hunter of justice

Whenda ENDA, continued

I want to elaborate on my earlier post about ENDA, which some persons have misread, no doubt because my language was not clear enough.

I did NOT mean to break any news or to cause any freak-outs about the work that lies ahead in securing an inclusive ENDA.  Some readers took my reference to "issues such as restrooms" as a message that nefarious negotiations are going on or that trans inclusion is at risk.  This reaction tells me that I probably stumbled into a hornet's nest that I did not anticipate. It is possible that none of the language of ENDA as introduced will change at all.  That, however, would make it a quite unusual bill.

And as I said in my original post, it should come as no surprise - given the ENDA mess two years ago - that there would be pushback from some members of Congress on trans inclusion.  Especially because lawyers have been wrestling with restroom cases for years, I know that restroom access for employees is definitely a context where wrangling over details should be expected.  Indeed, it would be surprising if arguments over this issue did not occur.

As I also tried to describe earlier, the phase of the legislative process that ENDA has now reached is much more important than it may appear. We are at the point when the bill's original language is reviewed with a fine tooth comb, not just for the next step - the committee vote - but for the vote in the full House as well. (And then, of course, the Senate will weigh in.) So every issue, from the technical to the central, can come up during this period.  There is nothing unique to ENDA in this - it happens with every bill that is moving forward to a committee vote.

All that said, I AM worried that the lgbt community is not worried enough about ENDA.  Because of excellent work by advocates, researchers and Congressional staff, the parts of the process that are in public view - like the hearings - have been sailing along. The first predictions about the timing of floor votes were overly optimistic.  Now a tougher reality has set in.

My goal in posting on this topic is to alert people that the fight for ENDA is far from over. Winning its passage should be, imho, the top priority for 2010.

Could Stupak-Pitts have a silver lining?

For years I never worried much about an outright reversal of Roe v. Wade, because I thought that the political instincts of conservative Justices would cause them to blink before they took that ultimate step, even if they had the five votes to do it.  If the right to choose were ever actually taken away from American women, the mostly dormant, somewhat ambivalent pro-choice majority would rise like a phoenix and exact revenge.  Goodbye to suburban mom Republican votes. And, although bad decisions have chipped away at it, Roe is still good law, at least formally.

More recently, I'm less certain about this underlying political calculation. If each state could decide whether to allow or prohibit abortion, many would opt for pro-choice laws much as they have today, and many women living in states where abortion was illegal would be able to travel to a location where they could obtain the procedure. 

Of course, it is also true that many would not be able to afford the time, the travel and the procedure. But those are only the poor women. My fear, to be blunt, is that if middle-class women basically retained the option to have an abortion, either formally through their state's law or informally through their own economic capacity, there would be no political price to pay for retracting the federal constitutional right entirely. And sooner or later, conservatives would figure that out.

Now Priscilla Smith, a savvy analyst of reproductive rights issues, has posted an intriguing essay at Balkinization in which she argues that the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health reform bill might reverse this trend toward fragmentation along economic lines by putting the majority of women in the same sinking boat. Following are excerpts:

From a public relations viewpoint, it is possible that by extending the double standard that already exists for poor women’s health care to middle class women, the inequality and injustice of the restriction on funding for poor women will come into greater focus for the more fortunate. The sting of the public funding ban is much greater for poor women than it will likely prove for middle and certainly upper class women. Studies have shown that approximately one-fifth to one-third of Medicaid-eligible women who become pregnant and would have obtained an abortion are forced to carry their pregnancies to term because they cannot raise the necessary funds. Still, despite significant success in state courts which have repeatedly pointed to the harmful and discriminatory nature of the bans, the political will has not existed to change the policy on the federal level. If middle and upper class women feel the sting of discrimination that many poor women have already felt -- when the men in their lives get their Viagra prescriptions filled but they are forced to pay out of pocket for their abortions – perhaps a new understanding of inequality and what poor women have gone through will gain hold. ...

