Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) is now endorsing a plan to expand the state Supreme Court following the Utah GOP’s unanimous smackdown in the state judiciary over their effort to gerrymander the state’s congressional map, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
However, even though he did not endorse such a plan until after the drama between the courts and the state legislature, he strenuously denied that this plan would amount to “court-packing” and insisted there are higher-minded reasons the state should add more justices.
“I didn’t have that same consternation,” said Cox. Rather, he argued to reporters, “We’re not the state we were 40 years ago. We’re not the state we were 20 years ago, from a size perspective. There’s a reason most medium-sized states to larger states start to move to the seven-to-nine justice range.”
In 2018, Utah voters passed Proposition 4, which established a redistricting advisory committee and outlined criteria the legislature should follow to ensure congressional maps aren’t biased to favor one party or the other.
However, the legislature sidelined that committee in 2021 and instead passed a heavily gerrymandered map that chopped Salt Lake City into three pieces and gave all four districts to Republicans. At the time, lawmakers claimed the districts were fair because they gave each seat a balance of urban and rural interests.
Following a lawsuit, a state court tossed the map, determining the legislature had ignored Proposition 4, and the state Supreme Court, all Republican appointees, unanimously upheld that ruling 5-0. Then, when the legislature tried to draw a new map that still had four Republican districts and start a process to give themselves the power to repeal Proposition 4, the lower court judge also tossed all of that and adopted a new map drawn by the plaintiffs that included one Democratic district.
Since then, state legislators have threatened the judge with impeachment, and they are currently discussing a law that would change candidate deadlines to give themselves more time to file more appeals.
Even if Republicans were to add two to four justices to the Utah Supreme Court, the original justices who upheld the rulings against the legislature on redistricting would constitute a majority.
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