“Here, sir, the people rule.” — Alexander Hamilton
The people of Utah do have some say in the way they are governed. At least a unanimous Utah Supreme Court ruled Thursday that, under the rights granted them by the state Constitution, they should.
The people of Utah now need to take this encouragement to stand up for their rights and demand that their elected officials do right by them and by their Constitution. Given the political history of our state, it will take more than one Supreme Court ruling to accomplish that.
The justices Thursday delivered a well-deserved rhetorical smack in the face to the Republican supermajority of the Utah Legislature, and to Gov. Spencer Cox. Those worthies had pulled out all the stops to protect the Legislature’s ability to baldly gerrymander the state’s four congressional districts to disadvantage the more progressive voters who tend to be clustered in Salt Lake City.
At issue was the Better Boundaries initiative, aka Proposition 4, passed by the voters in 2018 and gutted by lawmakers in 2020.
As passed, the initiative would have taken from the Legislature the sole power to draw congressional, legislative and state school board districts and handed it to an independent commission.
That commission was charged with drawing fair boundaries that kept communities of interest together and did not blatantly favor one political party or ideology over another. Under that process, the Legislature would have to give the commission’s proposed maps an up-or-down vote, with no changes, and lay out specific reasons for rejecting any design.
But the Legislature shoved that initiative aside and passed SB200. That law turned the redistricting commission into a mere advisory body, the advice of which lawmakers and the governor proceeded, to the surprise of no one, to ignore.
The commission proposed boundaries for Utah’s four congressional districts that held Salt Lake City together, thus creating one district in the state where an election might be competitive between Democrats and Republicans.
The Legislature blew that out and replaced it with a set of maps that left Salt Lake County drawn and quartered across all four districts, leaving each of them dominated by Republican voters and ensuring that the more liberal residents of the state have absolutely no voice in who represents them in Congress.
Backers of Proposition 4, led by the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued to overturn SB200, arguing that the Legislature’s destruction of the initiative violated the rights of the people as laid out in the Declaration of Rights of the Utah Constitution: “All political power is inherent in the people; and all free governments are founded on their authority for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.”
That language clearly echoes the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Through Proposition 4, the people of Utah exercised their right to reform their government. The Legislature’s move to overturn that move was wrong.
The argument raised by Cox and others, that if the people don’t like the districts drawn by their lawmakers they should elect different lawmakers, is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Utah, whose ability to choose their legislators is similarly hobbled by gerrymandered legislative districts.
We may now expect Republican lawmakers to seek another way to protect their unconstitutional ability to ignore the people and draw malignantly designed congressional districts.
The people must use every tool in the kit to stand up to that, as often as it takes.