Many Utah legislators have been quite rabid in their public opposition to two proposed citizen initiatives to reform ethics in government and create an independent commission to advise lawmakers on the redistricting of legislative and congressional boundaries every 10 years.

But the scuttlebutt behind the scenes is that they are not that concerned. If voters impose tougher rules on what they can do with their generous lobbyist friends and how much they can benefit from gifts and campaign contributions, they can just reverse them in the next legislative session.

Same for the political boundaries initiative. After all, if you listen to the most vocal of the opponents to that proposal, it's being pushed by Democrats, so where's the credibility?

And, talk in the chewing gum-filled back rooms of the Legislature is that they can stick their thumb in the collective eye of the public by nullifying the initiatives with little or no consequence, because most areas of the state will vote Republican no matter what.

As proof of their supreme confidence, just look at the war over vouchers two years ago.

The Legislature ignored the public opinion polls that showed the majority of Utahns opposed giving vouchers, or tax credits, to pay for private school tuition and passed the bill making that possible anyway.

A referendum petition to repeal the law was begun almost immediately and despite lawmakers' legal claim, which failed in court, that the petition was invalid because it didn't cover a second voucher bill amending the first, the referendum passed overwhelmingly.

The legislators who favored vouchers despite the public sentiment were cast as being aloof to the wishes of their constituents. But it didn't matter; nearly all of them won re-election and many of the races were against opponents who made vouchers the issue.

That's why, despite the public protestations, lawmakers are saying privately that if they don't like the ethics and redistricting initiatives that appear headed for the 2010 ballot, they'll amend or repeal them in the legislative session. If their constituents don't like it, they can eat Jell-O.

The Legislature reversed an initiative passed in 2000 to stop law enforcement from seizing assets from suspected drug dealers, even when the suspects hadn't been charged with a crime. That initiative had passed with 69 percent of the vote.

The government didn't like the results of that initiative because the government was the great beneficiary of these sometimes questionable seizures. So the Legislature waited two years, then passed legislation in its 2002 session repealing what the citizens initiative did. The lawmakers also changed the law to make it more difficult to get an initiative on the ballot.

Did legislators suffer for that blatant disregard of the public will? Nope. The Republican supermajority is right about where it was for that 2002 vote.

Remember the effort by the Utah PTA and church groups to get an initiative on the ballot to ban concealed weapons holders from carrying their guns to churches and schools? They never got enough signatures, and some teachers and PTA members reported being told that if they didn't knock it off, it could hurt future budgets for public education.

But my favorite example of legislative game-playing with the initiative process was when political gadfly and now former Congressman Merrill Cook began a petition drive to put a term-limits initiative on the ballot.

The Legislature thwarted that effort by passing term limits in its legislative session that year, limiting most elected office holders to 12 years. When many of the legislators were about to reach that 12-year bar in 2006, lawmakers simply repealed the law.