Journey with me back to a simpler time — a scrappy prosecutor named Robert Mueller was just hired to probe Russian election meddling, the song “Despacito” was the summer’s annoying earworm, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz decided to throw everyone a curve, quitting just four months into his term.
As you’ll recall, the law was unclear about how to pick Chaffetz’s replacement, since legislators had failed to fix it a few months earlier. So, in mid-2017, there was a showdown between legislators, who wanted to let the more stridently conservative Republican delegates pick the next congressman, and Gov.