MAGA Report Cards — LGBTQ Rights

Kevin Hern Called Tulsa City Councilors to Warn Them Off a Human Rights Ordinance. A Year Later, It Still Isn't Law.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:22:11 +0000

In June 2025, the Tulsa City Council took up a change to the city's human rights ordinances. It did three things.

The first was housekeeping — cleaning up gender-specific language, swapping "he" for "the contractor," adding a seat on the Human Rights Commission for the new Asian Affairs Commission, and updating the Tulsa Women's Commission's name.

The second added veterans to the city's list of protected classes.

The third took protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — which Tulsa already applied to housing — and extended them to public accommodations.

Its sponsors said it overrode no state or federal law and altered no employment standards. Fifteen people signed up to speak in favor at the June meeting. Nobody signed up to speak against it. Mayor Monroe Nichols said he'd sign it as soon as it reached his desk.

The council tabled it 7–2 and set a vote for September 10. Three councilors — Anthony Archie, Carol Bush and Karen Gilbert — asked for more time with the language. Some councilors also raised a worry that the federal government might pull money from Tulsa if it passed. The sponsor, Councilor Laura Bellis, disputed that.

Then Kevin Hern started calling them.

What the councilors say he said

Hern was then, and still is, Oklahoma's First District congressman, representing Tulsa. Multiple councilors told the Tulsa World in August 2025 that he had phoned them about the ordinance.

Councilor Anthony Archie described the call this way:

"He has been receiving a lot of feedback from folks at the state level and some folks at the federal level about the ordinance, and he's concerned that it may hamper his ability to bring resources back to the state of Oklahoma."

Archie was careful about what he had and hadn't been told. He said he did not come away thinking passage would mean a "one-for-one" loss of any particular federal funding source. What he came away with was this:

"But I came away with the idea that the White House was watching, and folks in the executive and the legislative branch federally were watching, and that the decisions we make here in Tulsa affects his ability to navigate his role as a representative for Oklahoma."

Councilor Karen Gilbert said Hern called her too, and put it more bluntly: "The call was to inform of concerns from the federal executive branch how our federal funding could be cut."

Councilor Carol Bush said Hern raised the same concerns she had already raised herself: "It was (about) the unintended consequences when we do things. Does this, you know, shine a light on us that maybe we don't need? Does it jeopardize federal funding?"

Council Chairman Phil Lakin declined to say whether he got a call.

Hern's office did not respond to several requests for comment from the Tulsa World.

It worked

The day before that story ran, Bellis and Councilor Lori Decter Wright abruptly halted discussion of the ordinance. In a joint statement read to their colleagues, they said "the highest levels of the current federal administration are actively spreading misinformation about the ordinance" in order to spread fear and make it fail.

"The malicious misinformation campaign undermines the hard work of many in our community who simply want to make certain Tulsa is a city that welcomes, supports, and protects everyone who calls it home, works here, or comes to visit."

Asked directly, Wright and Bellis confirmed that Hern was one of the people they were talking about.

The context made the threat legible without anyone having to spell it out. The Trump administration had been explicit about withholding money from entities running diversity programs, and within the previous month city councils in Dallas and Fort Worth had ended their cities' DEI programs to head off the loss of millions in federal funds. Tulsa's councilors did not need a specific grant named to understand the shape of the thing.

Look at where that leaves the ordinance today. Tulsa's own city government still lists the protected classes for public accommodations as "race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, or disability." Sexual orientation and gender identity are not among them. Neither is veteran status. A full year later, the law reads exactly as it did before.

Not his job

Hern does not represent the City of Tulsa on the City Council. He holds a seat in the U.S. House. The Tulsa World's editorial board made that point with a list, published September 7, 2025, of seven things he could have been doing instead of calling city councilors.

Number one on the list: host a town hall where the public is invited and people can ask him questions directly.

That one lands, because our own research on Hern found that the last time he is known to have taken open questions from a room of Oklahoma constituents was February 2025 — at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool where he was pressed hard about Elon Musk and mass federal layoffs. Weeks later a public lunch with him was canceled after more than 100 activists signed up. When a Tulsa station asked all five Oklahoma House members whether they'd keep meeting constituents, two said yes and Hern didn't respond. In April 2025, constituents held a town hall for him anyway and asked their questions to an empty chair, while he was in El Salvador touring the CECOT mega-prison and promoting the trip on Newsmax.

The editorial's other suggestions included getting Ryan Walters to release federal education money still undelivered to Oklahoma schools almost two months into the fiscal year, and working to stop the clawbacks of money he and his colleagues had already voted for. It closed on the asymmetry:

"We bet Congress made a city councilor or two wince a time or three with the belief that federal decisions would hurt Tulsa. But they didn't bother representatives. They are too busy working with other leaders trying to run a city that's progressing into the future."

The same lever, used elsewhere

Threatening a smaller government's funding to make it drop a policy is not a Hern invention; it is the standard play of this era, and it usually works.

The Education Department opened a case against Ann Arbor's schools over a policy on not outing transgender students to their parents, with the district's federal funding as the enforcement mechanism. Greg Abbott threatened two Texas airports' funding over a foot-washing sink, and DFW folded the same day.

What distinguishes Hern's version is how little had to be said. He never had to name a grant. Archie's account is that no specific dollar was ever put on the table — just the information that Washington was watching, delivered by the congressman whose job is to bring Washington's money home. That was sufficient.

Hern is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What the record shows

Tulsa's City Council was set to vote on September 10, 2025, on adding veterans as a protected class and extending the city's existing LGBTQ discrimination protections from housing to public accommodations. Nobody had signed up to speak against it; fifteen people spoke for it; the mayor said he would sign it. Then Kevin Hern, the area's congressman, phoned councilors to say he was worried the ordinance could hamper his ability to bring federal resources to Oklahoma and that the White House was watching. Three councilors — Archie, Gilbert and Bush — described those calls on the record. The sponsors pulled the ordinance, naming Hern as one of the people pressuring them. Hern's office would not comment. Today, Tulsa's public accommodations ordinance still does not cover sexual orientation, gender identity or veteran status.

Sources

Hern called to raise concerns about proposed human rights ordinance, city councilors say — Kevin Canfield, Tulsa World, August 28, 2025, and Editorial: 7 things Rep. Kevin Hern could do rather than bother the Tulsa City Council — Tulsa World Editorial Board, September 7, 2025. Current protected classes verified against the City of Tulsa's own human rights page. Photo: Daniel Shular / Tulsa World.

Marsha Blackburn and Tommy Tuberville Signed a Bill to Ban Federal Money for Studying Trans Kids' Care. Two Weeks Later, Trump's Medicare Agency Moved to End the Coverage.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:01:17 +0000

On July 30, seven Republican senators put their names on a bill called the Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act. Two of them were Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Read the name again, because the name is the whole story. Not harmful care. Harmful research.

