Utah Republican leaders say judge crossed a line by selecting own congressional map

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Republican officials erupted on Tuesday in reaction to a court ruling that replaced GOP lawmakers' proposed congressional map with one submitted by nonprofit groups that guarantees a deeply Democratic district in Salt Lake County.

State House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told the Deseret News that legislative leadership will pursue every path possible to reverse the decision. On Tuesday, House and Senate majority caucuses convened to discuss next steps.

Everything is on the table, according to Schultz, including efforts to appeal the ruling to the Utah and U.S. Supreme Courts, to push back candidate filing deadlines and to pursue impeachment for 3rd District Court Judge Dianna Gibson.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson stated on Tuesday she would comply with Gibson's order but acknowledged there would likely be "an emergency appeal." Gov. Spencer Cox, saying he fully supports the Legislature's intent to appeal the decision.

In the eyes of GOP leadership, the judge's 11th-hour ruling, coming within half-an-hour of Monday's midnight deadline, violated the constitutional separation of powers to create a new, uncompetitive Democrat seat with no time left for a proper appeals process.

"This judge gerrymandered the map to get a specific outcome," Schultz said. "You had a judge completely ignore the Constitution, come up with her own process and her own outcome, outside of the Constitution. This should make every Utahn scared."

Plaintiffs in the case, including the League of Women Voters Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and Democrats in Utah and Washington, D.C., celebrated the ruling, calling it a check on a Legislature which has repeatedly skirted the redistricting requirements of the state's Proposition 4 law.

Meanwhile, conservatives from across the political spectrum, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and Count My Vote executive director Taylor Morgan, said the negative implications of Monday's ruling go beyond the next election cycle, setting a negative precedent for judicial activism and partisan elections.

What did judge Gibson say?

The judge argued in her 90-page ruling that she was forced to pick a map because the Legislature had once again failed to produce electoral boundaries that met the anti-gerrymandering standards of Proposition 4, passed by ballot initiative in 2018.

Gibson rejected the map lawmakers approved under court order as "an extreme partisan outlier." The vast majority of computer-simulated maps based on Proposition 4 criteria produced a "Democratic-leaning district anchored in the northern portion of Salt Lake," Gibson wrote.

The Legislature's "Map C" — passed during a special legislative session on Oct. 6 — made two of Utah's four congressional seats significantly more competitive, but also appeared to split the Democratic vote in Salt Lake County, according to Gibson.

While the Legislature's redistricting expert said he did not refer to partisan data during the map-drawing process, "Map C" was drawn with a tool that displays such data, and the map divided municipalities more than necessary — both violations of key Proposition 4 mandates, Gibson said.

"Collectively, the preponderance of the evidence supports that Map C does not comply with Proposition 4," Gibson wrote. "(T)he record overwhelmingly supports the court's conclusion that Map C exhibits substantial pro-Republican bias."

Gibson called her position an "unwelcome obligation" to override the Legislature's choice by picking her own compliant map by Nov. 10 to give election officials enough time to prepare for the candidate filing period in January so that "Utah's 2026 elections are not jeopardized."

A large portion of Gibson's ruling focused on criticizing a bill passed on Oct. 6 that created three tests to clarify what was meant in Proposition 4 by partisan fairness. The bill, SB1011, according to Gibson, did the opposite.

Gibson echoed points made by the plaintiffs' experts who said the Legislature's proposed means of filtering out maps would actually guarantee that all four congressional districts remained well out of reach for Democratic candidates.

By amending Proposition 4 — which created an independent redistricting commission in addition to map-drawing criteria — Gibson said the bill violated Utahns' "right to alter and reform their government" as identified by the Utah Supreme Court.

Did the judge cross a line?

Utah's senior senator disagreed firmly with Gibson's previous rulings and that of the Utah Supreme Court that empowered her. But Lee said her latest decision takes judicial interference beyond the limit of acceptable disagreement.

"We are so far afield from the proper function of the judiciary here, it's stunning: The Utah Constitution makes very clear that it is the Legislature that draws the maps," Lee told the Deseret News. "This takes it to a different level."

There is nothing in the state Constitution that suggests a judge can craft congressional voting districts without the Legislature, and certainly not with a focus on guaranteeing that Democrats gain a seat, according to Lee.

Map C should qualify under Proposition 4, Lee believes. The Legislature should take measures to reverse the decision because there is nothing in Proposition 4 that gives a judge power to pick which maps she thinks best meet its criteria, Lee said.

"I know they will do everything they can to correct this error. I'm sure they will explore all of their traditional review options in this because they must," Lee said. "I do believe that there has been a great injustice here."

In her ruling, Gibson responded to criticism that she is legislating from the bench, arguing that the court is merely determining whether the Legislature followed the law with their map — and because they did not, the court must "reluctantly" intervene.

Utah Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, said Gibson did the best she could to navigate a novel ruling from the Utah Supreme Court that protected certain ballot initiatives from changes and reinstated the original version of Proposition 4.

Gibson gave the Legislature opportunities to remedy the state's unconstitutional 2021 map, which was passed after the amendment of Proposition 4, Escamilla said. But Gibson determined that lawmakers did not follow the correct process.

"It's not the ideal scenario, but I think she's working with what she has," Escamilla told the Deseret News. "Many people in Utah have felt for years that after they went through their constitutionally given process of governing themselves and putting Prop 4 in place that that was not even taking place."

However, one of Utah's best-known advocates for fair election processes says Gibson's ruling took Proposition 4 "off the rails" because the original intent of the 2018 Better Boundaries initiative was to make congressional seats more, not less, competitive.

Proposition 4 was sold on the promise that it would encourage better general election contests between quality candidates from both parties that had to persuade a wide variety of voters, Taylor Morgan said, arguing that Map C would have done this.

But under Gibson's ruling, Proposition 4 has done the opposite, Morgan said, turning districts with single-digit Republican margins into three districts where Republicans lead by up to 50 percentage points and a Salt Lake district where Democrats lead by 25.

"The goal of Prop 4 was to create, you know, fairness," Morgan told the Deseret News. "Not one of these four districts are even remotely competitive. ... The Democratic district would be one of the most liberal congressional districts in the entire country."

This will have the effect of discouraging candidates from trying to appeal to the middle, discouraging voters from participating in general elections and discouraging quality candidates from both parties to compete against each other, Morgan said.

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