In our years of legislative service, we have known many fine people who work conscientiously to serve the voters who put them in office, and this is as it should be. However, a disconnect has developed between the Legislature and the voters at large, in which legislators collectively have come to be seen too often as less than open and occasionally even out of touch.
In politics, perception is reality, and this perception, left unchecked, grows more corrosive each year. The Legislature, which more than any other is the people's branch of government, should respect the public it represents and the public's right to be involved and understand the legislative process.
The referendum over school vouchers was perhaps the most significant eye-opener for voters because it raised perceptions of legislative disregard of public opinion. On the heels of that debacle, the Senate and House passed Senate Bill 2 - the infamous omnibus education bill - innocuously titled: "Minimum School Program Budget Amendments."
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, made its surprise appearance with three days left in the 2008 legislative session. It passed the Senate 21-7 and the House 63-12.
Even so, it has become the session's most controversial product. In its own way, SB2 rekindled perceptions of slippery process manipulation and a Legislature cavalierly out of touch with what voters want.
If there's one thing voters want, above all else, it is to be able to reasonably understand what their elected officers are doing in the people's name. For the public, SB2 was the procedural equivalent of an old hide-the-football play, in which a quarterback tucks the football under his jersey so that no one knows where it is as he deceptively lopes for the goal line.
In the Legislature, we believe, such a play violates Utah's Constitution. In 1896, those wise leaders who drafted our Constitution added a protective check against legislative overreach by requiring bills to contain a single subject and a clear expression of purpose in every bill's title except general appropriations bills and bills for codification and general revision of laws.
The wisdom of this requirement is best evidenced by what has been allowed to happen in Congress, where omnibus bills run thousands of pages in length and contain every kind of issue under the sun.
With SB2, the Legislature set a precedent which, if not challenged, promises mischief in the years to come. Pop out an omnibus bill in the last hours of the session, and get a favorable vote by combining it with essential funding, and perhaps throw in school vouchers for good measure.
In fact, Sen. Mike Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, who is hoping to unseat the current Senate president, beat back a convention challenge by distributing a flier to delegates that promised "no more omnibus bills" if he is elected president, and added that he only voted for SB2 because he was afraid a "no" vote would leave public schools without operating money next year.
SB2 was irregular in so many ways. It combined 14 bills, each of which had been introduced and treated independently at different stages for 42 of our 45 days. What's more, six popular bills were folded into SB2, including two that had already passed both houses but were never forwarded to the governor for signature (as our rules require) in order to ensure passage of three bills of a special-interest nature that had already failed.
Five bills were passed by the House but withheld from the Senate to be rolled into SB2, and three were passed by the Senate but withheld from the House until rolled into SB2.
The ultimate hostage, of course, was millions of dollars to fund the basic school program, and if a legislator or taxpayer just read the bill's title, "Minimum School Program Budget Amendments," appropriating all of that money would appear to be the only purpose of the bill.
Another purpose of the bill - to use vital money and bills that had already passed in order to "logroll" approval of other bills that had failed - could only be ascertained by the public with diligent and microscopic analysis of the changes to 25 separate sections of the Utah statutes and the 14 separate bills rolled into SB2.
Since the bill appeared in the last days of the legislative session, sorting it out would be daunting for the public and difficult for legislators. That, of course, is why our Constitution prohibits omnibus bills. The Utah Supreme Court has issued at least 43 opinions that have applied the single-subject and clear-titling requirements to various legislative enactments.
To quote part of one Utah decision, "an omnibus bill which rolls many diverse subjects into a single bill and thus secures the passage of other measures, which could not succeed on their own merits, is both corruptive of the legislator and dangerous to the state."
The process of democracy is so very fragile. In a democracy, authority requires checks and balances. The rule of law begins with a reverence for the legislative process and a respect for the separation of powers. Omnibus bills do not respect an open, understandable legislative process. Nor do they respect the governor's veto authority.
Will we prevail in court? Who knows, but if SB2 does not raise a judicial red flag, it's hard to imagine a worse case that might.
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* REP. SHERYL ALLEN, R-Bountiful, represents District 19 in the Utah House. SEN. SCOTT MCCOY, D-Salt Lake City, represents District 2 in the Utah Senate.
