Citizen-initiative efforts unsettle conservatives

Congratulations this week to now-Gov. Gary Herbert. I liked his inaugural address on Tuesday.

Conservative talk, sure. But Herbert clearly wanted to make that point — at heart, he is a conservative. We'll see if having to deal with the problems of education, the poor and sick and disadvantaged will push him more to the political middle.

Now, on to what may become two huge political problems for most Republicans in the Utah Legislature.

This past week, two groups moved forward in their efforts to get citizen-initiative laws before voters in November 2010.

Each of the two groups — one who wants to impose stricter ethics on legislators, one to require an independent commission to recommend redistricting to lawmakers — must collect 94,552 valid signatures, at least 10 percent of which must come in 26 of Utah's 29 counties.

While both sides of the recent private-school-voucher-initiative fight could put forward good arguments (the anti-voucher side won, and the controversial law was repealed), how do GOP legislators (or their minions) argue against stricter ethics or a nonpolitical redistricting process?

I mean, are lawmakers supposed to say better ethics are bad?

Can they find any supporters to say that the Legislature would be better off if members don't get an independent recommendation — it would only be a recommendation — on how to redraw lawmakers' own House and Senate boundaries in 2011? That process now is the most self-serving thing that the Legislature does. (And that's saying something.)

Of course, in the end, legislators will argue that Utah can't afford either new commission — which together could cost taxpayers several million dollars.

And since the Utah Constitution says the Legislature will decide its own ethical conduct, and the Legislature will redistrict every 10 years following a Census, why spend any money on an "independent" process when the Legislature ultimately must make those decisions anyway?

But both these citizen groups are much encouraged by what happened in the bitter voucher fight two years ago.

If Utahns for Ethical Government and/or the Fair Boundaries coalition can put together an organization like the anti-voucher folks had in 2007 — then, as my sainted mother would say, it's "Katie bar the door" for the GOP legislative majority.

The conservatives could be rolled under the citizens' wheels even harder than they were on vouchers.

While an independent ethics and redistricting commission would be hard for some GOP lawmakers to swallow, they probably could live with both.

But I'm told the deeper one dives politically, there's other reasons these new initiative efforts are more unsettling to conservatives.