Jason Perry: On this episode of "The Hinckley Report," states scramble to keep critical services running as the federal government remains shuttered.

Lawmakers draw new lines that could reshape political power in the state.

And big changes come to Utah's highest court.

announcer: Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Jason Perry: Hello, and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week we have Congresswoman Celeste Maloy, a Republican from Utah's 2nd congressional district; Representative Doug Owens, a Democrat from Millcreek and Minority Caucus Manager in the Utah House; and Brigham Tomco, reporter with the Deseret News.

Thank you for being with us on a big political week in the country and in the state.

We're glad to have you with us.

Congresswoman, can we talk about government shutdown?

I feel like we'll just jump right into this.

As of the time the show is going to be filmed, we're day ten.

We're in second week of the government shutdown, and as the one appropriator we have in our delegation from Utah, maybe talk a little bit about what's sort of the heart of the shutdown itself and what the issue is with the continuing resolution.

We see this on the news.

Everyone talks about the CR, the clean CR.

What is that?

Celeste Maloy: Yeah, so a CR, a continuing resolution just means we're continuing with the budget we have right now.

And in the past I've opposed CRs, so I've had people ask me about that.

Why did you vote for this CR when you didn't vote for others?

And one of the reasons is because I'm an appropriator and we have marked up all 12 appropriations bills in the House.

So, if we were following regular order, everybody says regular order too, and sometimes they know what it means.

Regular order means we passed 12 appropriations bills in the House, 12 appropriations bills in the Senate.

We conference whatever differences we have between those bills, and 12 bills go to the president's desk and get signed, and those are the bills that govern how we spend money at the federal level for the fiscal year.

We haven't done it through regular order I think someone told me in 30 years, so we've had a lot of continuing resolutions.

We've had a lot of omnibuses and minibuses, and we are so close this time to doing regular order, but we ran out the clock.

So, the Senate is a little bit behind the House.

We have 12 bills marked up.

We've moved three of them across the House floor.

The Senate needed more time, so we passed a seven week clean CR, and clean means there are no riders, there are no changes.

It really is just the existing budget.

We passed that in the House, it went over to the Senate, and it's failed in the Senate several times.

That's how the shutdown started.

So, I've had people ask me, you know, if I'm going to vote for the CR.

We already did, it passed the House.

Some of my Democrat colleagues in the House are out messaging how they won't vote for it, and it's just theater because we already passed it in the House.

Everything right now is on the Senate, and specifically Senate Democrats.

Jason Perry: Representative, talk about this for just a moment too, because the idea of some things being attached to that continuing resolution is what the Democrats in Washington D.C.

are talking about right now, specifically the Affordable Care Act tax credits, continuing those that are set to expire.

That seems to be the heart, at least what the Democrats want in the continuing resolution.

Doug Owens: Jason, that's my understanding from being an outsider looking at it from Utah and not from inside D.C., but I hope that--I think what almost every voter I know really wants is both parties to work together and to stop the kind of confrontational politics that we have and sit down and do the country's business together.

I appreciate the congresswoman's efforts along that line.

And I think when they need Democratic votes to keep the government running, the the majority in D.C., the Republicans, should be willing to accept some compromise with the Democrats.

That's how you get governance done with a two party system.

Jason Perry: Let's talk about some of the impact--did you have a comment?

Celeste Maloy: Well, I was just going to say it's worth noting, you said it's day ten.

Today's also the first day that federal employees will miss paychecks.

And so, we have a lot of federal employees in Utah.

Today's the first day they're really gonna feel that financial impact, and I learned something yesterday.

I was a federal employee for the first 12 years of my professional life, and I managed to wedge in between shutdowns, so I never lived through a shutdown as a federal employee.

They had a big one right after I left.

But I never heard as a federal employee what I learned yesterday, which is that banks, credit unions, credit card companies, they've all survived a lot of shutdowns, and if you are a federal employee and you're worried that you can't pay your mortgage or your car payment or your credit card payment without a paycheck, and most Americans can't miss a paycheck and get by.

If you call your lender now, tell them that you're a federal employee and ask them to work with you, a lot of them will.

And if you don't know that, you don't try that.

And then, you know, your payment's late, you're in trouble.

But if you call now, tell them what situation you're in, they don't want to turn good customers into bad customers is what they told me yesterday.

So, if you're a federal employee or you're in the military and you're about to miss a paycheck, reach out to your lender.

