Brian’s Utah Weblog

It seems like the IE problems are ironed out and even the brand new IE7 bugs are under control.  Please let me know if you have any problems with the new look of Brian’s Utah Weblog.

If you are using Internet Explorer, isn’t it time to say goodbye to security holes, crashes, popup advertising, and convicted monopolists who have admitted stealing Utah jobs with unethical business practices?  It’s time to get Firefox!

The Senate has reconvened. The House is likely to approve map L easily but there may or may not be fireworks in the Senate. Senator Bramble is sumarizing the committee results.

Senator Arent (D-Cottonwood) has a history with bad redistricting plans. She is in the Senate because she was drawn out of her house district in 2001. Arent is retiring this year and I like seeing her go out with a comment on redistricting. “Voters should pick legislators; legislators should not pick voters.” We will miss Patrice Arent.

Senator Bell (R-Farmington) points out that this redrawing is done to enable unconstitutional activity in Washington.

Senator McCoy (D-SLC my senator!) talks about the need for a nonpartisan process. McCoy stresses the difference between a bipartisan process where parties protect their mutual interests and a nonpartisan process.

S5001 passes 23-4.

A Brian’s Utah Weblog thank you to Senators Bell and McCoy.

In the House Julie Fisher (R-Fruit Heights) wants to block Congress from “end run[ning] the Constitutional requirement of statehood.” “Since when,” she asks has the state no interest in the Constitution. She wants to attach an amendment requiring retrocession to Maryland or a constitutional amendment or statehood before D.C. can send a congressman.

I think Fisher is Greg Bell’s representative. Maybe they should bottle the water in Fruit Heights and send it up here when the Republicans are writing up their contempt-of-the-Constitution message bills next year.

There’s some trouble with numbers. Fisher thinks Utah has three million people (the truth is about 2.5 million, or 2.2 million in the 200 census). Another rep suggests that the population of D.C. is over one million (the truth is about 550,000). Why don’t all of Utah’s legislators at least know the actual population of Utah? Shouldn’t these folks bother to look things up before announcing them on the floor? Looks like they’ve all got laptops on their desks.

The Fisher amendment vote is close, but she doesn’t ask for a roll call. Speaker Curtis pauses for a while; seems like he’s surprised that she doesn’t want a roll call. So am I.

The bill passes 51-19. The governor is expected to sign it.

The Democratic House caucus is holding an open meeting discussion of redistricting process and the new legislature. Sentiment in favor of a bipartisan redistricting commission is as universal with Litvack (D-SLC) and Biskupski (D-SLC) telling the story today.

Republican caucuses are expected to be more divisive but also closed to the public.

Biskupski is telling us about what is probably happening in the Republican caucus with pieces of West Valley switching from the Map L plan into district 2 while more of Taylorsville moves into district 4. Part of the idea may be to put Senator Mayne (D-West Valley) into district 2 to prevent him from winning in 4, as he and Rep. Matheson (D-UT2) are the only Democrats expected to be able to win in 4. (My map shows that Mayne is already in 2 under Map L, but just barely.)

Much scoffing is done toward the idea shared by Republicans and the Democratic HQ staff that the reason Mark Walker or Greg Curtis were in close races was Matheson coattails. There was much angst over losing Matheson coattails among Democratic leaders last week and now Republicans are trying hard to push Matheson out of their legislative districts.

Rep. Shurtliff (D-Ogden) observes that the current map trimming is about political prospects but that in hearings the Republicans emphasized that political data should not be considered in the map drawing.

Rep Clark (R-Dixie) has come to visit the Dem caucus and offered either to bring to the floor the public map L or a modified map L with various adjustments favored by Republican legislators who don’t want Matheson campaigning in their districts.

It is suggested that with Democrats in the majority maybe we should draw a new map that could send two Democrats to Washington. Biskupski says there is no such map presented. Rep. Becker (D-SLC) suggests maybe I could draw such a map. I’ve drawn it up just for fun, Rep. Becker, but it’s even uglier than any map we’ve seen yet.

Rep. King (D-Price) is reluctant to support the bill since the Carbon County folks really want to keep Jim Matheson. He proposes that if he votes for it he’ll need to claim temporary insanity.

Democrats are now speculating whether voting aye or voting no on any bill here will result in a stronger position before the public to advocate for a bipartisan commission bill before 2011.

The decision is that map L will come to the floor. But no one knows yet what the Senate will do.

