(SPL)ENDA set for floor vote this week

According to Gay City News (via Pam's House Blend), the trans-exclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act known as SPLENDA (Split ENDA), H.R, 3865 is set for a vote in the House Rules committee this week.

What's interesting are the inside the beltway details of the latest on the Baldwin Amendment to restore transgender protections to the bill:

Floor action on ENDA could come as early as Tuesday, but is clearly expected some day this week.

The Committee will also consider whether an amendment from out lesbian Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, to add transgender protections back into the bill, will be heard on the floor as well. Baldwin, originally Frank's co-lead sponsor on ENDA, declined to put her name on his revised measure, urging instead that the original, fully-inclusive bill be taken up by the House.

[...]

Baldwin has apparently made limited headway in wooing colleagues to support the inclusion of transgender protections, and ironically her measure, if put to a vote, would create precisely the framework that Frank warned against when he advised a narrower formulation of the bill. His fear was that Republicans would put up a mirror-image amendment to Baldwin's, stripping out transgender protections.

Such an amendment, by forcing members of Congress to record a vote specifically on that issue, threatened to point up the weakness of support for transgender rights - and if done by using a particular parliamentary maneuver could have killed the entire bill for this session.

[...]

Both Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, and Roberta Sklar, a spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force - two groups leading a coalition of roughly 300 organizations pressing Congress to vote no on any version of ENDA that is not fully inclusive - confirmed today that their understanding is the same as what Gay City News learned last week: that Baldwin's amendment would be offered on the floor, debated, probably for one hour, and then withdrawn.

[...]

"It's unfortunate that leadership would continue to try to pass a bill that the LGBT community has said it doesn't want," Keisling said when asked about the imminent Rules Committee action. "But whatever happens, this is not the end. There is no chance of this becoming law now. We will have to get together and decide how to proceed in '09."

And so the plot thickens....