Jan 04, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) is expected to push for a Senate vote in 2008 on the same gay-only version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that the House of Representatives passed in 2007, a Kennedy spokesperson said this week.

Kennedy stated on the Senate floor on Nov. 8, one day after the House passed ENDA by a vote of 235 to 184, that he hoped the Senate would follow suit by passing the employment protection bill in the current Congress, which lasts through 2008.

But until this week, Kennedy’s office had not stated publicly where Kennedy stood on the demands by many gay and transgender organizations that Congress should withhold any action on ENDA unless it includes protection for transgender persons.

“Although Sen. Kennedy strongly supports protections against job discrimination for transgender workers, inaction won’t advance justice for anyone, and will just make it harder to pass any version of ENDA in 2009,” said Kennedy spokesperson Melissa Wagoner.

“We will most likely work to move the House-passed bill, rather than introducing a separate Senate bill,” Wagoner told the Blade by e-mail. “Because the same legislation must pass both the House and Senate, now that the House has acted, the only realistic way to get a bill to the president’s desk this Congress is to have the Senate pass the House bill.”

Asked if Kennedy thought ENDA could pass the Senate in an election year, Wagoner said, “Yes, if enough Republicans support the bill to give us a realistic chance of breaking a filibuster.”

Most political observers have predicted Republican senators opposing ENDA will stage a filibuster against the legislation, which requires 60 votes to break through a parliamentary move known as cloture. Kennedy and Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), who has joined Kennedy as a chief sponsor of ENDA, have said they were hopeful they could line up a bipartisan “super majority” of at least 60 senators to ensure the bill’s passage.

Jim Manley, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said this week that Reid strongly supports ENDA and favors holding a Senate vote on the measure in 2008. Manley said Reid would defer to Kennedy on the “strategy and timing” of such a vote.

House Democratic leaders, led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said they favored a trans-inclusive version of ENDA but determined there were not enough votes to pass it. Rather than wait one or more years before being able to line up the support to pass a trans-inclusive bill, Pelosi, joined by gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chose to strip the bill of its transgender provision to enable it to pass in 2007.

Frank introduced a separate bill banning job discrimination against transgender persons and Pelosi vowed to schedule a vote on that bill when enough support could be found to pass it.

The statement this week by Kennedy’s office that Kennedy plans to back a gay-only version of ENDA comes after news surfaced last month that a high-level official at the Human Rights Campaign suggested a vote on ENDA would not take place until 2009.

Trans rights activists picketed the HRC National Dinner in October. Meredith Bacon, president of the board of the National Center for Transgender Equality, recently published a blog entry denouncing HRC for its handling of the ENDA-trans dispute. (Blade file photo by Henry Linser)

Holding off until ’09?

News of the HRC official’s comment came in a memo that was leaked to transgender blogger Marti Abernathey, who published it on her Transadvocate blog on Dec. 4.

The five-page internal memo, written by HRC national field director Marty Rouse, proposed that HRC adopt a series of actions and policy initiatives to “win back” the confidence of the transgender community. Rouse acknowledged in his memo that HRC lost the confidence of transgender leaders and that community’s rank-and-file members when HRC changed its position of unequivocally opposing a gay-only version of ENDA to one of “not opposing” such a measure.

HRC on Nov. 6 announced it would support the gay-only version after the influential Leadership Conference on Civil Rights came out in support of the gay-only measure. The Leadership Conference, considered the nation’s most respected civil rights organization, said it favored transgender protections but it, too, determined there weren’t enough votes to pass a trans-inclusive bill.

Rouse’s memo calls for HRC to redouble its efforts to build support for a trans-inclusive version of ENDA by providing logistical and financial support for transgender ...