Bill Rekindles Fight Over Bias Suits : Civil rights: Democrats seek to remove caps on damage awards won by women, the disabled and religious minorities. White House opposition is seen.

Democrats sounded the bell on the next round in their long-running fight with President Bush over civil rights Tuesday by introducing a bill to lift the limits imposed on damage awards that women, religious minorities and disabled workers may receive in discrimination suits against their employers.

In the Senate, 23 Democrats and three liberal Republicans introduced legislation to remove the caps on damage awards included in the civil rights measure that Bush signed into law last week. A group of 40 Democrats are sponsoring an identical measure in the House.

“Women, religious minorities and the disabled are not second-class citizens, and they do not deserve second-class remedies,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said at a news conference called to unveil the proposed Equal Remedies Act.

The product of an intense two-year struggle between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the Republican White House, the civil rights legislation that Bush signed last Thursday reversed a number of recent Supreme Court decisions that made it harder for victims of racial discrimination to prove their cases in court.

For the first time, it also gave women, religious minorities and the disabled the right to sue for damages in discrimination or harassment cases, extending to these groups the same legal remedies available to victims of racial discrimination.

However, in a compromise struck with the White House to avoid an otherwise certain veto, Democrats agreed to cap the damage awards that these groups can receive at levels ranging from $50,000 to $300,000, depending on the size of the employer involved.

Civil rights advocates and women’s groups argued that the caps are themselves discriminatory because no such limits apply to cases involving racial discrimination. But they also went along with the compromise when it became clear that neither the House nor the Senate was likely to pass a bill without caps by the two-thirds majority required to override a presidential veto.

“To save the whole bill, we were forced to build (in) an inequity,” said Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.), the chief Senate sponsor of the new legislation. “Just when we say we think women should be treated equally in the workplace, we turn around and discriminate against them in the courts.” Now, he added, “we must fix this convoluted injustice.”

Other proponents of the legislation concede that they face an uphill fight in securing the two-thirds majority needed in both houses to make their effort to lift the caps veto-proof. But they added that support for abolishing the newly created “two-tier” system of damage awards was growing in the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Faye Hill controversy, which focused attention on the issue of sexual harassment.

Kennedy said the Labor and Human Resources Committee he chairs in the Senate will take up the legislation in February, shortly after Congress returns from its winter recess. He said Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) has promised to expedite its consideration on the floor.

The White House opposes removal of the caps, fearing that the prospect of unlimited damage awards could lead to a flood of court cases excessively costly to businesses.

But supporters argued that those fears are unfounded because the lack of caps on damage awards in racial discrimination suits has not deluged the courts with frivolous cases.

“As Prof. Anita Hill showed us, a woman who seeks to prove sexual harassment stands a far better chance of becoming a victim of her own charges than her harasser does of being assessed any damages,” District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said.

“As an African-American woman,” she added, “I find it quite impossible to accept a standard of full equality for the part of me that is black, but a lower standard because I am a woman.”