The House is discussing fixing the scheme for taxes on boats and watercraft.  And now recessing for two hours for lunch.  Recess until 1:30 pm.

Now I’ve abandoned the languid pace of the Senate for the House, where they are organized enough to have started discussion and the traditional seating respects the history and traditions of Western Civilization.

So far they’re proposing some redistricting principles and then rumor has it the Senate will adjourn so that the Republicans can decide what to do about redistricting in closed caucus. The House Republicans will probably soon do the same.

Whispers indicate that Senator Waddoups (R-Taylorsville) wants the rest of Taylorsville in the new district and possibly some more of his district, too. Waddoups lost a leadership race in the Senate and may be marginalized by his erstwhile opponent, President Valentine. If a fourth congressional seat opens, Waddoups may want as much chance to take a new job as he can.

Just now the news is that the Senate has convened.

I’m here at the Utah Senate temporary gallery waiting for the session to start, watching Senator Arent charming the press.

One thing that strikes me about the temporary chamber (the Capitol is undergoing a seismic retrofit) is that the Democrats are sitting on the right. It’s been like this since the first general session in the temporary chamber in two years ago.

The more progressive caucus in popular assemblies has seated itself on the left and the more reactionary has been on the right for over two centuries. When I interned at the Illinois General Assembly it was so. When I traveled East to lobby Congress it was so. In our Utah Capitol building it was so. When I as a tourist visit the Colorado chambers or the Massachusetts chambers or any other chambers it is always so.

The first time it happened, the world changed. On the 20th of June in 1789 the Spirit of ‘76 spread to Europe and the various representatives of the different social classes of France declared the people’s sovereignty over the king. They had been run out of royal chambers by the king and convened in a tennis court. When they took an oath to stand against the king in the name of the people they organized themselves with the radical revolutionaries on the left and the less radical revolutionaries on the right.

But in 2005 for some reason we did it differently.

The Deseret News has produced a great set of campaign finance articles this year. The latest one came from Lee Davidson and Bob Bernick today.

Remember that in Utah campaign cash can be converted to personal use with simple accounting. When a legislator accepts large contributions to his campaign account and doesn’t need them to campaign, he can take the money for his own consumption. That practice was forbidden on the federal level after 1992 because Congress noticed that it was tantamount to bribery.

I am astonished again that it takes only $26,050 to put you on the list of top 20 contributors in Utah. Corporate welfare collecting industries regularly filch millions from taxpayers with the cheerful help of our legislature. The return on investment for greasing the palms of Utah legislators must be astronomical.

I don’t agree with the definition of “special interests” as anyone except an individual inside a lawmaker’s district. I contribute to lots of campaigns outside my district for purely idealistic reasons. Most of the donations listed in the article today were from corporations and professional lobbyists who are certainly special interests.

If Curtis is thinking of a U.S. House seat, he’ll be mighty disappointed.  National elections have strict rules against taking corporate contributions and that means state campaign funds can’t be mixed into
federal campaigns.  Not one penny of Curtis’ $265,000 could be — legally — spent on a race for Congress.

That will be a problem for most Utah Republicans running for Congress.  Very often they have to dip into their own bank accounts because they’re so unfamiliar with asking people for money.  Corporate lobbyists just hand them checks or funnel more money to them through the state Republican party. Later on the corporate lobbyist gets paid back with millions of your tax dollars in corporate giveaways.  It’s a cozy system and it has almost completely replaced traditional fundraising in Utah.

Ethan has started using WordPress so it’s time for me to do a small redesign.

Firefox users should see new style tomorrow. Those of you using backwards and outdated browsers like Internet Explorer will have to wait a bit longer for everything to work. Shouldn’t you upgrade to Firefox and say goodbye to popups, viruses, window bloat, and the other ugly side effects of Internet Explorer?

Charlotte thinks there’s nothing wrong with Christmas that a little more commercialization couldn’t cure.

I spoke to Rep. McGee about her proposal for a bipartisan redistricting commission in 2011. She says that she will be reintroducing her constitutional amendment resolution in the 2007 legislature. I’ll write again next week about some ways we can make the proposal better, including structuring it as a law rather than a constitutional amendment so that we need only half plus one rather than two thirds support in the legislature.

Bob Bernick wrote a very good piece about Utah interim redistricting in the Deseret News.