Jason Perry: Okay, it's good to know, particularly since we know that there are impacts, and a lot of them here in the state of Utah.

Brigham, you've done some really great reporting this week with the Deseret News on the impact on Utahns.

A couple of great interviews, maybe talk about that for just a moment, starting with Senator Ann Millner.

She is a Utah state senator but represents Ogden.

She has the IRS Center, she has Hill Air Force Base in her district.

She had some things to say to you about impacts in her district.

Brigham Tomco: Sure, so Senator Millner told me that this is having real impacts on the working families that live in her district, and especially as we go into the second week of this shutdown, like you said, she represents those areas that are hardest hit in the state.

We have about 40,000 workers in the state of Utah that are employed by the federal government.

That's about 2% of our workforce, and there's about 7,500 IRS workers in Ogden, 20,000 at Hill Air Force Base, and these folks have experienced shutdowns, the September scramble and the October shutdown, several times over the last 15 years, but this time feels different.

I talked to one IRS employee who said we're hearing from the White House Budget Office that there's no guarantee of back pay, as opposed to previous shutdowns.

There was always an assumed guarantee or assurance that there would be back pay or compensation for that time where they're forced to be on unpaid leave.

But this time there may not be that assurance, and that could be a tactic to put pressure on Democrats, or it could be that this time those federal employees in Utah will be more financially, you know, hit because of this shutdown.

Jason Perry: Brigham, continue on your conversation with Senator John Curtis.

It was interesting, because I want to get to this question people are talking about, which is like who's to blame, you know, who's really responsible.

And it was interesting from him, this is from Senator Curtis in his interview with you where he said Congress's current process which relies on shutdown threats and last minute brinkmanship would be unrecognizable to any responsible household or business.

It's interesting, because we're hearing this from kind of both sides of the aisle.

Brigham Tomco: The IRS employee I talked to said that he and his co-workers don't care which side is responsible.

From their point of view, Congress is failing one of its basic duties, and so they hope that our delegation back in Washington D.C.

and members of both parties are able to kind of fulfill this essential function of at least keeping the government functional and these agencies that handle taxpayer dollars can continue to work.

Jason Perry: Go ahead, Representative.

Doug Owens: I'm anxious to get back to a time when parties recognize elections ended and quit being in a 24/7 election cycle.

And there's a lot of money to be made in bashing the other side now, and back in the olden days 10, 20, 30 years ago, parties used to recognize that elections ended and go to work on policy together.

You actually get enduring improvements in policy when both parties cooperate.

Neither party has a lock on all wisdom and all good policy, and, you know, we've got episodes in Utah's history where a Republican in the Senate, Jake Garn, worked with a Democrat in the House, Wayne Owens, and got the Central Utah Water Project funded.

I mean, those--and that was over a billion dollars invested in Utah water.

And that bipartisan friendship yielded huge benefits.

So, I hope we can get back to it.

Jason Perry: I want to show a video clip, and Congresswoman, if you would give a comment on this, but I'd like to hear kind of both sides of this one a little bit too.

Senator Angus King is from Maine.

He's an independent.

He caucuses with the Democrats, but it's interesting.

He's one of the three that voted, even though he caucus with the Democrats, voted for the continuing resolution.

So, let's hear some thoughts from him, because he takes this beyond just right now, but it's what the ultimate impact might be.

Angus King: Shutdown gives this administration more license to do harm than they had before, and that's why I just voted to reopen the government.

This is--I'm afraid this may just be the beginning of the worst.

I was, but I ultimately decided that the risk of what's apparently happening is greater than the chances of getting the healthcare amendments that we need.

We should get them, they're necessary, they're important, but the risk to our democracy, I think, is a higher risk.

Jason Perry: Representative, he talks about the risk to our democracy by this government shutting down the way it has.

Celeste Maloy: He made a couple of important points there.

One of them is that we just have to be serious about keeping the government operating, and I agree with him.

This is what Congress is supposed to do.

We have the power of the purse.

This is our responsibility.

We shouldn't be just yielding it to the executive branch.

And even though I belong to the same party as the White House belongs to right now, I still think it's important that we have three separate branches that each do their jobs, and I belong to the legislative branch, and we're supposed to control the purse strings.

