Congress is being asked to celebrate the Feb. 12 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth and centennial of the founding of the NAACP in an unusual way: vote on a bill that could give Utah an extra House seat, along with one for the District of Columbia.
"We cannot think of a more appropriate way to celebrate these milestones than to grant the people of the District of Columbia the equal voting rights they have been denied for more than 200 years," wrote Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., Washington's nonvoting delegate in Congress.
She wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday to ask for a Feb. 12 vote on a bill to give the District of Columbia a House seat with full voting rights.
The House passed such a bill in 2007 that included, as a political counterweight to heavily Democratic D.C., also giving another House seat to heavily Republican Utah until redistricting for the 2012 election. If Utah would have had an extra 80 people in the 2000 Census, it would have won a fourth House seat. Instead, that last-available seat went to North Carolina.
While the bill passed the House last year, it attracted only 57 of the needed 60 votes in the Senate to end a filibuster against it. Seven Republicans who opposed the bill, however, were replaced by Democrats in elections last month.
"We believe that with an even larger Democratic majority here and in the Senate, and a party committed to this issue in its platform, the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act should be an easy, bipartisan vote in both the House and Senate," Norton wrote.
Norton said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, came up with the idea of holding that vote on Feb. 12, which is both the 200th birthday of Lincoln and the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Norton noted that President-elect Barack Obama co-sponsored the bill in the Senate last year and has been supportive in conversations with her of passing the bill next year.
Also to encourage early passage of the bill, the District of Columbia City Council last week sent Obama a letter asking him to use district license plates with the slogan "Taxation Without Representation" on his presidential limousine during his inaugural parade.
All of Utah's members of Congress voted for the bill last year — except Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who voted a neutral "present" on it. He said at the time that he supports Utah gaining the extra seat but voted "present" in protest of what he said was poor treatment of Utah as it sought amendments in the bill.
While Utah would likely win a fourth seat from population gains after the 2010 Census anyway, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said gaining it early would help the state with an extra vote and possibly provide it with even more seniority than would waiting until after the census.
E-mail: lee@desnews.com