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Tribune editorial: Utah lawmakers pick on the weak and weaken democracy

The Utah Legislature can’t abide being challenged. Which just makes it all the more necessary that its power grabs be challenged at every turn.

It’s early yet, but the focus of this session of the Utah Legislature seems to be lawmakers’ efforts to accumulate more power for themselves and less for everyone else.

One way of doing that is by picking on somebody already lacking political power and beating them down even further.

For example, the Republican super-majority is rushing to approve still more legislation designed to make life even more difficult for members of the LGBTQ community, specifically transgender people.

Responding to a panicked social media screed about a transgender woman assigned to room with other women at Utah State University, the Utah House approved HB269, banning such assignments in the future.

Of course residents of university dormitories should feel safe where they live. But schools already have a process, as was used at USU, to reassign roommates who are dissatisfied with their accommodations, whether it’s about gender identification or playing music too loud.

No legislative action required.

Lawmakers are also striking back at those who have dared to question the Legislature’s supreme power.

Moving rapidly through the process is SB73, a bill to require groups seeking to place a citizen initiative on the ballot to spend an estimated $1.4 million publishing the text of the proposal in newspapers across the state for 60 days.

Bill sponsor Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, has made it clear that he dislikes the whole process of ballot initiatives. He and other legislative leaders view them as a kind of alien lifeform that threatens to suck the strength away from the Legislature. Not, as intended by those who drafted the Utah Constitution, a much-needed check on legislative authority.

Something else that offended lawmakers’ sense of superiority were the efforts by, among others, the Utah Education Association to oppose the latest school voucher scheme and to shoot down the Legislature’s Amendment A. That was the proposed constitutional change that would have ended the rule that all state income tax revenue go to education or aid to children and the disabled.

The Legislature’s response: Kneecap the UEA, and all other public employee unions in the state, by moving HB267 through the process.

That bill wouldn’t end unions for teachers, police officers, firefighters, librarians, etc. And it wouldn’t stop them from advocating for various causes.

But it would mean no municipality could recognize them as a partner for collective bargaining — which is kind of what unions are for — and so amounts to nothing more than a punishment for the UEA’s activism.

This crowd would obliterate the Utah League of Women Voters and the Mormon Women for Ethical Government if they thought they could get away with it.

Bottom line: The Utah Legislature can’t abide being challenged. Which just makes it all the more necessary that its power grabs be challenged at every turn.