Interesting article this morning from the Salt Lake Tribune's Paul Rolly. We incorporate the pertinent paragraphs below:
The Utah Republican Party seems to be in a battle for its political soul.Does the foregoing signal a genuine shift of the Utah Republican Party from the far right wing toward the center? Will current GOP leadership pay the ultimate political price for the voucher debacle, and for their stubborn resistance to all forms of ethics reform? Will Utah Democrats finally emerge from their stupor, and extract their long overdue pound of flesh?
Fifteen Republican incumbents in the state House of Representatives are facing stiff challenges from within their own party. Of the nine Republican incumbents who are up for re-election in the State Senate, five are being challenged by fellow Republicans.
For the first time in memory, all 75 House seats are contested, while in the Senate, only President John Valentine, R-Provo, escaped with no challenger at all.
The obvious impetus behind the assault on the Republican establishment - from within and outside the GOP - is the voucher fight of 2007, when GOP legislative leaders crammed tuition tax credits for private schools down the throats of a reluctant public, then vigorously fought the successful populist movement to repeal that legislation.
But it goes deeper than that. The voucher debacle was a symptom of a greater problem: a Legislature in the grip of an ultraconservative clique that is intolerant of moderate points of view, especially within its own party, and excludes anyone who doesn't play along.
Another troubling symptom of GOP unrest on Capitol Hill is the absolute resistance from most of the Republican leadership to any ethics reform that would attempt to reign in the current culture of favoritism and cronyism between legislators and their gift-bearing lobbyist buddies.
What is intriguing about this counter-establishment uprising is that it's coming from other Republicans, not just the marginalized Democrats. [...]
One telling feature of this year's political climate is that while many Republicans have GOP opponents, the most outspoken anti-voucher Republicans - Reps. Sheryl Allen, Kory Holdaway, Steve Mascaro, Mel Brown and Kay McIff - have no Republican opponent. That is a shift from past years when moderate Republicans were the ones being targeted in GOP conventions by the armies of the right.
The cyber-world awaits the comments of our gentle readers.
