Scholar: Bill to give House seats to Utah, D.C. is unconstitutional

WASHINGTON — Advocates at a Senate hearing Tuesday defended a bill creating new House seats for Utah and the District of Columbia, arguing that adding representation for both is an urgent civil-rights issue.

But a constitutional-law scholar told lawmakers that the bill is the wrong way to do it.

"It is the equivalent of allowing Rosa Parks to move halfway to the front of the bus in the name of progress," Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, testified.

"I consider this act to be the most premeditated unconstitutional act by Congress in decades," he said.

The House passed a bill last month that would add two seats to the 435-seat House, giving one to Democratic-leaning D.C. and one to Republican-dominated Utah, which narrowly lost out on a fourth seat after the 2000 census.

Utah Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett are sponsoring the Senate version of the bill with Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The bill is a compromise designed to attract GOP support. District residents have long argued they deserve a voting member of Congress, while Utah leaders claim they were penalized in the last census when many young Mormons out of state on church missions were not counted.

But many Republicans — and the White House — still argue the bill is unconstitutional. The hearing mostly centered on whether the bill is the proper way to grant the district a vote.

Hatch and others argued that if Congress can tax district residents and grant them other rights, it can give them a full-fledged member of the House.

"They pay taxes, vote in presidential elections and serve in the military," Hatch said. "Yet more than half a million Americans do not have a voting representative in Congress."

District Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, emotionally recalled fighting for civil rights in the South.

"The denial of a vote to the residents who live in our capital, where black people are the majority, carries unintended messages around the world," Norton said.

The D.C./Utah bill "will relieve the Congress of the terrible racial burden that has been at the core of the denial of the rights of D.C. citizens," she said.

But Turley argued the country's early leaders debated the issue and deliberately made the district a neutral "non-state enclave" free of influence of any state and governed by all members of Congress.

To pass legal muster, he said Congress would need to amend the Constitution or return the district to Maryland.

"Despite the best of motivations, the bill ... would only serve to needlessly delay true reform for district residents," he said.