The Colorado Supreme Court just handed Democrats a unanimous beatdown, and it’s hard not to enjoy it.
On Monday, the court blocked all five ballot measures that would have let Colorado redraw its congressional map ahead of the 2028 election. Every justice agreed that each measure violated the state constitution’s single-subject requirement.
Here’s what Democrats tried to pull. Two of the five measures would have rewritten the state constitution to allow mid-decade redistricting, one of them rigging up a map that handed Democrats a 7-1 advantage, the other a 5-3 map for Republicans. A fifth measure would have gutted the independent redistricting commission Colorado voters created less than a decade ago. The other three measures tried to get there through a side door, first stripping the redistricting commission language from the constitution, then triggering new maps for 2028 and 2030 that would only take effect if voters approved that first change.
Justice Richard L. Gabriel wrote the opinion on the three interlocking measures, and he didn’t pull any punches. “To conclude otherwise and to allow initiative proponents to proceed with interlocking measures like those at issue here would allow proponents to achieve indirectly what they could not achieve directly and would endorse an end run around the single subject requirement,” Gabriel wrote. “This we cannot do.”
Chief Justice Monica M. Márquez handled the other two measures, the ones bundling a process change with a brand-new map into a single amendment. She wasn’t buying that either. “We conclude that these are distinct and separate subjects,” Márquez wrote. “Temporarily allowing mid-decade redistricting is not merely the means to implement or effectuate the Initiatives’ central purpose of adopting a specific new congressional district map for the 2028 and 2030 election cycles.” She went further, calling mid-decade redistricting “a seismic shift,” noting that plenty of voters might back a process change without wanting a specific map, or back a map without wanting redistricting more than once a decade.
Gabriel made the same point about the multistep measures. “We conclude that the result is not different and that when a measure’s effectiveness is expressly contingent on the passage of a separate and independent measure, the measure contains multiple subjects, just as if the measures were combined into one,” he wrote.
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Colorado’s congressional delegation is currently split 4-4, with CO-08 the only real toss-up heading into the midterms. That’s exactly why Democrats wanted a do-over.
This is the latest setback Democrats have endured in the redistricting battle.
Scott Gessler, the former Colorado secretary of state who represented the pro-Republican measures, summed it up well. “Eight years ago, Colorado voters strongly supported an independent redistricting commission,” Gessler said. “Today, the court soundly rejected the Democratic efforts to manipulate the ballot process to overturn Colorado’s nonpartisan redistricting process.” Gessler readily admitted his own clients’ measures would have done the same thing to that process.
Curtis Hubbard of Coloradans for a Level Playing Field, the group pushing the pro-Democrat measures, wasn’t nearly as gracious. He called the ruling a “legal setback over a technicality”. He described it as “the success of this partisan attempt to sideline Coloradans from responding to Donald Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade redistricting scheme.”
Losing unanimously, on every single measure, because you tried to jam an unconstitutional power grab through the ballot box in pieces, is not just a technicality.
Let’s be honest here: Democrats have been gerrymandering states for years without a hint of self-reflection. Once Republicans decided to fight back after getting screwed in the most recent census count, it suddenly became a five-alarm threat to democracy. Colorado’s Supreme Court just unanimously told them to pound sand, and I’m loving it.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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