Democracy’s hometown

FOR EVERY REASON THOSE OF US outside the Beltway have to complain about Washington -- and we have many -- Washingtonians can do us one better. Since the adoption of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution in 1961, the almost 600,000 residents of the District of Columbia have been allowed to vote for

president, but otherwise they have no say in the federal government that is their hometown’s biggest tourist attraction.

Residents of the nation’s capital would finally get a vote in Congress under the D.C. Fair and Equal House Voting Rights Act proposed by Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democrat who serves as the district’s nonvoting “delegate” in the House of Representatives, and Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

The selling point of the bill is that it deals only with representation in the House -- historically the “people’s chamber” -- and not with the more problematic question of whether the district should become a state with two votes in the Senate. It’s not clear that D.C. is any more deserving of statehood than other cities of roughly similar size -- say, Sacramento -- and in fact what makes the district distinctive is that it is not a state. A better way to give D.C. residents a voice in the Senate might be to cede most of the district’s neighborhoods to Maryland or Virginia.

But that’s an issue for another day. Norton is pragmatically supporting the House-only option, which some advocates of D.C. voting rights consider half a loaf. The real problem with the bill, however, is that it also bakes a little bread for Utah, which would get a fourth House member because it came the closest of any state to achieving an additional seat in the 2000 census. Not so coincidentally, that additional Utah representative -- who would be elected statewide until after the 2010 census -- probably would be a Republican, balancing the Democrat who surely would be elected to represent D.C.

Partisan horse-trading is a venerable part of the legislative process, of course, but the Utah add-on is an unseemly gimmick in a bill designed to redress a long-standing grievance. It would be cleaner if the House simply added a seat for D.C. and delayed the expansion of Utah’s delegation until after the next census in 2010. That said, the special status for Utah would end in a few years. Meanwhile, residents of the District of Columbia who pay taxes and send their sons and daughters to war would finally have not just a voice but also a vote on Capitol Hill. That is the overriding objective, and it’s long overdue.