A judge’s ruling Monday that state lawmakers must redraw Utah’s congressional boundaries to comply with a voter-approved ballot initiative aimed at ending partisan gerrymandering could cost Utah Republicans one of their four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Judge Dianna Gibson’s order prohibits the current congressional maps from being used in any future election and gives the Legislature 30 days to adopt new boundaries that comply with Better Boundaries’ Proposition 4, the citizen-passed initiative — a decision that Utah Sen. Mike Lee called a “judicial takeover.”
“The Utah courts are now invalidating both the legislature’s amendments and Utah’s existing congressional-district maps,” Lee wrote on the social media platform X Monday night. “This is a great day for Utah’s Democrats — who haven’t controlled the Utah legislature in many, many decades (because most Utah voters don’t like what the Democratic Party is selling), and have found a clever way to even the score by enlisting the help of their judicial allies.”
Most of Utah’s congressional delegation had nothing to say about the decision as of Tuesday morning.
A spokesperson for Rep. Blake Moore, who represents the 1st Congressional District and serves in House leadership, said they had no comment on the ruling, while a spokesperson for Rep. Mike Kennedy referred comment to a campaign spokesperson, Joe DeBose.
“That’s a state issue still going through the courts,” DeBose said, seemingly referring to the possibility that state lawmakers may appeal the ruling. “Congressman Mike Kennedy remains focused on working every day to deliver results for working families and to make Utah and America stronger than ever.”
Lee, as well as Sen. John Curtis and Reps. Celeste Maloy and Burgess Owens did not respond.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Katharine Biele speaks at a news conference in Salt Lake City on Monday, Aug. 25, 2025. A judge earlier ruled that the Legislature will have 30 days to adopt new maps that comply with the 2018 Better Boundaries initiative guidelines.
Utah last had a Democratic representative in the House from 2019 to 2021, when Ben McAdams represented the 4th Congressional District, which at the time included a significant portion of the Salt Lake Valley.
Utah’s current congressional boundaries, adopted in 2021, split the Democratic-leaning portion of Salt Lake County into four parts, dividing the voters and combining them with conservative and rural parts of the state to make four solidly red districts.
Monday’s ruling comes as a tense battle about congressional gerrymandering dominates national politics, and just two days after the Texas Legislature approved new congressional maps years before the 2030 Census as part of a controversial scheme backed by President Donald Trump to gain five safe Republican U.S. House seats and help the GOP retain control of the body in the 2026 midterm elections.
The plan now awaits Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature and already faces legal challenges.
California launched a similar effort last week, redrawing congressional boundaries in response to Texas’s plot. California’s gerrymandering ploy requires voter approval in a special election this fall before it can be officially enacted.
The ordeal has inspired a number of other states — including Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Illinois, Maryland and New York — to consider similar plans.
And the potential swing of one GOP-held seat in Utah could have major congressional consequences in the 2026 midterm elections.
Moore, who represents Utah’s 1st Congressional District, previously served as the co-chair of Better Boundaries and has been a vocal critic of gerrymandering. He is the only member of House leadership — or of Utah’s house delegation — to have spoken out against the Texas scheme.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Oliver Conger, 7, and his mom Helen Langan show their support for Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams, looking to retain his seat for Utah’s 4th Congressional District, as he hands out pre-ordered meals to friends and supporters driving up to Pat’s BBQ in Salt Lake City, as part of his small election night watch party on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020.
“I do not agree with state efforts to redistrict mid-decade,” Moore said in a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune earlier this month. “It undermines established norms and gives Blue States a glaring green light to do the same. Partisan gerrymandering is clearly done by both sides, but to allow this wildfire to spread mid-decade is a step too far.”
In 2018, prior to his election, Moore said at a Better Boundaries forum, “I literally cannot think of one reason in the world why you would need to use voting records to draw a map other than to do it for partisan gain.”
In 2023, however, once he was in Congress, he signed onto a brief asking the court to throw out the redistricting lawsuit, a brief which Curtis, who at the time represented Utah’s 3rd Congressional district, also signed.
Moore and Curtis, along with Owens and then-Rep. Chris Stewart, wrote in the brief that the lawsuit had “the potential to affect both the makeup of the districts represented by the Congressmen as well as their Elections Clause powers.”
“The Constitution does not stutter,” they wrote. “Congress, not state courts creating substantive law from vague state constitutional provisions, is the Constitution’s backstop to protect constitutional rights from infringement by State Legislatures. There’s no constitutional right to be free from partisan gerrymandering.”
Maloy, who now represents Stewart’s former district, previously served as Stewart’s chief legal counsel. She said during a recent telephone town hall that the Utah Constitution gives the Legislature the right to create congressional district maps, but did not note that the state Supreme Court ruled last year that voters could pass laws to create guidelines for how redistricting is done.
Asked specifically if she supported the current construction of Utah’s districts that break up the densely liberal Salt Lake City, Maloy said yes.
“I don’t even get to draw these maps,” she said. “The state draws them; I live by them. But I do think it’s an advantage in Utah that every one of our districts has urban and rural [areas].”
“When states that are larger than ours have so many seats that you have some representatives that are only urban representatives and some representatives that are only rural representatives, they sometimes work against each other, Maloy said. ”And in Utah, we all have to work together.”
Owens made a similar argument, telling the Deseret News earlier this month he was proud of having a mix of rural and urban areas in his district.
“Serving such a broad range of priorities sharpens our focus and deepens our impact. States — and their democratically elected officials — should decide how they are represented in Congress, not Washington,” he told the outlet.
Kennedy of the 3rd Congressional District, who served in the Legislature when the current maps were adopted, condemned Democratic lawmakers in Texas for leaving the state in an attempt to prevent a vote on the state’s new maps.
“It’s shameful for these state legislators to run away from the responsibility that their constituents have charged them with,” Kennedy said during an interview with ABC4 this month. “If they don’t have the votes to win, that’s how this process works on the state side.”