Senate will vote on 4th seat Tuesday

WASHINGTON — The Senate will vote on Utah's potential fourth House seat Tuesday, with bill advocates confident it will get the support it needs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on Wednesday called for a procedural vote to take place on Tuesday. If the measure gets 60 votes, it would be allowed to move to the Senate floor for a full vote.

The bill, primarily designed to give the District of Columbia a full vote in the House of Representatives, still brings up constitutional questions for some, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., because the district is not a state.

Still, supporters are optimistic.

"The only way to stop it now is for opponents to reach back to the old and much discredited Senate practice of filibustering voting rights and civil rights bills," said Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. Norton currently represents the district in the House but has limited voting privileges.

Norton, along with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., wrote an opinion piece in Wednesday's Washington Post pushing the civil rights message of the bill.

"Filibusters of equal-rights bills have long been discredited by history," the four lawmakers wrote. "Democrats were wrong to filibuster voting rights bills in the 1960s, and Republicans would be wrong to filibuster our voting rights bill today. A Post poll earlier this year showed that 61 percent of adult Americans support a House vote for the District. This is not surprising, since District residents have fought in every American war and rank second in per capita income taxes paid to support our government."

The District of Columbia seat would likely go to a Democrat, so the bill's authors paired it with a seat for Utah, which would likely go to a Republican. Utah missed getting a fourth seat after the 2000 Census but is likely to get a new House seat after the next census in 2010. The bill would allow the state to get the new seat earlier than that.

"I am grateful to the three Republican senators who voted with Democrats to move the bill out of committee with a nine to one bipartisan vote, and to the Republicans who said they will vote on the bill on the floor," Norton said Wednesday in a statement. "I know that D.C. residents also will be elated that in just days we will be taking another giant and historic step toward getting a full House vote."

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E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com