Representative Barney Frank said yesterday that ENDA legislation (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, prohibiting discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity) will be marked up in the Education and Labor Committee soon:
"It will be this week or next week."
He went on to say that a vote in the full House would happen soon.
Frank reiterated that he expected a floor vote to follow the expected committee passage in short order. "The speaker has promised that,'' Frank said. ''We will get this done fairly quickly."
This is good news. There are almost 200 sponsors and co-sponsors of the legislation in the House, so when Frank says
"We will get this done fairly quickly."
we can hope he knows that the votes are there for passage.
But what of the Senate? The place good legislation goes to die? Not so good news.
The committee in charge of the Senate's version of ENDA, S.1584, is the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. There are 23 members, 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans. Of these member, 12, a majority, are co-sponsors of the legislation. So getting the bill out of committee would seem to be non-problematic.
There are 44 current Senators who are sponsors or co-sponsors of the bill (Kennedy and Kirk are also list as sponsors), including Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Insofar as 60 votes are required to bring the legislation to a vote, 16 other Senators would have to be found to vote for cloture.
The 17 Democratic Senators who are not sponsors of the bill are pretty much the ones you'd expect with a few surprises:
- Max Baucus
- Evan Bayh
- Robert Byrd
- Tom Carper
- Kent Conrad
- Bryan Dorgan
- Kay Hagan
- Tim Johnson
- Blanche Lincoln
- Claire McCaskill
- Ben Nelson
- Bill Nelson
- Mark Pryor
- Harry Reid
- Jay Rockefeller
- John Tester
- Mark Warner
This ENDA spreadsheet lists 51 confirmed YES votes, including from the above list Baucus, Tester, McCaskill, Dorgan, Ben Nelson (!), Warner and Reid.
Without any further Republican support, 9 out of the remaining 10 would be needed to force cloture. This seems like a tall order. Scott Brown of Massachusetts doesn't seem at all supportive, but might be pressured by his constituents. The referenced spreadsheet suggests that Voinovich, Lugar and Murkowski are conceivable votes.
So getting 50 votes for passage would seem more than doable, but 60 a stretch. A diary from November suggests there are 56 votes to be had. I have seen no reference to talk about inserting ENDA legislation into some other 'must pass' legislation, such as with Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense Appropriations Act, thereby forcing an up-or-down vote. On the other hand, I don't know why it couldn't be done, if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi wanted it so.
So it's quite possible we will be seeing a repeat of the last time ENDA legislation was considered: passage in the House but failure to act in the Senate. And prospects for passage next year would seem even worse, with less Democrats in the Senate and the House, or even a possible Republican takeover of the House.
It would be nice to find any solid evidence to suggest otherwise, but I've been unable to do so.