The fourth-seat fiasco
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Friday, September 21, 2007
We don't like I-told-you-so's any more than you do, but the fact remains: We told you so.
In November 2005, we urged Utah officials to halt their quest to secure a fourth seat for Utah in the U.S. House of Representatives.
We said it smelled of backroom dealing, since Utah would get its additional, and certainly Republican, seat in a quid pro quo deal with the District of Columbia, which would get its first seat, and one that would doubtless go Democratic.
No one listened.
In December 2006, we compared supporters of the effort to Sisyphus, predicting they would "carry their bill to the top of Capitol Hill, only to see it roll down to the bottom."
Still, they persisted.
Then in March of this year, with the fourth-seat effort still powering on, we listed the reasons it was doomed to failure, concluding supporters were pursuing a fool's errand.
Not surprisingly, they ignored us.
Our relentless skepticism was finally validated on Tuesday, as the U.S. Senate fell three votes shy of awarding the Beehive State its hoped-for fourth seat. Not that Utah would have gotten the seat anyway, since the U.S. Constitution appears quite plainly to forbid the District of Columbia from having a voting representative in the House. People with lawsuits based on constitutional objections were hovering nearby, waiting to file them had the Senate votes been there.
But even the lawsuits would not have been needed, since President Bush had made it clear he would veto the legislation should it reach his desk.
We do not take any pleasure in having been correct. We would have loved to see Utah get its fourth seat -- one we deserved in 2002, but were denied based on the Census Bureau's wrongheaded method of counting members of states' military personnel and religious missionaries living outside a state's borders.
Getting the seat via judicial activism -- Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch hypocritcally suggested the U.S. Supreme Court should clear the way by contradicting the Constitution -- or by mutual back-scratching with the District of Columbia may have been convenient, but it doesn't comport with the intent of our founding document.
Until the Constitution is amended regarding the issue of the District of Columbia's congressional representation, we'll have to wait our turn and hope the Census Bureau has its act together when it conducts the 2010 count.
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