We're supposed to pass our appropriations bills and not put the whole country through this drama or trauma of will it be funded, will it not be funded, will there be TSA agents if I'm getting on a flight, can I use this government website, is my nephew, uncle, brother going to get a paycheck this month?

Am I going to get a paycheck this month?

So, we do need to do a better job of that just in general, making sure that we're not going up to the last minute and then waiting to see if we'll have funding.

He also said it should be bipartisan, so I want to point out that the continuing resolution in the house was bipartisan.

Almost nobody reports on that, but we did have at least one Democrat vote for the continuing resolution because it is a clean, short term, seven week CR just to get us through until we can do regular order.

And in the House there was at least one Democrat that was willing to recognize that and cross the aisle and say we should keep the government open and do our job.

So, I'm not without hope.

Jason Perry: Okay, that's good.

Before we leave entirely, Representative Owens, should we be talking about it the way we just did?

Is this really a partisan issue now?

Because it's interesting we have both sides of the aisle talking about the impacts and getting government open again.

Doug Owens: Well, I'm not an expert on the inside game that the representative is here, but I think it obviously, to get Democratic votes, they've got to make some concession to what the Democrats want, and which was protecting people's healthcare.

I don't think that was out of line to--for them to be asking for that, so I hope there can be some some compromise on that front.

Celeste Maloy: So, I'm gonna push back on that one a little bit, and I'm not somebody who pushes back on the idea of compromise in general.

However, Democrats in the House and the Senate said they wanted a clean short term CR, and now they want to negotiate the ACA subsidies on a seven week CR, and it's just too small of a vessel for that large of an ask.

The numbers that are out there in the media are $1.5 trillion, so you don't make a $1.5 trillion dollar bargain on a seven week continuing resolution.

What we should do is get the government open, not hold the American people hostage, and then negotiate on subsidies.

So, I'm with you on we need to grow up and act like grownups and work to solve problems for Americans, but I don't think a short term CR is the place to negotiate our healthcare problems in this country.

Doug Owens: Well, if you gotta have the Democrats on board, you gotta have them on board.

And I think both parties ought to be able to work that out.

Jason Perry: Okay, no less difficult conversation, redistricting.

Okay, this is a big week.

Brigham, we'll start with you on this one because our legislature met in a special session.

The governor called the session.

There were 13 items on that list, a lot, you know, some were a little more high profile than others.

We won't talk about higher ed recodification today, but you know, highly interesting.

We're gonna talk about redistricting.

Talk about the process and that call just a little bit, because the stage was set, but tell us what happened first in the committee in the morning and then what happened in the afternoon.

Brigham Tomco: Sure, so I'll start with this.

The loudest message coming out of that special session on Monday is that Republican lawmakers felt like they shouldn't have to be there in the first place, and that fits into this broader legal context of a judge ordering that the legislature meet to craft new maps for our congressional districts.

And so, in the morning the redistricting committee that Representative Owens sits on, they approved map C, which was one of the five maps that they had been discussing.

And later in the day they approved this map that shifts around our boundaries for our four members of the house in Washington D.C., and they sent it to Judge Gibson, who now has the choice to select this map or one of the maps submitted by some plaintiffs in this lawsuit that has been ongoing for several years now.

Well, there's a lot right there to unpack, but Representative Owens, please give us a little bit of an understanding of what happened with the maps, and you had your own map, but you're on this redistricting committee itself.

Give us a little flavor for what happened there.

Doug Owens: I was.

You know, the big issue that went on was that we had five maps presented by the majority, the Republicans, and we had problems with all of them, because what Proposition 4 says that the legislature is supposed to be implementing now is it says you're supposed to draw a map fairly without regard to partisanship and just take into account municipalities and other boundaries and things like that, communities of interest.

And then after you draw it without regard to partisan concern, you're supposed to test it and see if it has an undue impact on any one party.

That's what Prop 4 has, two steps.

And it was that second step we had a problem with, because they were drawn properly under the first set of criteria, but when you tested them against party impact, there's a real issue of fairness there, because--and the way you can test that is you can have a computer draw thousands and thousands of maps based on those nonpartisan criteria that are in Prop 4, and then what happens when you do that is almost every one of them will yield one of the four congressional districts where the minority party, the Democrats, can be competitive.

And we got those five maps, and no district was--had a competitive where it yielded a district where a Democrat would be competitive.

And so, we started getting into the way the expert was analyzing that, and we thought there were a ton of issues about the way that was being done.