Perhaps more importantly, Stupak-Pitts could change the landscape against which an equal protection claim was heard, perhaps leading to a renewed challenge to the Hyde Amendment itself:

• First, it magnifies the equal protection violation caused by the Hyde Amendment and prevents health care coverage of one health care service, abortion, that is needed only by women, not only in the “exchange,” but by extension ..., in the private market itself, while allowing health care coverage of lots of stuff that men need, especially treatments for erectile dysfunction which anyone watching television or videos on the internet knows is a HUGE problem out there;

• Second, equal protection challenges to abortion restrictions have gained support over the last ten years or so...

• Third, remember that the U.S. Supreme Court in Harris v. McRae 448 U.S. 297 (1980) (upholding ban on federal funding for abortions in the Medicaid program), did not consider a sex discrimination claim so the field is open.

• Fourth, in Harris the Court decided was focused on a privacy claim and found that the Hyde Amendment didn’t infringe the right to obtain an abortion at all; it wasn’t the funding ban that made it harder for women to obtain abortions, it was their indigency that was too blame. As crazy as that argument might sound, it would be irrelevant in a sex discrimination claim...

Whenda ENDA?

The joint statement issued last week by all the major lgbt rights organizations designed to generate alarm about the delay in ENDA should be heeded. ENDA is over for 2009. Why? Not because members of Congress are lazy or dismissive, but because the reality of tough issues is hitting the fan.

The next step in the process of enactment is for the House Ed and Labor Committee, which held a hearing on ENDA in September, to go through its "mark-up" process. This means that the existing bill language will be changed into the final form that will go to the House floor; the committee will pass the bill in its revised form. Although the bill can't go to the House floor for a vote until after the committee votes, the revisions made in the mark-up process are not just those needed to get a majority vote in committee (House Ed and Labor is probably the farthest left committee in Congress); they embody the adjustments and deals needed to insure the bill's passage in the full House.

It should come as no surprise that the bill's provision of job protection for transgender persons, which likely would not have survived a Republican amendment to strike two years ago, is proving to be a potentially tough sell. Advocates are tweaking and talking, trying to achieve wording on issues such as restroom use that can stand up under the Republican ugliness that will kick into high gear when a floor vote is scheduled.  This is one reason why referenda votes within the last year in Kalamazoo and Gainesville were so important - in both cases, conservatives sought a popular repeal of a local anti-discrimination law covering both sex/o and GI by singling out trans people for attack.  In both cities, voters reaffirmed the anti-discrimination laws. You can bet that advocates on Capitol Hill will be mentioning Kalamazoo and Gainesville every chance they get.

In addition to trans issues, there are also some fairly technical legal questions regarding the bill as well, for which clarifying language may be added.

The goal now is to do whatever rewriting is necessary to move the bill as early as possible in 2010. The Senate will take up the version of the bill that the House passes. In the Senate, there could well be more debates over additional amendments, although ideally the deals made now will be sufficient for both chambers.

With a lot of work and a little luck, there could be a White House signing in the spring.

Why the Stupak amendment is unconstitutional

By Cardozo Law Professor Marci Hamilton, published in Writ:

...Although many have attacked the Amendment as a policy matter, the constitutional arguments against it have been underplayed. That is a shame, because under any reasonable reading of the Constitution, the Stupak Amendment is unconstitutional: Indeed, it violates three different constitutional principles.

How the Stupak Amendment Violates The Establishment Clause

First, the Amendment violates the Constitution's separation of church and state. The anti-abortion movement is plainly religious in motivation, and its lobbyists and spokespersons represent religious groups, as is illustrated by the fact that the most visible lobbyists in the Stupak Amendment's favor have been the Catholic Bishops. This is a brazen and frank attempt to impose a minority's religious worldview on the entirety of American healthcare. (A majority of Americans have favored a woman's right to choose for many years.) There is no secular purpose for the extension of the Hyde Amendment to all private health insurance plans as well. Accordingly, whatever secular purpose might be devised by those trying to defend the Stupak Amendment in court would be a sham purpose, intended to cover the frankly religious pandering the Amendment represents.

