David Irvine: I’m a former Republican lawmaker. We should be your servants, not your masters.

Since its founding, Utah has recognized that “the people are the source of all political power,” and those “who occupy the position of rulers are but the servants of the sovereign people.” (The Constitutional Convention: The Body Organizes and Begins Work, Deseret News, July 6, 1887.)

Have our legislators abandoned this founding truth?

The question has arisen in the contest over Utah’s congressional maps. The people want one map, the Legislature another. Our system casts the courts in the role of referee. Utah Third’s District Court recently ruled in favor of the people. And the men and women who should see themselves as “servants of the sovereign people” are not happy about it.

Sen. John D. Johnson’s recent commentary (“When judges draw the maps, Utah loses more than district lines Gibson’s ruling rewrote constitutional roles of government. Utah Supreme Court should issue a stay,”) criticizes the court’s ruling. The senator’s commentary rehashes arguments the Legislature’s D.C. attorneys have been making for years in Utah courts. No court in Utah has found them persuasive.

The Third District Court’s ruling is an 89-page masterpiece of sound judicial reasoning. It considers all the points Johnson makes — and many, many more — and explains in excruciating detail why Johnson’s objections cannot save the Legislature’s power grab. No matter how loudly the Utah Legislature squawks, the people of Utah have a constitutional right to reject gerrymandering.

But our Republican legislators seem to think that their will, not ours, should be paramount.

We the people made our will clear in 2018 by passing Proposition 4. We want congressional maps drawn based on neutral, nonpartisan criteria without regard to partisan interests. Proposition 4 reversed decades of shamelessly gerrymandered congressional maps in Utah. Even the Wall Street Journal called Utah’s 2001 map a “scam.”

Proposition 4 outlawed gerrymandering but left the map-drawing responsibility with the Legislature. If, as Sen. Johnson asserts, this case were about who draws the map, the Legislature would simply have complied with Prop 4. Instead, in violation of the Utah Constitution, they gutted it. They excised its essential directive: that congressional maps be nonpartisan. Then they drew a rigged map — one that would guarantee that all four of Utah’s Congressional seats would be handily won by Republicans, even though one-third of Utahns consistently vote for Democratic candidates. The current litigation has exposed the Legislature’s scheme.

Plaintiffs’ expert Dr. Jowei Chen showed that if you draw 10,000 congressional maps based on Prop 4’s neutral (nonpartisan) criteria, 99.93% will contain three Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning district.

By contrast, the Legislature’s map, which was drawn using partisan data, creates four Republican districts. The Legislature’s gerrymandered map is not what we the people of Utah want or deserve. But it was on brand.

Last fall Republican legislators attempted to bamboozle Utahns into voting away our power to pass meaningful citizen initiatives using ballot language that, in the words of BYU political science professor Quin Monson, “purposefully obfuscated the true purpose of the amendment.”

Our courts had to stop that caper just as they have done with the Legislature’s current rigged congressional map. After all of this, after decades of shenanigans by a Legislature seeking to rule us rather than be ruled by us, Sen. Johnson wonders “how best to earn public trust in the redistricting process.”

Frankly, our Republican legislators lost that trust long ago. They lost that trust when they gutted Prop 4. They lost that trust when they tried to trick us into voting away our constitutional right to check their legislative excesses. And they lost that trust when they passed another blatantly gerrymandered map.

But what about the senator’s view that “nothing in our Constitution empowers a judge to choose or impose a replacement map?” Fortunately, his view is not shared by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has long recognized the power of state courts to formulate valid redistricting plans and held that “under no circumstances” should courts permit elections to proceed under unconstitutional maps. Courts in the states of Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, to name several, have exercised this power.

And really, what is the alternative? To force unconstitutionally drawn maps on voters? That seems to be what our Legislature wants. To draw its own maps by their own rules to ensure their own party sweeps the field every two years.

And to sit in judgment on its own maps to decide whether they are constitutional. That is not how our system works under the separation of powers.

The role of the legislative branch — including the people when passing citizen initiatives — is to pass legislation. The role of the executive branch is to implement that legislation. The role of the judicial branch is to resolve challenges to the constitutionality of that legislation.

And the role of everyone is to respect the rulings of our courts.

But the foundational principle in our system — in every form of democracy, really — is that the people are the source of all political power and that their representatives “are but the servants of the sovereign people.” And that really bugs Utah’s Republican supermajority.

David Irvine is an attorney and a former four-term Republican legislator from Bountiful.

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