His brother, Joe Cannon is the former GOP State Party Chairman, and was appointed Editor in Chief of the Deseret Morning News in November 2006.

This time, however, the district's partisan lean proved too much for Orton to overcome, and Cannon defeated him by four points.

[5] Cannon was named Chairman of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee at the beginning of the 108th Congress in January 2003, and served as its ranking Republican from 2007 to 2009.

He served on the Subcommittees on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources as well as Regulatory Affairs.

In 2000, Cannon co-founded the Congressional Caucus to Fight and Control Methamphetamine, which has nearly 130 members from both major political parties in 2008.

Safavian was arrested in September 2005 in connection with the Jack Abramoff corruption case, and was convicted in June 2006 on four felony counts.

In January 2003, Cannon was elected chairman of the influential Western Caucus, an organization of over 50 Congressmen working on resource management issues.

In 2004, Cannon defeated Republican challenger Matt Throckmorton in the primary, getting 58.4% of the vote, in a race in which the major issue dividing the candidates was immigration policy.

The spending imbalance was offset to some extent by immigration reform groups that attacked Cannon through billboards, ads, and websites, though these did not support his Democratic opponent.

In October 2005, millionaire real estate developer John D. Jacob announced that he would run against Cannon in 2006.

Cannon faced Democrat Christian Burridge,[14] a consumer rights attorney and also a graduate of Brigham Young University's Law School, in November, as well as Jim Noorlander (Constitution Party)[15] and Phil Hallman (Libertarian party).

[20] Cannon's financial disclosure statements showed that he gave a loan of between $50,000 and $100,000 to Gary Ruse, an executive and later president of First National Bank of Nebraska, in September 1996.

The Premium Beef plant operated for a little more than a year before closing its doors, after the rabbi who oversaw the preparation of the meat died.

[26] Cannon offered Hertford College, Oxford philosopher Peter Millican $10,000 to prove that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers by using computer analysis to compare that work to Ayers' Fugitive Days.

During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, conservatives attempted to link Obama to Ayers, a former radical leader of the Weather Underground.

Regarding the claim that Ayers authored Obama's book, Millican concluded "I feel totally confident that it is false".