One of the clearest Establishment Clause principles is that the government may not impose a certain group's religious beliefs on those with different beliefs. The principle was articulated by the framer of the First Amendment, James Madison, in his important work "Memorial and Remonstrance," and it has been a mainstay of Establishment Clause doctrine. The Stupak Amendment violates this principle by imposing on the entire country a religious worldview that millions of Americans do not share. Moreover, this imposition of religious belief in the private sphere is in the context of healthcare, which every American needs.

How the Stupak Amendment Violates The Equal Protection Clause

The Stupak Amendment also discriminates on the basis of gender. Only women have to deal with the difficult question of abortion. Conspicuously missing are parallel exemptions barring funding for Viagra, or for, say, prostate surgery treatments, which can leave a man sterile and therefore operate as a birth control measure.

In addition, the exemption (the purpose of which is, again, obviously a religious one) does not serve any medical end, when serving medical ends is presumably the overall and most important purpose of the Health Care Reform Act. If health is truly to be served, then refusing to permit women to obtain even private health insurance that covers unplanned pregnancies, or pregnancies involving fetuses with fatal abnormalities, is not just discriminatory, but outright irrational.

How the Stupak Amendment Violates Substantive Due Process and Privacy Rights

Finally, the Stupak Amendment attempts to curtail -- across the board – the privacy rights that Roe v. Wade and its progeny secured for women. While other restrictions on abortion (including the Hyde Amendment) have been upheld by the Supreme Court, this is a far more expansive and repressive move against women, and it surely institutes an undue burden on a woman's right to obtain an abortion in consultation with her doctor. Although it is not clear precisely where the boundary line lies, it is very clear that this move transgresses any reasonable interpretation of the line the Court's cases draw.

The Stupak Amendment is also a harbinger of future constitutional violations, for it erects a slippery slope of top-down control of the spectrum of healthcare options. Abortion is surely just the first foray of the religious lobbyists' battle to take away Americans' right to choose among the full panoply of healthcare options. Attempts to control and halt the funding of both emergency and ordinary contraception surely are not far behind, for such attempts are part of the very same politico-religious platform that includes the Stupak Amendment. There is no more obvious violation of Griswold v. Connecticut – which established that laws prohibiting contraception are unconstitutional under the Court's right-of-privacy doctrine -- than for the federal government to reduce the affordability and, therefore, the availability of contraceptives for all Americans.

Conservative Senators who are pandering to religious interests (and/or simply imposing their own religious beliefs on the country) have been quoted recently as saying that they will not permit the Health Care Reform Act to backtrack on abortion issues. But backtracking is a misleading description of what the religious lobbyists are seeking. The truth, instead, is that the Stupak Amendment is a far reach beyond the already repressive Hyde Amendment, and that the advent of the federalization of healthcare is giving anti-abortion religious believers a one-stop lobbying opportunity on an issue that they were previously having to address on a state-by-state basis.

In sum, if the millions of Americans who believe in choice do not act quickly and in a concerted fashion, then we will have a historic rollback of women's liberties. That would be a true disaster, for not only is the Stupak Amendment repressive and regressive, but it also violates constitutional rights.

Who's on first? Congress and states reshuffle lgbt issues - Updated

In  last week's election, Maine, New Jersey and Virginia delivered a triple whammy to progressives.  Although it is a mistake to treat these results as a herald of conservative resurgence - polls also show strong support for a public option in health reform, for example - it is nonetheless silly to deny that winning the elections in those three states (or two, or one) would have been a lot better than losing all of them. Instead, marriage bit the dust in yet another ballot contest; and Dems in Congress are spooked by the loss of the two governorships, no matter how many op-eds proclaim that the results were driven by local issues.

So what happens as a result?  As one of the most vulnerable and expendable of Dem priorities, lgbt issues look considerably shakier than they did two weeks ago.

