Many members of the Legislature think the people they serve are chumps. And they are joined in that opinion by lobbyists who come up with clever ways to skirt gift reporting requirements through such tricks as spotting lawmakers $49.99 toward a round of golf.

Current rules allow lobbyists - people whose job it is to influence your elected officials in ways you may or may not agree with - to keep gifts to lawmakers of less than $50 under the table. A proposal in the last session to lower that threshold to $10 went, unsurprisingly, nowhere.

Because of this subterfuge, the lobbyists who paid for a post-session meet and greet at the Greenspring golf course in St. George had to report how much they spent buying quality time with the protectors of the state's purse, but not list the names of the lawmakers whose time was bought.

The fact that the lawmakers involved - reportedly including House Speaker Greg Curtis and House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander - covered the difference between the $49.99 lobbyists' mulligan and the $57 list price suggests nothing more than that they were fully complicit in this deliberate effort to evade state reporting requirements.

Lawmakers often argue that their vote cannot be bought for a round of golf, and there is no reason to doubt that. There is also no reason to accept it as an excuse.

Legislators are human beings who quite naturally feel indebted to those who have done them a favor and predisposed to listen in the future to people who have lamented bogeys with them in the past.

It is not graft. But it is corrupting.

Unless legislators give the average citizen of Utah a handicap advantage by, say, treating a random sampling of their constituents to a round of golf, a line of bowling or just a long lunch, so that real people can have the same opportunity to schmooze their lawmakers that players of the lobbying game can now buy.

For $49.99.