This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
WASHINGTON - Even if Congress doles out another congressional seat for Utah, the state may have to endure an elongated legal challenge before it takes effect.
“I would be surprised if the people of Utah ever see this seat,” constitutional scholar Jonathon Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday about the bill that would give Utah and the District of Columbia new seats in Congress.
The Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill today, though it is unlikely it will have the lopsided 25-4 vote the legislation received in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday.
The legislation is primarily aimed at getting the Democratic-leaning District of Columbia its first full-voting member of Congress; that seat would be politically balanced with a likely Republican seat from GOP-dominated Utah.
But it has been labeled unconstitutional by several critics who contend that language in the Constitution says Congress shall be chosen by the “people of the several states,” and the district is not a state.
They also argue that creating a temporarily statewide seat for Utah, as the bill now says, would give Utahns more power than other Americans because the state's residents would have two members of Congress representing them when other Americans would have just one.
Rep. LaMar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, plans to seek an amendment today to get an expedited review of the legislation should it pass, a move that means a legal action would be immediately filed in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., and a decision could be appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Mr. Smith feels there's absolutely no reason to prolong a judicial resolution on an important issue like this,” GOP spokeswoman Beth McGinn said Wednesday.
Either way, it is anything but certain the legislation will even get to that point.
Smith says he is “troubled” by the legislation. “I believe [the bill] exceeds constitutional bounds,” he said.
Turley said passing the measure means ignoring the nation's founding document.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the former GOP chairman of the Judiciary panel, was “greatly disturbed” by the idea of an at-large seat for Utah and says voting for the bill means “sticking one's head in the sand” and ignoring reality.
Still, during the two-hour long hearing Wednesday, most of the panelists said the bill would pass a Constitutional test. Advocates of the bill say they have the votes to pass the bill in the House, though it is unclear how it would fare in the Senate.
Viet Dinh, a former assistant U.S. attorney general and an author of the USA PATRIOT Act, said the bill was sound. “I would not counsel this committee or this Congress to take a leap of faith,” he said.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said ultimately a court will decide whether Congress has the authority to grant the district and Utah seats and it is worth the battle to try. “The time for action has long passed,” he said.