Duck and cover

When the House buried campaign finance reform recently after having passed the same legislation twice previously, it confirmed what many suspected – those two earlier votes were done under the cover of the Senate’s blockade. The Senate passed the bill this spring and the House’s cover was blown.

When the House passed President Bush’s faith-based initiative last week, it once again used the Senate for protection. Not as cover this time, but to resolve a difficult issue the House preferred to duck.

The difficult issue is that of discrimination and whether faith-based charities that accept public funds should be able to practice it. The 1964 Civil Rights Act contains an exemption for churches, rightly reasoning that churches hiring staff for their religious activities have valid reasons to give preference to practitioners of that particular faith. The House version of the faith-based initiative extends that exemption to the nonreligious charitable activities a church might provide with federal funding – this is both wrong and almost certainly would not withstand the court challenges it would generate.

At its core, the president’s proposal is sound. The need for social and humanitarian services is unabated and increasingly expensive; churches and other religious organizations already use federal funds efficiently and effectively to provide such essentials as childcare and health care. The proposal seeks to expand the range of services eligible for public funding to such things as soup kitchens, food banks, homeless shelters and substance abuse and domestic violence programs.

Helped along by vigorous debate on legitimate concerns within the religious community and among civil libertarians, the bill had benefited from thoughtful compromise. It includes a ban on participating organizations from requiring religious observances, although they would be able to retain religious names, charters and symbols. The $13 billion in tax breaks over the next decade, though much smaller than what Mr. Bush wanted, would encourage charitable giving and the provision for a deduction for taxpayers who do not itemize would make giving more widespread.

The last major issue to resolve was discrimination. While it makes sense for a church to hire from within to run the church, it does not make sense to allow a church to discriminate in hiring staff, paid with public funds, to cook at a soup kitchen, to run a homeless shelter or to provide counseling for a substance-abuse program. This issue exposed a rift within the Republican majority that led to the bill being tabled Tuesday.

The intervening two days could have been used to work out a compromise within the caucus, but instead it was used for arm-twisting – Republicans with deep concerns about federally funded discrimination and about Congress pre-empting state anti-discrimination laws were told to get on board or risk being labeled anti-religion.

So now the Senate gets to resolve this issue. Once that is done, the two versions of the bill will have to be reconciled. House Republican leadership then will have to deal with this issue or, more likely, they won’t and this important legislation will die. When he first introduced this plan on the campaign trial, Mr. Bush spoke of the “armies of compassion” he wanted to mobilize. He probably never reckoned on the needless dissension in his own ranks.