Utah lawmakers have set a high standard for citizens placing issues on the state ballot to discourage "government by initiative." By and large, that's a sensible policy. To place a matter before voters in the 2010 election, for instance, a group must collect 94,552 valid signatures. At least 10 percent of the signatures must come from people in 26 of Utah's 29 counties.
Given the success of a citizen initiative that vanquished the Utah Legislature's private school tuition tax credit law in 2007, there is ample evidence that properly motivated and well-financed citizen groups can place issues on the ballot and carry the day at the ballot box. As two citizen groups have launched efforts to place matters on the 2010 ballot, legislative leaders are concerned that they're seeing the beginnings of a disturbing trend — groups circumventing the legislative process when they are interested in changing laws. The legislative process includes committee hearings, debates and votes in the House and Senate. The governor can sign legislation into law, veto it or allow it to become law without his or her signature.
With few exceptions, this process works best. But there are occasions when lawmakers, bent on a particular philosophy, refuse to do the bidding of the people. For instance, state lawmakers either can't or won't institute meaningful legislative ethics reforms, despite years of public opinion polls and other measures that tell us Utahns clearly want them.
So a citizen group, Utahns for Ethical Government, is taking matters into its hands. It is attempting to place on the statewide ballot an initiative that would establish a code of ethics for legislators and create an independent ethics commission to hear complaints against legislators in public. The initiative would set limits for campaign contributions and limit legislative gifts to "light refreshments of negligible value."
This push has perturbed some state lawmakers because many of the same players who were successful in overturning the state's private school voucher law are working on this issue. Other lawmakers say the initiative is premature because a bipartisan special ethics committee is working on the issue.
State lawmakers could fast-track that work if they are displeased with the initiative movement. But they must pass meaningful reforms. Lawmakers have nibbled around the edges of this issue in the past but they have hesitated to enact significant changes. The strongest arguments to reform legislative ethics rules and procedures were the largely ineffective closed-door ethics investigations against two state lawmakers.
If lawmakers fail to make substantive reforms, the initiative proposed by Utahns for Ethical Government provides a highly attractive alternative. Utahns should support efforts to place it on the ballot.