Utah Legislature declares fake ’emergency’ in an attempt to rob people of what little power they have

“He became so powerful that the only thing he feared 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 for Utahns to trust their elected officials when they have so clearly demonstrated that they do not trust us.

The Republican supermajority in the Utah Legislature absurdly declared an “emergency” in order to convene a special session on Wednesday to approve a proposed amendment to the state Constitution.

That amendment, unless the state’s electorate intervenes to block it, would effectively nullify 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 fundamental charter that says, “All political power is vested 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 that promote foreign interests through ballot measures.”

As if our legislators were not susceptible to pressure and money from lobbyists, corporations and out-of-state groups. As if they could not make bad decisions that should be subject to popular oversight and judicial control.

There is no emergency. There is no reason to change the Utah Constitution to make 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 law gutting the Better Boundaries initiative, adopted by voters in 2018, smacks of an unconstitutional overreach of legislative power.

That initiative, more formally known as Proposition 4, decreed that the process of drawing Utah’s legislative and congressional districts should be removed from the partisan Legislature and turned over to a special seven-member commission.

The commission was to be comprised of Utah citizens who had not held public office, run for office, received money from a political party or partisan political action committee, or worked as lobbyists for at least the previous four years. At least two of the commission members were to be unaffiliated voters, meaning they were not registered with any political party.

The motivation for that initiative, which was brought to a vote through the onerous legal process of statewide signature gathering, was the glaring fact that Utah’s legislative and congressional districts are obscenely gerrymandered, making it impossible for Democrats to win seats in Congress and more than a small fraction of seats in the Legislature.

In the case of our four congressional districts, that was accomplished by dividing Salt Lake County, Utah’s closest thing to a Democratic-leaning area, into four parts. That’s something Proposition 4 would prohibit, by mandating that the redistricting commission keep districts as geographically compact as possible and refrain from dividing municipal jurisdictions or communities of interest.

The result is not only that Republicans have all the power, but also that the unchallenged Republican Party, and therefore the Legislature, is pulled much further to the right than it would otherwise be, rendering the Legislature basically immune to any concern for what the people as a whole want or need.

The Legislature defended that power by passing Senate Bill 200. That law eliminated Proposition 4 and restored to lawmakers the power to select their own electors.

Supporters of Proposition 4, including the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, did not take it seriously. They filed a lawsuit, took the case to the state Supreme Court and last month won a unanimous ruling that when a voter-proposed law deals with the structure of government, it is unconstitutional for the Legislature to dismantle it, barring extraordinary circumstances.

The judges, all appointed by Republican governors and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate, sent the specific question of whether SB200 constitutes an unconstitutional action to the district court.

Utah Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz, among others, are waving the bloody jersey of a tsunami of California-style initiatives and referendums that is wrecking Utah’s orderly government. They deceptively ignore the fact that, compared to California, Utah already makes it much harder to get such issues on the ballot, thereby protecting us from absurd ideas and extreme policies.

The proposed amendment was passed through the legislative process without time for public input and in a sham public hearing, just as our Legislature typically operates.

Two Republican senators — Daniel Thatcher of West Valley City and Wayne Harper of Taylorsville — voted no, as did seven Republican House members — Raymond Ward, Matt MacPherson, Anthony Loubet, James Dunnigan, Steve Eliason, James Cobb and Marsha Judkins.

All Democrats (14 in the House and six in the Senate) voted against it.

The safety valve in all of this is that this proposed amendment will not go into effect unless it is adopted by voters in the November election.

Utah voters can prove they are not so easily fooled by defeating this anti-democratic proposal at the ballot box.