Every democracy carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Every free and fair election could be a state’s or a nation’s last. That’s because whatever party or faction won the last election may take advantage of its power to make sure it cannot possibly lose the next one.
The four Republicans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Utah are just fine with that.
Their only concern is that the judiciary — state or federal — may move to put the interests of democracy ahead of their partisan power grabs. That the courts might put an end to the kind of political oppression that allows those in power to stay in power without threat of being turned out of office in a truly democratic process.
Utah’s Four Horsemen of the Gerrymander — Blake Moore, Burgess Owens, John Curtis and, for another couple of months, Chris Stewart — have filed a brief with the Utah Supreme Court arguing that the drawing of political boundaries, such as their own districts, is a purely legislative matter. That there is no state or federal constitutional right for voters to be able to vote in fairly drawn districts. That, under the federal and state constitutions, the only recourse voters may have when a state legislature deliberately disenfranchises any political party or faction is to hope that Congress will intervene.
It is true, as our congresspersons argue, that the U.S. Constitution openly worries about state legislatures getting up to some kind of monkey business in drawing districts and other aspects of running elections. It starts by allowing the states to make their own rules, but immediately moves on to saying that Congress can overturn and replace any state’s rules for whatever reason the national legislature might see fit.
Even if it would make everything worse.
The representatives don’t really try to argue that such a set-up is a good thing. Just that those are the rules and anyone who doesn’t like it is just out of luck.
Such a set-up is not a good thing, of course. And, like all acts of every state legislature and of Congress, should be reviewable by the courts. It is the job of that branch of government to put a break on purely political actions, when those actions clearly violate any semblance of one-person, one-vote democracy. Which Utah’s congressional districts clearly and unashamedly do.
Utah’s top court should not listen to just clearly partisan arguments and should strike a blow for democracy by upholding the legal challenges from Utah’s Better Boundaries initiative, the Utah League of Women Voters, Mormon Women for Ethical Government and others who are rightly challenging the drawing of Utah’s clearly gerrymandered congressional districts.
The four districts drawn by the Utah Legislature after the 2020 census have — in the parlance of gerrymanderers — cracked and stacked cities and counties so that the significant number of Democratic-leading voters in Salt Lake County have absolutely zero influence on the outcome of congressional elections.
All the East Bench and West Side neighborhoods where yards display progressive signs might as well be on Mars for all the influence they have in picking a member of Congress. Their sometimes overwhelming votes for little-known and underfunded Democratic candidates cast in Salt Lake and Summit counties are deliberately drowned in the returns from the rest of their districts, which reach into the much-more-conservative counties, all the way to the Colorado and Arizona borders.
Such legislative behavior would, if designed to disenfranchise Black or Latino voters, clearly be illegal. Congress, as Utah’s representatives argue, has moved many times to say so, most notably in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What they conveniently leave out of their reference to that landmark legislation is that the U.S. Supreme Court, since coming under the domination of conservative Republicans, has repeatedly chipped away at the protections of that law, denying Congress the exclusive power to oversee elections that Utah’s Republicans claim it has.
So far, no Republican in Congress has been heard to object to what is, according to the pro-gerrymandering argument of Utah’s delegation, the Roberts Court’s unconstitutional encroachment into exclusively congressional territory.
The congressmen also argue that those who are aggrieved by the existing boundaries have only to work through the political system to get a better deal. But that is a particularly cynical idea, given that the people tried to do exactly that by passing the Better Boundaries initiative at the voting booth in 2018.
That effort, including the independent redistricting commission it called for, was immediately tossed out by the Legislature, once again making it clear that the preservation of the one-party state is much more important in Utah’s halls of power than even the slightest nod to democracy.
Competitive elections where no political party has a free ride are necessary for democracy to function. Without them, Utah’s political system becomes only more and more polarized, less and less responsive to the needs and desires of the people.
Efforts such as the Better Boundaries initiative must continue. Voters should vote and demand better.
But, in the short run, the only hope of bringing a functioning democracy to Utah rests with the courts. We should all hope they stand up for us, because our elected officials clearly will not.