Thursday, February 20, 2014

Just when you thought the Utah State Legislature wanted to do the will of the people they serve.

(Ok, I didn’t but…)

When Judge Shelby struck down Utah’s Amendment 3, banning same sex marriages, our legislature screamed “unfair”, this is going against the will of the people.  After all, in 2004 the people voted 2:1 in favor of the amendment, and no activist judge has the right to usurp the will of the people.

Yeah, activist judges, who are employed to interpret the U.S. Constitution, don’t, but seems that elected legislators do have the right to ignore what the people want.

Senate Bill 54 passed an initial vote in the senate with a 13:1 ratio in favor of it.

SB54 gives our caucus system of nominating candidates a slight facelift, but most importantly it directly voids any conclusion to the Count My Vote initiative that would completely eliminate state caucuses in favor of open primaries.

It boils down to this, like Rod Decker of Channel 2 news put it: if SB54 goes into law and the people vote to keep the caucus system, we get the caucus system.  If the people vote in favor of open primaries, we get the caucus system.

Thanks Utah State Legislature, way to do the people’s work!

4 comments:

Lisa Shafer said...

Yup. Kinda figured.

Max Sartin said...

Yeah, I was amazingly unsurprised too.

Lisa Shafer said...

Then again, compared to what Arizona's doing right now, our legislature looks surprisingly sane.....

Max Sartin said...

True that.