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Utah Supreme Court’s ‘watershed’ redistricting ruling has major implications. Now what?

By KATIE MCKELLAR - | Jul 13, 2024

(Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, is pictured during a press conference on the first day of the legislative session at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024.

David Reymann, attorney with Parr Brown Gee & Loveless representing plaintiffs in an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit against the state of Utah, speaks at a press conference at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City celebrating the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling in his client’s favor on July 11, 2024.The Utah Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday, which handed a major win to plaintiffs in an anti-gerrymandering lawsuit, was a “watershed moment.”

That’s how the plaintiffs’ attorney, David Reymann with Parr Brown Gee & Loveless, described it during a news conference celebrating the ruling.

In a unanimous opinion released that day, Utah Supreme Court justices ruled a district court “erred” when it dismissed a claim that the Utah Legislature violated the Utah Constitution in 2021 when it repealed and replaced a voter-approved ballot initiative that would have enacted an independent commission to draw Utah’s new political districts in its redistricting process.

While legislative leaders at the helm of Utah’s Republican-supermajority Legislature have argued it’s well within lawmakers’ constitutional authority to change ballot initiatives and ultimately adopt their own version of the maps, the Utah Supreme Court’s opinion clearly stated there are limits to that authority.

“Although the Legislature has authority to amend or repeal statutes, it is well settled that legislative action cannot unduly infringe or restrain the exercise of constitutional rights,” Justice Paige Petersen wrote in the opinion. “Consequently, when Utahns exercise their right to reform the government through an initiative, this limits the Legislature’s authority to amend or repeal the initiative.”

Such a ruling has major implications not just for the lawsuit that now goes back to 3rd District Court — but also, depending on how the rest of the court case plays out, for Utah’s future congressional district boundaries, perhaps as early as 2026.

It could also lay the field for a whole new game when it comes to other voter initiatives and the Utah Legislature’s legal ability to tweak them.

“What the (Utah) Supreme Court did today was establish a new framework in Utah that doesn’t just apply to citizen initiatives about gerrymandering, but any democracy-furthering, government-reform initiative,” Reymann said.

What now?

It’s impossible to predict exactly what will come next, given the case will now go back to 3rd District Court for a trial. However, Reymann said he believes the Utah Supreme Court strengthened his clients’ case by making clear the Legislature’s powers have limits.

“At its core, what the Supreme Court ruled today was that the Legislature cannot constitutionally ignore the will of the people when they act to reform their government. It is not, as the Legislature tried to put it, a harmless game of ping-pong between the Legislature and the citizens,” Reymann said.

“It’s a fundamental right, and if the Legislature wants to change something the citizens have done to reform their government, then they need to satisfy the highest level of scrutiny known to the law,” he said. “And that is something we don’t think they’ll be able to do in this case.”

When asked what the ruling means for Utah’s 2021 redistricting process and its resulting maps, Reymann said “we don’t know the ultimate end game,” but the Utah Supreme Court ruled the district court must decide whether the Utah Legislature can “satisfy its burden of overcoming this level of scrutiny.”

“If they cannot, then the repeal that the Legislature put in place that took away Prop 4 (SB200), will be invalid, and the laws that were enacted by Prop 4 will be the law of the land,” he said. “And then, the maps that the Legislature has put in place have to be tested against those standards (in Proposition 4). And we don’t think they will satisfy them for many reasons.”

Ultimately, Reymann said his clients’ hope is that Proposition 4 will govern the redistricting process. That new law would ban partisan gerrymandering and requires the Legislature, if it doesn’t adopt maps put forth by an independent commission, to adopt maps that adhere to neutral criteria outlined in the proposition.

It’s “hard to know exactly” how that process would play out — whether the Legislature would adopt the previously-discarded maps drawn by the 2021 independent commission, whether new maps would need to be drawn, and when or if Utah would adopt new maps. But Elevate Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm, said the ruling could pave the way for new redistricting maps as soon as the 2026 election cycle.

As news of the ruling spread, it sent shockwaves across Utah. It was joyous news for anti-gerrymandering groups like Better Boundaries, which originally sought the 2018 voter initiative, and the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters of Utah, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and individual Salt Lake County residents who alleged they were disenfranchised by unlawful gerrymandering.

For Utah’s Republican legislative leaders, it was also earth shattering — but in the worst way.

Ruling ‘destroys our basic Republic,’ Utah Senate president says

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, issued a seething statement that did not mince words, calling the ruling “one of the worst outcomes” to ever come out of the Utah Supreme Court. They said the ruling effectively made a “new law about the initiative power, creating chaos and striking at the very heart of our Republic.”

“I’m sad and disappointed,” an audibly heated Adams told Utah News Dispatch in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “I never thought this would happen in Utah, of all states in the nation.”

Adams said he fears it could open the door for California-style politics in Utah, ruling by referendum by creating “a whole new statute — a super law — that can’t be changed.”

“Basically, they’ve changed this from a rule of republic to a rule of referendum,” Adams said. “So why would you ever come to the Legislature to pass a law if you can just just do it by referendum, and it becomes super status?”

“That destroys our basic Republic,” Adams said, painting a glum picture of what the ruling spells for Utah’s future.

