This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion." — Edmund Burke

The choice presented to the voters as to who will be Utah's attorney general for the next four years is an embarrassment of riches. Which is nice, because, for far longer than most of us even knew, the office was just an embarrassment.

For an unlucky 13 years, the regime of Mark Shurtleff and John Swallow brought shame upon an office that, even more than other public posts, should be above ethical reproach. For nine months, Utahns have been fortunate to have Republican Sean Reyes take over and begin what is going to be a long and difficult slog of restoring to that office the public faith and trust it must have to be effective.

But the people of the state would be more fortunate still were they to elect Democrat Charles Stormont to the office of attorney general. His would be a more independent administration, providing a cleaner break with an unfortunate past, and building a future in which the state's chief legal officer would stand for the rights of all the people, not just the ruling majority.

The sharpest difference between the two is a matter of a principled disagreement over a major point, a point on which reasonable people of good will can, and do, differ. But it's a point on which Stormont has the better argument.

Stormont thinks that the independently elected attorney general owes the people not just his industry, but his judgment. That the state's lengthy and expensive pursuit of such issues as protecting its ban on same-sex marriage and seeking control over millions of acres of federal land are not merely unwise, not just political losers, but flat unconstitutional and, in the case of same-sex marriage, a clear violation of individual rights. And that's something that the attorney general should be standing against, not enabling.

Reyes, on the other hand, is just as principled in his belief that the laws of the state are the laws of the state, thus to be defended by the attorney general of the state with all the energy — and taxpayers money — that can be brought to bear.

Reyes has also been just a bit tone-deaf on such matters as accepting dark-money campaign donations through a national organization and not refusing all donations from any source tied to suspect industries such as payday lenders and the kind of online business operations that got Shurtleff and Swallow into so much trouble.

Either way this election turns, Utah will be much better off than it was for quite some years. The better choice, though, would be to put Charles Stormont in the attorney general's chair.