Brady Brammer: The Architecture of Power

SB0230 changes how prepayment penalties work on certain consumer loans, removing an exception that had allowed prepayment fees on a specific category of dwelling-secured loans (subordinate-lien loans outside federal Regulation Z, such as second mortgages and HELOCs) while prohibiting contingent prepayment penalties generally.

Who helped present it

• Senate Business and Labor Committee, Feb. 6, 2026: Brammer presented the bill "with the assistance of Candice Pitcher, General Counsel, First Electronic Bank." Kent Landvatter, Chairman and CEO of FinWise Bancorp, also spoke to the committee.
• House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee, Feb. 27, 2026: Landvatter again gave public comment when the bill was presented. It passed 9-0-7 and moved to the Consent Calendar with no further debate. House final passage, March 4, 2026: 69-0-6 — genuinely unanimous, with Democrats and Republicans both voting yes.

Who gave to the campaign

• FinWise Bank gave Brammer's campaign $3,500 on June 3, 2026.
• UCL PAC gave Brammer $6,000 across two gifts; one of UCL PAC's donors, Tosh, Inc., is the parent company of Check City, a payday-lending and check-cashing chain. Check City's core business does not typically involve prepayment penalties, so the bill's substance does not appear connected to that donor's business model.
• Security Finance Corp, a consumer installment-lending company, gave Brammer's campaign $1,500 directly on June 25, 2026 — after SB0230 had already passed and taken effect. This is a direct gift from a consumer lender, not routed through a PAC.

Both FinWise Bank and First Electronic Bank are Utah industrial-bank charter partners that work with fintech and marketplace lenders nationally. That business model — loans originated by a Utah-chartered bank and then sold or serviced by an outside fintech partner — is one context in which prepayment-penalty rules can matter more directly than for a payday lender like Check City. This reporting has not established whether SB0230's provisions specifically affect that model; it notes the connection because the bank whose CEO testified on the bill, and the bank whose general counsel helped present it, are both closer in kind to the type of prepayment-heavy consumer lending the bill addresses than the PAC-linked payday lender is.

Mostly a reorganization of the statute governing the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, but with real substance. It adds new timeliness certification standards specifically for Supreme Court and Court of Appeals judges — a justice must distribute no more than 25% of opinions more than 150 days after submission, no more than 10% past 210 days, and 100% within a year (Court of Appeals judges: 120/180/270-day equivalents). It confirms the commission must study, by October 1, 2026, whether a judge's rate of being overturned on appeal for abuse of discretion should factor into performance evaluations, reporting to the Judiciary Interim Committee by November 1, 2026 — a provision that connects directly to SJR005 and HB392/366 above, since a judge who rules against the state in a case reassigned to a specially convened panel could see that reversal counted toward a public performance metric.

The transparency picture is genuinely mixed. Retention reports become public and posted online, and a judge who fails a certification standard gets a guaranteed chance to appear and respond. But individual commissioners' votes on a specific judge stay protected, confidential records — only the commission's final aggregate vote is ever disclosed — and the bill newly authorizes the commission to meet in closed session to discuss a judge's performance before the vote itself happens in public.

SJR005 amends the Utah Rules of Civil Procedure. It does two things. First, it lets the Attorney General, the Governor, or the Legislature — and no other party — file notice to pull a pending case away from its assigned judge into a specially convened "district court panel," referencing the same code section as the previously-documented HB392/366 panel mechanism. Once notice is filed, the original judge must transfer the case and can take no further action; parties lose the normal right to disqualify the whole panel or automatically change judges. Second, it creates a mandatory fast-track transfer to the Business and Chancery Court: if requested within 21 days, the district court must transfer the case and may not give any deference to the plaintiff's original choice of forum.

The bill's chief sponsor is Brammer, not merely a floor sponsor as with the other three bills in this cluster. It passed the Senate 21-7-1 (2/12/2026) and the House 54-14-7 (2/13/2026) — in both chambers, every "no" vote matches the Democratic caucus exactly and every "yes" vote is Republican. No Democrat voted for it and no Republican voted against it in either chamber.

