Agroup suing over an omnibus education bill passed this year by the Legislature should take their complaints to the venue best suited to decide such issues: the ballot box. Their beef is more about politics than law.

More than three dozen politicians and educators have joined a lawsuit against SB 2, a wide-ranging education funding bill. The plaintiffs say it violates Utah's Constitution. Article VI, Section 22 says (in part): "Except general appropriation bills and bills for the codification and general revision of laws, no bill shall be passed containing more than one subject, which shall be clearly expressed in its title."

The bill includes some ideas that got shot down earlier in the session, only to be tacked onto SB 2 and revived. Critics said this allowed legislative leaders to pass some of their pet projects by stuffing them in with education funding that no legislator would dare to kill.

It's true that legislative bodies can go too far with "catch-all" bills. The U.S. Congress is one of the worst offenders -- note the recent omnibus farm bill, which granted huge subsidies to millionaire farmers and also gave handouts to race horse owners. We'd say that's distasteful, but not unconstitutional.

And the remedy is for voters to register their contempt at the polls for any senator or congressman who went along with the bill.

The Utah Legislature has created a parallel case with SB 2. But it was far more restrained than Congress.

At the beginning of the session, almost all observers agreed that Utahns were demanding action on education. That's Job No. 1 for any legislative body: respond to the wishes of the voters. So it's hard to criticize lawmakers for trying to address education.

Well, then, is SB 2's title, "Minimum School Program Budget Amendments," clear according to the state constitution? We'd say it's not exactly a model of clarity, but neither is it obfuscatory. Omnibus bills always have title troubles.

Is the bill about "one subject"? Defenders say yes -- education. The bill ranges from a major appropriation ($2.5 billion for the Uniform School Fund) to a host of lesser matters, including the powers of the State Charter School Board, various education programs, school transportation funding and more.

But all of them deal with education.

Let's look more closely at the bill. Does it hide items in a huge package that no human being can reasonably read? No. The bill is not enormous. It runs a mere 40 pages printed out, which isn't haiku but isn't too bad as laws go.

Numerous news accounts about the bill have been published since it was cobbled together. Those reports seem fairly clear and complete; so Utahns had some notice about what was in it.

The bill was passed in the last few days of the Legislature, but last-minute bills are normal for all kinds of legislative bodies.

So, all in all, we don't see what all the fuss is about.

The major complaint against SB 2 is that it upsets the legislative process by resurrecting ideas that were voted down earlier, such as more funding for the controversial International Baccalaureate program. Funding was approved in the omnibus bill because such bills, by their nature, include numerous provisions that require compromise.

It's a mundane political fact that when a wide range of measures are packaged together, a give-and-take process to secure votes follows. And it is easier to pass almost any measure in an omnibus bill than as a stand alone. No surprise here.

Critics of the Legislature often lament that a good proposal can be sidetracked by politics in committee, preventing a fair hearing by the full Legislature. This lawsuit makes the opposite complaint, that some dead bills get new life because both houses are forced to take a second look but with more political capital at stake. The plaintiffs are right about this, but they'll have to recast our entire political system to change it. Horse trading is a normal part of politics.

Some of the ideas most criticized in SB 2 seem to be worthwhile attempts to improve education without huge sums attached. The International Baccalaureate, for instance, is a harmless concept that for some reason was too hot politically to survive on its own. Yet it passed in the omnibus bill, packaged with more important provisions.

To this we can only say that sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- political maneuvers do lead to good policy.

It's been said that this lawsuit is more political than legal, a charge disingenuously denied by the attorney for the plaintiffs. If you were to view a few dozen plumbers unclogging drains or installing hot water tanks, you'd have no hesitation in saying they were engaged in plumbing. Here, seeing a few dozen people trying to reverse an action of the legislature, we have no hesitation in saying they are engaged in politics.

Do they propose an alternative? Do they say the Legislature should have passed a separate law for each section of SB 2, so that each is about "one subject"? We figure the bill could be easily divided up into 170 clauses, which is a lot of laws. Surely the plaintiffs don't mean that.

Then what do they mean? How do they define "one subject?" So far, we haven't heard.

It's been said that one should never watch two things being made: sausage and laws. SB 2, like the federal farm bill, might not be particularly appetizing, but that doesn't make it illegal.

Do you agree?