In Congress, Rep. Barney Frank - who, whatever his faults, often speaks realpolitik to wishful thinking - now says that ENDA will likely get to the House floor in February.  This is not what advocates were thinking two weeks ago, when the sense was that mark-up in the House, followed by a floor vote, could happen before Thanksgiving, certainly before Christmas.  Instead, Barney is predicting that domestic partner benefits for federal employees is likely to jump the queue, moving ahead of ENDA in the sequence of lgbt rights legislation. Okay, federal employee benefits is an important issue. But ENDA is the bill that will shift workplace dynamics and help achieve basic material equality for every lgbt person in the nation who is employed. 

The difference between the two? ENDA includes transgender persons; partner benefits does not implicate that issue. In other words, this is ugly. And dangerous. It is ESSENTIAL that both the House and the Senate pass ENDA before the 2010 election season begins in a few months, around spring break in academic-speak. (In some, mostly Beltway, politics-obsessed quarters, it began on November 5, 2008.)

(UPDATE 11/17 - The mark-up in the House committee on the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act will be next Wednesday, November 18. You can watch it here. The mark-up on ENDA was originally set for the 18th, but has been postponed, with no new date set.)

And in the states -

In New Jersey, the plan was always that the lame duck legislative session would enact a marriage law, regardless of who won the governor's race. That is still the plan, but it looks less like a lock than it once did.  Soon to be ex-Governor Jon Corzine will sign a marriage law if it gets to him in the two months remaining in his term. After that, incoming Governor Chris Christie has vowed to veto such a bill. Although the top job changed hands, there was essentially no change in the party breakdown in the legislature. So will the deal to pass a new marriage bill hold, or will the Maine vote scare off enough legislators to delay any possibility in NJ for another four years? Apparently, there is little doubt that a marriage bill would make it through the state house, but the state senate vote is likely to be a squeaker.

And New York ...What can I say -- New York's state legislature has been dysfunctional for so long that even the smallest sign of adulthood looks like up from here. Governor David Paterson, who is as strong a supporter of marriage equality as any non-gay politician anywhere, has apparently struck a deal with state senate leaders to guarantee that there will be vote on the issue before Christmas. (See Gay City News for a fascinating account of the machinations.) Which side will win this vote is anybody's guess.

If we get to New Year's Day 2010 and neither New York nor New Jersey has legalized gay marriage, that campaign will be hitting its lavender ceiling much sooner than the advocacy groups expected.

Stupak amendment would result in massive cut in abortion access

The Stupak amendment to the House health reform bill, adopted by a 240 to 194 vote, does not explicitly bar any insurance plan from covering abortion, yet it achieves that effect by barring any plan that accepts federal subsidy dollars at all from including abortion coverage from the insurance exchange through which plans will be sold.  Few, if any, insurance plans will have a body of enrollees that does not include at least some receiving premium subsidies. The abortion access issue had been building for months, and finally exploded as a floor vote became imminent. (See my first post from July here; additional background here, here, and here.)  The Kaiser Family Foundation has posted helpful Qs and As. Following is an analysis of the final amendment by Jessica Arons, from Wonk Room:

Here’s what the Stupak Amendment does:

1. It effectively bans coverage for most abortions from all public and private health plans in the Exchange: In addition to prohibiting direct government funding for abortion, it also prohibits public money from being spent on any plan that covers abortion even if paid for entirely with private premiums. Therefore, no plan that covers abortion services can operate in the Exchange unless its subscribers can afford to pay 100% of their premiums with no assistance from government “affordability credits.” As the vast majority of Americans in the Exchange will need to use some of these credits, it is highly unlikely any plan will want to offer abortion coverage (unless they decide to use it as a convenient proxy to discriminate against low- and moderate-income Americans who tend to have more health care needs and incur higher costs).

2. It includes only extremely narrow exceptions: Plans in the Exchange can only cover abortions in the case of rape or incest or “where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death.” Given insurance companies’ dexterity in denying claims, we can predict what they’ll do with that language. Cases that are excluded: where the health but not the life of the woman is threatened by the pregnancy, severe fetal abnormalities, mental illness or anguish that will lead to suicide or self-harm, and the numerous other reasons women need to have an abortion.