S. 5202 does not ban a treatment. It bans finding out about one. In Blackburn's own words, the bill would "prohibit the use of federal funds for any research or study on gender transition surgeries for minors." Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is the sponsor; Blackburn, Tuberville, Ted Cruz, Steve Daines, Cynthia Lummis and James Lankford signed on. It was read twice and sent to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where it sits.

The timing tells you what this is

They went after the research first.

Two weeks after this bill was filed, Trump's Medicare agency published a rule barring state Medicaid and CHIP plans from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors. It hit the Federal Register on August 13 and takes effect October 13. Kids already on hormone therapy get six more months of federal money, and then it stops.

So the order is the reverse of what you would guess. The bill to keep the federal government from ever funding a study of what happens to these kids was filed and referred to committee before the coverage was taken away — not after, as a tidy-up. Whatever these senators knew was coming, the study went on the chopping block first.

That is not a policy that protects anyone. You cannot protect children from a treatment by refusing to learn its outcomes. If the treatment is as dangerous as these senators say it is, research is the thing that would prove it. A ban on research is only useful if you would rather not know.

What they said about it

The three senators quoted in Blackburn's announcement did not make a scientific argument. They made a rhetorical one.

Lee: "Why is the federal bureaucracy in the child mutilation business?" And: "President Trump rightly halted this attack on America's kids."

Lankford: "For too long, taxpayers have been forced to fund sex-rejecting studies on kids."

Blackburn: taxpayers "should not be spending a penny on research done by those who want to push harmful gender transition surgeries and radical gender ideology on our kids."

Notice what's missing from all three. No study is named. No finding is disputed. No researcher is accused of anything specific. The case against the research is that the people doing it are assumed to want the wrong answer.

Federal health research funding does not work that way, and these senators know it. A grant is reviewed, the methods are public, and the results are published whether or not anyone likes them. Cutting the funding doesn't correct a bias. It just ends the record.

Two senators running for governor, spending their Senate time here

Here is the part their own voters should weigh.

Blackburn's Senate term runs to 2031 and she is running for governor of Tennessee anyway — if she wins, she gets to name her own replacement in the Senate. Tuberville's term ends in January, and he is running for governor of Alabama. Both are asking their states to hand them the job of managing hospitals, schools, budgets and rural health systems.

The bill these two chose to put their names on while running for those jobs does nothing for either state. It removes federal research dollars from a field that affects a very small number of children, in a country where the Medicaid money for that care is already being taken away.

This is the same lane Tennessee's congressional delegation keeps working. Rep. Diana Harshbarger celebrated the Medicaid cutoff and then said she "will not rest" until Congress bans the care outright, with $100,000 penalties per violation. And it's the same playbook as the surrogacy bill twenty-five Republicans we track have signed — a bill about a handful of families, aimed at a much larger audience.

The pattern is the point

Ban the research. Ban the coverage. Ban the care.

Each step is defended with the others as evidence — the treatment must be dangerous, look how much of it we've prohibited. And the step Blackburn and Tuberville put their names on is the one that makes sure nobody can check.

Tennessee and Alabama both vote November 3.

Sources

Blackburn, Colleagues Introduce Bill to End Federal Funding for Harmful Gender Transition Research on Minors — Office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, August 21, 2026
S. 5202 — Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act — sponsor and cosponsor list, introduced July 30, 2026
Medicaid Program; Prohibition on Federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures Furnished to Children — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services final rule, published August 13, 2026, effective October 13, 2026

A Byron Donalds Ad Cut a Sentence in Half to Claim His Opponent Backs 'Gender Changing Surgeries on Kids.' Jolly Was Quoting Someone Else's Grandfather.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:54:05 +0000

On August 8, a PAC supporting Byron Donalds put out an attack ad about David Jolly, the Democrat running against him for governor of Florida.

The text on screen said Jolly supports "gender changing surgeries on kids." Then it played a clip of Jolly saying:

"We embraced it, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care."

PolitiFact rated it False, and the reason is worth reading slowly.

The Sentence the Ad Cut in Half

The clip comes from a September 2025 podcast interview. Jolly was telling a story about a phone call he got a few years earlier from a grandfather in Florida.

The man's grandchild was in high school, was transgender, was having suicidal thoughts, and was wondering whether to leave home.

Here is the full sentence Jolly said, quoting that grandfather:

"As a family we embraced it, we sought the right pathways, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care, for this grandchild."

Those are the grandfather's words about his own family. Jolly was repeating them.

The ad cut out the beginning, cut out the end, and ran the middle as if it were Jolly announcing his own policy.

The man wasn't calling to talk about surgery, either. He was calling because Florida lawmakers were considering SB 254 — the bill that made it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a minor. He told Jolly his family's doctor could be arrested, and that the parents could lose custody. That bill became law in May 2023.

A grandfather afraid of losing his grandchild became, in the ad, proof that a candidate wants to operate on children.

What Jolly Actually Says

PolitiFact looked for any instance of Jolly talking about gender-affirming surgeries for kids. It found none in the public record. It asked the Donalds campaign for one. The campaign didn't provide any.

PolitiFact also asked Jolly's campaign directly about the ad and about his position on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and got no response — so on that narrow question his campaign has not said either way. What he has said, when Politico asked him in July about medical care for minors:

"I simply subscribe to the old-school Republican position that government should stay out of your life, out of your doctor's office, and out of your bedroom. The last person you need sitting on the foot of your bed during hard family conversations is Byron Donalds."

What "Gender-Affirming Care" Actually Means

The ad depends on people hearing that phrase and picturing an operating room.

Gender-affirming care covers a wide range of things, starting with using a person's chosen name or pronouns. For adolescents, medical treatment can include puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Surgery is rare, limited to older teens, and requires a parent's consent.

Surgeries are not performed on young children. That is the thing the ad's on-screen text says Jolly wants.

Donalds Said It Himself, Too

This wasn't only the PAC. In July, at a restaurant in Doral, Donalds told patrons that Jolly believes "it's okay to change the gender of young kids."

And when PolitiFact asked his campaign to back the ad up, spokesperson Skylar Swanson didn't walk anything back:

"I do not know what further statement you need when he says it pretty plainly himself."

He doesn't say it plainly. He doesn't say it at all. He was quoting a grandfather.

The Second One This Month

This is the second time in a week that a claim Donalds made about Jolly and transgender kids has fallen apart when someone checked it.

Days earlier, at a rally before the primary, Donalds said the American Medical Association had "finally realized that this is insanity" and come around to his position. The AMA told a reporter that is not what it said, and that it still believes families and doctors should decide together.

It is also not the first ad of this cycle to pin "surgeries on kids" on an opponent who never said it. In Iowa's Senate race, PolitiFact rated False an Ashley Hinson attack ad claiming Josh Turek supports "sex changes for kids" — an ad her campaign put out within an hour of Turek winning his primary. That one was built differently: it ran video of surgeons operating while citing Turek's vote against a school law about names and pronouns, which PolitiFact found "did not authorize or regulate medical gender-affirming care."

The move underneath is the same: put an operating room in front of the voter, and attach it to something that was never about surgery.

