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Legislative grab-bagging
The Legislature's creation of Senate Bill 2 -- the so-called "omnibus" education bill -- has been described by some as arrogance personified, and by others, perhaps more charitably, as behaving like Congress.
Neither, we would think, is the sort of thing a self-respecting lawmaker would want to be associated with.
The Standard-Examiner's editorial board fell into the latter camp. At the close of this year's regular session, we termed SB 2 "the embodiment of the Legislature behaving like Congress: badly." We decried its rolling of more than a dozen education-issue bills into one -- including one or two that had previously been defeated -- as strong-arm politics, forcing lawmakers to vote up-or-down on the whole package.
Well, that arrogance and/or Congress-like behavior has come back to bite the Legislature in the backside. A lawsuit with 38 plaintiffs has been filed in 3rd District Court, claiming SB 2 violates the Utah Constitution, which says: "Except general appropriation bills and bills for the codification and general revision of laws, no bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title."
Defenders of the bill among lawmakers claim SB 2 meets that constitutional requirement because all the bills are education-related. The plaintiffs argue that the omnibus bill contained measures which were not popular among most lawmakers, such as forced tax-revenue sharing between school districts and charter schools, as well as others that were wildly popular, including teacher raises and an extra $5 million for highly qualified math, science and technology teachers.
The 38 plaintiffs include various Top of Utah residents, including current Rep. Sheryl Allen, R-Bountiful, former Davis health board member Beth Beck and State School Board member Kim Burningham. Interestingly, Allen voted for SB 2 -- but she says she did so because she was forced into it: To get the things she favored, she also had to vote for the things she didn't.
And that, of course, is the repulsive nature of such a legislative creation. As the lawsuit notes, proponents of the bill purposely cobbled together SB 2 in a way that guaranteed support by a majority of lawmakers.
That's typical in Congress, but until now had not been the way the Utah Legislature -- despite its multitudinous problems -- saw fit to operate.
While the plaintiffs appear to be serious about pursuing their complaint -- the names include many current and former lawmakers, as well as past and current education officials -- attorneys for the plaintiffs did extend an olive branch. If the Legislature will reconvene in special session and vote on each of the bills separately, the lawsuit will be withdrawn.
Legislative arrogance might prevent that from happening. We hope not.
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To Smells Fishy - Any attorney can tell you that the plaintiffs HAD to file in 3rd District Court. They would have had to get a special writ to go straight to the Supreme Court, and those writs are almost never granted. The voucher-amendment litigation went straight to the Supreme Court because a Utah law (Title 20A) permits direct appeal to the Supreme Court on issues involving referenda and ballot language. No similar law exists here. Indeed, far from smelling "fishy" or "political grandstanding", the Plaintiffs are litigating in good faith and doing it the correct way.
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