3. It allows for a useless abortion “rider”: Stupak and his allies claim his Amendment doesn’t ban abortion from the Exchange because it allows plans to offer and women to purchase extra, stand-alone insurance known as a rider to cover abortion services. Hopefully the irony of this is immediately apparent: Stupak wants women to plan for a completely unexpected event.

4. It allows for discrimination against abortion providers: Previously, the health care bill included an evenhanded provision that prohibited discrimination against any health care provider or facility “because of its willingness or unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.” Now, it only protects those who are unwilling to provide such services.

One in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. Eighty-seven percent of employer plans offer abortion coverage. None of that will matter if the Senate takes its cues from the House. In every other way, this bill will expand access to health care. But for millions of women, they are about to lose coverage they currently have and often need.

ENDA in the Senate: how the hearing went

Bottom line: the hearing on S. 1584, the Senate side version of ENDA, was smooth sailing. Both this and the House committee hearing were probably more theater than anything else.  Apparently, theater on this topic is not terribly appealing to members of Congress, since only three Senators (committee chair Harkin plus lead sponsor Merkley and Franken) stayed for the full hearing; only one additional Senator (Bennet) attended for part of it. On the House side, most Dems and even a couple of Republicans put in an appearance. Attendance is irrelevant to the end result, though - the hearing stage is now completed, and the committees in both chambers can move to mark-up, hopefully this month.

One difference in the dynamic of the hearing was that the attention paid to the two Republican witnesses - a management side lawyer and a religious broadcaster - was the opposite of what happened in the House hearing.  There, committee members seemed interested only in particular points of employment law that arguably could be clarified.  In the Senate, those issues were largely ignored, and instead the religious broadcaster drew a number of questions.

You can watch the hearing and read copies of the testimony here.

New proposal attempts to thread abortion needle in health reform

Anti-abortion House Dems, whose number is large enough to defeat health reform, have balked at the compromise worked out earlier to avoid the use of federal funds for abortion and are insisting on additional conditions. From the NY Times:

Under the House bill, health plans are neither required nor forbidden to cover abortions. Under [Rep. Brad] Ellsworth’s proposal, if the public plan decides to cover abortion, it would have to hire private contractors to handle money that might be used for that purpose.

Supporters of abortion rights, like the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the proposed restrictions went too far. Laurie Rubiner, vice president of Planned Parenthood, said Mr. Ellsworth’s proposal would “tip the balance away from women’s access to reproductive health care. Abortion should not be treated any differently from any other medical benefit or procedure,” Ms. Rubiner said. “It is our hope and expectation that the secretary would decide to include coverage of abortion in the public option.” [The bill calls for the Secretary of HHS to decide the criteria for benefits.]

On the other hand, Liz Farrar, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ellsworth, said, “We think the public option will become the pro-life option.”

The bill stipulates that in every part of the country, there must be at least one insurance plan that provides coverage of abortions and at least one that does not.

Douglas D. Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Mr. Ellsworth’s proposal was “a phony compromise. It serves no purpose except to assist Speaker Pelosi in peeling votes away from an amendment that would flatly prohibit the public plan from paying for elective abortions,” Mr. Johnson said. That amendment was offered by Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Ellsworth’s proposal authorized “a money-laundering scheme under which the health secretary would hire an agent to pay abortion providers.”

The Congressional Research Service said recently that money received by the government insurance plan, including premiums, “may be classified as federal funds or government funds.” But in a memorandum analyzing the House bill, Prof. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard took issue with that conclusion, which he described as “an exercise in sophistry.” Under the House bill, he said, abortion services could be financed “only by special private premiums that are segregated” from other money. Thus, he concluded, the House bill, “as it currently stands, does not authorize governmental funding of abortion.”

ENDA chugging along

Both publicly and behind the scenes, things are moving on ENDA.

Tomorrow at 10 a.m., the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will conduct a hearing on this year's (trans inclusive) version of ENDA. You can watch it here; Beltway denizens can show up in person at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 430.

