If you checked the Senate calendar out today you might give it a double-take after looking at the scheduled start time. The Senate gets to sleep in until 4 p.m. central and 5 p.m. Washington time! Not really, of course, as they will still be busy with behind-the-scenes / committee work most of the day.
So why the unusually late start to legislative work? Republican members objected to the Democrats’ request to delay consideration of the veterans’ legislation so members could be present for an unrelated vote on a fair pay bill. Senate rules mandate that consideration of the bill which received a cloture vote, as the veterans’ bill did yesterday, must begin the next day approximately one hour after the session has begun. That means that Majority Leader Reid (D-NV) was forced to delay the start of today’s session to a time when all his members could be in attendance for the unrelated equal pay vote before the one hour time allotment is reached. Yes, it’s quite the procedural mess. The bottom line is the Senate usually has leeway with these various procedural hurdles because of unanimous consent requests to change the rules. In this case, however, Republican members are forcing them to play by those rules.
Once the time is up and the Senate reconvenes, they will move to a procedural (cloture) vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (H.R. 2831). This is the bill that would reverse a 2007 Supreme Court decision that upheld a rule stating that pay discrimination complaints must be filed within 180 days after occurring. That decision was a very close 5-4 margin. The case arose after Lilly Ledbetter, an employee at a Goodyear Tire Plant in Alabama, claimed she was not equally compensated over her career when compared with male workers at the plant. She was originally awarded some $3.5 million in damages by a jury before an appeals court reversed the decision based on the 180 day rule. That led the case to the Supreme Court where Ms. Ledbetter lost by a narrow margin.
H.R. 2831 would reverse that decision by changing language in the Civil Rights Act and extending the amount of time an individual has to file a discrimination complaint against their employer. The bill obviously has wide Democratic support but it is unclear how many Republican members will cross over, especially more conservative members who may not want to reverse a decision led by President Bush’s recent Supreme Court nominees (Roberts and Alito).
Update: Roll Call reports that the late start to today’s session is meant to accommodate the schedules of the two Democratic contenders for president, Senator Obama (D-IL) and Senator Clinton (D-NY). Majority Leader Reid, despite complaints of Republican delays on the Veterans’ bill, wanted to push back the vote on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Bill until both Senators could attend. This signals that the cloture vote may be a close one.
