Congressman Doc Hastings (R-Pasco) tries to avoid the spotlight according to most reports. His most notable national achievement was to do virtually nothing while he was chairman of the House Ethics Committee while the GOP controlled Congress.
He did, however, find himself on national TV when the committee was charged with investigating Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., who resigned for sending sexually explicit e-mails to at least one underage male after the teenager had served as a congressional page.
The Foley investigation was one of the few occasions when Hastings found himself on national television.
He made the rare decision to personally direct the Foley investigation, though most probes are handed off to subcommittees and staffers.
"Simply put, the American people, and especially the parents of all current and former pages, are entitled to know how this situation was handled. And we are determined to answer their questions," Hastings said. [Yakima Herald]
Hastings found the spotlights passing over him again briefly today when he led an attempt by his party to derail the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
In a strange-bedfellows act, Hastings found himself arguing on the House floor for a position supported by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and by Seattle-based gay-activist groups including Equal Rights Washington and the Pride Foundation.
Hastings has never been known as a friend of ERW, but in this case he argued that the House should vote on an amendment to ENDA introduced by Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) that would have restored "gender identity" into the bill. And that's exactly the position that ERW and over 300 other LGBT activist groups led by the Task Force have been loudly promoting for weeks.
The activists groups had taken the all-or-nothing position that Congress should vote only on a version of ENDA that included protection from discrimination based on both "sexual orientation" and "gender identity." Hastings and the Republicans were arguing for essentially the same position today.
According to Windy City Times, Hastings was given a tongue-in-cheek congratulations by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) “I’m impressed by the sincerity of the gentleman from Washington on behalf of people who are transgender,” said Frank.
But, really, Frank wasn't impressed and Hastings didn't much care about "people who are transgender". Hastings had offered his argument on behalf of the Republican caucus as a way of embarrassing Democrats who had decided they could not pass the Baldwin amendment, but didn't want to be put on record about the measure that had such obnoxiously loud support from activists.
Frank said Hastings was seeking to use the amendment for transgenders “as a weapon with which to defeat the whole bill.”
It didn't work. The House voted down Hastings's procedural amendment. It didn't vote on the Baldwin amendment, and then -- finally, after thirty years -- passed ENDA by a vote of 235 to 184.
That would normally be considered a huge victory. Normally. But ERW and its activist-group cousins had decided that the bill that they had promoted for decades was no longer good enough in the form they had promoted it. And that means that they lost today because ENDA passed.
I'll admit I have only a limited understanding of the odd ways of politics in that other Washington, and so I can only guess at this, but I suspect that the Task Force, ERW, and its 300 brethren lost more politically than just one vote today because of their impolitic intransigence on the bill.
It's a sad day, but maybe Hastings can now count on support from ERW during next year's campaign since he was the only one to really stand up for their self-destructive all-or-nothing position.
