Chapter 13

The Legislature

Spending a week each year at the Utah State Legislative sessions with my father as a state senator had a significant impact on me. I grew up knowing legislators, hearing discussions of lawmaker dynamics, and listening to the distinctive rhythm of parliamentary debate.

Even the legislative chambers had a special meaning to me. On a winter night in February 1973, I proposed marriage to my wife in the Utah Senate Lounge. I was attending a legislative ball as the guest of my parents. It was an event to raise money for the Republican Party. I had chosen that night and location because the Capitol was close enough to Newton, Utah, that Jackie’s parents—whom I had pre-notified—could attend and be part of the surprise.

At the right moment, I suggested we escape the hot, crowded Capitol Rotunda for the more serene Senate chamber area, which I knew intimately from my days as a child. When we were alone, I took a knee in the classic position and popped the question. I must have surprised Jackie, because her first response was, “Oh, get serious.” To which I replied, “I’ve never been so serious in my entire life.” She nodded her agreement as I used trembling hands to guide a ring onto her finger.

About that time, Senator Warren Pugh wandered into the lounge and became the first person to hear our big announcement. We proceeded back to the crowded event, our parents, and the happy life that has followed that memorable moment.

Throughout my adult life, additional reasons developed for me to interact with the legislature. I helped many lawmakers politically as they ran campaigns. I participated in higher-education governance, worked to recodify the insurance code, and guided initiative and referendum campaigns defending Utah’s tax system.

When I decided to run for governor, it felt natural seek the support of state legislators. Despite never having served in the legislature, I was able to gain commitments from all but two Republican legislators. Those legislators from whom I gained commitments formed a very important foundation for my campaign in 1992.

So with all that history, I was surprised by how much I still had to learn during my first legislative session—things changed once I became governor.

Our first legislative session felt like a honeymoon—but the reality is my team and I hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare. Not surprisingly, our agenda was a bit light, and so the legislature was gracious to me. I got everything I asked for. . . until the last night of the session.

Senator Lane Beattie, who would later become my best ally in the legislature, had quietly engineered a property tax increase for school construction and introduced it on the last night of the session. It was a bombshell.

I had committed in the campaign that there would be no tax increases during my first legislative session. On the other hand, the education community, which had backed me in a big way, was jubilant. I was at cross-purposes with two of my most important allies.

I indicated to the media that the tax increase took me by surprise. I reminded them of my campaign statements where I said that I would not support tax increases during the session. Within hours, the Utah Education Association announced that if I vetoed the bill, teachers would go on strike.

In my mind, I had no choice but to veto Senator Beattie’s property tax increase bill, though I had not announced it publicly. I went to Lane and told him we had to find another solution. He understood the fix he had put me in. On the other hand, he had skillfully navigated his Republican column to pass a tax increase—no small feat.

I’ve never been more serious in my entire life.

I had twenty days to sign or veto the bill. As the time ticked away, I worked to engineer an alternative. As I did, the education community ratcheted up their pressure. Groups of teachers in various districts walked off the job. Suddenly, parents faced the dilemma of how to manage school-age children while they were at work. Things were getting tense.

I developed a plan under which I vetoed the bill but committed to finding tax exemptions for repeal worth the same amount produced by the property tax increase. I would then call the legislature back into session to consider that alternative. I felt absolutely confident that Republican legislators would not override a veto of their new Republican governor, who had vetoed a property tax increase.

It was a smart plan. It allowed me to veto the tax increase but still show sensitivity to the plight of education. It also allowed me to face down striking teachers—something my conservative base liked.

The big challenge however, was finding an equivalent amount in tax exemptions to repeal. Identifying the list of possibilities wasn’t hard. The state had, over the years, granted several hundred million dollars in exemptions—an exemption, essentially, from taxes everybody else had to pay. Each exemption had a constituency, however, and none of them were going to give up their position easily.

For example, the newspaper industry had an exemption. The rationale was, “Why would we tax news?” The coin-operated car wash industry had one, as well as those who owned coin-operated vending machines. Churches were exempt, as were their non-profit purchases. It was a fascinating process.

