Legislative attorneys asked the Utah Supreme Court to halt a lower court judge’s order for lawmakers to draw new state congressional districts and consider overturning the district judge’s ruling.
In doing so, lawmakers find themselves back before five justices who last year unanimously ruled that the Legislature had to respect the will of voters when they pass ballot initiatives and violated the Utah Constitution when they repealed the voter-passed Better Boundaries initiative, known as Proposition 4.
That 2018 initiative sought to create an independent redistricting commission and put other limits on how legislators draw the state’s political boundaries, including prohibiting maps that partisanly favored one party over the other.
Now, attorneys for the Legislature argue that there isn’t time to redraw Utah’s congressional maps and still adhere to all of the requirements in Proposition 4.
The people of Utah can have new congressional maps in place for the 2026 congressional elections. Or they can have new congressional maps resulting from a process that follows all of Proposition 4,” wrote Tyler Green in the brief filed Friday evening and first reported by Fox13 and ABC4. “But given the election calendar, Utahns cannot have both.”
Last month, based on the Utah Supreme Court’s earlier decision, Gibson ruled the Legislature violated voters’ constitutional rights by repealing the Better Boundaries initiative, nullified the maps the Legislature drew — which split blue areas in Salt Lake County, creating four safe Republican seats — and ordered the lawmakers to draw new maps.
Specifically, the Legislature objects to Gibson not requiring a new independent redistricting commission to also draw new maps for the Legislature to consider.
Lawmakers’ attorneys are not directly challenging the merits of Gibson’s ruling, only the process now in place for drawing the new maps, although they could challenge her decision that the Legislature’s 2021 maps were improperly drawn later.
At a recent hearing, Green referred to the expedited schedule for coming up with a new map — without a new independent commission — as “Prop 4 Lite.”
Mark Gaber, the attorney for the plaintiffs, argued that the law does not require a new commission if a court voids the Legislature’s map and that there would not be a reason to recreate the commission because commissioners already did their work and submitted maps that remain valid and viable options.
The justices have given the plaintiffs until Sept. 10 to respond to the Legislature’s motion to halt Gibson’s decision. The Legislature’s attorneys asked the court to decide whether to halt the map-drawing process no later than Sept. 15.
“Time is of the essence in obtaining an answer,” Green wrote. “The [court’s] order harms the Legislature, and disregards what the district court has determined is the proper will of the people, by requiring the Legislature to draw an alternative map using a process that does not comply with Proposition 4.”
In the meantime, the Legislature has until Sept. 25 to produce a draft of a new congressional map, allow the public 10 days to comment on it, and then convene a special legislative session Oct. 6 to adopt the final version.
That map will be submitted to the court, along with proposals from the plaintiffs, to determine if the new map complies with the requirements in the Better Boundaries initiative.
If it does, the map will be in effect for the 2026 congressional election. If it does not, the judge will have to decide on the next step, including potentially choosing one of the plaintiffs’ maps.
The legislative attorneys had asked Gibson to pause on her order to draw maps while they appealed to the Supreme Court, but Gibson was having none of it, saying the public, who voted in the 2022 and 2024 elections based on unlawful maps, would be “irreparably” harmed if the maps remained in place in 2026.
Granting the request, she wrote, “would be sanctioning the Legislature’s violation of the people’s constitutional right to reform their government through redistricting legislation” and would leave in place maps that were “enacted in disregard to Proposition 4 and in defiance of the will of the people of Utah.”
Utah’s redistricting fight comes amid a national battle between red and blue states and President Donald Trump’s push to gerrymander U.S. House of Representatives seats enough ahead of the 2024 election to ensure Republicans will continue to hold Congress through his presidency.