Why This Matters to Floridians

Donalds is asking to run a state of 23 million people. His campaign's response to being shown, in detail, that its ad reversed the meaning of a sentence was to say the sentence speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, the actual policy question in Florida is not hypothetical. SB 254 is law. Doctors face felony charges. Families like the one that grandfather described have to decide whether to leave the state.

Donalds' contribution to that conversation was an ad built out of half a sentence.

Source

Samantha Putterman, "Byron Donalds' ad deceptively edited David Jolly clip on gender-affirming care", PolitiFact, August 19, 2026.

Byron Donalds Said the AMA 'Finally Realized This Is Insanity.' The AMA Told a Reporter That Isn't What It Said.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:22:36 +0000

Ahead of Tuesday's Republican primary, Byron Donalds stood at a rally and went after David Jolly, the Democratic front-runner in Florida's governor race, over transgender kids.

His words:

"David Jolly is somebody who thinks it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports."

And:

"David Jolly still thinks it's okay to transgender kids. This is sick to me."

Then he reached for an authority to back himself up:

"Even the American Medical Association has finally realized that this is insanity. That you do not take the puberty from kids."

That last part is the one worth stopping on, because it's checkable — and somebody checked it.

The AMA Says That Isn't Its Position

Donalds appeared to be leaning on New York Times reporting that the AMA had changed its guidance to favor new restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors — The Advocate says his characterization "appeared to be based on" that story.

After that story ran, the AMA pushed back. It told The Advocate that it continues to believe parents, families, and medical professionals should decide together when such care is "medically necessary."

That is not "finally realized this is insanity." It is close to the opposite of it: the doctors' group is saying the decision belongs to a family and its physician, which is precisely the arrangement Donalds is campaigning against.

Donalds took a contested news story about a professional body's guidance, flattened it into a total reversal, and put words in the mouth of the largest association of doctors in the country — in front of a crowd, just before an election.

What Jolly Actually Says

The second thing worth checking is whether Donalds described his opponent's position accurately. He didn't.

Jolly's stated position, per The Advocate's reporting, has several parts:

He opposes athletes assigned male at birth competing in female sports.
He opposes sweeping government restrictions on youth sports participation.
He supports parental rights on gender-affirming medical decisions.

On the sports question he drew the line at kids' rec leagues: "if a 10- or 12-year-old soccer league in the community has a coed team, I don't think the governor should be throwing a flag on the field."

So the man Donalds described as thinking "it's still okay for boys to be in girl sports" has said he doesn't think that. The disagreement between them is about whether the governor of Florida should be personally policing a 10-year-olds' soccer league.

That's a real policy difference. Donalds could have argued it honestly. He chose a version that wasn't true instead.

"This Is Sick to Me"

Set the factual problems aside for a second and look at what's being said about actual children.

Donalds is running to be governor of a state with a lot of transgender kids in it. He would be their governor too. He described the medical care some of them and their doctors and parents have decided on as "sick."

For many of those families the care is about to be taken away anyway. In a separate move, Trump's Medicare and Medicaid agency has ordered Medicaid and CHIP to stop covering gender-affirming care for minors, effective October 13, 2026 — meaning the lowest-income families are about to lose the option regardless of what their doctor recommends.

So the practical situation for a poor family in Florida with a trans kid is this: the coverage is going away in October, and the man leading the Republican field for governor calls what their doctor advised "sick."

The Habit

This is not the first time a confident, checkable Donalds claim has come back short. In July he wrote that Florida's new data center law "ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers"; PolitiFact rated that Half True, because the law "outlines ways to protect consumers from paying higher bills because of new data centers, but it doesn't guarantee it won't happen."

The pattern is not sloppiness. It's a bet: that the applause line travels farther than the correction. In a primary campaign, it usually does.

Which is why the correction is worth writing down. The American Medical Association has not decided that families and doctors making a medical decision together is insanity. It said the opposite, on the record, once the story Donalds was leaning on had run.

Source

Byron Donalds attacks David Jolly's support for trans youth — The Advocate, August 17, 2026. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.

Medicaid Is About to Stop Paying for Trans Kids' Care. Diana Harshbarger Says She 'Will Not Rest' Until She Goes Further.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:42:44 +0000

On August 14, 2026, Diana Harshbarger put out a statement celebrating a federal rule that takes health coverage away from poor children.

She did not describe it that way. She described it as protecting kids. But that is what the rule does, and it is worth being precise about who it reaches.

What she was celebrating

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule barring state Medicaid plans and the Children's Health Insurance Program from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors — and barring federal dollars from paying for any of it. It takes effect October 13, 2026, with a tapering-off period of up to six months for children already on hormone therapy.

Medicaid and CHIP are the coverage of last resort. They exist for families who cannot pay for care any other way. So the children this rule reaches are, by definition, the poorest ones — kids whose doctor, parents and therapist agreed on a treatment plan that is now going to stop because of a rule written in Washington.

Harshbarger's reaction:

"I am grateful CMS is finally cutting off every taxpayer dollar that funded this abuse, and I will not rest until Congress passes my STOP Act and TRUTH in Coverage Act so this industry can never prey on another child again."

That last clause is the news. She is telling you the rule is not the finish line.

What "I will not rest" means in bill text

Harshbarger has two bills, and they are considerably more aggressive than a Medicaid coverage rule.

The STOP Act — Safeguarding the Overall Protection of Minors — which she introduced in April alongside Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, would:

Ban gender transition procedures on minors outright, not just decline to pay for them
Impose civil penalties of at least $100,000 per violation, collectible by the Attorney General
Create a private right of action so patients or their families can sue doctors for damages in federal court
Route the penalty money into a "Victims of Gender Transition Procedures Compensation Fund" in the U.S. Treasury

The TRUTH in Coverage Act, introduced in July, requires insurers that cover this care to also cover "restorative care" on the same terms.

Read the STOP Act's structure again. A $100,000-minimum federal penalty plus an open invitation to sue is not a coverage policy. It is a mechanism designed to make it too legally dangerous for any doctor in the country to provide this care to a minor — including in states where it is legal, and including for families paying entirely out of pocket.

The CMS rule takes away the money. Harshbarger's bill takes away the option.

The medical consensus she is legislating against

Harshbarger is a pharmacist by training. Her statement rests on an HHS report titled "Wolves in White Coats," which alleges hospitals billed nearly $120 million for care on minors since 2019 — including nearly $50 million in puberty-blocker claims it says were filed under vague or inaccurate diagnosis codes. Those are the administration's own findings, produced by the same administration that then referred hospitals to the Justice Department and to HHS's own inspector general — not an independent audit.

Set against that: the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement, "Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents," recommends "providing youth with access to comprehensive gender-affirming and developmentally appropriate health care," supporting insurance coverage for those interventions where appropriate, and having pediatricians advocate for policies that "promote acceptance of all children."

That is the professional body of American pediatricians. Harshbarger's bill would fine its members $100,000 a time for following its guidance.