We didn't think it was he was applying the right kind of tests that Prop 4 called for.

It said you're supposed to use the best available data, the best available scientific and judicial methods, and we thought he was not doing that.

And so, we brought in an expert to try to analyze and help understand that.

So, that was our problem with all five of the maps.

Jason Perry: Now, of course, I'm so curious about what this means for you.

I mean, there's going to be an impact, but are you just kind of along for the ride as they have these discussions?

Tell me what your vantage point of this whole thing.

Celeste Maloy: So, I keep telling people as members of Congress, we don't have any part to play in that process, but then we have to live with it.

So yes, we're along for the ride.

I keep saying I'm on the ride, but I'm not driving it.

And I've had a lot of people reach out over the last few days since the legislature selected a map and ask, you know, how I feel or what my district looks like.

And as a delegation, we're sort of holding off and waiting to see what the judge does, because again, we don't have any control.

But we will be governed by whatever happens, and it just doesn't--there's no wisdom in us getting way out ahead and talking about districts that may or may not last.

Jason Perry: Brigham, talk about this idea that Representative Owens was talking about a second ago too on this competitiveness, as you look at the maps and the lines and what happens.

Is that supposed to be one of the criteria?

I mean, that there's such an interesting point you made right there is you draw a map and one becomes more or less competitive, is that--does that at the heart of this?

Can we be talking about that?

You wanna say that first?

Doug Owens: Let me chime in there.

You know, it isn't that you're supposed to have a competitive district.

What I'm trying to say is that the neutral process always yields a competitive district, so we think it was not a neutral process.

So, I'm not arguing for a competitive district, per se.

What I'm saying is I'm arguing for the neutral process, and the neutral process does that.

So, you can see that it isn't neutral, because we did not get any competitive maps.

Jason Perry: Yeah, I hope--I did understand what you're saying on that, but that's so interesting because as soon as the map is drawn, the very next thing is who has a chance, who has a better chance or a worse chance in that particular district.

Which Brigham, you talk about this for just a moment too.

This is a lot on the court, maybe more than some of our legislators feel like should be on the court.

Brigham Tomco: Yeah, redistricting battles are as old as democracy.

We have them once every ten years when we get a new census and we have new population numbers.

What makes this time different in the eyes of lots of the Republican lawmakers is the interference or the interaction between the judicial branch and the legislature.

So, the context for this redistricting battle in 2025 is that the Utah Supreme Court said that the legislature had dismissed a ballot initiative passed by a very narrow majority of Utahns back in 2018 and had not followed kind of the spirit of what that legislation entailed.

Now Republican lawmakers will say it is entirely in their purview, and in fact the state constitution gives total and sole authority for redistricting to our elected officials, and that the court shouldn't have any say in that process.

So, really, at the end of the day, this is a fundamental debate about separation of powers in the state, and that's why this case is probably going to end up at the US Supreme Court in coming months.

Jason Perry: Can I--go ahead.

Doug Owens: I was just gonna say I think there have been some notes injected into the music of the debate going on in the last couple of weeks that are not really very valid.

You know, when you--when there's been complaints about the judiciary overstepping its bounds, what we have here was, as Brigham was saying, is a ballot initiative passed by the people telling the legislature we want you to put some guard rails on how you redistrict.

It didn't take the authority from the legislature to redistrict.

It said you have it.

We'll do some independent maps.

You don't have to take the independent maps.

You can draw your own map, but you can't do these partisan things with the map if you decide to draw it.

And the Supreme Court said, yeah, the legislature needs to follow that, because while the Constitution, Utah Constitution, says that the legislature draws the boundaries, it also says the power resides in the people to reform their government.

The power really comes from the people, not the legislature.

It's important to remember that.

And the people had said, we want you to put up some guard rails about how you exercise that authority.

So, to bash the court, I think there's been some real implicit criticism of the courts.

The courts are the weakest branch of government.

They're just trying to declare the law as the people enacted it through that initiative, and it is--I don't think it's right for legislators who are in the driver's seat publicly, they can speak out publicly, judges cannot, to be--to issue veiled comments about the inappropriateness of the court or the courts are overstepping their bounds.

The court has declared the law as enacted by the people, and we should just in good faith follow that.

Jason Perry: Okay, one more point to this too.

You represent, Congresswoman, urban and rural.

This is part of this discussion too.