Paired with HB0392 (same scheme). House chief sponsor is Jordan Teuscher; Brammer is confirmed as Senate sponsor, not merely a floor carrier. This modifies and reenacts the same panel statute SJR005 later operationalized procedurally — the AG, Governor, or Legislature can move a pending constitutional challenge to a specially selected panel mid-litigation, with a $1,500 filing fee for that notice.

The bill's "Constitutional Court" backup provision turns out to be far more developed than a placeholder. It only activates if a court strikes down the panel scheme — but once triggered, it's a complete, fully-designed replacement court: three judges with exclusive jurisdiction over the identical category of cases, and it automatically pulls in even already-pending district court cases through a 45-day retroactive removal window. A party has no way to transfer a case back out once it lands there. Judges for this court are chosen by a brand-new nominating commission whose all seven members are appointed directly by the governor — no legislator is eligible to serve, and there's no requirement for balance the way ordinary judicial nominating commissions have. Sitting district or appeals judges can serve on it without giving up their existing seat, earning an extra 5% salary for the dual role. In effect, this is an insurance policy: if courts ever invalidate the panel-transfer scheme, a fully governor-selected alternative court instantly takes over the exact same litigation instead.

Separately, this bill also weakens transparency in a way not previously documented: the originally introduced version would have required the Business and Chancery Court to publish all of its final decisions online. The substitute that passed made this discretionary — the court only publishes a ruling if it decides that ruling is "valuable precedent or in the interest of the public." The court controls what the public gets to see of its own work. The bill also creates an expedited appeal right for challenges to injunctions against state laws, and exempts government defendants — but not private ones — from posting a bond to use it.

None of this is theoretical — the Legislature used the underlying panel mechanism within weeks of passage, filing notice in March 2026 to move the state's own redistricting case away from the district judge it had been assigned to.

House sponsor is Logan Monson; Brammer is Senate sponsor. This entry was corrected after reading the full substitute text — two things previously believed about this bill turned out to be wrong. What's confirmed real: the Judicial Council must build a single public website for searching court records, free for up to 50 searches and downloads a month, and judges and court commissioners must file the same public financial and conflict-of-interest disclosures as elected candidates.

What's not accurate: the bill does not mandate free live audio streaming or automatic posting of recordings within three days — that was in the originally introduced bill, but this substitute stripped it. What actually passed only requires that a recording be made, then provided if an individual specifically requests it (expedited for parties, fee-eligible for everyone else); whether to make audio freely available going forward was punted to a Judicial Council study due in November 2026. Separately, the bill does not bar retired justices from appearing before their old court — that provision doesn't exist here. What it actually does is narrower: a law firm currently suing, or planning to sue, a Utah government entity may not hire a departed judge for two years, which protects the state's own litigation position more than it enacts a general judicial-ethics rule. One more wrinkle: registering to use the new court-records website requires disclosing citizenship status, not just identity and address — a real access barrier worth naming.

A genuinely mixed bill. On the positive side, it closes a real loophole: lobbyists themselves are now banned from soliciting or accepting "success fee" compensation contingent on a government action happening — previously only the employer side of that arrangement was an offense.

On the transparency side, it raises the small-gift disclosure thresholds by two and a half times — the daily aggregate expenditure amount that triggers public disclosure and the cap on non-food gifts both rise from $10 to $25, and a new $50 cap (up from $30) is carved out for publications and commemorative items. More lobbyist spending on public officials becomes legally invisible to the public as a result.

It also creates a brand-new, complete exemption: tickets, travel, and admission to a sporting or artistic event hosted by a state or private nonprofit university no longer count as a reportable "expenditure" at all — not just a raised threshold, a full carve-out — so long as the purpose is to "build a relationship" between the institution and the official, a test that's easy to satisfy. This has not yet been checked against Brammer's own donor list for university-athletics or booster-organization money.

