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The Utah House has voted to draw $350,000 from your petty cash to create a new "federalism curriculum." That's something, apparently, that will teach state lawmakers about the different branches and levels of American government.

How about this:

Federalism is the structure in which the different levels — federal, state, city, mosquito abatement district — and different branches — executive, legislative, judicial, Koch Brothers — divvy up power, allowing people who want things to shop around until they find the level or branch of government that will give it to them.

Just about every person — liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican — is fibbing to you, or themselves, if they claim a principled allegiance to a particular allocation of powers in all circumstances.

Major public policy issues, from race in the 1960s to gender issues of the 2010s, find activists on all sides of an issue scurrying to the part of government that will most likely provide them with a victory. And where that is can change, literally overnight, depending on the last election or the freshest Supreme Court ruling.

Utahns who were hot to sue Barack Obama to make him turn over millions of acres of public land in the state are now happy to take a wait-and-see attitude with his successor. When it gets you want you want, executive overreach is suddenly not such a bad thing.

The sponsor of this federalism brain rinse, Rep. Ken Ivory, says legislators need a refresher course on the jurisdictions the different parts of government have, with emphasis on how to resist federal encroachment on state prerogatives.

I wonder if that bit about states' rights asserting themselves all the way to Appomattox Court House in 1865 will be on the test.

So. There's your federalism course. I'll settle for 10 percent of the $350,000.

With the rest of the money, legislative leadership should bus everybody up to the University of Utah to get the lessons they really need. Mostly in science. Mostly in medical science.

Our politicians need to hear from the real doctors who have basically given up trying to obey the state's junk science pronouncement that abortions where the fetus is more than 20 weeks along should involve "fetal anesthesia."

That's a term that has no meaning to real doctors, even after they asked the governor, the attorney general and state health department. So they aren't doing it.

That hasn't stopped the willful know-nothings in the Legislature from again trying to substitute their own judgment for that of the medical community. This time it's a bill that would tell doctors to tell their patients something the doctors don't really believe, that a woman who has begun a chemical abortion procedure by receiving the first of two doses of medicine can still change her mind, skip the second dose and deliver a healthy baby.

Medical science doesn't back that up. A doctor who said that on her own would be risking a big, fat malpractice suit. But our Legislature doesn't care about medical science. So some lawmakers want to compel it.

A quick breeze through the bill revealed, to my eye, no protection for a doctor who abandons his own moral judgment to say what the law makes him say, then gets sued by the patient when the compelled statement turns out to be so much bushwa.

The Utah politician who is in the most urgent need of a science education isn't in the Legislature. He's in Congress. He's chairman of a very influential committee, a committee that should pay careful attention to what the best available science says.

But, of course, Rep. Rob Bishop regularly demonstrates himself as a scientific illiterate of the worst kind. So, of course, he is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Bishop's latest sin against knowledge was an attack on the Endangered Species Act.

"It has never been used for the rehabilitation of species," The Washington Post quoted him as saying. "It's been used to control the land."

The first part of that statement is palpably false. Worse, the second half is astoundingly unintelligent.

Any effort to save a species from extinction must, as a matter of basic biology, include saving the habitat — the land — that the animal or plant calls home. There. Is. No. Other. Way. It. Can. Be. Done.

The question is whether Bishop chooses not to understand that, or just can't. Either way, perhaps we should be glad he's in Congress and is no longer teaching in the public schools, where he might do even more damage.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, once moved from working at a newspaper to working at a natural systems agricultural research center, lowering the average IQ of both institutions in the process. gpyle@sltrib.com