In the end, the teachers stayed mad for a while but didn’t strike. I vetoed the bill and then called the session. We passed repeals of several exemptions. In a stroke of good luck, during the period before we had to meet, a new revenue estimate was made and we actually had some money that the legislature had not contemplated. It was spent to make up the difference and to prevent the legislature from taking very hard votes on tax exemptions.

It was a baptism of fire into the dynamics of the legislature. The honeymoon was over.

Rhythms and Tensions

Over time it became clear to me that I had a misperception about the relationship between legislators and the governor. The model in my mind was that of management and a board of directors. That is not the model legislators envision. Several experiences aligned to reshape my vision. Conversations with Lieutenant Governor Olene Walker and legal counselor Robin Riggs, who both came from the legislative branch, were helpful. But perhaps the most important ah-ha moment came in a meeting related to child protective services legislation. The gathering was in the Governor’s Board Room. I stepped in to share my views on how a particular provision should be structured.

In addition to my staff, members of the legislative counsel staff were there. I was fairly insistent on how the bill should be written, even though the legislative sponsor wanted it done differently. The discussion wasn’t tense, but it was clear we disagreed.

The staff member, Bryant Howe, had been at the legislature for some time. He quite skillfully and tactfully taught me an important principle, simply by saying: “The problem is not everyone here [clearly meaning me] fully appreciates that legislators come to the Capitol having also been elected and feel quite empowered to enact change according to their own ideas.”

I appreciated his polite and tactful manner, and luckily the lightbulb went off. I had not fully appreciated the independence and responsibilities legislators feel, having been duly elected in their own right to bring their own ideas to state government.

The legislature and the governor are two different and distinct branches of government, both imbued with a duty and power to act. Our system of government requires that each respect the other, and a skillful governor can turn that position into a powerful tool.

The governor’s primary advantage is that he or she can speak with one voice, whereas the legislature speaks with 104 independent voices. But I concluded that the key to working well with the legislature was to understand them. They are, in fact, quite predictable in the ways they will behave in certain situations.

Predictably, there will be bad blood between Republicans and Democrats—and the dynamics between the House of Representatives and the Senate are equally predictable. This knowledge becomes the governor’s best tool toward the end of a legislative session. And there is nothing more guaranteed to bring the legislature together than showing the governor who is boss.

In reality, wielding executive-branch power in a legislative session is an art form. It requires a sense of timing and an understanding of human nature. Knowing how individual members were feeling—who they are mad at and why—becomes enormously important during the closing days of a legislative session.

There is a rhythm about a legislative session. In many ways mastering that rhythm is an important component of a governor’s success.

Utah’s legislative session generally convenes the third week of January. To be ready, we had to begin framing our primary objectives the summer before. The yearly staff retreats I instigated for cabinet heads and senior staff were held to prioritize objectives.

By September, we were developing a state budget. Departments were given assumptions about the amount of money they would be allocated and were expected to prioritize their needs and send a report back to my office for review throughout October and November.

Typically on the day after Thanksgiving, we would have a meeting to finalize decisions on the budget, which we would propose by mid-December of December. The document had to be finalized, printed, and put forward.

During my first couple of years as governor, I gave a budget address formally to a joint session of the legislature. However, legislators soon concluded that such an address made the governor’s budget too prominent in people’s minds. In their reasoning, the only budget that mattered was the one the legislature proposed and enacted. So, the invitations to address the legislature on the budget soon ended. I was a bit put out by that decision, as it seemed personal. However, I quickly understood that this lemon could be turned into lemonade.

When I previously gave the budget addresses to the joint session, the news media ran a single story with a pie chart showing how the total budget would be divided. I instituted a new process and called it “Budget Week.” We’d tell the budget in stories, revealing the budget one section at a time over a week to ten days, with great visuals that made the component parts more than just a pie chart.

When we announced the education budget, for example, we did it in a school surrounded by children. The next day we would announce the public safety budget, where I would be with highway patrolofficers talking about the ten new officers we were putting on the road. The third day, it might be the higher education or social services budget. Over the course of the rollout, we dominated the news.

Our incremental approach irritated the legislature. I understood that. However, we made efforts to include legislators and highlight bills they wanted to sponsor.

