SALT LAKE CITY – On Aug. 22, Gov. Spencer Cox signed three bills from the recent special session of the Legislature, including two controversial measures sending a proposed constitutional amendment to the state voters on the general election ballot in November.
That proposed amendment will let Utah voters decide whether members of the Legislature should have the authority to amend or repeal new laws passed by citizen-led ballot initiatives.
Those two laws – Senate Bill 4002 (Ballot Proposition Amendments) and Senate Bill 4003 (State Initiative and Referendum Amendments) – passed by vote of 54-21 in the Utah House and 20-8 in the Senate during the special session on Aug. 21, easily clearing the two-thirds margin for approval of constitutional amendments. Predictably, both votes were largely along party lines.
But lawmakers are discovering that the political debate over the proposed amendment is far from over.
“The Republican supermajority (in the Legislature) is going to extreme lengths to seize power for themselves because they know that Utah is changing,” said Diane Lewis, the chair of the Utah Democratic party.
As the fastest-growing and youngest state in the Union, Lewis believes that Utah is positioned to become a swing state within a decade.
“Rather than allowing the voters to decide Utah’s future for themselves,” she emphasizes, “power-hungry politicians are dead-set on propping themselves up.”
The issue that sparked this controversy was the July ruling by the Utah Supreme Court that reversed a 3rd District Court decision to dismiss part of a lawsuit brought by League of Women Voters of Utah that has been working its way through the state courts since 2022.
Utah voters passed a ballot initiative in 2018 to create an independent commission to redraw maps for Utah’s congressional districts, a process that takes place every ten years following the Census.
In 2021, however, the Republican majority in the Legislature opted to ignore the commission’s recommendations and drew its own districts.
The League had argued that the Utah Legislature violated Utahns’ constitution right to alter and reform the state government when lawmakers repealed and replaced Proposition 4, the citizen-driven ballot initiative to enact an independent commission to draw new boundaries in the 2021 redistricting process.
A 3rd District Court had dismissed that claim, only to be overturned by the Utah Supreme Court in July, sending the case back to the lower court.
On Aug. 16, Utah GOP chairman Robert Axson and more than 60 Republican officials and their supporters send a letter to Gov. Spencer Cox urging him to do an end-run around the Supreme Court ruling by calling a special session of the Legislature to consider an amendment to the state’s Constitution.
Using their authority to call themselves into a special session, the Utah Legislature did just that on Aug. 21, passing SB 4002 and SB 4003.
One of the authors of the proposed amendment, Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Draper, argued that the recent Supreme Court ruling has the potential to create so-called “super laws” that are immune from repeal or amendment.
Instead, he insisted, laws should be “living and breathing” statutes, amenable to change as needed.
But Lewis called the proposed amendment just another example of a GOP power-grab.
Previous examples of such attempts, she said, include the Legislature usurping executive branch powers by calling itself into special session and unconstitutionally replacing fair congressional map with their own gerrymandered districts.
“The framers of our State Constitution created the ballot initiative process as a way for everyday Utahns to check the power of the Legislature,” Lewis added, urging all Utahns to turn out to vote in November to defeat the proposed amendment.
“We cannot let power-hungry politicians take away our ability to hold them accountable,” she said.