Take 2 Podcast: Pres. Biden’s vaccine mandate, Utah County death penalty



In this week’s Take 2 Podcast, host Heidi Hatch speaks to former Utah Speaker of the House Greg Hughes, and former Salt Lake mayoral candidate David Ibarra about the vaccine order President Joe Biden spoke about earlier in the week.

They’ll also talk about Utah County Attorney David Leavitt’s decision to no longer seek the death penalty in cases he prosecutes.

They discuss Utah Senate President Stuart Adams’ recent comments that came under fire about “educating” Utah Jazz guard Donovan Mitchell and helping him to “understand” the state’s critical race theory resolution.

Finally, understand the problems with Utah’s homeless crisis and ideas to fix it.

Guests: Greg Hughes – Former Utah Speaker of the House- businessman and lobbyist
David Ibarra- Former SLC Mayoral Candidate President/CEO at eLeaderTech, Inc.

Vaccine Mandate President Biden: 2 Months after declaring the nations “independence” from the virus
July 25 White House: Vaccine mandates are “not the role of the federal government.”

  • Employers with 100 + employees must require vaccine or test weekly (80 million people)
  • All health care facilities
  • All Federal Employees and contractors – no test out option
  • $14k per violation

Is it legal?
Will states challenge?
Will the Supreme Court weigh in and how quickly?

Death Penalty off the table in Utah County
Utah County Attorney David Leavitt announced Wednesday that he’ll no longer seek the death penalty.

“Pretending that the death penalty will somehow curb crime is simply a lie,” Leavitt said in his video. “The answer to preventing these types of horrible crimes is in education and prevention before they occur. No family wants to hear, ‘My child is dead and that man got a long sentence.’ What they want to hear is, ‘My child was never killed.’”

  • Ronnie Lee Gardner was the last state execution- 13 years ago by firing squad.
  • 2022 Session will tackle the issue again.
  • Senator Steve Urquhart bill failed in final hours in 2106
  • 2018 the bill was pulled without support.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams at ALEC says Donovan Mitchell did not “understand” state critical race theory resolution.

“I hate to use names, but I will. Donovan Mitchell is not happy with us,” Adams says in the video from May 21 posted on social media. “And you start to get very popular sports stars like that that are pushing back. We’ve got work to do to try to educate them. My text back was, ‘Let’s get after him and let’s go tell him what we’re doing,’ because I don’t really think he understands what happened.”

Utah Homeless Crisis rears its ugly head again both Ibarra and Hughes have worked on the issue, understand the problems and have ideas to fix it.

  • Are streets safe?
  • Do we need an overflow shelter?
  • Who’s problem is it?