The approach reflected an important realization. Ultimately, the legislature was right: the only budget that mattered was the one they passed. However, the governor must sign the budget, or there is no budget. To be most effective in those negotiations, I needed to use the budget as a political document to set expectations according to my own views.

Our Legislative Strategy

My legislative strategy had a definite rhythm. Play hard at the beginning, lay low in the middle as the legislature organized its own budget, and then rev things up again at the end as the two sides had to come together to reconcile their differences.

It drove my budget director, Lynne Ward, crazy that I viewed our budget as a political document. I explained to her that I knew the extremely hard work her office had done in developing the budget and that I knew it was valuable and necessary. However, it was valuable because it gave us both a point of reference and created political support for us to negotiate with the legislature from a position of strength.

Our aggressive, media-centric budget announcement schedule was what I meant by playing hard at the beginning. Frankly, I know it annoyed legislators. I didn’t do it for that reason. I did it because I knew they were going to do everything they could to minimize the importance people put on the governor’s budget. We were jockeying for position.

It was a baptism of fire into the dynamics of the legislature. The honeymoon was over.

I came to understand that right after I released the entire budget, the legislature would do two things. First, they would announce that the governor’s budget was dead on arrival. Second, they would ceremoniously ax some things they knew were important to me. They knew doing so would create bargaining chips for later. (Two of their favorites were cutting funds to the governor’s offices in both Washington, D.C., and Utah. They knew I’d fight to restore the money and they could then extract something for it.)

Laying low in the middle meant that once I had announced my budget and legislative priorities, I stepped back so they could have their turn to shine. I stayed out of the news as much as possible and worked at not reacting to some of the odder things that would be said and done.

Playing hard at the end often meant ratcheting up public support to support our position. This is where the executive has an advantage because of the single voice. At various times, this got very tense.

For example, decisions about whether the legislature would authorize the state to bond—take on debt to build roads, facilities, and buildings—typically occurred closer to the end of a session. The alternative to bonding was to use ongoing sales tax revenue instead, but the use of sales tax meant education and other programs would receive less than I had proposed.

I would do all I could to persuade legislators behind closed doors, but if that didn’t work, my only option was to bring external pressure. So, often when we were approaching the end of the session, I would deliver a message to them that in its current form, I would not be willing to sign the budget. I would then begin to talk with the media, who were always looking for a hint of drama or controversy about our disagreement, framing the issue in very simple terms.

For example, “The legislature has decided to spend money on roads rather than schools. I just can’t go along with that.” I would then slowly turn up the pressure with stronger rhetoric or by getting groups to join with me. The goal was to create enough disagreement in the caucus that things would start to change. It was a delicate dance because if you went too far, you could stampede the legislature.

We worked hard at maintaining good relationships with legislative leadership. I held meetings every week with the leadership of both houses and with both parties. The goal was to make certain that they knew when we had a disagreement, so that, to the degree possible, we could work it out.

In advance of each session, we would meet with them to ask each individually what issues they would be carrying. We would also use that as an opportunity to explain our priorities. We actually assembled a list of bills we needed to see passed. Our legislative team monitored our list every day to assure that things were progressing as necessary.

The legislature has decided to spend money on roads rather than schools. I just can’t go along with that.

The legislative team wore red name tags during the session. We had negotiated legislative floor privileges, meaning my staff didn’t have to go through the Sergeant at Arms to get on the floor. It was a necessity to be responsive to members’ needs for information. It also allowed us to gather intelligence from everybody about what was happening or likely to happen. Periodically, if the legislature got irritated over something, they would revoke the team’s floor privileges, saying there were too many of them. It was the legislative equivalent of diplomatic sanctions.

Most of the work with legislators would be done by staff members. It was a deliberate method to keep the governor in reserve for moments that needed a deadlock broken. This would typically take the form of inviting a legislator to the Governor’s Office or having a meeting with leadership.

The truth is, legislators enjoyed being summoned to the Governor’s Office. They would often feign irritation, but when I called, they always told their colleagues. There were certain legislators I’d call down if there was a message I wanted spread around. I knew they would talk. However, most often I would have legislators down just to build relationships or to specifically ask for their vote.