This bill did not start as Brammer's, and it did not start about the governor. It was introduced by Sen. Michael McKell as "Attorney General Compensation Amendments," pegging the Attorney General's salary directly to the chief justice of the Supreme Court's total compensation. A substitute changed the chief sponsor to Brammer, retitled the bill "Governor Compensation Amendments," and added the same chief-justice-pegged formula for the governor. By the enrolled version, the original Attorney General provision was dropped entirely — the AG remained at 95% of the governor's salary as before — leaving only the new governor's-salary formula in the final law.

Using 2025 compensation figures (the most recent full year, since then-Chief Justice Matthew Durrant held the role for all of 2025): Gov. Spencer Cox's total compensation was $258,818.58. Durrant's was $381,410.88. Pegging the governor's salary to the chief justice's would mean a raise of roughly $122,592 — about 47% more than the governor's current total pay. This passed the same session as SB0134, which gave the governor appointment power over the chief justice position itself; the two bills are not the same mechanism, but they land in the same session and the same pay category.

SB0234 restricts Utah agencies' ability to regulate "environmental health and waste management" — a defined term covering drinking water, water pollution, hazardous substances, contaminated site remediation, air quality, and solid and hazardous waste. Wherever a federal standard exists, the bill prohibits Utah from adopting a numeric standard stricter than it. Where no federal standard exists, an agency may only set one if it can show — through "best available science and the weight of scientific evidence" — a direct causal link between exposure at that level and demonstrable bodily harm, a notably high bar compared to the risk-based standards environmental rulemaking typically relies on. One provision from the original bill was dropped in the final substitute: a proposed grant of authority letting a legislative committee delay any environmental rule's effective date did not survive to the enrolled version.

Two of Brammer's campaign donors operate in industries this bill directly touches: EnergySolutions (Utah's hazardous and radioactive waste disposal operator) gave $500 in 2023 and $1,000 on 9/4/2026 — after this bill had already taken effect — and Energy Fuels (operator of the White Mesa uranium mill) gave in a same-day, multi-PAC batch on 11/20/2025, about three months before the bill passed. This bill also connects to an existing pattern of environmental-rule changes documented elsewhere in this project, including the 2024 repeal of the Air Quality Policy Advisory Board and a 2026 sunset-extension bill that pointedly excluded several environmental statutes from its extensions.

Chief sponsor is Rep. Calvin Roberts; Brammer carried it as Senate floor sponsor. The bill bundles several distinct oil-and-gas-industry provisions with an $11.9 million one-time General Fund appropriation to Transportation for road construction.

It creates a new fast-track permitting scheme for oil and gas "midstream facilities" — pipelines, storage tanks, and processing plants — imposing a mandatory 120-day decision deadline on state regulators across the air-quality, water-quality, and hazardous-substance permitting divisions, extendable unilaterally by only 30 days. It also temporarily cuts the gasoline tax to a fixed rate for the back half of 2026, while raising the tax on alternative fuels (compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, hydrogen) from roughly 16.5 cents to a new 21.2-cent baseline — a real asymmetry that favors conventional fuel over clean alternatives.

The most notable provision is a new quarterly refinery production-reporting requirement. On its face this looks like new oversight, but the reported data is legally classified as a protected record, confidential commercial information, and a trade secret all at once — it can only ever be released in aggregate, cannot be used for regulatory enforcement, price regulation, or any civil or criminal investigation, is not subject to subpoena or discovery in any proceeding, and a court "may not order disclosure." A state employee who discloses it commits a crime. The bill also expands an existing infrastructure tax credit to explicitly cover pipeline construction and refined-hydrocarbon storage in salt caverns.

Not yet checked against Brammer's donor list for refining or pipeline industry money.

This is a sweeping rewrite of Utah nuisance law — 58 code sections affected across three Senate substitutes, all carried by Brammer, who is listed as both floor sponsor and substitute sponsor (the House chief sponsor is Rep. Colin Jack). Its central move: it abrogates the common-law right to sue over a nuisance entirely, replacing it with a narrow statutory scheme. Going forward, only the Attorney General may still bring a common-law nuisance claim — and only where there is "substantial ongoing harm to a significant number of the citizens of Utah," with a report due to the Judiciary Interim Committee every four years starting in 2029 on how that authority has been used.

