Since statehood, there have only been 28 initiatives placed on the ballot by Utah citizens, and only seven have been approved. Since 2016, the Utah Legislature has proposed 20 constitutional amendments, of which two were voided by lawsuits in 2024.

The mischief-maker is not the voters. It’s the Republican supermajorities who have constantly invited Utahns to cede more and more power to the one branch of government that voraciously wants to run everything by re-writing the Utah Constitution.

Amendment B, the Legislature’s latest plot to kill off our constitutional right of initiative inch-by-inch, was last losing 62% to 38%. Amendment B would have required tax-related initiatives to pass with a 60% supermajority vote, a majority which only two initiatives in Utah’s political history have ever met — both passed in 2000. One of those, with a 67% majority, made English Utah’s official language. The other, by a 70% majority, prohibited civil asset forfeiture in criminal cases prior to a conviction and sentencing, which the Legislature then gutted in 2004.

I’m a lawyer, four-term legislator and I’ve been involved in dozens of political, initiative and referendum campaigns. The unintended consequence of Amendment B was that Utah voters turned it into the most seismic political event in the Utah Legislature since the 1974 Watergate scandal last delivered Utah a Democratic trifecta in 1975.

Amendment B became the live grenade that blew up the Legislature’s Republican supermajority stranglehold, which they have used so effectively for the past 26 years to do whatever they wanted, no matter how unpopular it might be with voters at large, like school vouchers.

Indeed, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Those two-thirds majorities are critical to the exercise of absolute power — Bilbo’s ring. They allow the Legislature to call itself into special sessions, and to override any governor’s veto. They are necessary to put state constitutional amendments on the ballot, and they prevent any Utah bill from being challenged by a citizens’ referendum. They made House and Senate Democrats irrelevant. Supermajorities made the house speaker and the senate president more powerful than the governor. They allowed the Legislature to attack the independence of the state’s judiciary by what one GOP senator described as sort-of politically packing the Supreme Court.

Republican arrogance pulled the pin on the live grenade when President Stuart Adams and Speaker Mike Schultz decided to allow Amendment B to go on the November ballot. What they did not foresee was the cratering of Donald Trump’s popularity and the broad extent of Utah voters’ deep loss of trust in just whose interests the Legislature was representing. That loss of trust may have been simmering for a long time, but the Legislature’s fury over the 2018 anti-gerrymandering initiative, and many legislators’ vitriolic attacks on the Republican justices who in 2024 unanimously upheld the right of the people to reform their government, came off as an out-in-the-open power-grab for all to see.

Voters’ loss of trust may have spiked in May 2026, with the announcement of the Stratos Data Center Project in Box Elder County and the ensuing bipartisan furor it evoked. (Full disclosure: I represent plaintiffs in the litigation to defeat it). Few had ever heard of an unknown political entity (MIDA) that was suddenly shown to have unimaginable (and unelected) authority to do whatever it wanted, with zero public oversight and accountability.

However, the one development that caused more negative public reaction to incumbent Republican legislators in the run-up to election day than anything else was the exceptional and well-funded campaign in opposition to Amendment B mounted by allies of Better Boundaries – the group which sponsored and defended the anti-gerrymandering initiative. Specifically, the media blitz mounted during October flooded cable TV and other outlets with anti-Amendment B arguments repeated over and over. If you watched the national football broadcasts of Utah and BYU games, even OSU v. USC, you saw the same ad multiple times, persuasively characterizing Amendment B as a sinister power-grab by legislators who put special interests over the public interest. The message was that the Legislature wanted to make initiatives impossible as a citizen check and balance.

The ads didn’t name names. They didn’t have to. The defeat of Utah’s most powerful politician in the June primary said it all. He and his party became the highly visible stand-ins for power grabs in the races which virtually unknown Democrats won. Some Democrats who won were considerably underfunded. Sen. Kirk Cullimore, the Senate Majority Leader, outspent winner Shana Anderson by 150 to 1. Many Democratic winners were likely as shocked to have won as were the GOP incumbents they defeated.

The enormous significance of the Amendment B debacle is that the word “compromise” may finally find its way back into the Republican vocabulary. The Senate under Evan Vickers holds more promise for re-earning public trust than it did before. The House will not be able to crank out two-thirds majorities so easily for right-wing fever dreams on orders from its speaker.

One-party government, no matter which party, is unhealthy. One of the public benefits from competitive districts is that a more vibrant exchange of ideas produces a more informed electorate. And reasoned compromise, more often than not, leads to wiser public policy.

David Irvine is a lawyer and a former four-term Republican legislator from Bountiful. He had the rare educational experience of serving under an excellent Democratic Speaker during one of them.

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