4th seat for Utah survives challenges

A bill that would give Utah a fourth House seat overcame two key challenges to its constitutionality on Wednesday and inched closer to passage in both the Senate and the House.

The Senate struck down on a 62-36 vote a point of order by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., contending the bill is unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee also brushed aside similar arguments that the bill is unconstitutional and passed it on a 20-12 vote, sending it to the full House for consideration.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill by the end of this week, and the full House is expected to pass it next week.

The bill would permanently expand the number of U.S. House members from 435 to 437 for the 2010 election to give the heavily Democratic District of Columbia a long-sought U.S. House seat and temporarily give (until the next Census) heavily Republican Utah a fourth House seat as a political counterweight. Utah was in line for the next available House seat after the 2000 Census, missing one by just 80 people.

McCain argued that the Constitution limits House membership only to states, so giving D.C. a seat through a simple law is clearly and radically unconstitutional. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., the longest-serving member of Congress who is considered a constitutional expert, agreed while sometimes yelling and raising a fist while talking from his wheelchair.

"It is a dangerous course on which we embark. Simply passing a law to grant voting rights to an entity that is not a state is plainly circumventing the Constitution," Byrd said.

But Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., main sponsor of the bill, said another part of the Constitution gives Congress the power to "exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over D.C., which he said includes allowing its residents to have a voting member of the House.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a chief co-sponsor of the bill, said Congress once used that power to allow D.C. residents between 1790 and 1800 to vote for senators and House members in Virginia and Maryland, from which D.C. was extracted.

"That land was no more a state in 1790 than the district is today," Hatch said. He added that writers of the Constitution were alive at that time, and no one then raised any objection to allowing D.C. residents to vote then.