Under the new statutory scheme, a private party suing over a public nuisance must prove "special injury" by clear-and-convincing evidence — and the bill explicitly excludes two categories from counting as special injury: harm to a site's "spiritual, cultural, or emotional significance," and a party's own expenditures made in responding to the nuisance. No class actions are allowed. Government entities that sue can recover only injunctive relief and abatement costs, never damages of any kind, and cannot base their right to sue solely on having spent money responding to the nuisance.

Most notably, the bill's definition of "public nuisance" explicitly excludes "the design, manufacturing, distributing, selling, labeling, or marketing of a legal product" as a category — and separately names firearms, firearm accessories, and ammunition as excluded by name. This mirrors a recognized national tort-reform pattern used in other states specifically to block public-nuisance lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, PFAS producers, and gun makers. The bill also creates new statutory defenses shielding manufacturing facilities in operation more than three years, critical-infrastructure and mining operations, shooting ranges, and agricultural operations from neighbor nuisance suits.

This has not yet been checked against Brammer's own donor list for manufacturing, mining, or firearms-industry money.

Included for balance, not scrutiny. SJR001 expands when a defendant's other bad acts can be admitted as propensity evidence in sex-crime cases — extending an existing child-molestation exception to also cover sexual exploitation of a minor charges, and adding a new provision allowing similar propensity evidence in sexual assault cases generally, with a disclosure requirement to the defense. This is a standard victim-protection reform of the kind many states have adopted, unconnected to any donor or power-transfer thread documented in this file.

Also included for balance. Chief sponsor is Rep. Jefferson Burton; Brammer carried it as Senate floor sponsor. It targets a well-known construction-industry fraud pattern: subcontractors falsely claiming "zero estimated exposure" workers' compensation policies to avoid paying premiums — a practice that can leave real workers without coverage if they're injured on the job. The bill requires a signed, fraud-warning attestation for any such policy, requires subcontractors on public projects to disclose their employee lists and zero-exposure status to the general contractor and property owner, requires those records be kept for three years and shared with the state on request, and makes noncompliance grounds for license discipline. A genuine anti-fraud, worker-protection measure with no donor or power-transfer connection found.

Flagged as needing more legal analysis before it's characterized further, not a settled finding. Chief sponsor is Rep. Anthony Loubet; Brammer carried it as Senate floor sponsor. It replaces Utah's existing three-part "bad faith" test for awarding attorney fees — which required proving a losing party lacked an honest belief in their position, intended to take unconscionable advantage, or intended to hinder or defraud — with a simpler, uniformly-worded standard applied across six different statutes at once: fees may be awarded if a claim, defense, or request for a new trial was brought "to harass, cause unreasonable delay, needlessly increase the cost of litigation, or abuse the judicial process." This touches dog-attack arbitration, uninsured/underinsured motorist arbitration, motor vehicle accident arbitration, mechanics-lien disputes, general civil actions, and small-claims appeals.

It isn't yet clear which way this cuts — it could make bad-faith fee awards easier to win (a more objective, conduct-based test) or harder (it drops the "honest belief" inquiry into a losing party's own state of mind). What is worth flagging: Brammer's donor list already includes a cluster of personal-injury law firms whose core practice is exactly the kind of motor-vehicle arbitration this bill governs — a real donor-industry overlap, even without a clear read yet on who the standard change actually favors.

Also included for balance. Chief sponsor is Rep. A. Cory Maloy; Brammer carried it as Senate sponsor. It lets an applicant request a "Federally Recognized Tribal Member" notation on their Utah driver license or ID — the substitute changed this wording from the originally proposed "Native American" to more precise, official terminology — based on documentation like a tribal ID, a certificate of Indian blood, or a Bureau of Indian Affairs birth affidavit. The notation cannot identify which specific tribe the person belongs to. The state appropriated $192,900 to update the Driver License Division's systems to accommodate it. A straightforward, uncontroversial accommodation bill with no donor or power-transfer connection.

