Under the bill, Utah would get one more House member, most likely a Republican, while the district would get one voting member, most likely a Democrat, and the political balance in the new 437-member House wouldn't change.

Utah got a raw deal in not receiving a fourth seat in 2001, even though Utah had 16,000 LDS missionaries out of state who weren't counted in the Census and Utah lost out to North Carolina by 900 residents, Hatch said.

If embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were to step down, Hatch said he would not take any offer to become Bush's attorney general. "He's not going to ask me, because (Alberto) Gonzales is not going to leave," Hatch added.

While the firing of eight states' assistant attorneys general was "muffed" up and down the line by inexperienced Justice Department staffers, "there is not one iota" of evidence that Gonzales did anything wrong in firing the prosecutors, Hatch said.

The Utah senator also advocated boosting pay for federal judges by 50 percent, because he said that otherwise the federal bench could be inhabited by "bureaucrats" who would take the job for the $165,000 salary. "That would be very, very dangerous" for the U.S. justice system, he said.

As for the war in Iraq, Hatch contended that the surge is working, but more time is needed to work out the political problems in the Iraqi government. "We are winning the military war," he said. "There is some indication that we are making lots of dents in al-Qaida."

Staying in Iraq "is a price we have to pay," or Iran could well take over Iraq, and that would be greatly detrimental to the Middle East and the world, Hatch maintained.

---

E-mail: bbjr@desnews.com