Changing court rules to ban abortion? Utah Republicans are trying it again.

Nearly three years after a judge first blocked a nearly total ban on abortion in Utah, Republican lawmakers are pushing through a proposed change to court rules that could give them another swing at circumventing the judiciary for their trigger law to take effect.

SB204, sponsored by Pleasant Grove Republican Sen. Brady Brammer, gives the state the ability to, if a court prevents one of its laws from being enforced, compel the party suing over the law to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that the law is unconstitutional. Otherwise, the law would be put back in place while litigation continues.

That is a much higher standard than currently required for judges to place an injunction on a law. If the bill passes, it could impact any cases that are active when it take effect on May 7.

Senators on the Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee approved it in a party-line 6-2 vote.

The move comes after a tense year between Utah’s legislative and judicial branches. While presenting his legislation, Brammer accused the state’s courts of setting “themselves up to be antagonistic.”

Legislative leaders reacted with anger after the Utah Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers overstepped their bounds when they rewrote a voter-approved ballot initiative establishing an independent redistricting process, then again when the court stopped an effort to change the state constitution to gut voters’ power to change law by initiative.

When state’s high court decided in August to keep the trigger ban paused, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, wrote in a joint statement, “Through this ruling, the Utah Supreme Court is undermining the constitutional authority of the Legislature to enact laws as elected representatives of the people of Utah.”

“If they’re going to enjoin a law that has been passed by the duly elected people,” Brammer told committee members, “they are getting in the way of democracy on a lot of levels. And, you know, there are times where that’s appropriate, but they may have swung the pendulum too far, and so that’s really the brunt of this, and this provides some immediate relief.”

Abortion is currently legal up to 18 weeks of pregnancy in Utah.

Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, when delivering his annual speech to lawmakers last month, urged against retribution over the rulings. Judges “must be free to make decisions driven by the law and the facts,” he said, “and not based on who the litigants are and how they might react to those decisions.”

Speaking on behalf of the Utah Bar Commission, former Judge David Connors said leaders for the organization, composed of Beehive State lawyers, had voted to oppose the bill.

“That’s very poor public policy to require that a statute that a judge has found likely unconstitutional go into effect just because there’s an appeal,” Linda Smith, an emeritus law professor at the University of Utah, told the committee while speaking against the proposal.

This isn’t the first time Brammer has taken aim at court rules because of his displeasure with judges’ decisions when it comes to state laws — specifically, the ban it enacted on abortions.

In 2023, Brammer successfully introduced a retroactive change to court rules that targeted the language a district court judge used in his ruling to halt the trigger ban.

Although the joint resolution was aimed at stopping Utah’s courts from enjoining “controversial” laws soon after they are passed by the Legislature, Brammer explained during a committee hearing, “the trigger law was also a trigger to this.”

While Brammer’s previous change to court rules has come up in hearings on the case, it has not been leveraged to undo the injunction on the abortion ban.

The bill next heads to the Senate. Under the Utah Constitution, amending court rules requires the approval of two-thirds of both legislative bodies and does not require the governor’s signature.