John Aravosis points to this interview with Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) who suggests that Congress will delay passing the Employer Non-Discrimination Act for approximately five years:

Asked later in a brief interview if that meant the House would not vote on ENDA this year, [Congresswoman Jackie] Speier [D-CA] told the B.A.R. , “The rest of the year is in question.”

“There’s no question ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ will be history this year,” she said. “ENDA, we will have that law for sure within the next five years.”

Speier, a Democrat whose district includes parts of San Mateo and San Francisco counties, said she was acknowledging reality.

“I’m being realistic,” she said.

Speier’s timeline clashes with previous assurances made to the LGBT community. For instance, back in April, Rep. Barney Frank (D-NY) told a group of gay activists that the House Education and Labor Committee will take up ENDA within several days and that the bill will likely receive a quick vote in the full House within weeks. “The speaker has promised that.” “We will get this done fairly quickly,” he said.

By May, Democratic aids were assuring groups that the vote on the resolution would occur sometime before the November elections. “It’ll be right before we leave…to energize the base,” they said, predicting that the vote would occur as early as the second week in June or mid July. “When the opportunity is there, we want to bring that up, and I hope that will be soon,” Speaker Pelosi said. “We’ll see what people want to do.” Still, she promised a House vote by the end of the year.

In June, however, the situation began to look even more perilous. Pelosi said she would not bring up ENDA until Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and Democrats in the Senate began to complain that they’re not ready to take-up the bill. “This issue is just not ready for the Senate,” an LGBT advocate and political insider told The Advocate’s Kerry Eleveld on condition of anonymity. “The procedural aspects of debate would make it way too easy for a [Sen. Jim] DeMint or a [Sen. Tom] Coburn to demagogue.” “The fact that there’s not a path in the Senate makes it a very heavy lift,” the source said. “It’s not enough to say that Pelosi needs to ram this through. The reason she isn’t able to ram it through is because members don’t want to vote for something that is politically difficult like this issue.” The bill currently has 45 Senate cosponsors and 199 House cosponsors.

Aravosis observes that “If they can’t pass ENDA with super-majorities in both the House and Senate, and a Democratic president who won by a wide margin and had a 70% approval rating (and an opposition that was in ruins), then it may take a lot more than five years to ‘improve’ the situation enough for Democrats to be comfortable keeping their promises to insignificant little pariahs like us.”

In contrast to benefits acquired through heterosexual marriage, the federal and most state governments treat dependent benefits for domestic partners as taxable earned income, placing an extra tax burden on gay and lesbian individuals who receive health care coverage through their employer. As a result, gay people pay $1,069 per year more in taxes than would a married employee with the same coverage. Collectively, “unmarried couples lose $178 million per year to additional taxes” and U.S. employers “pay a total of $57 million per year in additional payroll taxes because of this unequal tax treatment.”

Well today those numbers will decrease, if ever so slightly. Google has announced that it will begin covering the cost of the extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay:

“We said, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t seem fair,’ so we looked into it,” Mr. Bock said. “From that initial suggestion, we said, let’s take a look at all the benefits we offer and see if we are being truly fair across the board.” As a result, the company also decided to make a few other changes that would help gay employees, including eliminating a one-year waiting period before qualifying for infertility benefits and including domestic partners in its family leave policy — going beyond the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires employers to provide up to 12 weeks’ leave in a one-year period to recover from a medical condition or to care for a relative.

The extra compensation to cover the domestic partner tax will apply only to same-sex domestic partners, Mr. Bock said, because heterosexual couples can avoid the added tax by marrying. (Same-sex couples can make their unions official in several states, but their relationship will not be federally recognized.)

The additional pay will also cover the dependents of the employee’s domestic partner. The changes will be retroactive to Jan. 1, and will apply only to workers in the United States.

Google is not the first company to pay for the benefit — “according to the Human Rights Campaign, a handful of other organizations, including Cisco, Kimpton Hotels and the Gates Foundation, do so as well” — but the experts NYT spoke to predict that “given the competitive nature of the benefits culture in Silicon Valley, where companies often offer extra perks to attract top employees, Google’s decision could lead to policy reviews.”

Indeed, a domino effect would not only alleviate the extra tax burden on LGBT employees, but it would also help the country move closer towards universal coverage. According to a recent study published in Health Affairs, the extra tax burden results in lower levels of insurance for partnered gay and lesbians as compared to their heterosexual counterparts. “Partnered gay men are less than half as likely (42 percent) as married heterosexual men to get employer-sponsored dependent coverage, and partnered lesbians have an even slimmer chance (28 percent) of getting dependent coverage compared to married heterosexual women.”

Ultimately, Congress has to extend the employer-coverage tax exclusion to domestic partnership benefits. The House version of the health care bill included this provision, but it was ultimately kept out of the final legislation.

By the third day of a confirmation hearing, opposition senators quickly start to sound like broken records, having used all their A-List attacks during the first round of questioning.  Moreover, since yesterday’s attacks on Kagan were such “thin gruel,” yesterday’s attacks on General Kagan barely even registered, and most of the Republicans’ time was spent on questions that Kagan had already answered.

Nevertheless, two very clear, and very different visions of the Constitution were on display yesterday.  Throughout the hearings, conservatives criticized civil rights icon and former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as a judicial activist.  Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) explained at length why Marshall is no activist, pointing out that Marshall’s well known battle against “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities” has firm roots in the Constitution.

Likewise, progressives offered their own vision of what it means to be a judicial activist.  While their more conservative colleagues largely offered empty platutes about “legislating from the bench,” progressive senators focused heavily of Roberts Court decisions permitting limitless corporate influence on American democracy, forcing consumers and workers into a secret, privatized court systems and ignoring laws protecting women from pay discrimination and older workers from age discrimination as paradigm examples of activist decision making.  By the end of yesterday’s testimony, the conservatives looked beaten down.

Nothing exemplified the difference between these two competing visions of the Constitution more than an exchange between Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).  Referencing the Affordable Care Act, Coburn lectured Kagan about how Americans are “losing freedom,” and how we were more free “30 years ago.”  Klobuchar then pointed out that, 30 years ago, there were no women on the Supreme Court, no women on the Judiciary Committee, and only one woman in the Senate.  What freedom means, say Klobuchar, is in the “eyes of the beholder.”

Watch it:

So it’s clear that progressives have finally found their voice on the judiciary, and it is a voice which declares that “freedom” does not mean the freedom to be ill, the freedom to be discriminated against, or the freedom to have your leaders chosen for you.  But one week of clarity will not be enough to take back the judiciary.  Conservatives worked very hard for a very long time to seize control of the courts.  If progressives want to take them back, yesterday should be the first step in a very long journey.