This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
— Constitution of the United States, Article VI
Members of the Utah Legislature met in special session Wednesday to ameliorate one big mistake they made during their last regular gathering and to exacerbate another.
First, the bad news.
Lawmakers rushed to pass a pair of resolutions pretending that the state of Utah can exempt itself from any federal laws or regulations its political class doesn’t like.
This is willful ignorance of the Constitution that most Utah officials claim to revere. It threatens to cost Utah taxpayers millions to pursue futile lawsuits that will wreck the state’s reputation and discourage the best and the brightest from coming here.
Specifically, Wednesday’s actions threaten billions in federal funding that benefit the most vulnerable of the state’s schools — the many serving low-income families — in order to threaten some of the state’s most vulnerable students — the few who are transgender.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that it would read Title IX, the 1972 act of Congress that prohibits gender discrimination by public schools and colleges, to include protection for pregnant and transgender persons.
This alarmed the Republican supermajority of Utah lawmakers, who imagine lascivious hoards of transgender persons invading girls sports or private female spaces. It’s a scare tactic that has little basis in fact but looks delicious to the far-right activists who dominate the party.
Lawmakers in 2022 passed, and Gov. Spencer Cox cravenly signed, a bill to prohibit transgender girls from female sports unless they pass review by a special committee. This year they added another ordering public schools and other public agencies to ban transgender people from restrooms or locker rooms that don’t match the gender they were assigned at birth.
Wednesday’s resolutions were passed under cover of a state law enacted earlier this year, one that sets up a process to command state agencies, local governments and school boards to ignore any federal law or rule the Legislature doesn’t like, at least as long as the matter is being hashed out in federal court.
It is a particularly heinous idea that is spreading across Republican-controlled states. It is a foot in the door that could as easily attack federal protections for other minorities, women, children, the handicapped, workers and our shared environment.
States, like anyone else, can always sue to challenge laws and rules that may reach beyond the federal government’s proper role. States, like anyone else, can also lobby Congress and the administration for changes.
But that process, which Utah should respect, leaves the power where the Constitution assigns it, with a federal government that is responsible for protecting the rights of all Americans.
Lawmakers see the light on IPP Renewed
Now, the good news.
Lawmakers Wednesday passed a bill that may sustain their quixotic hope of sustaining coal as a source of electric power but that allows the green-energy dreams of the Intermountain Power Agency (IPA) to proceed.
The bill wisely stops what was basically a hostile takeover of IPA, a public agency owned by 23 mostly rural Utah communities, and that agency’s Intermountain Power Plant (IPP) near Delta.
Lawmakers were troubled by an innovative project called IPP Renewed. It envisions the shutdown of the plant’s 40-year-old coal-fired units and creation of low-to-no carbon facilities that would start by burning natural gas and, eventually, run on hydrogen.
IPP Renewed recognizes some cold, hard facts. Coal is the dirtiest power there is. It’s also getting harder to find. California, which buys almost all of the plant’s power, is moving to ban electricity that comes from coal.
And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is belaying enforcement of pollution rules that could mean shuttering the whole facility, a forbearance allowed only because IPP has promised to move away from coal.
The bill passed in the regular session would have basically forced IPP to keep its coal plants operating, threatening a federal air-quality crackdown on it specifically and on Utah in general, in the futile hope that someone else might want to buy all that dirty juice.
The new measure, wisely, allows IPP to renew itself, while the state, foolishly, looks for a legal and economical way to keep the coal units spewing.
That’s not likely. New transmission lines that would be needed to ship the power elsewhere would cost millions and take years. And the most likely customers for power at that magnitude, data centers and other high-tech operations, are also partial to clean power.
But the new action allows IPP Renewed to proceed as it lets lawmakers claim they did all they could to keep the coal fires burning. Little good will it do them.