The Texas piece she left out

Harshbarger's release points to Texas Children's Hospital, which paid a $10 million settlement with the Texas Attorney General and the Justice Department over fraud allegations, and agreed to open the nation's first "Detransition Clinic."

Here is what the release doesn't mention. That settlement was Ken Paxton's, and part of the deal permanently stripped five doctors of their hospital privileges. A Stanford pediatrician described the result as a clinic built by legal intimidation — a facility ordered into existence by a prosecutor, with the physicians who understood the underlying medicine barred from working in it.

Cited as a success story, it is really a preview of the STOP Act's enforcement model.

This is not a one-off for her

Harshbarger's interest in this subject has not always arrived in the language of patient safety.

In an interview, she said of the Biden White House, "I never saw so many fairies in the White House, dancing around." In the same interview she called a 77-year-old Black congressman "boy" — and when he explained why that word is a slur, she tweeted "BOY oh boy."

A year later she was writing federal legislation about transgender people.

She also signed on as a cosponsor of the SAFE KIDS Act, which would void surrogacy contracts based on the nationality of the intended parents — part of the same broader push against the ways LGBTQ families and infertile couples actually have children.

What this costs in Tennessee's 1st District

Tennessee already bans this care for minors. Its law was the one the Supreme Court upheld 6–3 on June 18, 2025 in United States v. Skrmetti, ruling it classifies by age and medical diagnosis rather than sex. As KFF counted at the time, 25 states' bans were left standing.

So the practical effect on Harshbarger's own constituents is narrower than the rhetoric implies. The care is already unavailable to them.

What her bills would do is reach past Tennessee. A $100,000 federal penalty and a private right of action apply in Illinois and California and Massachusetts too. That is the point of writing it as federal law rather than state law.

Harshbarger is not asking for the ability to set policy for her district. She has that. She is asking to set it for everyone else's.

Source

Rep. Diana Harshbarger's office: "Harshbarger Applauds Recent HHS Crackdown on Sex-Rejecting Procedures for Children," August 14, 2026.

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.

Trump's Medicare Agency Just Cut Off Medicaid for Trans Kids' Care. It Takes Effect October 13.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:44:49 +0000

On Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced a rule that bars state Medicaid plans from covering gender-affirming care for anyone under 18, and bars federal Medicaid dollars from paying for it.

The rule does the same for the Children's Health Insurance Program, for kids under 19.

CMS defines the banned care as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical operations. It takes effect October 13.

Kids currently on cross-sex hormones don't get cut off that day — state plans may keep claiming federal money for those medications "for a period of up to 6 months from the effective date of this final rule". After that, the money stops. There is no such grace period for puberty blockers: the rule says flatly that their administration "is not eligible for this tapering provision."

Who this actually hits

Medicaid and CHIP are the health coverage of last resort. They exist for kids whose families can't afford anything else.

So the population this rule reaches is not the one in the political ads. It is not wealthy families making a choice. It is a poor teenager whose doctor, whose parents and whose therapist agreed on a treatment plan, and who is now going to lose it because of a federal rule written in Washington.

CMS did not run a study of its own. It leaned on a 2025 HHS review of the research and on the reassessments of several European health authorities, and concluded from them that this care "does not meet the quality of care standard" Medicaid money is supposed to buy. The doctors who actually treat these kids say that review misreads their field. The agency wrote the rule anyway.

What the doctors actually say

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a news release that gender-affirming procedures "carry serious risks and can cause irreversible harm."

The nation's leading medical associations — including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — have affirmed the safety of care that aligns with a child or teen's gender identity, in response to a series of Trump proposals on the subject.

Dr. Susan Kressly, then president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, put it this way in December:

"These rules are a baseless intrusion into the patient-physician relationship. Patients, their families, and their physicians — not politicians or government officials — should be the ones to make decisions together about what care is best for them."

It's also worth being precise about what's actually at stake, since the debate is usually conducted about surgery. Surgical gender-affirming operations are very rare for children. The overwhelming majority of what this rule cuts off is puberty blockers and hormones — prescriptions, taken under supervision, that a pediatrician and a family agreed on.

Note what the rule leaves standing

CMS says federal funds can still be used for mental health care for these kids.

Consider what that means in practice. The government is willing to pay for a trans teenager's therapy. It is not willing to pay for the treatment their doctor prescribed. It will fund the appointment where the kid processes losing their care.

This is one piece of a much bigger campaign

A federal rule is only the newest tool. The same push runs through Congress, the states and the agencies:

The Education Department is threatening a school district's funding for not outing trans kids to their parents.
In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little signed a law that can send someone to prison for using the wrong bathroom.
In Congress, Republicans have spent floor time and committee time on bills targeting trans people — including one member who missed the actual defense bill vote while pushing to ban trans troops.

And the political calculation is sometimes said out loud. Andy Biggs called Arizona's anti-trans ballot measure "an 80-20 issue" — a phrase about polling margins, not about medicine or children.

That's the honest framing of this whole project. It is not a health policy. It's a wedge, and the wedge is being driven through kids who use Medicaid.

What happens on October 13

Families have roughly two months to figure out what comes next, and then up to six more on borrowed time if their child is already on cross-sex hormones.

Some will pay out of pocket. Most families on Medicaid cannot. Some will drive to another state, until their state bans it there too. Some kids will simply stop.

Doctors said all of this to CMS directly. The rule's own record of the public comments notes that "several commenters stated that abrupt discontinuation of treatment would be cruel, unethical, and/or contrary to standards of care and medical science." They got six months, for one of the three treatments.

Sources

CMS, "Medicaid Program; Prohibition on Federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures Furnished to Children," final rule, 91 FR 52406, Aug. 13, 2026; CMS, "CMS Ends Federal Medicaid and CHIP Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures on Children and Youth", Aug. 11, 2026; Nada Hassanein, "Federal agency blocks Medicaid coverage of kids' gender-affirming care," Stateline / Oklahoma Voice, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor.

127 Democrats Cosponsored Nicole Malliotakis' Museum Bill. Her Own Committee Added a Trans Ban, and Not One of Them Voted for It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:10:15 +0000

Nicole Malliotakis introduced H.R. 1329 on February 13, 2025. It was a short bill with a simple job: let the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum be built on the National Mall.

It became a genuinely bipartisan bill. 231 members signed on as cosponsors — 127 Democrats and 104 Republicans, more Democrats than Republicans. Judy Chu and Nancy Pelosi were on it. So were Brian Fitzpatrick, Claudia Tenney and Mike Lawler. Malliotakis was vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and this was the kind of bill that caucus exists for.

On May 21, 2026, the bill died on the House floor, 204 to 216. Not one Democrat voted for it. Six Republicans voted against it.

Malliotakis quit the Problem Solvers Caucus the next day and said bipartisanship had become "a one-way street."

Here's what actually happened to her bill.

The bill she wrote didn't say any of this

You can read the version Malliotakis introduced. It's about land. It lets the museum sit inside the National Mall's Reserve, sets up how federal agencies hand over the site, and tells the museum's advisory council to seek out a broad range of women's experiences.

