Legislators oddly insensitive to voters' wants

With a freshman group of legislators and a new governor sitting up on Capitol Hill, it's an appropriate time to consider once again the eternal question: Why do legislators wear hand-written signs on their backs saying, "I vote against government reform bills; please kick me."

Yes, as in previous years, legislators, both Republicans and Democrats (although mostly Republicans), are refusing to adopt common-sense changes to the old ways of campaign-fund-spending, lobbyist-gift-taking and so on.

These are not issues upon which Utah state government turns.

Truth be told, some of the "reform" bills may be as nitpicky as some lawmakers claim when they say: "You can't buy my vote for a $5 ham sandwich," and so on.

But I've watched legislators run bills and try to solve problems before — and in the process get so worked up over stuff like teaching agriculture production to seventh-graders that you'd think the republic would fall if you don't adopt what they want.

One would think that if 81 percent of Utahns didn't want you taking gifts from lobbyists who get paid a lot of money to try to influence you, well, you wouldn't take gifts from lobbyists.

Or if 79 percent of Utahns didn't want legislators to become paid lobbyists immediately upon leaving office, well, you'd adopt a law imposing a reasonable "cooling off" period between walking off of the Senate floor into the hallway and taking a job lobbying your former colleagues.

I mean, what's the big deal about correcting actual or perceived ethical problems? Such changes are a common-sense approach that even everyday Utahns can understand.

But, argue legislators, we are different. We stand for election every two years (for House members) or four years (for senators). And if the "people" don't like us or trust us, then they can throw us out.

True. Elections are great things. But how legislative elections actually work is also a practical function of some of the so-called government reform bills that lawmakers kill each year.

For example, if you get most of your campaign funds from the special interests who are also wooing you while in office (as a Deseret Morning News study showed was the case in the 2004 election), if you are running in a district whose boundaries you yourself helped draw (as is the case for GOP and even a few Democrats after the Legislature's 2001 redistricting), and if most of the voters can't even name you as their legislator after the election (as is the case for the 104 part-time lawmakers, polls show), then you get these kinds of results:

In the 2004 legislative elections, 92.3 percent of the senators who ran for re-election won; 93.5 percent of the House members who ran again won.