Panel OKs giving Utah a 4th seat

WASHINGTON — Critics of a plan to give Utah an additional seat in Congress and grant a vote to the District of Columbia fought hard at a House meeting Tuesday, but the bill will move on to the next legislative step Thursday.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee passed the bill Tuesday, 24-5, including two minor amendments, but lawmakers voted down several others that would have drastically changed the bill.

Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, said "there will be some hard-core opposition" to the bill but there is no question in his mind that it will pass the House. It is more a question of how many Republicans will vote for it, he said.

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, is a co-sponsor of the latest version of the bill. Although it does not mention Utah specifically, the new at-large seat created in the bill would go to the state because it is next in line to get a new seat after the 2010 Census. The bill increases the number of members in the House of Representatives to 437.

Utah missed a fourth seat after the 2000 Census. The bill speeds up the process as part of a bipartisan compromise to avoid either the Democrats or Republicans gaining an advantage. Utah's seat would likely go to a Republican while the district's seat would likely go to a Democrat, according to its supporters

At Tuesday's meeting one of the approved amendments from Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, R-Ga., emphasizes that the bill is not adding two senators for the District of Columbia nor it is making the district a state.

Another, offered by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., simply inserted language to point out that the District of Columbia was once part of Maryland. This was to emphasize that residents would have had a vote in the House if the land was not redrawn to create the capital city, according to Issa's office.

Of the rejected amendments, one offered by Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., would have given the land making up the District of Columbia back to the state of Maryland and created a "National Capital Service Area" basically made up of federal monuments, the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court building and federal buildings around the National Mall. McHenry also tried to make the bill's passage contingent on a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to create a seat for the district but that failed. McHenry — and other opponents of the bill — argue it is unconstitutional.