A crowd of about 350 people waving signs and chanting “Vote No” joined a coalition of groups Monday on the front steps of the Utah Capitol and vowed to defeat a constitutional amendment that would ensure the Republican-led Legislature can repeal or amend any future ballot initiative.
“I say this as a conservative,” said Ryan Bell, a board member of the group Better Boundaries and part of the “Vote No” coalition, “it would be difficult to imagine anything less conservative than a knee-jerk, slapdash rewriting of the Constitution in order to shift more power from the people to their representatives.”
Last week, the Republican supermajority in the Legislature voted to put a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would overturn a Utah Supreme Court ruling in which the five justices — all of them Republican appointees — held that citizens have a constitutional right to enact laws through the ballot initiative and, in order to maintain coequal lawmaking power, the Legislature can’t simply repeal or gut the will of the people.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the public attend a rally against a proposed constitutional amendment to reform the citizen initiative process at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024.
Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, said that Utah’s Constitution guarantees citizens the right to vote in fair elections, access to the courts and to make laws through the ballot initiative process.
“Yet every time you try to exercise one of those three constitutionally-enshrined rights to reform our government,” she said, “the Utah State Legislature has moved quickly and unilaterally to change the rules, eliminating Utahns’ ability to have a fair and independent redistricting and pursuing a constitutional amendment to override the court and undo citizen initiatives in an attempt to stamp out our ability to check their power.”
Supporters of the amendment have yet to unveil their own pro-amendment campaign.
Legislative leaders have argued that the court’s ruling would create chaos, enshrining “super laws” in the books that, though flawed, could not be changed in any way by the Legislature.
Republican legislators also worry that big-money special interests will flood Utah with ballot initiatives in order to enact bad policies the Legislature would never pass. Senate President Stuart Adams said last week that he has heard of more than 10 such initiatives being teed up for the 2026 ballot.
Retired Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham said that is not the case. She said the court’s narrow ruling was limited to initiatives that reform government and that the justices said the Legislature could revise laws in order to aid in the implementation of the voters’ wishes. The body cannot, however, disregard voters’ wishes and reverse the core of a ballot measure.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, makes remarks at a rally against a proposed constitutional amendment to reform the citizen initiative process at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024.
Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley, who voted against the amendment last week, said the voters are “the final check and balance on this action.”
“You get to say, ‘yes, we agree to change the Constitution,’ or, ‘No, there is a limit,’” he told the crowd on Wednesday. “The question before us is: Is there a limit? Either there is a limit, and it is this reasonable boundary [the court established], or there is no limit, and we surrender the final bulwark forever.
The court case stemmed from the 2018 Better Boundaries ballot initiative that sought to prohibit partisan gerrymandering — drawing political boundaries that favor one party to the detriment of the other. Voters passed the measure, which also created an independent redistricting commission, by a narrow margin.
But in 2020, the Legislature repealed the language banning partisan gerrymandering and ignored the maps drawn by the commission, choosing their own map that split Salt Lake County — the most liberal area of the state — into four pieces and creating four safe Republican congressional districts.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham makes remarks at a rally against a proposed constitutional amendment to reform the citizen initiative process at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024.
The League of Women Voters, Mormon Women for Ethical Government and several voters impacted by the split sued, arguing the Legislature violated the voters’ constitutional right to enact laws by rescinding the ban on partisan gerrymandering that the public supported.
The court agreed, saying changes the Legislature makes to initiatives that “alter or reform government” will be given “strict scrutiny” — meaning the government needs a compelling interest to make the change and the revisions must be as narrowly tailored as possible so as not to infringe on the voters’ constitutional rights.
“The people of Utah do not answer to the Legislature,” Bell said. “We, the people, are the ultimate authority in this government, and if this legislature wants to pick a fight to change that balance, that is the signal that we need to link arms as citizens of Utah and let them know they have badly misunderstood their role and badly, badly underestimated us.”
Katie Wright, executive director of Better Boundaries, said the coalition had raised small donations from more than 300 supporters since last week and expects more will roll in. But she also expects the opposition campaign to have a strong grassroots component.
“The campaign will look like Utahns from all over the state, from all different political beliefs, standing against this power grab and protecting their constitutional rights,” she said of the “Vote No” initiative.
Correction: Aug. 26, 5:45 p.m. • The story has been updated to correct that Emma Petty Addams spoke for Mormon Women for Ethical Government