http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/05/18/Pelosi_Talks_DADT_ENDA/
By
Kerry Eleveld
As LGBT activists prepared to voice their support Tuesday for taking
immediate legislative action on employment discrimination protections,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi convened a conference call Monday afternoon
with advocacy organizations to discuss pending LGBT legislation.
The
Speaker relayed different avenues to passing both “don’t ask, don’t
tell” repeal and the Employment Nondiscrimination Act this year and
solicited feedback from advocates, according to two participants of the
call.
“I have no intention of losing on either of these,” Pelosi
said, according to one person on the call who spoke on the condition of
anonymity.
A second participant said the Speaker discussed the
timing of taking a vote on ENDA relative to a DADT repeal vote, which is
automatically built into the calendar for next week based on the fact
that the House is scheduled to consider the National Defense
Authorization Act that week. A DADT repeal measure is likely to be
proposed on the House floor as an amendment to the NDAA.
The
second source said the Speaker went through the chronology of the
calendar and the fact that taking a vote on ENDA and DADT in the same
week is literally impossible from a scheduling standpoint. Pelosi also
said she thought ENDA would have a much better likelihood of passing if
DADT were successfully ushered through first.
The National Gay
and Lesbian Task Force planned to hold a press conference in Washington,
D.C. Tuesday urging a vote on ENDA. In addition, Get Equal, a new LGBT
direct action organization, planned a demonstration outside of Pelosi’s
San Francisco district office Tuesday afternoon.
The
organization circulated a flier reading, “If we don't get ENDA through
the House now, it will DIE. Not just for this year -- but probably for
many years. We have the votes to pass ENDA in the House. Speaker Pelosi
-- Don't delay, schedule this vote now!”
While Capitol Hill
insiders such as Rep. Tammy Baldwin have agreed that the votes to pass
ENDA do exist, they continue to worry about the strong possibility that
Republicans will attempt to add an amendment known as a “motion to
recommit in order to kill the bill or irrevocably alter it.
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/05/13/GOP_Tricks_Worry_Dems_on_ENDA/
Reps. Barney Frank, Jared Polis, Baldwin and House Majority Whip Jim
Clyburn have been conducting vote counts on both the broader legislation
and the motion to recommit. But some Hill observers think the motion to
recommit could go beyond a simple effort to strip out gender identity
protections to being something more hostile, more depraved in the way it
targets certain segments of the transgender community. At the same
time, advocates decline to guess at the language publicly for fear that
it might actually be adopted by the right and used against them.
But
there is no way to know if a motion to recommit will be offered or what
the nature of such a motion would be until the legislation comes to a
vote.
On the call, the Speaker suggested that the motion to
recommit could be harsher than activists originally anticipated, and
said that while she believed ENDA could pass if it were put to vote
right now, she was concerned that progressive Democrats could not
overcome a narrowly targeted motion to recommit.
However, the
second source added that Pelosi said she did not intend to leave this
Congress without putting ENDA to a vote in the House. “It’s not one or
the other,” the source recalled Pelosi saying in reference to ENDA and
DADT.
If ENDA is not called to vote this week and the House
considers DADT next week, any vote on employment protections legislation
would be pushed back at least into the second week of June, after
lawmakers return from a weeklong recess during the first week. ENDA has
yet to be voted on in committee, but LGBT advocates anticipate that the
House vote will commence shortly after committee passage.
The
call included several Pelosi aides and representatives from a mix of DC-
and California-based organizations: the Human Rights Campaign, the
National Center for Transgender Equality, the National Center for
Lesbian Rights, Equality California, the Transgender Law Center, and the
Equality Federation.
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