A reader sends along the following provocative email:

Among other things, I have appreciated the excellent coverage you have given to the pending bill that would give D.C. a representative in Congress. As I have been following the debate, however, I have been unable to find any discussion whatsoever of one of the odd quirks that will occur if the proposed bill passes. Interestingly, this bill has been touted for its partisan fairness, since it balances DC’s expected Democratic representative with an expected Republican representative from Utah. But in fact, there is an aspect of this that is not completely in political equipoise. That is because under federal law, see 3 U.S.C. sec. 3, the number of presidential electors that each state gets depends on the number of congressmen that the state has at the time that the new president would take office. Since Congress is sworn in before the president, that means that Utah would get an extra electoral vote in the 2008 elections. Yet DC would not get an equivalent extra electoral vote in the 2008 elections, as its number of electoral votes is fixed by the constitution.
For all practical purposes, then, the effect of this bill would be to give the Republican nominee for president an “extra” electoral vote in the 2008 election.
Obviously, in a close election this could affect the outcome. Whether or not that is a cause for concern for purely partisan reasons, or for more general reasons of partisan fairness, I offer no opinion. But if such a scenario came to pass, one wonders if congressional democrats could raise a viable challenge to the certification of Utah’s electoral votes, using as their ammunition the claim that the D.C. bill was unconstitutional. And in voting on such a challenge, one further wonders whether the D.C. representative would be allowed to vote (an issue that potentially raises some quite paradoxical possibilities). And if the congressional challenge failed, what would happen if the whole D.C. Representative Bill were later struck down by the federal courts? At the very least, the whole scenario raises complicated issues of law. At worst, it threatens a constitutional crisis that makes Bush v. Gore look like a walk in the park.
The question I had for you was whether you knew if these issues had been getting any coverage, anywhere, in the debate over the D.C. bill? I’ve been unable to find any discussion about this whatsoever, and I’m starting to wonder if Congress has even thought through this aspect of the bill. Indeed, I have not even seen clear evidence that Congress has been cognizant of the first step in this chain — that the effect of the bill is to give an extra Republican vote for president in 2008.

I haven’t been following this closely. Do others have an opinion on this?