I was kind of curious what the internal conversations were on the Democratic side too.

Do you, having been in this role for a little while, is do you espouse that same kind of opinion that it should be that?

Celeste Maloy: Absolutely.

Utah is one of the few states that really has an urban rural divide like very few other states do.

And one of the examples I was just thinking as we were sitting here talking, you know, Brigham talked about Ogden and how hard it gets hit by a government shutdown because there are so many federal employees in Ogden.

But I represent Garfield County, where Doug's family is from, and they might have a higher percentage of federal employees than even Ogden, because 25 federal jobs in Panguitch is a large part of the economy.

And if we have a delegation where somebody represents urban and somebody else represents rural, they may not be representing both of those well.

We may not as a team be representing both of those well, and even though the impacts are felt very differently in urban and rural by federal policies, they impact both.

And when you have a delegation that understands both, when all four of us have to think about urban issues and rural issues when we're making policy decisions, we do a better job of representing Utah.

Jason Perry: Talk about this.

Doug Owens: Well, I'm--those are--that's one thing to be thinking about, what spectrum of Utah citizens should be represented.

And you can do that, but you also have to take account of other things, and you're supposed to test whether that the way you finally end up drawing a map has an undue impact on a party.

And again, that's where I think it falls down.

I think the neutral maps overwhelmingly show a competitive district, and we didn't get one.

So, I think there's lots of ways of looking at what the proper division of the state should be, and that can be taken into account, whether you want the right mix of urban and rural.

But you also need to do--you also need to test it about whether that's unduly punishing to one party, and there's ways to do that.

And the political scientists should have free reign in court to do that.

And then we're going to see that process playing out in court here in the next couple of weeks.

Jason Perry: One more issue from the special session, Brigham, maybe you can tee this up for us a little bit.

A new way for the Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court to be selected.

Brigham Tomco: Sure, so as part of an ongoing discussion about checks and balances within Utah, the Legislature proposed several initiatives at the end of the last session in February, March, and one of them would change the way that the Chief Justice on the Utah Supreme Court is selected.

Currently there's kind of an internal nomination process.

This would have allowed the governor, the head of the executive branch, to select the Chief Justice, as is done at the federal level with the US president selecting the justice on the Supreme Court.

And Governor Cox, in a move that surprised some, vetoed this opportunity to have greater control over the judicial branch.

But in discussions with the legislature, a compromise was formed that was eventually passed on Monday where the governor will be able to appoint the Chief Justice or select which justice will be the Chief Justice once every eight years, and so it won't line up exactly with some of these political elections every four years.

It'll be a longer term, which is what shifted or changed governor's mind.

Jason Perry: Just a 30 second comment from you.

As an attorney as well on that.

Doug Owens: I oppose that.

We have one of the best judiciaries in the country.

The state judiciary in Utah is renowned across the country for being fair, honest, and efficient.

And it was an adjustment that was made to send a political message, I think, to warn the court off from questioning the legislature's power.

It was a completely unnecessary statutory change that is a message bill, frankly.

And I just think it's wiser under the Constitution to let the judiciary have free and independent rein to interpret the law.

We don't need to be sending those kind of messages.

Jason Perry: We have about a minute left.

I just have one thing, because you all are so good at this particular aspect.

I just want to talk about what you modeled here today, some civility in disagreement.

We live in a time when maybe that's not as easy to see.

Maybe just a couple comments about how it's family legacy for you.

You follow that, and for you, Congresswoman Maloy, talk about that for just a moment.

Celeste Maloy: Yeah, Utah has been under the microscope lately in ways that we're not used to, even with redistricting.

It's sort of gotten conflated with the processes that are happening in much larger states where they're redistricting for different reasons that are new, and we're settling an old lawsuit.

And I've been really impressed with the way Utahns have risen to the occasion and demonstrated some political savvy and lived up to the values that we espouse in the state by being willing to reach out to people who are hurting.

And even when, you know, I know it didn't happen in Utah, but when the LDS Church in Michigan got shot up and then burned down, people in Utah started a fund for the shooter's family, which if we're going to have a spotlight on us in this state, that's the way I would hope we would shine under that spotlight.

Jason Perry: That's gonna have to be the last comment, but thank you all for modeling that kind of behavior, and thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast.

Thank you for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

announcer: Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by the Cleone Peterson Eccles Endowment Fund and by donations to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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