Political Votes Now, Protection for You Later
House leadership today was forced to drop language from the Defense Department authorization bill that would have made sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability protected categories under the current federal hate crimes law. While the stand-alone hate crimes bill supposedly enjoys wide support from Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House (and was, in fact, added to the bill by the Senate), the fight to include the language failed because many liberal Dems always vote against authorizing the Department of Defense (and wouldn't change their votes) and because many conservative Dems and Republicans didn't support the legislation and/or its inclusion in the defense bill. Although the bill supposedly has all this broad support (which one would think would make it easy to pass), there's no word when or if the House will vote on it. Pelosi says, that she's "strongly committed" to the bill, though, so I'm sure it will be really soon. [ CNN ]