Prescription for an Ailing ENDA
By Bil Browning
http://advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/01/05/Prescription_for_an_ailing_ENDA/COMMENTARY: When a version of the long-standing federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act failed to move out of a House committee last year (in fact it has yet to pass), many of the bill's proponents grew worried. But after The Hill reported in December that Speaker Nancy Pelosi privately assured skittish first-term Democrats that the House wouldn't bring controversial bills to the floor this year unless the Senate acted first, worry turned into panic. Is ENDA dead for this congressional session? Will gender identity protections be cut from the bill again, as they were in 2007? Are our leaders selling us out?
The answers are far from simple. But ENDA isn't dead. Not yet. In my recent interviews for The Bilerico Project, Colorado representative Jared Polis and Wisconsin representative Tammy Baldwin confirmed that ENDA's delay was attributable to the health care reform debate and that later this month the legislation will undergo markup (the process where a committee makes changes to existing bill language before voting on whether to send to the floor for final approval). Both said they'd spoken with Speaker Pelosi and Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller and were confident that the bill would receive a vote. Polis and Baldwin further asserted that removing gender identity language from the bill wasn't on the table.