One of my favorite things to do was sending legislators a note. In my back private office, there was a speaker that I could open up and hear the legislative debate. If there was something happening that I found interesting or important, I’d turn it on. Or if I got wondering what they were up to, I’d listen in.

When I heard a legislator say something thoughtful, I’d write a handwritten note and have it delivered by a member of our team to them personally. Generally, it would say that I was in my office listening to the floor debate, and I thought their remarks were particularly thoughtful. Little things like that paid a big dividend.

We would also do more formal things. We would entertain at the Governor’s Mansion and invite them to events during the year. If there was a board or commission candidate that I didn’t have a strong feeling about, I’d call a legislator and ask if there was somebody in his or her district who would serve well in the role. I’d then let them offer names. These were important relationships, and we worked to treat them as such.

However, there were a few legislators who simply became political critics, and I felt they were liabilities to the party and to the functioning of the legislature. So, occasionally I would support the opponent of a Republican in a primary election. It made legislators very uncomfortable, but I felt it important to send a message that if you are going to attack me politically, as a Republican, it will have ramifications.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned about dealing with legislators was that they valued their status as an independent branch of government, and getting too close could create a backlash.

In 1996, my reelection was contested, but not rigorously. My opponent, a Salt Lake County commissioner, did not present a serious threat. However, I wanted to campaign and felt it might be useful to campaign for legislators—with the hope that it would ultimately benefit me in the session.

Marty Stephens was the House Majority Leader. He aspired to be Speaker of the House and it was widely expected that he would. I suggested to Marty that if he wanted to team up with me, I’d use some of my campaign funds and we could campaign with legislators in their districts. That summer and fall, I campaigned personally in fifty-eight legislative districts. For a guy who had a slam dunk of an election, I worked incredibly hard.

The election occurred. I got 74 percent of the vote and won every county in Utah—a first for a governor. Republican legislators did well also.

In the week following the election, the legislature met to choose its leaders. Mel Brown surprised Marty and won the election for speaker. Mel had cleverly developed a campaign against Marty claiming he was “too close to the governor.” Mel pledged to maintain the separation of powers by standing up to the governor.

I had spent thousands of dollars of campaign money and burned weeks of time campaigning for Republican legislators in fifty-eight different legislative districts only to have it cleverly turned into a campaign against me. (There was more to it than that. Mel maintained close ties to rural legislators and built a coalition of legislators who wanted rural roots within leadership.)

While I was able to work pretty well with Mel Brown, as a new speaker he needed to make good on his commitment, and therefore we had a steady tension present in our relationship. Four years later, Marty became Speaker of the House. He was not going to make the mistake of being too close to the governor again. Although I had a healthy relationship with him, we were both smart enough to keep it arm’s length. In fact, Marty gave serious thought to running against me in 2000, but ultimately decided not to.

To a degree, I think legislative relationships naturally wear thinner as time goes on. The shine diminishes as political ambitions heighten, and tensions accumulate.

The Final Night of the Legislative Session

The most dangerous night in Utah government is the final night of the legislature. Utah has a forty-five-day limit on its legislative session. By the forty-fifth day, the budget and other essential bills were usually finished. However, there was always a backlog of bills that had passed in one house but not the other. This was one of the predictable sources of conflict between the two bodies.

Generally, late in the afternoon of the last day, both bodies would start racing in to finish before the clock ran out. Almost every legislator would have bills they wanted passed, so everybody had an incentive to play along. Bill after bill would come up. Legislators would give a thirty-second explanation. Debate was frowned on because it meant fewer bills would get passed. If a bill was amended, somebody would physically run to the other chamber carrying the bill, with the hopes that the leadership of the other house would allow a concurring vote.

On the last night of the legislative session, I would sit in my office monitoring developments. My staff would periodically come in and report developments or ask for direction. Occasionally, a legislator would bring a family member in to visit and take a picture. We would be checking off the final bills on our agenda as they passed. One year, I even walked to the back door of the House—something nearly unheard of for the governor—and said directly to the majority leader, whose desk was next to the back door, “You committed to me that (a certain bill) would be voted upon. We have six minutes left. Let’s get it done.” Tempers would always flare. It was simply craziness.

