Strategies of civil rights groups lag election results

“In curious ways, our work is probably not going to have to change that much,” she said. “There are ways in which we are going to have to ask ourselves how we can look at our advocacy issues to sort of figure out who our usual suspect, or perhaps unusual suspect, allies are in terms of trying to get attention on Capitol Hill.”
Several organizations also said that they would pursue more administrative strategies. Baker said that she hopes to see the Obama administration be more resourceful about using the tools that it has to advance equal opportunity and civil rights.

According to House, “I also expect that we will try to do more things administratively, because there are a lot of enforcement issues that we’re going to be working on.”

Michael Cole, the Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBT advocacy group, said that HRC would also continue to advocate federally for administrative measures to increase civil rights protections for the LGBT community, including pushing the Obama Administration to institute health care access policies that do not discriminate against LGBT employees.

Not ready for state advocacy?

Several organizations agreed that an enhanced focus on state-level advocacy made sense in the current environment. According to NOW president O’Neill, “That’s what we think we have to do — increase the resources going out to the local chapters.” House of the Lawyers Committee agreed that there will probably be “more opportunities in certain areas in the states because of the log jam we expect to have at the federal level.”

Chai Feldblum, who founded the Federal Legislation and Administrative Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center and currently serves as the commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pointed out that it was already difficult to advance progressive legislation before the elections, and that, in the new Congress, it’s going to be “harder to get bills through that various progressive civil rights groups would have wanted.”

Korstad agreed. “I can’t imagine any kind of expansion of civil rights in any kind of meaningful way” in the new Congress, he said.

And while Feldblum said that progressive organizations should continue to focus on federal legislative efforts, she said that that focus should not preclude organizations from looking at the states, “because the truth is that getting things done in the states can actually help things getting done at the federal [level].”

Feldblum noted that said that Democratic losses in Congress had been anticipated four to six months before the election.

Strikingly, however, little planning for state-level legislative advocacy has been executed to date.

O’Neill said that a specific strategy was not in place for how her organization was going to reallocate resources to the state and local level, but that NOW intends “to start having those conversations.” At the Lawyers Committee, House said, “It isn’t something that has been planned for yet.” She attributed the lack of planning to a lack of foreknowledge of what the legislative terrain would look like after the elections.

Ditto for Legal Momentum. According to Jacobs, “We never do ourselves any favors by trying to have too much of that discussion before we have actually figured out where we have landed after the election. Now that we have figured that out and we can see what both the federal landscape looks like and what the state landscape looks like, there are discussions happening.”

Other groups said that they had been busy focusing on getting sympathetic candidates elected.

According to Baker, People for the American Way was “focusing a lot on the election and on trying to do what we can to help ensure the best results possible for progressives.” She continued, “Now what we’re doing is regrouping.”

A spokesperson for the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, which describes itself on its website as “the nation’s premier civil and human rights coalition,” said in an email that its member organizations were “still in the process” of developing an agenda for the next Congress, but that next year the Leadership Conference would itself still be focusing at the national level in the same “remarkably consistent” way that it has for 60 years.

A two-track policy

In other areas, such as LGBT rights, substantial gains have already been made at the state level. Michael Cole at the HRC said that focusing on the states has been, and would continue to be, part of the HRC’s overall legislative strategy.

“We’re going to have to do some more proactive work out in the states than we are at the federal level,” said Cole.

Particularly in the area of relationship recognition, Cole said that the HRC had identified several key states, such as New York, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, Illinois and Hawaii, where there might be legislative possibilities to protect same-sex couples.

Though he added that some of the HRC’s resources will be focused on ensuring that anti-LGBT riders don’t get attached to federal appropriations bills, Cole emphasized the need to have a balanced strategy between federal and state agendas.

“What is important to building a successful movement is making sure that we have a toolbox that is able to adapt and evolve and continue to make progress and continue to buttress the gains that we’ve made as time goes on and as the environment changes,” he said.

And while Cole acknowledged that it is more useful to have federal protections of the LGBT community, he also said that the HRC’s continued focus on federal strategy “doesn’t diminish the fact that every state level gain we can [achieve] makes the lives of LGBT people better, and we should do as much as we can in that regard.”

Felblum said that other organizations could learn from the HRC and other LGBT advocacy groups. She explained that gay-rights organizations have been forced to build an infrastructure at the state level, in order to defend against attacks on LGBT rights in the states, and that those groups have begun to use that infrastructure to advance a proactive agenda there.

“I definitely think that the other progressive civil rights groups can learn from that, and that even without being attacked at the state level should really be out there building their infrastructure,” said Felblum.