Alexander said his bill, which no one had seen this morning, would give assistant attorneys general a choice: Take a small pay raise this year and keep merit status, take a larger raise and give up the merit status, making them at-will employees who could be fired at any time.

"We won't do it for one-fifth of parity, which is what they are offering," said a visibly upset Shurtleff, who announced last week that he's seeking re-election this year.

"We're not asking for parity in pay with public attorneys in the county. That would cost too much. We're not asking, for goodness sake, for parity with the private sector. That would be a 270 percent pay hike," he added.

While House Democrats tried to block the opening of a bill file on the subject, they were voted down.

"This is a huge, huge policy change," said Rep. Scott Daniels, D-Salt Lake, who is the past president of the Utah State Bar. "Usually the bad decisions we make up here, we make in the last couple of days. And now this? We won't have public hearings on this bill. This is very imprudent."

But Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, said for years he's seen new federal administrations be elected, but the bureaucrats in the field refused to implement new policies.

"We don't get the change we expected, that the people voted for," he said.

Likewise, new attorneys general can't change the legal philosophies of his large office because merit attorneys can't be replaced.

But Rep. Neal Hansen, D-Ogden, said much of the legal consistency, institutional memory, could be lost if a new attorney general came in "and cleaned house, put in all of his (attorney) friends."

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E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com