The Republican witnesses in the Senate will be the same two who testified on the House side: management side lawyer Camille Olson and Religious Broadcasters Association official Craig Parshall.  Representing the Obama administration will be Tom Perez, the head of DoJ's Civil Rights Division.  Other Dem witnesses will be Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, University of Colorado Law Professor Helen Norton, a Nike Corporation respresentative, and a Massachusetts police officer.

Behind the scenes, House members are hoping to schedule a mark-up (a session during which Education and Labor Committee members will offer amendments to the bill) soon. At that point, there will be a "chairman's mark" that will include any modifications that the sponsors wish to make before the bill moves to the House floor.  The chairman's mark effectively substitutes for the version of the bill as originally introduced. The floor vote on ENDA in the House will probably occur about a week after the mark-up.

Split on abortion threatens health reform

CQ reports on an abortion impasse in the House that will hit the wall when the health reform bill goes to the floor. Anti-choice Dems are insisting that there be no allowance of abortion services in any plan to be offered in insurance exchanges, a position that would effectively preclude coverage of abortion for millions of women.

A showdown is shaping up among Democrats as abortion foes press House leaders to change the health care bill to explicitly ban abortion funding, or at least permit a floor vote on the issue. The effort led by Bart Stupak of Michigan and Daniel Lipinski of Illinois could have far-reaching implications for the fate of the legislation when the House takes up the health care overhaul late next week.

Stupak, who has been at the forefront of a group of several dozen anti-abortion Democratic dissidents, said he would likely vote against a rule providing for floor action on the health care overhaul bill if party leaders do not come his way. “I’ve got to have somewhere to responsibly express my opinion and that of my district,” Stupak said.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland points to the abortion disagreement as perhaps the most important unresolved issue as he prepares to move the measure to the floor. Stupak said he would look for ways to work with Republicans, if necessary, and moderate senators including Bob Casey of Pennsylvania to override the decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., to omit an outright ban on abortion funding from the legislation she unveiled Thursday.

The anti-abortion Democrats want to win language that would essentially extend the existing abortion funding ban known as the “Hyde amendment” to the new and expanded programs that would be created by the health care overhaul. Mindful that abortion is a politically divisive issue within her caucus, Pelosi and her leadership team have sought to promote a compromise, but the anti-abortion Democrats consider it to be too weak.

The compromise language is similar to current restrictions on the use of federal Medicaid funds. The provision would ensure that federal dollars are kept in separate accounts when they flow into health insurance plans, and that federal accounts could not be used to fund an abortion.

UPDATE: Hate crimes bill passes Senate, heads to POTUS

The final Senate vote on the hate crimes bill is expected to occur this afternoon. The hate crimes language is a provision of the Department of Defense Authorization Conference Report. A cloture petition was filed last night, and the vote on cloture will be this morning. It is likely that debate on the bill will follow the cloture vote, and the final Senate vote on adoption of the Report will occur in the afternoon.

UPDATE: The Senate passed the bill late this afternoon, including the hate crimes provision, by a vote of 68 to 29.  It now goes to the White House for the President's signature.  It is the first federal law to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

According to HRC's summary:

Under the legislation, federal prosecutors could step in to try violent
hate-crime cases if local authorities cannot or will not secure an
appropriate conviction. It also opens up federal funding for law enforcement
to handle the typically high cost of investigation and judicial proceedings
in such cases, and would make grants available for training and prevention
programs at the local level.

Wondering what happened to the hate crimes bill?

According to an update from HRC Backstory, it could be law as early as next week -

Earlier this evening [Oct. 6], the U.S. House defeated a Republican motion to instruct conferees seeking to strip the hate crimes provision from the Defense Authorization bill to which it is attached.  The vote was 178 to 234.  You may recall that in July, the Senate voted 63 to 28 to add the provisions of the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act to the defense bill.  Nearly identical legislation passed the House earlier this year on a bipartisan vote of 249 to 175.  Conferees are expected to retain the hate crimes provisions in the final version of the conference report and today’s vote is a strong show of support for the hate crimes language.

