While passing a new growth/open space law may be the enduring legacy of the 1999 Legislature, the political remembrance will likely be the neutering of Attorney General Jan Graham's office.
While they deny it publicly and privately, GOP legislative leaders and Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt have been hit with the charge of partisan politics in the Graham affair.Called vindictive and petty by Democrats, Republicans say their HB139 is good public policy, long overdue.
The bill says that when the attorney general and the 29 locally elected county attorneys deal in civil actions, their clients are their government's executive branch -- specifically the governor and county commissions.
That means when Graham and Leavitt disagree on the approach of a specific civil case -- whether it's a high profile abortion appeal or an action against a businessman cheating the public that few people notice -- the executive branch, not the attorney general, makes the call.
But that change seen as nominal and common sense by the Republicans is a major shift to Graham and the Democrats. It is, the minority party says, nothing short of the majority Republicans trying to strip Graham, the only Democrat holding a statewide office, of much of her power. Republicans amended the bill before passage to apply to the next attorney general (Graham says she won't seek re-election in 2000). But by then the political damage had been done.
The bill flew through the session with votes basically on party lines -- Republicans for, Democrats against.
Leavitt will sign it, his deputy chief of staff Vicki Varela says. And then Graham will sue to see if the Utah Supreme Court believes the move is constitutional.
A light-hearted aside is the fact that Leavitt won't be bothering to ask Graham -- the state's "legal adviser," as the constitution says -- for her legal opinion on HB139. Often, the attorney general does give the governor opinions of bills before he decides whether to sign or veto them.
"She's made her opinion very clear, and we have legal expertise to the contrary," Varela says.
"If he asks us -- and I don't think he will -- then we'll tell him (Leavitt) that it couldn't be more clear that it's against" the state constitution to change her powers without a constitutional amendment, says Graham.