Unable to openly punish teachers for the November voucher debacle, many state legislators seem to have pointed their rage at anyone and everyone else during the 2008 Legislature.

It's the politics of mean, where the public is an inconvenience and a seat in the House of Representatives is a bully pulpit. And now it goes back to where it came from - Draper and Kanab and Orem and West Jordan - to run for re-election.

Every legislative session is nasty and brutish. The Capitol rotunda acts as a sort of isolation bubble - keeping fresh air and new ideas out. Legislators choose a designated scapegoat for vigorous whipping and a moral crusade for vigorous drum-beating. They twist themselves and the rules to toy with others' bills. And crowds of residents jam into hearing rooms hoping for a brief moment to testify before most are sent home frustrated.

It's almost a formula. But this year was different. When one senator's racist mumblings and judicial tampering sucked the air out of the Capitol, other lawmakers on the fringe saw an opening and took it.

"People get up here and somehow lose a sense of reality," says Rep. Roz McGee, a Salt Lake City Democrat who is retiring from the House after six years. "When people have been in politics for so long, they don't know how to lose."

Lawmaker behavior ranges from the juvenile to the needlessly spiteful, from height jokes to green-baiting.

Given the chance, legislators repeatedly reminded us who is in charge.

Public comment - by mothers who want to give birth at home and immigrant college students and Minutemen and Salt Lake City's domestic partners - was stifled by the clock and caprice. At the same time, legislators made it harder for voters to reverse their decisions, lopping months off the time allowed to gather signatures for a referendum.

And West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars rose from his funeral pyre to slice hospital visitation rights out of revised legislation targeting Salt Lake City's fledgling domestic partner registry. Stories of couples separated in hospital emergency rooms by hostile families and doctors were "tender," he said, but irrelevant.

"That's a simple human kindness that could have been extended - and they chose not to," says Kim Hackford-Peer, a Salt Lake City mother of two who has drafted medical power of attorney and hospital visitation documents with her partner.

Despite media reports, the most angry personality of this session comes from farther south.

Kanab Republican Rep. Michael Noel crammed a lifetime's worth of bile into six short weeks: He forced the Utah Rivers Council to remove its name from a water conservation bill. He egged on lawmakers who demanded Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney Steve Bloch testify under oath. He scheduled a series of "press conferences" to attack environmentalists. After a blustery meeting, he left one environmental lobbyist in tears. And he has demanded that SUWA - a private, nonprofit organization - release its financial records.

"It's a saga. It's been awful. They hate us," says SUWA organizer Deeda Seed. "It's all bluster; there's no substance. But who wants to spend 45 days up close and personal with a bunch of bullies? It's like high school."

And now they want you to vote for them again.

walsh@sltrib.com