-- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The Utah Legislature does not have sole power to create laws. The people have that power, too. And they can reject a law by referendum. It's right there in the Utah Constitution.
The only exception is when a law is passed by a two-thirds majority of lawmakers. That certainly was not the case with House Bill 148, Utah's school voucher legislation, which passed the House by only one vote.
Now Utahns for Public Schools is working feverishly to gather the 92,000 signatures required to put HB 148, the most far-reaching voucher law in the nation, to a vote of the people. That would be the people who have consistently opposed vouchers conveying public money to private schools.
As expected, Republican voucher supporters are working just as hard to undermine the referendum petition drive and the constitutionally protected right of the people to reject a law they don't want.
They say House Bill 174, which makes minor amendments to HB 148 and includes most but not all of the same provisions, is sufficient to implement the voucher program even if the referendum succeeds. Maybe so. Maybe not. That will be up to the courts.
But the court of public opinion should consider this question: Is legislative sleight of hand being used to thwart the right of the people to reject a law by referendum?
The Legislature passed HB 148 on Feb. 9. Gov. Jon Huntsman signed it just three days later, weeks before the session ended. Four days after that, a "boxcar" bill, with a number but no substance, suddenly became HB 174, "Education Voucher Amendments." It eliminated several key provisions of the original, including one to restore funding to public schools that otherwise would be drained by vouchers.
Most of the legislators who voted for HB 174 it passed by a two-thirds majority undoubtedly believed it to be what its sponsors claimed, simply a vehicle to make minor changes to the law. But why weren't those minor changes incorporated into HB 148, as usually happens? There was plenty of time to amend the bill before the final vote.
Did pro-voucher legislators, anticipating a referendum on the unwise and unpopular law, come up with HB 174 to stand as a substitute for the original? Sure seems like it, because their argument now is that since HB 174 is referendum-proof, there is no way their voucher law can be rejected by voters. Still more revealing is their veiled threat that because the back-up bill contains no provision for mitigating the financial hit to public schools, killing the original bill by referendum would only hurt public schools.
How clever. How devious. How arrogant.
Our advice to voters: Pass the referendum to kill HB 148. Then make it clear to your representatives in the House and Senate, and to the governor, that if they care so little about what you think about private school vouchers as to frustrate your right of repeal by referendum, you will employ the only recourse left to you and vote them out of office.
Maybe that will get their attention.
