Nonpartisan redistricting panel unlikely

Not unexpectedly, U.S. House GOP leadership announced this week that the Utah/D.C. extra seat bill will not be heard during a four-day lame-duck session that is supposed to end Friday night.

So whether Utah gets a fourth U.S. House seat and the District of Columbia gets a full voting member apparently will be decided in the new, Democratic-controlled Congress starting next month.

Utah legislators went through a well-publicized, three-week process of forming a special redistricting committee, holding six hearings around the state and meeting in a special session Monday to adopt a new four-seat plan — as GOP House leaders demanded.

Should Congress give Utah a fourth seat before the 2010 Census, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, would end up in a much more Democratic 2nd Congressional District.

But since Utah and national Republicans have thrown everything at Matheson except the kitchen sink in his recent re-elections, giving him a safer 2nd District isn't much of a consolation.

Indeed, finding little fault with the proposed four-seat map, local Democrats have used the Utah/D.C. debate to argue that a nonpartisan redistricting commission be adopted and redraw legislative and congressional seats following the 2010 Census.

To which various GOP legislators tested — again — the gullibility of Utah residents by claiming that the Legislature should redraw the districts because lawmakers know their areas better than any commission could, that no group is really nonpartisan and without political bias, and blah, blah, blah.

Republican legislators are never going to give up the power of redrawing their own legislative districts. And while the minority Democrats may, now, push for a nonpartisan commission, I'm guessing if they ever got a majority in the House and Senate, they, too, would find reasons for not adopting a nonpartisan redistricting commission — like they would have to redraw the GOP-gerrymandered districts at least once to make things "fair."

Democratic legislators were, admittedly, given much more say in the four-seat redistricting that just took place.

Part of that is because GOP Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., reading the political tea leaves of Congress, demanded that Matheson be well taken care of. And part was because GOP lawmakers no doubt knew they couldn't beat Matheson no matter how they drew his 2nd District and so decided to just not be so hard-nosed.

Besides, except for the few legislators who hope to run for Congress some day, most lawmakers aren't that interested in U.S. House district lines. But they are really interested in how their own legislative districts are drawn.