Drop the 4th seat plan

Utah's push for a fourth congressional seat is back, only this time it has regressed to the original plan, which was to make the new seat at-large.

So much for all the frantic efforts last year by state politicians to come up with a bipartisan four-district map known as "Plan L."

The Democrat-controlled Congress has reasons to push the extra seat for Utah. It would come as part of a compromise that also would grant a first-ever seat to the District of Columbia. Utah's seat would almost certainly go to a Republican, and the district's seat would almost surely go to a Democrat.

But just because this effort is back before a new and differently oriented Congress doesn't mean it smells any better. In fact, the idea of an at-large seat makes it smell even worse. Should the plan become law, everyone in Utah would be represented by two House members — the one from their own home district and the one representing the entire state.

And everyone in Utah and the entire nation would have something else, as well — a big court battle.

For people who believe the Constitution actually means what it says, this compromise is illegal. House members, the Constitution says, shall be "chosen every second year by the people of the several states ... " The District of Columbia is not a state. A group of Republicans in Utah reportedly already has a legal brief ready in case the plan becomes law.

By the time the law is passed and the legal case is exhausted, the 2010 Census would be so close as to render any advantage to Utah meaningless. The way this state is growing, that Census is bound to provide a fourth, and perhaps even a fifth, representative without any legal challenges.

We are sympathetic to the notion that the District of Columbia deserves representation. It makes little sense for so many U.S. citizens to lack a voice in the body that taxes them. But if those people are to be granted representation, it must come legally, and that would require an amendment to the Constitution. In 1961, the nation ratified the 23rd Amendment, which granted the district electoral votes in presidential elections. That is the proper example here.

Utah should have gotten a fourth seat after the 2000 election. It missed by a few hundred residents, and the number of full-time religious missionaries serving abroad easily would have cleared that barrier, if they had been counted.

But that's quickly becoming ancient history. Utah has little to gain any more from a legislative compromise.