Utah, he said, “leads the nation” in economic development and upward mobility. “We’re the happiest state in the nation. We’re the most philanthropic. We’re the most humanitarian. We do so many great things. We’re the best-managed state in the nation.”

“And the (Utah) Supreme Court potentially changed all that today,” Adams said. “With a new management style that I believe will be difficult for Utah to stay in that type of status. We’ve taken away the Republic. When you destroy the Republic, that’s a sad day.”

Other lawmakers also took to social media to decry the ruling, including Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan. In a lengthy post on X, Teuscher said the decision “is a stark deviation from the principles that have guided our state so effectively.”

“While grassroots, citizen-led initiatives can have value, this ruling creates a rigid and unmanageable system. By allowing initiatives to become immutable ‘super laws,’ the Court has opened the door to potentially devastating consequences,” Tuescher wrote. “Utah now faces the risk of becoming like California, where large sums of outside money influence laws that do not reflect the values of our citizens.”

The nation’s founders “wisely designed a democratic republic to prevent the chaos of direct democracy,” he continued. “This ruling disrupts that balance, leaving Utah vulnerable to the whims of special interests and fleeting majorities. I’m afraid that if something isn’t done to mitigate the consequences of this decision, Utah … will be a shell of its former self.”

How will Utah lawmakers respond?

It’s unclear what — if anything — the Utah Legislature could do to respond to the ruling. As voter initiatives have risen in popularity in recent years, Utah lawmakers have explored various ways to make it more difficult to successfully get them on the ballot.

When pressed on whether the Legislature can or will do anything, Adams didn’t have a specific answer.

“I’m not sure what we can do,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to stand up to protect the people’s right, to elect their elected officials and have them govern.”

Asked for specifics, Adams said Thursday lawmakers will do what’s “within our constitutional power. We don’t know what those are. We’re still reading the report, it came out this morning. We’re going to react accordingly.”

“What they’ve done,” Adams said of the Utah Supreme Court, “is basically said if you have enough money and you can buy signatures … if you have enough money to pay for the ads, whether it’s Facebook ads or social media ads or TV ads … you can pass a super law. That super law, whatever it is, is untouchable by the Legislature. And that means you put the power in the people who have the money. And that’s not what our constitution stands for.”

Katie Wright, executive director of Better Boundaries, said there has been “ongoing, consistent” efforts almost every legislative session to “make it harder for all of us to enact our constitutional right to ballot initiatives.”

“I do not see that slowing down. I absolutely see it ramping up,” she said, noting Better Boundaries has been working to fight those efforts, including legislation that would have increased the required signature threshold to place an initiative on the ballot. “We anticipate that coming back.”

“A ballot initiative is core to our practice of representative democracy, and we’re committed to protecting it,” Wright said. “And yes, we believe it’s under attack and will remain under attack.”

Asked if lawmakers could potentially create new laws to make it more difficult for voters to put voter initiatives or referendums on the ballot — something that could potentially be questionable legally now under the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling — Adams said, “right now, I don’t think that matters.”

“People will do what they have to do to pass a super law,” he said. “If those that want to have enough money, they’ll do whatever they can to pass a super law. I mean, it’s crazy. … Why would you come to the legislative body to pass any type of statute if you can just do it by referendum and have it unchangeable?”

Can the ruling apply to other voter initiatives?

While Adams’ comments paint the Utah Supreme Court ruling in a broad stroke, implying it has implications for all voter initiatives, Reymann told reporters Thursday the question of whether the ruling could apply to other voter initiatives that aren’t targeted so specifically at government reform — like perhaps medical cannabis or medicaid expansion, which voters also passed in recent years — is yet to be answered.

“It’s a good question and it’s one they left for another day,” Reymann said. “They said in this case there’s no question that this initiative was exercising the people’s right explicitly to reform their government, but there will be other initiatives that will be considered government reform initiatives, and it will be left to those cases to decide where the boundaries lie.”

While Adams and Schultz said in their joint statement that as the lawsuit makes its way through district court, “we believe the Utah Constitution’s text shows that the Legislature should ultimately prevail,” Adams told Utah News Dispatch he was “very concerned” about the legal standing the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling puts the Legislature’s case in.

“Again, I think the Supreme Court basically took away the ability for duly elected officials to be able to do their job,” he said.

As for what’s next, Adams said it’s unchartered territory.

“I’m not going to say where we’re going from here, because I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that I believe the Supreme Court made a mistake. They’ve all taken an oath to abide by the constitution. They’ve all taken an oath to follow the law, to follow the statute. … And I just believe they’ve made a severe mistake today.”

Reymann said it’s not uncommon to see lawmakers respond to court decisions by changing the law, but “the importance of this decision is it places limits on the ability to do that,” and it makes clear that the Legislature simply does not have “unfettered power to just simply change laws that the citizens enact.”

To comments from lawmakers upset with the Utah Supreme Court’s decision, Reymann said “claiming that the judiciary has overstepped is usually what people say when they don’t like the result. It’s not a reasoned attack on the decision.”

“We think (the ruling) is well-rounded and the Supreme Court went to great lengths to detail how well-grounded it is in the history of the state,” he said. “So they can say whatever they want about it, it’s not going to change the outcome.”

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