Congress drops hate-crime measure from budget bill
The Associated Press
10.19.99
WASHINGTON —' A Republican decision to remove an expansion of federal hate crimes from a spending bill seems to leave little chance that Congress will broaden the statute's protections this year.
House-Senate bargainers — dominated by Congress' majority Republicans — yesterday completed a compromise measure financing the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. It omitted language approved by the Senate in July that would have widened the definition of federal hate crimes to include incidents motivated by a victim's sexual orientation, gender or disability.
"That was one elephant too much for this boa constrictor," Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said of the spending bill and its wide-ranging provisions.
President Clinton is likely to veto the overall measure because of disputes over hiring police officers and other issues. But the White House seems unlikely to demand a restoration of the hate-crimes language as a condition for signing the measure, said Democrats who spoke on condition of anonymity.
And with Congress hoping to adjourn for the year in a few weeks, that leaves little time or leverage for supporters to push the measure through the House and Senate.
"Today's action showed a callous disregard for hate-crime victims and their families," said Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights political group.
The House version of the spending bill did not contain the hate-crimes expansion.
Critics of proposals to expand the scope of hate-crimes laws — including many conservatives — have said such legislation creates special classes of citizens who are already protected by state laws against violence. Some critics complain that hate-crime laws infringe on freedom of expression by punishing thought, or, in essence, creating a thought crime. However, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1993 case Wisconsin v. Mitchell rejected a First Amendment challenge to a state hate-crime law.
Gregg said the issue was dropped because it should be considered by Congress' Judiciary committees. He also said it had become "extremely complex" to resolve differences between two hate-crimes bills that were included in the spending measure: one by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and a second, stronger version supported by the Clinton administration.
Both were omitted.
The second version was sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and about three dozen other Democrats and moderate Republicans.
It would have added the new categories of victims to race, color, religion or national origin, which are already covered by hate-crimes law. The measure also would have expanded current law to cover any incident related to interstate commerce, such as use of a gun made in another state.
Currently, the federal government can prosecute hate-motivated violence if the victim was on federal property or engaged in a federally protected activity such as going to school.
Citing a spate of highly publicized killings, Kennedy said, "We must stop acting as if somehow this fundamental issue is just a state and local problem. It isn't. It's a national problem, and it's an outrage that Congress has been missing in action for so long."
Momentum for the legislation had grown after the dragging death of a black man in Texas, the fatal beating of a gay college student in Wyoming and the July shooting spree in Illinois and Indiana by a man police said was a member of a white-supremacist group.
Hatch's measure would have expanded federal jurisdiction to hate crimes committed after the crossing of state lines, and allow federal aid to state and local authorities prosecuting hate crimes.