The word "biological" does not appear in it. Not once.

Now read the version that went to the floor. A new section was bolted on:

"The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States."

"Prohibition.—The Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as a female."

That language was added in the House Administration Committee on March 18, 2026. The committee's own report records that it "adopted an amendment in the nature of a substitute offered by Mrs. Miller by voice vote," then reported the bill out 7-4, straight down party lines. A competing amendment from Rep. Norma Torres failed 4-7.

Malliotakis knew exactly who wrote it, and defended it

She didn't just go along with the change. She put out a press release the same day naming the amendment's author and calling it reasonable:

"It's unfortunate that, despite having more than 230 bipartisan cosponsors and the support of President Trump, this legislation passed out of Committee (7-4) along party lines, with the Democrats opposing it, simply because language was added via amendment by Rep. Mary Miller to ensure the museum exhibits only biological women."

The word doing the work in that sentence is "simply."

Mary Miller is not a random colleague. Eleven weeks later she filed a resolution asking the House to formally stop recognizing Pride Month, on the grounds that Americans are "inundated with perverse Pride Month displays." That's the member whose amendment Malliotakis accepted onto her own bill and then defended as one of two "reasonable requests."

The rewritten bill also handed the President discretion to change the museum's location within 180 days — a provision Malliotakis listed alongside the trans ban in the same press release, as one of two pieces of "clarifying language."

What she said on the floor

Malliotakis' argument for the language, as she put it to the House: "I hate to alert my friends on the other side of the aisle, but a museum dedicated to women's history should have women in it."

That's a good line. It's also not what the amendment says. The amendment doesn't require that the museum include women — the museum was always going to be about women, that's the entire point of the building. It requires that the museum be prohibited from depicting a specific group of Americans. It writes a federal ban on who a Smithsonian curator is allowed to put on a wall.

Rep. Joe Morelle of Rochester answered the plain version on the floor: "I am saddened and disappointed that the Republican majority has needlessly politicized what has for years been a bipartisan priority." He called the added language "an ideological poison pill intended to dictate what the museum can and cannot say about women's history."

Six Republicans killed it too

The story Malliotakis told is that Democrats sank her bill. Democrats did all vote no. But so did six members of her own party — Andy Harris, Warren Davidson, Josh Brecheen, Tim Burchett, Keith Self and Michael Cloud — who, sources told Spectrum News, questioned whether the museum was necessary at all and worried it would divide Americans.

She had 231 cosponsors. She got 204 votes.

At least 127 members who had put their names on this bill voted against it in the end: 126 of the 127 Democratic cosponsors, plus Tim Burchett, a Republican who had cosponsored it. The one Democratic cosponsor missing from that column, Nikema Williams of Georgia, did not vote at all. That is not a Democratic problem. That is a bill that got changed after people signed it.

The part that's actually about Malliotakis

Nobody made her keep the language.

She is the sponsor. It was her bill, her name on it, her five-year project. When the amendment went in — on a voice vote, in a committee her party controls 8-4 — she had a choice: strip the trans ban and pass a women's history museum with 231 cosponsors behind it, or keep the ban and lose the museum.

She kept the ban. The museum lost. And then she resigned as vice chair of the bipartisan caucus, telling Spectrum News: "I've been a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus for five years. And it's clear that it's become a one-way street."

The one-way street runs the other direction here. A bipartisan bill was rewritten by one party, in one committee, and reported out on a party-line vote, to add a culture-war provision that had nothing to do with the bill's purpose — putting a building on the Mall. The sponsor accepted it. When the bill died, she blamed the people who had cosponsored it.

This is a pattern with her

Malliotakis has a long record of standing where the wind is. Running for mayor of New York City in 2017, she said she regretted her vote for Trump — she'd write in Marco Rubio if she had it back. Two and a half years later, running for Congress in the one part of the city Trump carried, she accepted his "Complete & Total Endorsement" and said the earlier remarks were taken out of context.

She did the same on abortion. In 2017 she told Gotham Gazette that it was "not something that I could do, but it's not to say that my views should be imposed on other women." In 2020, running in a redder seat, she told the Brooklyn Paper: "I would consider myself pro-life, my voting record is as such."

The museum bill is the same instinct with a building attached. When the choice came down to the thing she'd worked on for five years or a line that pleases the right flank of her conference, the building lost.

The bottom line

There is no Smithsonian American Women's History Museum on the National Mall. There was a bill with 231 cosponsors that could have started one. Nicole Malliotakis wrote it.

Then her party added a provision telling the museum which Americans it may not depict, she defended it as reasonable, the bill died, and she blamed everyone else and walked out of the bipartisanship caucus she was vice chair of.

Staten Island and south Brooklyn have a member of Congress who still won't hold an in-person town hall while constituents rally outside her office every Monday. The museum vote is the same story in a different room: when it costs her something inside her own party, she folds.

Source

Rep. Malliotakis leaves House caucus after failed museum vote — Spectrum News NY1, May 27, 2026. Photo: John Minchillo/AP.
H.R. 1329 — Smithsonian American Women's History Museum Act — congress.gov

Texas's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Is Still in the State Constitution. Jake Ellzey Voted Twice Against the Federal Law That Would Blunt It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:50:31 +0000

In 2022, Congress passed a law whose entire job was to make sure that if the Supreme Court ever reversed itself on marriage, the marriages already made would still count.

It's called the Respect for Marriage Act. It repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and required the federal government and every state to recognize marriages — same-sex and interracial — that were legally performed somewhere else.

Jake Ellzey voted no. Then he voted no again.

The two votes

July 19, 2022. The House passed it 267–157. Forty-seven Republicans voted yes. Ellzey voted Nay.

December 8, 2022. The Senate had spent five months rewriting the bill, adding explicit protections for religious organizations — churches wouldn't have to perform ceremonies, faith-based nonprofits wouldn't lose their tax status. The House passed that final version 258–169. Thirty-nine Republicans voted yes. Ellzey voted Nay again.

Five months and a bipartisan rewrite designed to answer exactly the objection most Republicans raised. It didn't move him.

Why this is not an old, symbolic vote in Texas

Texas never repealed its ban.

Article I, Section 32 of the Texas Constitution — approved by voters in 2005 — still reads that marriage "shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." A matching statute sits in the Texas Family Code. Both are dormant, unenforceable only because Obergefell v. Hodges says so. Texas is one of 32 states where the bans could snap back if that ruling fell.

And the pressure on that ruling in Texas is not hypothetical. Two things happened in a single autumn:

October 24, 2025. The Texas Supreme Court amended the state's judicial conduct code so that a judge who declines to perform a wedding over a "sincerely held religious belief" isn't violating the impartiality rules. In plain terms: a Texas justice of the peace can perform opposite-sex weddings only, and face no sanction for it.