There was another category of legislation that would be held for the last night of the session: bills that somebody in leadership wanted to pass, but for tactical reasons they didn’t want to debate. The tax increase I described earlier is a good example. Sometimes, legislation was deferred because it was controversial, or because of the special interests it would help. During those final six hours, an astonishing percentage of bills were passed.

When the clock struck midnight, pencils were put down and the craziness turned to weariness. A delegation would be sent to inform the governor that they had concluded their business. I would be invited to close the legislature by addressing each house.

I always tried to keep my remarks on the lighter side, laced with gratitude for their service. If the close of the legislature marked the end of a particular lawmaker’s service because of retirement, I would mention him or her by name. Slowly, people would collect their things and head for home.

One of my favorite days at the State Capitol was the day after the legislature concluded. Typically, everything would start a bit later because of the late night. The dull roar which had filled the building over the previous forty-five days was replaced by a wonderful silence. “It was,” as a friend of mine said, “like having 104 house guests leave after a forty-five-day visit.”

Our work was not done, though. A new phase started—bill review and signing. The governor has twenty days after adjournment to sign, veto, or let a bill go into law without signature. With 350 or more bills passed each year, this was a significant ask.

However, the two or three days right after the legislature ended was a good time to get away, either with my family or with friends. All the bills just enacted had to be processed, checked, and conveyed to the Governor’s Office, and my head needed to clear.

Our bill review process resembled a factory. The governor’s general counsel, Robin Riggs and then Gary Doxey, were responsible for leading the effort each year. Bills were divided into piles and sent to the individual in the GOPB that dealt with that issue. The staff member would review it and send it back to me. At first, I tried to physically read or review each bill, but that proved to be quite difficult. Bills are written in a language unique to the legislative process. Bill drafters strike out the old law from the code using hash marks and insert the new language in parentheses. This makes understanding the specific changes intended by the bill convoluted and time consuming, especially when language is being moved from section to section.

Veto Power

The veto is one of the important powers of the governor. Vetoing a bill did not mean the discussion was over, of course. The legislature could call themselves back into session for the purpose of overriding the veto—something they loved the thought of doing.

A veto is enacted simply by writing a formal letter to the legislature referencing the bill by number, announcing it has been vetoed, and then giving an explanation. Sometimes a veto disappointed only the legislator who passed the bill but generated little real controversy. Other times, vetoes would set off a firestorm.

I made a point of exercising the veto every year. Generally, I would veto five to ten bills. It wasn’t hard to find bills I thought were a bad idea. Almost every year there were bills that had been inadequately debated and passed on the last night of the session that were simply terrible policy. It also kept my capacity to threaten a veto credible. However, there is a price to pay for every veto.

I would typically announce vetoed bills the last day of bill signing, always calling the sponsoring legislator first to explain. Those were never happy calls. Many times, legislators felt a bit embarrassed, angry, or both. Almost every year, there would be an attempt to organize a veto override session among the legislators. Several years they got close. We would scurry around working with friends to assure they couldn’t get the support required. Sometimes we had to trade assurances of future actions. Almost always, I had public sentiment with me, and legislators were mad, but not interested in fighting the public.

I did not have a veto overridden for nine straight legislative sessions. Then in my tenth session, it became clear they were going to override the governor, just to prove they could. They chose to override an obscure technical amendment on a bill dealing with municipal bonds. I didn’t even contest it.

Once we had decided which bills to sign, which to veto and so on, each bill required four signatures. The governor’s, enacting it into law; the lieutenant governor’s, acknowledging the bill and conveying it back to the legislator; and witnesses to each of those signatures. Finding the right page, signing one’s name, affixing the Seal of the State and passing each one back and forth took hours. It was tedious.

I started trying to figure a more efficient way to get the bills processed. We developed an assembly-line process where the staff would line up tables in the Governors Board Room and turn the bill open to the signing page. The lieutenant governor and I, along with a person who wielded the State Seal from the lieutenant governor’s office, would walk around the table and simply sign our names. This sped the process up.

As time went on, we continued to work on getting more efficient. To measure our efficiency, we would time how long it took us to do twenty bills at a time. I’m afraid some of the signatures on those bills weren’t my best penmanship. It probably doesn’t matter since I’d venture a strong guess that in the twelve decades since Utah became a state, no one has ever scrutinized a passed and processed bill after it was filed with the State Archives.

