GOP tries a power grab

Already flush with power in the Utah Legislature, one Republican senator is looking to remove two of the last bastions of equality for Democrats.

Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, has filed two bill requests to institute proportional membership on the Legislative Management and Executive Appropriations committees. Instead of the current near-equal balance of Republicans and Democrats on the two powerful committees, the makeup would reflect the overall balance within the Legislature, which is currently more than 75 percent Republican.

"It's not appropriate for the electorate to have spoken, and for them to have chosen three-fourths of the Legislature to be from one party, but then to make two of the most powerful committees disproportional," Stephenson said

While the appointments for all of the other standing and interim committees at the Legislature are based on the balance of power in the House and Senate, the Legislative Management committee has traditionally been equally weighted, with four members from each party, each house. The Executive Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, is made up of leadership of each party, each house, with the majority party gaining an extra vote in the House and Senate through the appointment of budget chairmen.

Stephenson said that while leadership's automatic appointment to Executive Appropriations is tradition, he does not necessarily agree that "it should be the litmus test." Instead, he would like to see a mix of leadership and chairmen of the appropriations subcommittees.

"The chairs of the subcommittees understand the issues," Stephenson said. "The need on Executive Appropriations is to understand the facts, and not just from a 30,000-foot level, but from the subcommittee level."

He has not devised a method for the proportional membership on either committee, and said that there are "probably 300 different ways we could do this." He also admitted that tinkering with leadership's inclusion on Executive Appropriations "may go down like a lead balloon."

Although not that blunt, Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem, did say that he "would need some convincing" to support changing the membership of Executive Appropriations, especially since they allowed the budget vice-chair (also a majority member) to vote in place of an absent majority member. That ensured that "the majority agenda" could still be pursued, which would give any appropriations bill a better chance of approval once they reached the House and Senate floors.