Justice Official Reiterates Bush's Stance Against Voting Bill

Measure Violates Constitution, Committee Is Told

The Bush administration provided testimony about the D.C. voting-rights bill for the first time yesterday, with a Justice Department official saying that the measure is unconstitutional and that arguments to the contrary are "unpersuasive."

John P. Elwood, a deputy assistant attorney general in the department's Office of Legal Counsel, was invited to speak by the Senate Judiciary Committee in the latest in a series of congressional hearings on the D.C. vote bill. The measure was approved last month by the House.

The White House has threatened a veto if it passes the Senate. But supporters of the legislation are hopeful that Bush, who rarely uses his veto power, can be persuaded to hold off on killing the bill.

U.S. Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who chaired the hearing, said he invited Elwood because he wanted to "hear the nature of the department's objection" to the legislation.

"The important thing is, the Justice Department should be vigorously committing to defend this" if it becomes law, Feingold said. The department usually defends laws from court challenge. But Elwood said it's uncertain whether it would do so in this case.

The bill is a political compromise that expands the House of Representatives by two seats. One would go to the heavily Democratic District, and the other to the next state in line to expand its congressional delegation based on population. That state is currently Utah, a Republican bastion.

In his testimony, Elwood repeated the Bush administration's contention that the bill violates the constitutional requirement that House representatives come from states. In addition, he said, "the framers and their contemporaries clearly understood that the Constitution barred congressional representation for District residents."

For decades, Elwood said, Congress and the executive branch had said that the District could get voting representation in Congress only through a constitutional amendment or by becoming part of Maryland.

Some legal experts at the hearing challenged those arguments.

Richard P. Bress, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general -- the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court -- said that critics of the bill relied on historical "snippets" to prove that the Founding Fathers opposed giving the vote to D.C. residents.

"There's plenty among the snippets that cuts the other way," he said.

Patricia Wald, a former appellate judge, testified that Congress could bestow voting representation under the Constitution's "District clause," which gives the legislature sweeping power over the nation's capital.