M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Democrats adopt new strategy on gay rights

Democrats are coalescing around a new proposal to rewrite the Civil Rights Act to include protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, abandoning a piecemeal strategy that won enough bipartisan support to pass the Senate in 2013.

On Thursday, a group of Senate and House Democrats will unveil The Equality Act, which would amend the landmark 1964 civil rights law to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of protected classes. That’s a major departure from the preceding Congress, when Senate Democrats persuaded 10 Republicans to support the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) ignored.


But with the Supreme Court ruling in June in favor of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples nationwide, LGBT advocates in Congress are shifting their focus to adding federal protections based on sexual orientation to local government services, education, housing, financial services, jury selection and employment in the 31 states that advocates say do not fully protect Americans on the basis of sexuality.

It’s going to be an uphill climb: The bill will have broad Democratic support, but Republicans control both chambers of Congress.

“We’ve reached out across the aisle. We do not anticipate in the immediate future we will have Republican sponsors in the Senate,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a leading figure on the Democrats’ left flank. “It may take some dialogue, some exploration for folks to become comfortable and step up.”

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey (D-N.J.), who has joined Merkley to push for the bill, is conducting outreach to African-American leaders concerned about any erosion of the Civil Rights Act. The other two lead co-sponsors are Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, the first lesbian senator, and Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a gay member of the House.

“You can be married on Saturday, post your wedding pictures on Facebook on Sunday and lose your job and be thrown out of your apartment in the majority of states in this country,” Cicilline said.

The quartet of lawmakers explained to reporters during a briefing on Wednesday that they struggled for months with how to approach the legislation and whether to make the tactical shift. Did it make more sense to amend the storied Civil Rights Act, they asked themselves, or to create a totally separate new law?

Ultimately they settled on the former, pointing to the legal underpinning for the Civil Rights Act that’s been upheld by the courts over the past 50 years.

“Everyone in America should have full citizenship rights and be free of the horrendous discrimination we’ve seen,” Booker said.

Notably, the Democrats said that even if they retake the Senate majority next year, hold the White House and make gains in the House, they would not again pursue the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because it covers only workplace discrimination.

The decision to pursue a more expansive bill could make it more difficult to gain GOP support. But Democrats still believe they can win over some Republicans.

Republicans, Merkley said, “want a chance to see the final bill, to talk to constituencies and ponder whether to step forward to be a leader on this issue or not.”

Indeed, the Democrats’ tactical shift comes as the GOP’s right flank is pushing in the opposite direction after the Supreme Court decision, urging leadership to pass a religious liberties bill that would offer legal protections to those that oppose same-sex marriage.