“He became so powerful, the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did.”— Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith.”
There is no reason why the people of Utah should trust their elected officials when those elected officials have demonstrated so clearly that they don’t trust us.
The Republican supermajority in the Utah Legislature absurdly declared an “emergency” for the purpose of calling itself into a special session Wednesday to pass a proposed amendment to the state Constitution.
That amendment, unless the state’s electorate steps up to block it, would effectively negate the part of the Constitution that allows voters, with great difficulty, to pass laws on their own initiative. It would destroy the part of Utah’s basic charter that says, “All political power is inherent in the people.”
Why? Because our legislative leaders think we are stupid. That if we retain the ability to write some of our own laws, we will be “vulnerable to laws advanced by foreign interests through ballot propositions.”
As if our lawmakers aren’t susceptible to pressure and money from out-of-state lobbies, groups and corporations. As if they can’t make bad decisions that should be subject to popular oversight and judicial review.
There is no emergency. There is no call for the Utah Constitution to be changed to make the power of the Legislature even more exempt from the will of the people than it already is.
All that has happened is that the Utah Supreme Court, in a recent unanimous ruling, rightly said that the lawmakers’ 2020 act disemboweling the Better Boundaries initiative, adopted by the voters in 2018, smells of an unconstitutional overreach of legislative power.
That initiative, more formally known as Proposition 4, decreed that the process of drawing Utah’s congressional and legislative districts should be taken away from the partisan Legislature and handed to a special seven-member commission.
That commission was to be made up of Utahns who, for at least the previous four years, were not in public office, had not run for public office, had not received any money from a political party or partisan political action committee and had not worked as a lobbyist. At least two of the commission members were to be unaffiliated voters, not registered with any political party.
The motivation for that initiative, placed on the ballot through the onerous legal process of gathering signatures from around the state, was the clear fact that Utah’s congressional and legislative districts are obscenely gerrymandered. That they make it impossible for Democrats to win any congressional seats and more than a tiny fraction of positions in the Legislature.
In the case of our four congressional districts, that was accomplished by splitting Salt Lake County, the closest thing Utah has to a Democratic-leaning area, into four parts. That’s something that Proposition 4 would prohibit, mandating that the redistricting commission keep districts as geographically compact as possible and refrain from carving up municipal jurisdictions or communities of interest.
The result is not only that Republicans have all the power. It is also that the unchallenged GOP, and thus the Legislature, is pulled much further to the right than it would otherwise be. It renders the Legislature basically immune from any concern for what the people as a whole want or need.
The Legislature defended that power by passing Senate Bill 200. That law kicked Proposition 4 to the curb and reclaimed for lawmakers the power to select their own constituents.
Proposition 4 backers, including the Utah League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, were having none of it. They sued, took the case to the state Supreme Court and, last month, won a unanimous ruling that when a voter-initiated law deals with the structure of government, it is unconstitutional for the Legislature to take it apart absent extraordinary circumstances.
The justices — all appointed by Republican governors and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate — sent the specific question of whether SB200 amounts to such an unconstitutional action back to the district court.
Utah Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz, among others, are waving the bloody shirt of a California-style tsunami of initiatives and referenda messing up Utah’s tidy government. They deceivingly ignore the fact that, compared to California, Utah already makes it much more difficult to get such questions on the ballot, protecting us from goofy ideas and extreme policies.
The proposed amendment was pushed through the legislative process with no time for public input and a travesty of a public hearing. Just the way our Legislature usually operates.
Two Republican senators — Daniel Thatcher of West Valley City and Wayne Harper of Taylorsville — found the courage to vote against it. So did seven Republican House members — Raymond Ward, Matt MacPherson, Anthony Loubet, James Dunnigan, Steve Eliason, James Cobb and Marsha Judkins.
All of the Democrats — 14 in the House and six in the Senate — voted nay.
The safety valve in all of this is that this proposed amendment won’t take effect unless it is adopted by the voters in the November election.
Utah voters can prove that they are not so easily fooled by defeating this anti-democratic proposal at the polls.