Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (38 page)

At this point, tensions arose between Miller and me on one side and Baldwin on the other. She and I had worked hard to maintain a friendly relationship, personally as well as officially. This was not something we could take for granted. Politics is a profession rife with jealousy. Jostling over status is, of course, a factor in most cases where human egos are involved, but the nature of legislating magnifies the effect. More than in most lines of work, our effectiveness is determined in substantial part by what people think of us—our colleagues, whose goodwill we need to accomplish anything; our constituents, without whose favorable opinion we would not survive; and not least potential contributors, who may prefer giving to our peers. As a result, we are strongly conditioned to worry about our reputations, not just absolutely but also relative to our colleagues.

Counterintuitively, the tensions among ideological allies can be especially strong. When people prefer to collaborate with, vote for, or give money to a conservative rather than me, I don’t take it personally. When they favor someone else on the basis of individual merit, I do. This problem gets worse when the two competitors share a particular niche in the political world—geographic, ethnic, or, as with Tammy and me, membership in a demographic minority. We worked hard to minimize all this, but our disagreement over ENDA strained our friendship.

As we approached the final vote, Tammy did her own informal whip count and concluded we would have enough Democratic votes. Speaker Pelosi, a strong supporter of the bill, asked Tammy for her count, checked it herself with the members, and decided that Tammy had been too optimistic—a conclusion that Miller and I, based on our own work, fully agreed with. We did not have the votes for the inclusive bill. It was sadly but unmistakably clear to Pelosi, Miller, and me that we could pass ENDA only in its earlier form, covering only lesbian, gay, and bisexual workers. The pro-ENDA community was divided, with many organizations (including many of the non-LGBT groups) opposed to any bill that did not cover transgender people. Others preferred something to nothing—especially given that, to us, it was a very significant “something” that represented a major advance in our fight.

With Miller’s and my endorsement, Pelosi decided to proceed with the LGB-only version of the bill. Baldwin disagreed, but she still worked hard to support our work. We now faced the problem of a Republican motion to recommit, which would allow some Republicans to appear supportive of the bill while in fact voting to poison it. It was the availability of this maneuver that had convinced us in the first place that we could not pass a law that included protection for transgender people. A Republican motion to recommit might have added fraught language—for example, we heard that they might offer provisions saying that no teacher could transition from one gender to the other during the school year. My very intensive lobbying effort convinced me that there was no way we could defeat such a provision, and I believed it would be better not to bring a bill to the floor at all than to add to it terms like that.

As it turned out, the Republicans employed the motion to recommit to make a different kind of trouble. When we brought our LGB-only bill to the floor, they offered a recommit that affirmed that nothing in the antidiscrimination legislation created a right to marriage. Of course it did not. The amendment was wholly unnecessary. Indeed, we offered to agree to their recommit. But they insisted on using a parliamentary form that would cause the adoption of the recommit to delay the bill’s passage until after Congress was due to adjourn. We therefore had to persuade members to reject the maneuver—we had to convince them that in voting for our bill, they were sufficiently protected against the charge that they were for same-sex marriage.

When I rose to speak, I spent too much of my five minutes trying to convince Democrats that there was no need to attach any anti-same-sex marriage language to the bill. But George Miller rescued me. From his place at the committee table, he somehow signaled I should be talking about the historic nature of the vote: For the first time, Congress was proactively protecting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from discrimination.

The words I went on to speak are among the highlights not just of my career, but of my life. From the well of the House—as we call the spot just below the Speaker’s rostrum—I gave a speech that had taken me fifty-three years to prepare:

Mr. Speaker, we say here that we don’t take things personally, and usually that is true. Members, Mr. Speaker, will have to forgive me. I take it a little personally.

Thirty-five years ago, I filed a bill that tried to get rid of discrimination based on sexual orientation. As we sit here today, there are millions of Americans in states where this is not the law. By the way, nineteen states have such a law. In no case has it led to that decision [to adopt same-sex marriage]. The Massachusetts law passed in 1989, that did not lead to the decision in 2004. [In fact, it was 2003, a misstatement that indicated how emotional I was.] Unrelated.