Utah’s fourth seat just got much more likely in the past day when Congressman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) was appointed to chair the very important House Select Committee on Intelligence. Hearty congratulations from Brian’s Utah Weblog to Congressman Reyes. The unexpected promotion of Reyes from third in seniority to chairman over Congressmen Harman and Hastings changes the internal Washington politics of the D.C. seat and the fourth seat in Utah. For the first time, this fourth seat is reasonably likely to happen, though I’d still guess the odds are less than even.

Vote in the fourth seat poll in the right hand column of the Brian’s Utah Weblog main page. Rumor has it that the RNCC might want to make some last minute edits to the map.

The Utah Legislature organized a whirlwind redistricting committee these past two weeks. The final approval by a special session is pending for next week. On the assumption that we’ll be facing a vote on Map L, let’s take a look at who won and lost so far.

Governor Huntsman (R-UT) wants to get back the fourth congressional seat Utah was cheated out of in 2001. A fourth congressional seat for Utah is a remote possibility in the lame duck session in D.C. next month. To have any chance at all to put this victory on his resumé, Huntsman needs a new map that would appeal to Washington insiders from both parties.

Utah did prepare a four district map in 2001. That map was drawn in case the Bureau of the Census was frustrated in its under counting of missionaries or its illegal sampling of empty households in larger states. Either repair would have given Utah a fourth seat, but the courts declined to order the fixes. Instead the seat went to North Carolina.

That existing map, like our present three district map, was drawn to unseat Congressman Jim Matheson (D-UT2). Huntsman knows that the deal to give Utah a fourth seat needs bipartisan support to survive with Democrats favoring a congressman for Washington D.C. and Republicans favoring a new seat for Utah. But if the map tries to squeeze out Jim Matheson, Democrats won’t support the deal. So what Huntsman really wants out of this process is any map with a reliably safe district for Jim Matheson.

And the committee drew a safe Democratic district for Jim Matheson. Governor Huntsman gets what he wants.

Utah’s Democratic Party wants to avoid being gerrymandered into an even tinier minority in the legislature. Last time in 2001 Republicans squeezed eight Democrats together into districts where they would have to run against other Dems to be reelected. The few Democratic leaning districts they left were drawn larger than the Republican leaning districts to minimize the number of Democrats elected.

Democrats had little worry that the bad experience of 2001 would be repeated this month since the governor was pressing for a safe district for Jim Matheson. Even though Democrats won 43% of the vote for congress from Utahns in 2006, there is little chance any map that would allow a second Democrat to win a congressional seat would pass through the legislature or win support from the D.C. Republicans. So Democrats should have been using this experience as a platform to advocate reform of the redistricting process in advance of 2011.

Real reform of the process would involve prioritized, objective criteria to be applied by a bipartisan commission outside the legislature. That was the basis of the most successful redistricting reform in the nation now operating in Iowa. Unfortunately the Democrats focused on the bipartisan nature of the commission without focusing on the prioritized, objective criteria the commission would apply. Representative Roz McGee’s (D-SLC) proposed constitutional amendment suffers from the same problem; while it lists principles to apply, it lacks a mandate to use prioritized, objective criteria for drawing districts.

The problem with the way the system runs now is that the majority party draws districts for itself to eliminate the people’s ability to choose representatives from another party. The problem with a bipartisan commission without prioritized, objective criteria for how districts can be drawn is that insiders from both parties will carve up the state to preserve existing insiders’ power. With insiders now three quarters Republican that’s nearly as bad for the Democrats as the current process. The benefit from Iowa style districting is that Iowa has the most competitive elections in the United States and the strongest influence from the grassroots in legislative elections.

Democratic Party Chair Wayne Holland spoke to newspapers and sent press releases boosting a bipartisan commission and earned media coverage for the idea. Unfortunately Senator Curt Bramble (R-Utah County) repeatedly knocked the idea with the accurate criticism that bipartisan redistricting just changes which people get to do the partisan carving. I haven’t seen any coverage of Iowa style districting in local media outlets.

The Democratic Party needs publicity for the idea of reforming the redistricting process. The quality of Democrats’ publicity was mixed.

Democratic legislators wanted to be involved in the process instead of ignored. They also want to avoid making themselves targets in 2011.

They succeeded in getting listened to and having input on the final map. The committee record indicates a little push back by Representative David Litvack (D-SLC) against the Democratic Party message that the current partisan process is unfair. While it’s true that this one time partisans were constrained by Huntsman, it doesn’t pay to dilute the message that Republicans will be vicious again in 2011 if they can be. Litvack was one of the Democrats drawn out of his district in 2001 so he should know better than anyone.

