Salt Lake Tribune: Utahns For Ethical Government Lawyers Sue In Federal Court - UPDATED

Godspeed to the UEG lawyers
UPDATED: Temporary restraning order granted; press conference set for 11:00 a.m.

Interesting development on the citizen's initiative petition front, according to this morning's morning's story in the Salt Lake Tribune:

• Suit demands secrecy for ethics petition signers.

In Tuesday's WCF article we assured our readers that Utahns for Ethical Government's (UEG) lawyers were prepared to go to court, although we confess that we had no idea they'd be doing it quite so soon. From this morning's Cathy McKitrick story:

One day shy of the deadline to turn in 95,000 valid voter signatures, attorneys who drafted a pending ethics-reform initiative filed suit in U.S. District Court, challenging the constitutionality of the practice of making petition signatures public.
David Irvine and Alan Smith, two of the key legal minds behind Utahns for Ethical Government, requested a temporary restraining order -- and permanent injunction -- to block the release of signers' names, addresses and, in some cases, their age or birth dates. Current state law allows their release as soon as county clerks have accomplished the task of matching names to registered voters.
"There's a provision in Utah's initiative statute that once you've filed your packets with the county clerk they become a public record," Smith said. "We're challenging the constitutionality of that statute. In effect it chills the First Amendment rights of those who signed the petition."

We'd expected that Utah Republicans who'd signed the petition would experience a certain amount of needling from GOP jack-boots operatives for having deviated from the Party Line. What we hadn't expected was that ethics reform-minded GOP petition signators, in doing so, would be mean-spiritedly accused of having committed the equivalent of an act of political treason:

"We want to protect those who signed our petition from being harassed," Irvine said, noting that some signed just because they thought that people should get to vote on the question.
"The [state] Republican Party has said it will target our folks," Irvine added. "We've had Republicans in Utah County saying 'if you sign you're not fit to run as a Republican.'"

Old-fashioned right wing socialist Brown-shirt Politics, anyone?

Godspeed to the UEG lawyers.

Sign the petition here:

• Utahns for Ethical Government

Please be patient, folks. The UEG website has been up and down this morning, (and over the past day or two as well), due to user overload (which is a positive omen for initiative supporters, wethinks). If you get a page load error the first time around, come back later and try again. Today's the last day for the gathering of signatures by the way, so for those who've dawdled... please be persistent... and don't give up until your electronic signature has been lodged.

Update 4/16/10 6:00 a.m.: The Salt Lake Tribune reports that U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups granted the UEG's request for a temporary restraining order to keep petition signers' names secret:

• Ethics initiative 'close' to making ballot

We also received an email from UEG representative Kim Burningham about thirty minutes ago informing us that despite intermittent crashes of UEG's website throughout the day, "yesterday also brought great 'highs,'" and "that there is far more news--and even more exciting--that will be clear at the 11 a.m. press conference this morning."

We'll keep our ears open, tune into this morning's press conference and report back with any new developments arising in connection with the UEG petition story.

Gotta admit the suspense is killing us.

Stay tuned, WCF readers.