Utah’s legislative session is still almost two months away, and already legislators have put in more than 1,000 bill requests.
That has some Utah legislators grumbling, but there’s a simple idea that could help: Let in some sunlight.
Utah touts its part-time Legislature for its efficiency, and 45 days is one of the shortest sessions in the country. But that hasn’t stopped legislators from loading up their staff attorneys with bill requests, many of which won’t ever even be introduced as bills.
One senator evidently has made 80 bill requests, about a quarter of the total requests made by the Senate. Who is that senator? We can’t tell you because the Legislature prohibits the release of that information.
Therein lies the problem. Ask legislators, particularly those in leadership, and they likely will tell you that the bill-request process has to be kept secret to allow lawmakers the space to explore ideas for legislation before they’re fully formed.
Nonsense. They just don’t want the public — their constituents — to know what they’re doing while they’re doing it. There is no legislative value that would be unraveled by opening up the bill-request process. If anything, it would reduce the amount of frivolous requests, giving both staff and legislators more time to weigh the bills that truly do deserve attention.
Brigham Young University Professor Adam Brown has been tracking legislative data for years, and the numbers show a general trend toward more bills for legislators to consider, but it’s not a steep curve.
More vexing, Brown has noted, is the haste with which legislation gets through. On average, it took only 17.2 days for a successful bill to make it to its first floor vote in one chamber in the 2017 session. Then it only took another 11.2 days to reach final passage. And that includes weekends when legislators aren’t in session.
And much of that haste is driven by one thing: Bills aren’t introduced until the final weeks of the session. Brown points out that legislators actually improved on this in the 2017 session, but late introductions were still well above what they were a decade ago.
Again, late introductions are strategic, and the strategy is to limit debate — by both legislators and the public.
So if legislators are serious about reducing the quantity to improve the quality of legislation, they should do two things: Make the bill request process more public, and move up the last day for introducing legislation (barring exceptional circumstances).
Changing times mean that most laws need a refresh every 10 or 20 years, and those refreshes should be improvements, not additional burdens on citizens. The best way to stay true to the mission is to make sure those citizens are there for every step.