But here is the deal. I used to be someone subject to this prejudice, and, through luck, circumstance, I got to be a big shot. I am now above that prejudice. But I feel an obligation to fifteen-year-olds dreading to go to school because of the torments, to people afraid they will lose their job in a gas station if someone finds out who they love. I feel an obligation to use the status I have been lucky enough to get to help them.

I want to ask my colleagues here, Mr. Speaker, on a personal basis, please, don’t fall for this sham … Don’t send me out of here having failed to help those people …

So I will close with this. Yes, this is personal. There are people who are your fellow citizens being discriminated against. We have a simple bill that says you can go to work and be judged on how you work and not be penalized. Please don’t turn your back on them.

My Democratic colleagues rose and began clapping as I finished—choking up as I did. The applause and cheering got louder, as more members than I could count rushed down—the floor is on an incline—to embrace me. The orientation that had once threatened to make me a pariah was now the reason I was standing on the floor of the House of Representatives receiving the emotional support of two hundred members of Congress.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 235 to 184, with 200 Democrats and 35 Republicans voting yes. It then died in the Senate, where party leaders didn’t have the 60 votes they needed and didn’t want to force Democrats to vote on a controversial measure that had no chance of passing. We knew that would happen. Even so, we wanted to establish that there was majority support for the bill, with an eye toward passing it when we had a Democrat in the White House as well as a Democratic House and Senate.

Many transgender activists and some of their supporters bitterly complained that the Democratic leadership could have delivered an inclusive bill if we had really wanted to. They blamed our decision to exclude transgender people on a mixture of political cowardice and our own prejudice. To my sorrow and anger, the last accusation was most often aimed at me.

I was sad because the charge reflected a stubborn, enduring ignorance of the political process. I had begged transgender advocates to join in our lobbying effort. I told them that getting transgender voters to lobby their representatives—in person, if possible—would be very helpful. We tried to facilitate this by providing a list of members whose votes seemed to be in play and by noting that we could hold off on the roll call until this work was accomplished. While a few advocates may have attempted such work, I never heard any reports of it. Instead, my interlocutors seemed to think Pelosi and I could have passed the bill by willpower alone. To illustrate the political difficulty we faced, I pointed out that even among those states that had enacted their own versions of ENDA, more than a third covered only lesbian, gay, and bisexual victims. “Given that efforts to include transgender people have been unsuccessful to date in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Wisconsin,” I asked them, “why do you think it gets easier when you add Texas, South Carolina, Utah, and Nebraska to the political equation?”

I was angered by the accusation that I was selfishly acting to shelter my own group while abandoning transgender people, who were different from me. In 2000 I had stressed on the House floor that transgender men and women were the most frequent victims of hate-based violence. Moreover, ever since 1973, I had fought the unfair treatment of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, noncitizens, women, the elderly, and those with disabilities. I have never been a member of any of these groups, except the elderly, whose ranks I entered long after the legislative struggles on their behalf were over. Through those years, I did not always put my own group first. When Massachusetts considered the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, I vocally opposed including protections for gays and lesbians, lest the amendment lose favor. I repeated this argument to colleagues in the House twenty years later. Insisting that some people must suffer until we have the power to end all suffering is a recipe for embedding misery, not diminishing it. I have never agreed with the maxim “No one is free until everyone is free.” If that were true, no one would be free today, and no one would ever have been free in the past.

An egregious example of inconsistent absolutism on the issue came from the LGBT activist Matthew Foreman. In 2002, as the head of the Empire State Pride Agenda, he had made a deal with the Republican governor George Pataki, then running for reelection, to support a state antidiscrimination bill that did not apply to transgender people. Foreman asked that I come to New York and defend him against attacks from activists angered by the deal, and I agreed to do so. Apparently my memory of this was much better than his. In his new position at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (as it was called), he was one of the most strident critics of our efforts to pass the same kind of bill in the House.

