Utah’s governor has been far too sparing with his veto pen this year.
There are many measures to which he should have applied the executive negative. Tops on the list was the bill that will seriously undermine of the state’s justly popular and highly democratic vote-by-mail system by making mail ballots opt-in rather than automatic.
Gov. Spencer Cox, who helped to create the mail voting system while he was lieutenant governor, rightly said the system is trustworthy but that, because some people don’t trust it, it needs to be rolled back. So he signed HB300.
The only reason anyone might not trust Utah’s election system is that legislative leaders and out-of-state enemies of democracy have lied to us about mail-in balloting, telling us it is replete with fraud. Which it isn’t.
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Cox also weaseled out on HB77, a bill to ban pride flags from all schools and public buildings in the state. He correctly described the bill as an unhelpful example of culture war posturing, but said any veto was likely to be overridden in the Legislature, so he kept his pen in his pocket and allowed the disgraceful measure to become law without his signature.
But Cox did put to use, and preserve, the constitutional separation of powers in a couple of very important ways.
The Legislature, bothered by the fact that the Utah Supreme Court has been making rulings lawmakers don’t like, floated a handful of bills that would take power away from the courts and give it to either the Legislature or the governor. Most of them, fortunately, did not pass.
One that did get to the governor’s desk — SB296 — was a measure that would have had the governor appoint the state’s chief justice, taking away from the five high court justices the ability to choose their own presiding officer. That appointment would come up for renewal every four years, giving the governor a great deal of influence over the judicial branch.
It was, to Cox’s great credit, a power he did not covet. And he vetoed the bill.
Declining an increase in one’s own power is not something that happens often enough in our government, at any level, by any party.
Another welcome veto from Cox was the skewering of SB37, a bill that would have taken all the property taxes levied by local school districts and sluiced it into the state general fund. Once there, that revenue could be diverted away from the collecting districts, or from education altogether, as long as the Legislature maintained a minimum funding for each district.
It would have been a major change in the way schools are funded and a large, and unjustified, step away from the principle that local taxes fund local operations. It was rightly opposed by the Utah State Board of Education and associations of teachers, schools boards and school superintendents, as well as the state auditor.
Cox was right to blow the dust off his veto stamp and prevent both bills from becoming law.
Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