December 19, 2025. Dianne Hensley, the Waco justice of the peace whose refusals prompted that fight, went to federal court asking the judiciary to overturn Obergefell. Her attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, argued that "the federal judiciary has no authority to recognize or invent 'fundamental' constitutional rights" and that "there is nothing in the language of the Constitution that even remotely suggests that homosexual marriage is a constitutional right."

The goal is stated plainly: send marriage back to the states, the way Dobbs sent abortion back to the states.

If that ever happens, the Respect for Marriage Act is the thing standing between a Texas couple and a marriage their own state stops recognizing.

Ellzey voted against it. Twice.

What the law actually does — and doesn't

Worth being precise, because the bill was widely misdescribed at the time.

The Respect for Marriage Act does not force any state to issue a marriage license. What it does is require recognition: a marriage lawfully performed in one state has to be honored by the federal government and by every other state. And the enacted text says in so many words that nothing in it requires a religious organization to provide services or facilities for a marriage, or denies a nonprofit its tax-exempt status over marriage.

That's the protection. It's narrow, it's defensive, and it's the exact thing Texas's dormant constitutional ban would otherwise override.

It also covers interracial marriage, which Loving v. Virginia protects on the same legal footing marriage equality does. Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in Dobbs, wrote that "in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell" — the footing itself, though he did not name Loving.

Forty-seven, then thirty-nine

The reason this is Ellzey's vote and not just his party's is that a meaningful number of House Republicans went the other way — 47 in July, 39 in December. Among Texas Republicans, Tony Gonzales voted yes both times.

Ellzey's public brand is the reasonable one. His own office highlights 20 years in the Navy, five combat tours, and a stint as Air Boss aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, and his House website carries a standing link to the bipartisan For Country Caucus.

On the vote where the bipartisan option was actually on the table, twice, he took a pass.

We've written about the identical two-vote record for Ohio's Troy Balderson, and about Dan Meuser, who voted yes in July and then flipped to no in December — after the bill got more religious protections, not fewer.

What it comes down to

There are Texans in Ellis and Navarro and Cherokee counties who got married under a Supreme Court ruling that a Waco judge is currently asking a federal court to erase, in a state whose constitution still says their marriage doesn't count.

Their congressman had two chances to make sure that marriage keeps being recognized no matter what the Court does.

He said no both times.

Sources

House roll call votes 373 and 513 of 2022, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives; "Waco judge asks federal courts to overturn same-sex marriage," The Texas Tribune, December 19, 2025.

Andy Biggs Calls Arizona's Anti-Trans Ballot Measure an '80-20 Issue.' Arizona Approved Seven Trans Athletes in Twelve Years.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:38:11 +0000

At a news conference on Monday, Andy Biggs — the congressman running to unseat Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs — stood with his party's nominees for secretary of state and attorney general to promote Proposition 318, an anti-trans ballot measure.

He didn't sell it as a policy that solves a problem. He sold it as a winner.

"This is an 80-20 issue."

That's the pitch. Not that Arizona schools are in crisis. That the polling is good.

The Arizona Mirror's Gloria Rebecca Gomez reported the whole news conference, and the framing was consistent throughout: Republicans are betting this measure drives their voters to the polls in November.

The problem it claims to solve

Republican lawmakers gave Prop. 318 the short title "Protect Girls' Sports in Arizona Act." Here's the part they don't lead with:

Arizona law already forbids transgender girls from joining school sports teams that match their gender identity. That ban passed in 2022, before Hobbs was even elected.

So what does Prop. 318 add? Two things.

First, it extends the ban past schools into private youth recreational organizations — leagues like Little League Baseball. Not state programs. Not public schools. Neighborhood kids' leagues.

Second — and this is the part that isn't about sports at all — it requires schools and athletic associations to make sure bathrooms, locker rooms, shower rooms and other "private spaces" aren't used by anyone of the opposite biological sex. The restriction applies to facilities "integral to athletic engagement," language broad enough to pull in facilities used by teams and even members of the public visiting during sports events. Critics say it could be read to cover every bathroom in a school.

And it works through lawsuits. Schools and athletic associations face legal action if they get it wrong. Which means the safest thing a school can do is police the question aggressively — checking, challenging, and asking children to prove themselves.

The number that ends the argument

In the dozen or so years before Arizona's 2022 ban, the Arizona Interscholastic Association fielded about 12 requests from transgender students to play on teams matching their gender identity — and approved seven of them. Those are the district court's findings in the case that blocked the ban, quoted by the Ninth Circuit when it upheld that ruling in 2024. The record does not say how many of the seven were girls.

Roughly 170,000 students play school sports in Arizona each year.

That's the emergency. Seven students in twelve years, and the response is a constitutional-grade ballot measure that reaches into Little League and turns every school bathroom into a potential lawsuit.

LGBTQ advocates call it a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The numbers make that hard to argue with.

Why it's on the ballot instead of in a bill

Biggs complained at the press conference that Republicans even had to go to voters at all — saying Hobbs had a chance to do this the easy way and didn't.

"She puts in jeopardy the opportunity for fair competitive athletics for women and it's really astounding."

That's a strange complaint, because it describes exactly how this is supposed to work. Hobbs has consistently vetoed anti-LGBTQ bills sent to her by the Republican legislature, including several that would have barred trans students from using school facilities matching their gender identity. That's a governor using a governor's power.

A large part of the reason Republicans wrote Prop. 318 as a ballot measure in the first place was to get around that veto.

It's worth being precise about Biggs's framing, too. The law banning trans girls from school sports already exists, and Hobbs never had the chance to veto it — it passed before she took office. Since then, Republicans haven't sent her further trans-athlete legislation. They've focused on school facilities. So the thing Biggs blames Hobbs for not doing is not quite the thing on the ballot.

The trap inside the measure

Here's the piece Arizona voters should understand before November.

If Prop. 318 passes, a future legislature essentially cannot undo it. The Arizona Constitution requires a three-fourths supermajority before lawmakers can change anything voters approved — and any change has to advance the measure's original intent, which rules out swapping in trans-inclusive policy.

The only other route is going back to the voters with a whole new ballot question.

Warren Petersen, the Republican nominee for attorney general, made the appeal plainly: he touted Prop. 318 as a long-term solution that can't be undone by future legislatures.

That is the actual design. Not to settle a policy question, but to lock one in past the reach of anyone Arizonans might elect later.

The ad is built on a video from another state

The "Yes on 318" campaign released an ad Monday built around a viral clip from a Massachusetts girls' basketball game, in which an allegedly trans player shoves an opponent while grabbing the ball. The voiceover asks Arizonans to protect "female spaces from those 'pretending' to be someone they're not."

When that clip went viral in 2024, LGBTQ advocates made a simple point: one athlete's bad sportsmanship is not a reason to condemn an entire group.

The campaign's website also hosts a page called "rational voices," collecting quotes against trans athletic participation from figures like Bill Maher, Caitlyn Jenner and Meghan McCain.

An out-of-state video clip and a celebrity quote page. That's the evidentiary base for a measure that would reach into Arizona's Little Leagues and school bathrooms.