Once again, my debates with LGBT leaders hinged upon history, especially the history of the civil rights movement. In one version of the past, African American leaders eschewed morally flawed compromises, never accepted less than their full demands, and scorned halfway measures. “Rosa Parks never asked for the right to sit in the middle of the bus” is the mantra of those who argue this way. In fact, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., did all of these things, not out of a lack of fervor or political timidity but because they infused their insistence on full equality with a shrewd, sophisticated understanding of how to achieve it within the existing political context. While many of the participants in the 1993 LGBT march on Washington competed with each other to see who could most offend Middle America, Randolph and Rustin tightly structured the 1963 March on Washington to maximize its broad political appeal.

The argument that a civil rights movement cannot in good conscience accept a law that goes only part of the way to equality comes from people who mistakenly attribute the sentiment to those who fought for racial equality. The 1964 Civil Rights Act did a great deal, but it left out vital areas of concern. Voting rights came a year later, and housing discrimination wasn’t statutorily outlawed until after Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968. The assertion that passing a law that reduces inequality without totally abolishing it amounts to complicity with the bigots has no historical basis.

*

During my twenty-three years of service on the Judiciary Committee, I’d often imagined I might become its chairman one day. I was second in seniority to John Conyers, who was a decade older than me and one of the most senior members of the House. On the Financial Services Committee, there were two Democrats ahead of me on the seniority list who were about my age. But one of them, Bruce Vento, a dedicated advocate for the homeless, suddenly became ill with mesothelioma and died. And the other, John LaFalce, from Buffalo, lost his seat. After the 2000 census required New York to reduce its delegation, the legislature and governor agreed to eliminate the seats of one Democrat and one Republican and the Democrats settled on LaFalce. I was surprised, because finance is a key industry in New York, and a state rarely sacrifices a member of the congressional leadership who deals with such an industry. I count the 2002 New York state legislature second in importance to Pope John Paul II as an enabler of my career.

When I became the ranking member of Financial Services, party rules forced me to step down from my Judiciary post. I appealed to Pelosi for a waiver, but she wisely turned me down.

As ranking member, I had a large role to play. But first, I had to become more discreet, as opinions I expressed took on more weight in the minds of my audiences. This was especially so in the area of the financial markets. I had not thought a great deal about them previously, but I soon came to the conclusion that the various stock markets have a dual personality—they are reasonably good predictors over the longer term of our economic health, and they are nervous hysterics in the short term.

The summer before I took on my new position, I made my second trip to the Republic of Cape Verde, an island nation formerly colonized by Portugal and the ancestral home of many of my constituents. I brought with me
Master of the Senate
, the third volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which covered Johnson’s work as Democratic minority leader in 1953 and 1954 as well as his later efforts to advance civil rights as majority leader. It would become the second instruction manual on my bookshelf, after Charles Hamilton’s biography of the African American trailblazer Adam Clayton Powell.

Reading Caro, I decided to emulate Johnson’s practice of making himself as useful and important to other members as could be. Recognizing that he had no power over his caucus, no authority to order them to do anything, Johnson needed to exercise power by other means. His method was to convince his colleagues that they had as strong an interest in having good relations with him as he did with them. My role did not compare to Johnson’s in the scope of authority, but as ranking member, I could allocate certain privileges—the right to hold hearings, or select witnesses, or manage bills on the floor. I made it my job to know as much as I could about the members on my side of the aisle, so I could grasp which privileges were important to which members. There is a mistaken notion that legislators often trade specific favors with each other. That is very rarely the case. I do not remember ever telling a member that if he or she voted with me in a particular way, I would confer this or that benefit. Rather, I tried to do as many favors as I could and to respond to requests. Then, when I did have to ask colleagues to cast a vote that might be politically difficult, I hoped they would at least think about it in the context of their interest in maintaining their ongoing rapport with me.