Shurtleff - who will be joined by Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, to lobby for the measure before the Senate Judiciary Committee - says both the District of Columbia and Utah suffer from under-representation, according to Shurtleff's prepared testimony. The district's "longstanding wrong" needs to be fixed as does the injustice done to Utah when it missed out on a fourth congressional seat after the 2000 Census, Shurtleff's testimony says.

"History is full of unusual alliances forged in service of the public good," Shurtleff says. "Our own alliance is no exception, as we come together to support expanding American democracy to better represent our two respective populations."

The measure is mainly geared to give the District of Columbia's nearly 600,000 residents a full-voting member of Congress and that seat, if approved, likely would go to a Democrat. Utah, a Republican haven, was paired with the district seat to achieve a political balance.

The bill passed the House in April by a 241-177 vote. Senate Judiciary Committee members plan to take up constitutional questions during today's hearing, which features a panel of experts split on whether the bill is constitutional.

Shurtleff, like other supporters of the measure, argues that a section of the U.S. Constitution known as the District Clause, giving Congress broad authority over the federal city, allows Congress to create a member for residents there.

"The district's local budget and laws are subject to congressional approval," Shurtleff says, according to prepared remarks. "Its residents pay federal income taxes, go to war and serve on federal juries. Yet it has had no voting representation in Congress for more than 200 years and remains the only democratic capital in the world with no voice in the national legislature."

Likewise, he says, Utah was cheated in the last reapportionment when the Census Bureau didn't count nearly 11,000 Utahns serving missions abroad for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but did count some 18,360 North Carolina residents serving in the military overseas.

In addition to Shurtleff, Cannon and the district's nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the committee will hear testimony by a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a representative of the Department of Justice, a Harvard Law School professor and a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

tburr@sltrib.com