What Biggs is actually running on

Biggs is running for governor with an anti-abortion record he has spent the campaign managing.

Prop. 318 fits neatly. It's a measure that does relatively little about school sports — those rules already exist — and a great deal about bathrooms, private leagues, lawsuits, and locking the whole thing beyond a future legislature's reach.

And Biggs's own stated reason for backing it wasn't any of that. It was the number: 80-20.

The people this actually lands on

Arizona's Democratic incumbents won narrowly last time — Attorney General Kris Mayes by 280 votes, Hobbs by two-thirds of a percentage point. Republicans think a wedge issue closes that gap.

So the strategy is legible. Find an issue that polls at 80-20, put it on the ballot, and let it pull your voters to the polls in a race you lost by 280 votes.

The cost of that strategy falls on the kids who wanted to play a sport, and on every student who now gets a school bathroom policed under threat of a lawsuit.

Mayes' campaign manager, Delaney Corcoran, put the political read plainly: "These attacks are designed to divide and distract Arizonans from the issues that matter most to Arizonans and their families."

Biggs told Arizona what this is when he called it an 80-20 issue. He was describing a turnout tool, not a problem in Arizona's schools. Voters should hold him to his own description.

Source

Top Republicans embrace anti-trans measure as a wedge in November races — Gloria Rebecca Gomez, Arizona Mirror, August 10, 2026. Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images.

"I've Had More Engaging Conversations with Trees": A Navy Veteran Took His Trans Daughter to David Joyce's Office. Nobody Was Listening.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:36:03 +0000

In mid-February 2026, three people from Ohio walked into a congressional office in Washington to lobby their congressman.

One was a father named Mike, a Navy veteran. One was his 17-year-old daughter Marigold, who is transgender. The third was Kaden Ames, 63, a transgender elder. They were in D.C. with the ACLU and Advocates for Trans Equality, lobbying for trans rights. On Marigold's list was the part of the 988 crisis line built for LGBTQ+ young people, which the federal government had shut off.

The office was David Joyce's.

Here is what happened, as The Buckeye Flame reported it: Joyce's staffer had a tablet and pen to take notes. Once he realized what the meeting was about, he put his phone on top of the tablet and leaned back. "You couldn't read anything from him," Ames said.

"Did he blink at all?" Ames asked afterward.

"I've had more engaging conversations with trees," Mike said.

"It felt like we had gotten nowhere," said Marigold.

Mike later learned the staffer was newly hired.

They weren't asking for much

The group also met with staff for three Minnesota lawmakers that day. Those staffers took notes and seemed familiar with the issues. When Marigold brought up the 988 cut, they looked surprised and thanked her for the reminder.

That's the whole comparison. Nobody in Joyce's office had to agree with them. Somebody had to write it down.

The service that got switched off

On July 17, 2025, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration shut down the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline's specialized services for LGBTQ+ young people. Callers under 25 could no longer press 3, text PRIDE, or use the online chat to reach a counselor trained to work with them.

Since the program launched in 2022, it had served roughly 1.5 million LGBTQ+ young people.

"This administration has made a dangerous decision to play politics with real young people's lives," said Jaymes Black, the Trevor Project's CEO.

This is not an abstraction to a 17-year-old girl who came to Washington to ask about it. It is a phone number that used to connect to somebody who understood her, and now doesn't.

Two House Republicans signed the bill to turn it back on. Joyce didn't.

In September 2025, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi introduced H.R. 5434, the 988 LGBTQ+ Youth Access Act. It directs the Department of Health and Human Services to restore the specialized service and to set aside at least 9 percent of 988 funding to keep it running.

Two Republicans joined as original cosponsors: Mike Lawler of New York and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

"Nearly 1.3 million LGBTQ+ youth have already turned to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline's 'Press 3' option," Fitzpatrick said. "That tells us two things: the need is staggering, and the service is working."

The bill now has 166 cosponsors. Two of them are Republicans — still just Lawler and Fitzpatrick. David Joyce is not on the list.

He could be. There is no political cost he hasn't already paid.

He is exactly the Republican who could have said yes

Joyce has spent his career being described as one of the reasonable ones. He is one of the small group of House Republicans who voted for the Respect for Marriage Act — twice, including final passage on December 8, 2022, when the House sent the bill protecting same-sex marriage to the President's desk. We've written before about how rare that made him among Ohio Republicans.

So the constituents who showed up in February weren't picking a fight with a hardliner. They were doing the thing everyone tells people to do: find the Republican most likely to listen, and go make your case in person.

That's how the system is supposed to work. A father takes his kid to Washington. They sit in a chair across from a staffer. They make the case for kids like his daughter, and they ask their congressman to listen.

And the answer was a man leaning back in a chair, looking at his phone.

The pattern in his own district

This isn't the first time constituents have described Joyce's office as a place where nothing lands.

In spring 2025, people in Geauga County got so tired of not hearing back from his office that they organized their own town halls without him. What he offered instead was a telephone town hall that ran about 30 minutes.

It's the same complaint from a completely different set of people: we asked, and there was nobody there.

Joyce has represented Ohio's 14th District since 2013. In 13 years, a member of Congress builds an office culture — who gets a real meeting, who gets a newly hired staffer and a blank notepad. The people who travelled to Washington to make that case in person found out which one they were.

Source

"I've had more engaging conversations with trees": Trans Ohioans get a cold reception from Ohio US rep in D.C. trip — The Buckeye Flame, March 17, 2026. Image: The Buckeye Flame.

Bob Onder Asked a Hate Group's Audience to Pray for Protection From the "Demonic Evil That Is the Transgender Cult"

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:06:59 +0000

In late February 2026, Bob Onder went on a podcast run by the Family Research Council to promote a bill he had just introduced. The host, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, asked how listeners should pray for him.

Onder's answer, as LGBTQ Nation reported:

"This is as much a spiritual battle as it is a political battle. I and my family have come under spiritual attack so, yes, please have your, your, your viewers, uh, pray to, uh, to guide me and guide my family to- that the hand of God would protect us from the demonic evil that is the transgender cult."

That is a sitting member of Congress describing a group of his own constituents as a demonic evil and a cult, and asking for divine protection from them.

The Family Research Council is designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Onder is a physician. He represents roughly 770,000 Missourians — the state's 6,160,281 people divided among eight House districts — some of whom are transgender, and some of whom are the parents of transgender kids.

The bill he was promoting

Onder introduced the Chloe Cole Act of 2026 on February 23, 2026, with Rep. Mike Kennedy of Utah. It has 88 cosponsors. On July 15, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee ordered it reported, as amended, 15 to 8.

It is not a ban. Missouri already banned this care for minors in 2023 — Senate Bill 49, which the Missouri Supreme Court upheld in January 2026. Onder's bill does something different: it creates a federal lawsuit designed to make providing that care financially unsurvivable anywhere in the country.

