He called it “hastily planned.” In the same essay, he longed for “a global order led by the United States with help from its democratic allies and partners.” The interventionist crowd that pushed Trump toward war in the first place talks exactly that way. Curtis’s beef with the war seems to be the schedule, not the destination.
Vice President JD Vance saw all of this coming. The morning after the election, Vance warned on X that the excuses would pile up fast. “Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty,” Vance wrote.
Curtis didn’t even make him wait. His post landed hours before Vance’s prediction did.
But that tells you where this fight goes once Trump leaves office. The establishment wing wants the pre-Trump party back, with its cheap-labor pipelines, its job-exporting trade deals, and its appetite for foreign entanglements. Vance, the MAGA heir apparent, stands in the way because he opposes both the endless wars and the amnesty schemes that replace American workers with cheap foreign labor. Don’t be surprised when the knives come out for him first.
Come January, Chuck Schumer runs the Senate, and Mark Kelly sits in the majority. A bill with a Republican name on top and a Democrat cosponsor is exactly the kind of “bipartisan” vehicle Washington loves to dust off once the GOP base stops paying attention.
Curtis closed his essay by urging lawmakers to “put petty partisan politics aside.” He already found his partner.
Ronald Reagan signed his amnesty on November 6, 1986. Forty years later, almost to the day, a Utah senator invoked Reagan’s name to scold Trump while his own amnesty bill sat waiting in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sources: Breitbart, “GOP Sen. Curtis Calls for Republicans ‘To Return to Principled Conservative Values’”; US Senator John Curtis, “It’s Time for Republicans to Return to Our Roots,” Substack; Breitbart, “JD Vance Warns Establishment Will Blame Migration Curbs for 2026 Wipeout”; Deseret News, “Utah Sen. John Curtis proposes state-led migrant worker pilot program”; Deseret News, “Sen. Curtis brought the Utah Compact on Immigration to Congress, MAGA called it a betrayal”; The Daily Caller, “GOP Sen. John Curtis Unveils State-Run Visa Scheme Offering Amnesty To Illegals”; CNN, “Trump-backed Senate candidate will lose bid for Romney seat”; ABC4, “Trump endorses Trent Staggs in video ahead of primary election”; Edwin Meese III, “An Amnesty by Any Other Name…,” The New York Times (via The Heritage Foundation); The American Legion; Conservative Climate Caucus records; Echelon Insights; The Spokesman-Review/AP, “Democrats take control of House and Senate as Trump’s imprint is seen in key races.”