Also included for balance. Chief sponsor is Rep. Grant Amjad Miller; Brammer carried it as Senate floor sponsor. It extends the sunset date of the Purchasing from Persons with Disabilities Advisory Board — a program requiring state procurement units to preferentially buy goods and services, up to $5 million a year, from "community rehabilitation programs" that employ people with severe disabilities — from 2026 out to 2036. It also adds a new annual reporting requirement to the Government Operations Interim Committee starting in 2027, covering contract counts, revenue, the number of disabled employees, and success metrics. A genuinely positive program-continuation and accountability bill, with no donor or power-transfer connection found.

Brammer is chief sponsor; House floor sponsor is Nelson Abbott. The bill creates a new civil right of action letting a business sued over an inaccessible website — under the Americans with Disabilities Act — countersue whoever filed that suit, if a judge finds the lawsuit was "abusive": defined as primarily seeking a payout rather than fixing the accessibility problem. A judge weighing that question considers factors including how many similar lawsuits the same filer has brought, whether the filer is a Utah resident or licensed to practice here, and whether the case was filed somewhere that makes it hard for the business to defend itself. There's a rebuttable presumption the suit was abusive if the business made a good-faith attempt to fix the problem within 30 days of notice, or actually fixed it within 90 days. If a court finds the suit abusive, it can award the business its attorney fees, punitive damages, and sanctions against the filer — capped at three times the fee award. The state Attorney General can also bring this action on a business's behalf.

This deserves a fair reading on both sides. "Drive-by" ADA website lawsuits filed mainly to extract quick settlements are a real, well-documented problem nationally, and this bill's target isn't invented. But private lawsuits are also the main practical way ADA website accessibility gets enforced at all — there's no government agency that proactively inspects business websites for compliance. A law that lets businesses countersue for punitive damages, where filing multiple similar suits counts as evidence of bad intent, risks discouraging legitimate accessibility advocacy — including from the specialist advocates and attorneys who file repeatedly precisely because violations are so widespread. Not yet checked against Brammer's donor list for business-association money.

Chief sponsor is Rep. James Dunnigan; Brammer is confirmed as Senate floor sponsor on the enrolled bill. It's a comprehensive rewrite of Utah's 2020 litigation-funding statute, and genuinely two-sided rather than a one-way industry favor.

On the consumer-protective side, it extends the rescission period on consumer legal-funding agreements from five to ten business days, bans referral-fee relationships between attorneys and funders, bars funders from directing or controlling a plaintiff's litigation decisions, protects consumer-funder attorney communications from discovery, makes funders jointly and severally liable for adverse cost awards against the consumer, and bans funding arrangements with foreign entities of concern.

On the insurer-favorable side — and this is the piece that matches a recognized national insurance-industry priority — it requires automatic disclosure of any commercial litigation-funding agreement to the opposing party without a discovery request, and makes those agreements admissible as evidence at trial. Brammer's donor list includes CIGNA, American Property and Casualty, and Regence, all of which have a direct interest in exactly this kind of disclosure-and-admissibility rule.

Chief sponsor is Rep. Doug Welton; Brammer is Senate sponsor. This one is a genuine loophole swap, not the removal it first looked like. A narrow existing exception had let a Public Infrastructure District board hold one meeting a year outside its own boundaries — planning or education purposes only, with no votes or final action allowed. This bill replaces that narrow exception with a much broader one: PID meetings may now be held anywhere "within the boundaries of the entity that created the PID" — with no limit on how often, no restriction on purpose, and no ban on taking final action or votes there.

The problem is that a PID's creating entity — usually a city or county — is typically far larger than the PID itself. For any PID created by an entire county, this means the board can now hold meetings, including ones with binding votes, anywhere in that county rather than where the district's own residents actually live. The bill passed unanimously at every stage of the process, and nobody raised this on the record.