So what’s next?  House Conferees have been appointed and a vote on the final conference report in the House is expected on Thursday.  The Senate action on the conference report should follow next week and then the bill will go to President Obama for his signature.

Abortion and health reform - state of play

The following is a chart by Jessica Arons at the Center for American Progress, published at RH reality check, which updates my earlier post describing the Capps Amendment by adding a comparison to the Senate Finance Committee bill: 

Current law	Capps Amendment to House health care reform bill	Senate health care reform bill
The Hyde Amendment
The Hyde Amendment prohibits federal Medicaid and Medicare money from being spent on most types of abortion, including pregnancies that threaten the woman’s health or involve fetal anomalies. Federal money can only be used to pay for an abortion when the pregnancy threatens the life of the woman or results from rape or incest.	The Hyde Amendment restrictions would apply to all insurance plans that participate in the health insurance exchange, whether those plans are operated by private insurers or by the government’s “public option.” In other words, no federal funding, including affordability credits or other subsidies, would be used to pay for abortions beyond what is currently allowed. Private premiums would be segregated from public funds and only the private premiums could pay for abortion services beyond those allowed by the Hyde Amendment.	The Hyde Amendment restrictions would apply to all insurance plans that participate in the health insurance exchange, whether those plans are operated by private insurers or member-run co-ops. In other words, no federal funding, including affordability credits or other subsidies, would be used to pay for abortions beyond what is currently allowed. Private premiums would be segregated from public funds and only private premiums could pay for abortion services beyond those allowed by the Hyde Amendment.
Other government programs
Laws similar to the Hyde Amendment that restrict coverage of abortion services also apply to military employees and their dependents, federal employee health plans, members of the Peace Corps, women in federal prisons and detention centers, and Native Americans who receive health care through the Indian Health Services.	Current restrictions on federal spending for abortion services would not change.	Current restrictions on federal spending for abortion services would not change.
States
States have the option to use their own money to pay for abortion services beyond what is permitted under the Hyde Amendment, and 17 states currently do so. Federal money subsidizes these state Medicaid programs even though they cover abortion.	Federal money would subsidize plans that cover abortion—just like they currently do for state Medicaid plans and employer plans—but no public money would be used to pay for abortion services not allowed by the Hyde Amendment. Government money would only be used to help pay for the other medical services covered by those plans.	Federal money would subsidize plans that cover abortion—just like they currently do for state Medicaid plans and employer plans—but no public money would be used to pay for abortion services not allowed by the Hyde Amendment. Government money would only be used to help pay for the other medical services covered by those plans.
Private insurance
Private insurance companies are allowed to decide whether to cover abortion services, and 87 percent of typical employment plans currently provide such coverage. The federal government subsidizes these plans through an employer tax credit, even if the plans include abortion.	Each plan in the exchange could decide whether to cover abortion services beyond those allowed by the Hyde Amendment, provided that at least one plan in each market area offers such services and one plan does not. This provision goes well beyond current law to guarantee that consumers have the option to purchase a plan that suits their medical needs and their values. No abortion services—even those allowed by the Hyde Amendment for cases that threaten the woman’s life or result from rape or incest—can be mandated as part of a minimum benefits package.	Each plan in the exchange could decide whether to cover abortion services beyond those allowed by the Hyde Amendment, provided that at least one plan in each market area offers such services and one plan does not. This provision goes well beyond current law to guarantee that consumers have the option to purchase a plan that suits their medical needs and their values. No abortion services—even those allowed by the Hyde Amendment for cases that threaten the woman’s life or result from rape or incest—can be mandated as part of a minimum benefits package.

The disparate impact non-issue in ENDA

By Guest Contributor Harper Jean Tobin

At last week’s House Education and Labor Committee hearing on ENDA, witness Camille Olsen, an attorney who represents employers, raised several questions about what she characterized as ambiguities in the bill. Among the points Olson raised was the question of “disparate impact” claims under ENDA. Olson’s technical arguments were potentially confusing even for an attorney like myself, so it’s worth trying to explain them in plain English.

