WASHINGTON — For decades, efforts to give the District of Columbia a voting representative in Congress have run into a brick wall. Constitutional amendments failed to win the states' support. Ad campaigns about "taxation without representation" did not help the cause.
Now, unexpected political forces are aligning behind a plan to give the district a House vote -- along with a new seat in Congress for Utah -- when lawmakers return for their lame-duck session in early December.
"This is closest we've come in at least 30 years," said Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, an umbrella lobbying group. "The stars are aligned on this."
The unlikely union of the District of Columbia and Utah is the brainchild of Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). Davis, who represents the district's Virginia suburbs, said he offered his proposal to "take the partisanship out of this."
Efforts to empower D.C. residents in the past always came up against the partisan reality that Republicans were unlikely to vote for a safe Democratic seat for the district, a Democratic stronghold with a 57% African American population.
The problem for Utah is that the 2000 census left it 857 residents short of getting a fourth member of Congress -- a decision the state protested to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying the census failed to count the thousands of Mormons serving abroad as missionaries. Utah lost the case.
For the district, not being declared a state by the founding fathers means the city's 515,000 residents pay federal taxes, cast votes in presidential elections and serve in the military without having a voting member in either the House or the Senate. The district does have a nonvoting at-large representative, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton.
By balancing the district with reliably Republican Utah, Davis won bipartisan approval in May by the Government Reform Committee for his bill, which would raise the total number of House members to 437.
In the House Judiciary Committee, legal experts questioned the legitimacy of giving Utah an at-large seat, which was the plan at the time because Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. balked at enacting a redistricting plan to carve out a fourth district.
But after Democrats swept to power in the midterm election, some officials in Utah worried about their cause in the new Congress. So the governor called the Legislature into special session, beginning next week, to approve a four-district map.
