Marriage amendment, voter ID issues won’t survive in 2011 Legislature

DES MOINES – The leader of a Senate committee that has control of a House-passed resolution on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages in Iowa said Thursday he does not have the votes to move it so it likely will fall victim to an April 1 “funnel” deadline.

Sen. Jeff Danielson, D-Waterloo, chairman of the Senate State Government Committee, said another House-backed bill to require voters to show a photo identification at a polling place before receiving an election ballot also will not be approved this session.

“We do not have the votes for that in State Government so that will not survive the funnel,” Danielson said of the marriage resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to declaring “marriage between one man and one woman shall be the only legal union valid or recognized in this state.” Even if House Joint Resolution 8 cleared committee before April 1, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, repeatedly has said he would not bring the issue up for debate on the Senate floor.

Sen. Kent Sorenson, R-Indianola, said he plans to explore options next week in advance of the Legislature's second self-imposed deadline that requires policy bills to pass either the House or Senate and a committee of the other chamber to remain eligible for consideration during the remainder of the 2011 session.

If his efforts fail, however, he said a procedural vote earlier this session when Republicans tried unsuccessfully to force the Senate to debate the marriage issue will serve as an indicator to Iowans about how senators come down on the effort to allow the public to vote on amending the constitution to effectively ban same-sex marriage.

“I did force a vote earlier this year,” Sorenson said. “I think the battle lines are drawn and I don't believe that anything's changed on that vote count. I believe that it was very clear that there were 24 Republicans that supported it and 26 Democrats that didn't, and anybody that wants to walk under the guise that that was a vote on rules is foolish because everybody in that room knew what we were voting on, we were voting on marriage.”

The vote in question was an attempt by minority GOP senators to overrule Senate President Jack Kibbie's ruling that a call for debating Senate Joint Resolution 8 was procedurally out of order and not eligible for immediate Senate consideration.

At the time of the vote, Gronstal noted that it was a procedural question, but he suspected that forces opposed to same-sex marriages would “lie” by trying to cast it as a vote on the marriage issue for political purposes.

But supporters of the marriage amendment said the Senate vote was a vote on the marriage issue.

For constitutional amendments to come before a vote of the people, both the House and Senate must pass the exact same language in two consecutive general assemblies, which would mean the earliest the matter could come before voters would be in the 2014 election unless it was handled by a special election. The proposed constitutional amendment would undo an April 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision that ruled a state law unconstitutional that defined marriage as only between one man and one woman, which paved the way for civil marriages between couples of the same gender in Iowa.