Special Sessions of the Legislature

The framers of Utah’s Constitution did a wise thing when they established a forty-five-day calendar limit. It means that the legislature has to get down to business. Over the first one hundred years of the state’s history, the session length changed. Until it was changed by constitutional amendment, the legislature met for sixty days in even years and thirty days, in what was known as a “budget session,” during the odd years. During the budget years, only budget matters could be considered. I think it appropriate that by constitutional amendment, the system changed to a forty-five-day general session each year.

However, sometimes business can’t wait for the regular session of the legislature. The catalyst might be a natural disaster, a budget problem, some unfinished business from the general session, an unusual opportunity, or the fact that a problem simply needs to be solved. In these cases, the State Constitution grants the governor the authority to call the legislature into a session to deal with specific matters.1 The list of matters is referred to as the “call.”

During my governorship, I called the legislature into special session about thirteen times. I received good counsel from people who had managed special sessions to not call the legislature into session until there was consensus for a solution to the problem motivating the session.

I mentioned the first special session I called in order to remedy the school construction property tax increase I had vetoed. The second came only a few months later. Utah had been involved in contentious litigation with a group of federal retirees. The court ruled that the state had improperly taxed their retirement benefits. We needed to pay damages, and the only way it could be done was by legislative action. I had come to an agreement with legislative leaders on how to go about it.

Since we were going to have a special session anyway, I concluded to add some items to the call, one that involved illegal access to guns by minors, a measure that had been filed in the general session but failed to be acted upon—largely because it had been proposed by a Democrat. During the summer of 1993, Utah had suffered a series of ruthless shootings and tragic gang violence involving young people. People were both angry and frightened that this was happening in Utah and I wanted to make changes. I also wanted to solve some prison crowding problems.

To highlight the issue, I organized a gang summit and asked for the cooperation of the state’s media. The evening before the special session, we had an event in the rotunda of the Capitol focused on how we could stop gang violence. It was televised statewide and included an impassioned plea for the state to act, made by Sherwin and Karen Watkins, a Provo couple whose twenty-two-year-old son was stabbed to death at a New York City subway platform as he fought back against a gang of violent muggers. Every one of the measures sailed through the legislature the next day.

While legislators didn’t like special sessions, as governor I found them to be rather effective tools under the right circumstances. The governor controlled when the legislature met and what they would consider, and the governor still held the veto option if the outcome was not to his or her liking. It proved to be an excellent way to focus the agenda on a single issue and get things done that proved difficult in the general session.

Most of the special sessions were called to recalibrate the state budget during periods when revenues were falling short of our original estimates.

Legislative Leaders

During my service, I worked with three Senate presidents and three Speakers of the House of Representatives. I had positive relationships with all of them.

I came to understand the differences between the culture of the House of Representatives and that of the Senate. Because of its larger size, the House was much more difficult to control. Speakers have to mirror or reflect their caucus rather than lead it. They get their power by controlling the committee assignments and assigning loyalists to lead them. Speakers control the agenda and the flow of debate—and if a member is not cooperative, their bills don’t seem to ever get to the floor for debate.

The Senate is smaller and therefore more collegial. The Senate president maintains control through one-on-one relationships and by sharing power. The Senate is more reflective and less likely to do reactionary things. I counted on the Senate to smooth over some of the foolishness that often happened in the House of Representatives.

The way the Utah Legislature worked, if you were not in the majority party, your chances of passing significant legislation were very low. Everything was decided in caucus. So, all you needed in order to prevail was to be a majority of a majority. There were many times that if the minority party votes could be added to the minority votes within the Republican caucus, they could have prevailed. However, the Speaker’s job was to assure that never happened. He would find ways to isolate and punish those who deviated from caucus positions.

Legislators are a cross section of people. As individuals, nearly all of them are agreeable and well-intentioned. However, there is a pack mentality that sometimes takes over at times during the session, creating very human dynamics. It is a reminder of why checks and balances are important in a democracy—those checks and balances protect the citizenry from the flaws of human nature that often find their way into legislative process. We truly have a government of the people.