Washington Wire
Summer, 2003 Vol. 5, No. 2

Congress has recessed for the balance of the summer and the pace of work in Executive Branch agencies has slowed as well. This allows us the opportunity to update you on the OU/IPA’s activities in Washington since our last newsletter, two months ago.

PRIORITY ISSUES

Support for Israel – In these critical days, the OU’s Washington Office is working in close concert with the broader pro-Israel community in support of Israel’s security and well being. The OU has been careful to monitor developments related to the Road Map and its implementation and spoken out when needed. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17643-2003Jun20&notFound=true OU leaders have recently participated in meetings with White House National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, NSC Mideast affairs director Elliott Abrams and senior leaders in the U.S. Senate in which the Administration’s current thinking toward the Road Map process was candidly discussed. On Capitol Hill, we continue our work in support of the Syria Accountability Act and other pro-Israel initiatives.

Education – We have continued to make progress in achieving greater equity for special needs children through the process of reauthorizing the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), the federal government’s primary funding program for special education services. We have been working over the past year with key staffers and allies toward improving IDEA’s treatment of special needs students in non-public schools. Too often, children with special ed. needs who attend religious schools are underserved by this federally funded program. We must improve the processes and accountability measures for ensuring that all eligible children, including those attending Jewish schools, receive IDEA funded services. Since May, we have built on the progress made in the House IDEA bill and secured language in the bipartisan Senate bill sponsored by Senators Judd Gregg and Ted Kennedy that addresses our concerns further. The Senate bill maintains the equity measures in the House bill and further bolsters the procedures which will ensure that public school officials cooperate with religious school communities in the context of special education services. See more information about this issue at http://www.ou.org/public/Publib/speced.htm

We have also been involved in supporting a school voucher pilot program for Washington, DC. This measure, initiated by President Bush and supported by DC Mayor Tony Williams (D) is pending in congress and will require bipartisan support to pass. Rabbi Weinreb and Nathan Diament recently attended a meeting with President Bush to promote this effort and we will continue to express our views to members of congress.

Faith Based Initiative - For several years we have supported efforts to open federal social welfare grant programs to religiously affiliated charities on terms equal to those which are secularly affiliated. Legislation embodying this principle was enacted four times under President Clinton, but have been stalled during the Bush Administration. In recent months, President Bush has advanced this agenda through executive orders and agency regulation reforms. There is still much that should be done through legislation, however. In early April, the compromise Lieberman-Santorum “CARE bill” – which contains a range of new tax incentives for charitable giving passed the Senate and we still await House action on this front. More recently, the House has acted to reform the provisions of the Workforce
Investment Act and Head Start programs to expand the opportunities for religiously affiliated entities to participate in these programs. This expansion depends, in part, upon clarifying the civil liberties laws with regard to the receipt of federal funds by religious institutions. The opposition has fixated exclusively on this aspect of the initiative with charges of “taxpayer funded religious discrimination” in hoping to derail the initiative in total. The OU has consistently defended the right of religious groups to be treated equally in the federal grants process without forgoing longstanding religious liberties. We have succeeded in defending this position in congress to date. For more information, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/fbci/booklet.pdf

Religious Liberty - ‘WRFA’: To date, our perennial efforts to secure greater protections for religious people having their religious needs accommodated in the workplace have not succeeded under Republican or Democrat control of Congress. However, the Workplace Religious Freedom Act was introduced in the Senate in April (http://ou.org/public/statements/2003/nate9.htm) with Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and John Kerry (D-MA) as the lead sponsors and we are pleased to have built to a record number of senate co-sponsors of this bill (20) including, for the first time, Senators Hatch, Specter and Coleman. (To see a full list, please visit http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:SN00893:@@@N) We hope that this effort will finally be successful.
‘HOWFSPRA’: A second significant religious liberty item pending in Congress is the ‘Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act’ sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). This bill will remove the restrictions upon clergy and houses of worship (as defined in §501c3 of the tax code) from engaging in political activities. It will allow clergy to explicitly endorse or opposed political candidates during worship services. We are deeply concerned that, were it to pass, this legislation would put rabbis and other clergy in the position of being pressured to engage in political activity they otherwise wish not to. We continue to monitor the progress of this initiative.

Judicial Nominations The longstanding policy of the OU has been, with rare exceptions, to refrain from endorsing or opposing nominees before the Senate for confirmation. In July, however, we felt compelled to weigh in on an emerging debate associated with the nomination of Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to a position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Mr. Pryor is clearly a politically conservative nominee and generated opposition from various quarters on the basis of his recorded views regarding abortion rights, gay rights and church-state separation. However, it is also known that Pryor is a devout Catholic. And, like some other nominees before the Judiciary Committee (John Ashcroft, Michael McConnell and Leon Holmes) who were known to be religiously devout, Mr. Pryor was questioned as to his ability to fulfill the duties of his office should they conflict with his “deeply held personal beliefs.” OU leaders were very troubled by this line of inquiry which we believe to be both inappropriate and irrelevant and wrote to Judiciary Chairman Hatch, without endorsing or opposing the nominee, to ensure such inquiries were repudiated. You can read the text of our letter as read on the Senate Floor by Senator Hatch at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2003_record&page=S10241&position=all.

Judicial Docket

Supreme Court: In late June, the Supreme Court denied the certiorari petition filed by the Borough of Tenafly in the Tenafly eruv case. This effectively ends the avenues which Tenafly could pursue to threaten the eruv’s existence and call the legal status of all eruvim into question. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Locke v. Davey. The OU, along with other Orthodox organizations, will be filing a friend of the court brief in this case in support of Josh Davey. To read about the case and our perspective on it, please visit
http://www.jewishtimes.com/scripts/edition.pl?now=5/25/1999&SubSectionID=33&ID=1775

INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

The end of July brought to a close another successful summer of the OU-IPA Washington Internship program. There were 45 interns working in congressional offices and public policy agencies around Washington and participating in a series of shiurim and lectures. For further information on the internship program please see, http://www.ou.org/public/interns/
 
 

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