Under existing employment discrimination laws, there are two types of unlawful discrimination claims. “Disparate treatment” cases are where there is evidence of intentional discrimination by the employer. Vandy Beth Glenn suffered a classic case of disparate treatment when her boss fired her for the stated reason that she was transitioning from male to female. The principle of “disparate impact” is different: an employer may not take actions that have the overall effect of excluding a group of people, unless there is a sufficient reason to do so.  For example, height and weight requirements have a disparate impact on women because (even though some women would meet them) they tend, on average, to exclude more women than men. Unless an employer can demonstrate a sound reason for using these requirements, they will be deemed discriminatory.

The disparate impact approach has been a powerful tool for promoting the inclusion of women and minority groups in the workplace. Some conservatives, however, oppose it because they view it as a form of “reverse discrimination.” Justice Antonin Scalia even speculated earlier this year that disparate impact laws could be unconstitutional. Because it has become something of a political football, disparate impact would be a sticking point under any new anti-discrimination law. But as Rep. Robert Andrews pointed out at the hearing, it would be hard to think of a situation where a disparate impact claim could be brought under ENDA. (No short men or tall women? No Streisand fans need apply?)  So, to avoid distracting debates on the subject, ENDA states that “Only disparate treatment claims may be brought under this Act.” That seems plenty clear to us. But Olson suggested that ENDA needs, well, added redundancy: to provide in so many words that disparate impact claims are barred, and that “disparate impact” means that same thing it does under every other law. Of course, as Acting EEOC Chair Stuart Ishimaru stated at the hearing, that’s really not needed: read in context, the bill is already crystal clear.

Like many of the other questions that have been raised about ENDA, this one is really a non-issue. We can expect to see more such non-issues raised in the weeks ahead.

-- Cross-posted at the Transgender Equality blog

ENDA - how the hearing went

To cut to the chase: yesterday's hearing before the House Education and Labor Committee probably could not have gone better for supporters of ENDA. You can watch it and access copies of all the written testimony at the Committee's website. Special cheers to witnesses Vandy Beth Glenn, Bill Eskridge and Brad Sears.

The Committee staff did a superb job of preparing the Democratic members for the discussion. There were no fireworks at the hearing, doubtless due in large part to the fact that only a handful of Republican members attended, at least one of whom is an ENDA co-sponsor.

A few comments on the two Republican witnesses:

> Virtually all of the discussion on possible problems with the bill centered on the testimony given by Camille Olson,a management side attorney with Seyfarth Shaw and a member of the policy subcommittee on equal employment opportunity of the Chamber of Commerce. In other words, she was representing employers. Her testimony was neither in support of or in opposition to ENDA, but was focused on raising potential objections to specific provisions in the bill. The main point of her testimony was that there is "ambiguity and uncertainty" in the bill at multiple points. Her issues included: whether ENDA will duplicate Title VII's cause of action for sex stereotyping, what changes employers will have to make regarding restroom use policies in order to avoid discriminating based on gender identity, whether ENDA will generate more attorneys fees awards for plaintiffs than Title VII does, and whether the explicit limitation of ENDA to disparate treatment claims really means that disparate impact claims are excluded. Acting EEOC Chair Stuart Ishimaru, testifying on behalf of the Obama administration, answered the last point by saying that, yes, there really is an exclusion, and I would direct the EEOC to not pursue any claims brought to it which fall into the category of disparate impact theories. But the other points generated a fair amount of discussion, and may show up in later phases of the legislative consideration of ENDA.

> The second witness sponsored by the R members was Craig Parshall, general counsel for the National Religious Broadcasters. He and Olson pretty much embodied the two wings of the Republican Party - the religious/social conservative wing and the business wing. By contrast to Olson, Parshall's testimony did not get much take-up or generate much discussion. This may be a result of so few Rs being there to pick up those themes. The tone of the committee and floor debates could well be very different from the tone of the hearing.  But it also struck me as perhaps auguring a new general attitude toward ENDA, of - more or less - morality, schmorality, let's keep our eyes on what's really important: insuring that this law doesn't cost employers too much.