In the end, some of the Democratic legislators’ concerns were addressed in the map.

Republican legislators wanted a district drawn for themselves to run in someday or one for an ally of theirs. The new fourth district takes in the homes of LaVar Christensen, Steve Urquhart, and John Swallow — all Republican legislators who recently run for national office. Unless Jim Matheson decides to run in the fourth district, some Republican legislator is likely to win if that district is created. Congressman Chris Cannon (R-UT3) was not drawn into a district that will make his perennial intraparty challenge easier.

Quite a lot of Republican legislators just wanted Jim Matheson drawn out of their districts so that the Matheson turnout machine wouldn’t be helping out their opponents every two years. With Matheson in a district that’s almost all represented by Democrats, they get their wish.

One district was drawn just for Republican legislators.

Hill Air Force Base workers and contractors almost won a big prize by accident.

Right now any congressman from the First district focuses on winning and keeping missions and jobs for Hill. Several proposed maps would have put South Ogden, South Weber, or other parts of the Hill community into another district, just to balance population numbers. The bonus for Hill and the state would be another focused advocate for Utah’s most important federal facility in congress.

Perhaps it would be an advocate who didn’t vote against job protections, benefits, and fair wages for Hill workers like current Representative Rob Bishop (R-UT1) does.

But the final committee map won’t include much of the Hill community in any district but the First. Hill AFB workers didn’t have a big win.

Rural Utahns make up 12% of the state according to the Bureau of the Census; Utahns argue that it’s a few percent more. The Utah Republican Party is dominated by suburban representatives who want to dilute rural strength by diluting their votes into all four possible districts. Republicans would like to dilute urban strength the same way, but that conflicts with Governor Huntsman’s desire to create a safe district for Jim Matheson. Democrats even proposed a map (Map G) that would let rural Utahns dominate one of the four districts.

It could have been worse because rural Utah was divided into only three and not four districts.

Incumbent Congressmen all saw their districts get safer. Chris Cannon (R-UT3) will see fewer of his frequent intraparty challengers. Congressman Rob Bishop’s (R-UT1) district gets more Republican. Jim Matheson (D-UT2) should run in the new fourth district to give us a chance to add a new Democrat in the second, but he might run in the second which is now much more Democratic. So the incumbents should be pleased.

Utah communities want to be kept together with like minded neighbors and not split. Except for Hill AFB workers mentioned above who wanted exactly the opposite.

Most Park City and western Summit County commenters wanted to be combined with Salt Lake County and split from North Summit and South Summit and they get their wish in the final proposal.

Carbon County voters are the strongest constituency for Rep. Matheson and they will be split from his district so they’re unhappy.

Senator Buttars (R-South Jordan) wanted South Jordan and West Jordan together and he got his wish.

Salt Lake City voters wanted to be reunited after the current plan split the City down the middle and they were.

In the end, some communities got what they wanted and others did not.

Last, as always, come the people. The people are best served by competitive districts. It was the intention of the committee to draw four districts that were all less competitive than the three we have now. Unless Matheson runs in the new fourth district, the people will lose the one competitive district we have.

Five years ago I booked a last minute ticket to fly home (my round trip ticket couldn’t be changed) and sat in a snowstorm four hours on the runway. Eventually we departed for Salt Lake and arrived in the middle of the night. I was barely in time for Charlotte’s arrival in the world just before 3:00 am.

Today Charlotte turns five years old. Here she is blowing out candles.

Check out the cookie turkeys.

Yes, those are chocolate chip pancakes that Charlotte and Rosalie are eating.

More than a decade ago, people who were disappointed with holidays dominated by consumerism started to set aside the busiest shopping day of the year as “Buy Nothing Day.”

Immediately after the family gatherings of Thanksgiving millions of Americans start their holiday shopping.  Instead we could take the day to renew our appreciation that the best things in life cannot be bought with money.  And we could avoid the crowds.

Buy Nothing Day 2006 is November 24th.  Celebrate in your own way.

I’ve been running a poll this week on the results of the general canvass and articles predicting, among other things, a solid win for County Auditor-elect Jeff Hatch. Here are the poll results among readers here,

Congrats to those who picked “Two.” But it doesn’t hurt to guess wrong so next time there’s a poll, let’s have more folks give it a whirl.

Now it’s time for me to go catch the train.