Read what's actually in the bill text — the substitute the committee adopted, by voice vote, keeps all of it:

It is retroactive. A claim can be brought "regardless of whether the alleged covered intervention occurred before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act." Care that was legal, consented to, and consistent with the standard of care when it was given becomes actionable years later.
It is strict liability. For care given after enactment, a provider whose participation is "proven by clear and convincing evidence shall be strictly liable for damages." Not negligent — liable, full stop.
The doctor has to prove the exceptions. If a physician says the treatment fell under one of the bill's medical carve-outs, the burden is on the physician to prove it "by clear and convincing evidence."
You cannot sign it away. "No liability for a health care professional under these provisions may be waived." No consent form protects anyone.
Ties go against the doctor. "Any ambiguities shall be resolved against any party found to have engaged in participation in a covered intervention on a child."
The medical standard of care gets "limited deference." For care given before enactment, the bill instructs courts to discount the prevailing standard of care to the extent it "contradict[s] the intent of this Act" and the doctor "knew or should have known that such standards of care were in serious, scientific, and medical dispute at the time of the covered intervention."
The window is up to 25 years. A suit can be filed within 25 years of the patient's 18th birthday — so a doctor can be sued when the former patient is 43 — or within four years of any detransition expense, whichever is later.
Punitive damages are on the table, plus emotional distress, pain and suffering.

And "participate" is drawn wide. It reaches anyone who prescribes, administers, performs, authorizes, directs, or "knowingly plan[s] or coordinat[es]" the care with intent to facilitate it — the supervising physician and the institutional representative are named in the text.

The bill also writes a definition of sex into federal law: "a person's immutable biological classification, determined at the moment of conception."

What a law like that actually does

You don't need a ban if no doctor will take the risk. A hospital lawyer looking at strict liability, a 25-year window, retroactive exposure, unwaivable liability, and a rule that ambiguity goes against the doctor will reach one conclusion: don't offer this care to anyone under 18, anywhere, for any reason.

That is the mechanism. It's the same one used against abortion providers — don't outlaw the procedure, just make the liability so lopsided that nobody will perform it.

The bill's carve-outs are narrow and the burden of proving them sits on the doctor. A physician treating a child with a disorder of sexual development, or treating a complication from earlier care, has an affirmative defense — one they must establish by clear and convincing evidence, after they've already been sued.

This isn't new for him

Onder's record on LGBTQ Missourians goes back a decade.

In 2016, as a state senator, he introduced Senate Joint Resolution 39, a proposed amendment to the Missouri Constitution shielding businesses that refuse to serve same-sex weddings. Democrats filibustered it for more than 39 hours — Onder himself called it the longest filibuster in state history — before Republican leaders cut off debate and pushed it through the Senate. Seven weeks later a Missouri House committee deadlocked 6–6 and it died. Onder's response was that House members had "caved to pressure from special interests."

Ten years apart, the same instinct: find a legal mechanism that lets other people do the excluding, and call it protection.

The company he keeps

The venue matters here as much as the words.

Onder didn't say "demonic evil" in a floor speech or to a local reporter. He said it to Tony Perkins' audience, on a program run by an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-LGBTQ hate group — and he said it while asking that audience to pray for him and his family's protection from the people his bill targets.

It's rhetoric with a body count risk, and it comes from someone who took an oath as a doctor before he took one as a congressman.

This is a pattern across the party, not one man's outburst. In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little signed a law that can send someone to prison for using the wrong bathroom — misdemeanor for a first offense, felony for a second within five years. In Colorado, Lauren Boebert spent a week trying to ban transgender troops and then missed the actual defense bill vote. The bills differ. The framing — that trans people are a threat to be legislated away — does not.

What Missourians get out of it

Onder is in his first term. He won his August primary and is set for a November rematch with Democrat Bethany Mann, this time in a district Missouri Republicans redrew mid-decade.

While he was writing this bill, an estimated 20,218 people in Missouri's 3rd District were on track to lose health coverage by 2034, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House Minority — 9,518 of them losing Medicaid under the law he voted for, and 10,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage as the enhanced premium tax credits lapse. Another 19,263 households in the district rely on SNAP to eat, including 8,428 with children.

Those are his constituents too. None of them got a prayer request on national radio.

Source

"GOP Congressman calls trans people a 'demonic evil' & asks supporters to pray for his protection", LGBTQ Nation, February 2026. Bill text and committee action from congress.gov. Photo: Nathan Papes / Springfield News-Leader / USA TODAY NETWORK.

Julia Letlow's Signature Bill Makes Schools Hand Parents a List of Every Book in the Library. It Died in the Senate. Now She's One Election From There.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:08 +0000

Julia Letlow is a former university administrator with a doctorate, and education is the thing she says she came to Congress to do. Her one signature piece of legislation is the Parents Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 5.

She introduced it in 2021, reintroduced it in 2023, and pushed it through the House on March 24, 2023 by 213 to 208 — every voting Democrat against, plus five Republicans. It went to the Senate and died there.

In June she won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat Bill Cassidy is losing. The general election is November 3.

What the bill actually says

Republicans spent the floor debate insisting the bill has nothing to do with banning books. Rep. Virginia Foxx, then the Education Committee chair, said so repeatedly. Rep. Chip Roy said on the floor that the bill is there "to just ensure that parents know what is in the libraries and what is in the curriculum. It does nothing more."

Here is the operative text, verbatim. It gives parents the right to receive:

"(i) a list of the books and other reading materials available in the library of their child's school; and (ii) inspect such books or other reading materials"

and separately requires that every school receiving federal Title I funds provide parents exactly that list and that opportunity.

Roy is right that the word "ban" doesn't appear. But the bill's opponents weren't arguing that it bans books. They were arguing that a federally mandated, parent-facing inventory of every book in every school library is the machinery a ban runs on. PEN America counted bans on 1,648 individual titles in school libraries and classrooms in the 2021–22 school year alone — removals, and removals pending review. Of those titles, 41% dealt with LGBTQ+ themes or characters and 40% had protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.

Roy, for his part, didn't hide the ball on the floor: "Yes. Some local jurisdictions are removing certain books—absolutely, and God bless them for it—books about explicit sex acts."

The part about students

The bill does two separate things here. Elementary schools and middle schools that take Education Department money have to get parental consent before:

"(1) changing a minor child's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on any school form; or (2) allowing a child to change the child's sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms"

And every school in a district that takes Title I money — high schools included — has to notify parents whenever "a school employee or contractor acts to ... change a minor child's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name." No form has to be involved, and no consent is asked for. In practice that means a school cannot call a student by the name that student asks to be called without the parents being told.

Rep. Mark Pocan, then chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said the effect would be to force "schools to forcibly out transgender students, even if it puts those youth in harm's way." Rep. Melanie Stansbury said the bill was "modeled after bills passed at the state level" that have censored teaching and endangered students.

And then the House added to it. Two amendments from Rep. Lauren Boebert were adopted before passage: one establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows transgender girls to play in girls' sports, and another establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows a transgender girl to use a bathroom or changing room matching her gender.

Those are now part of the bill Letlow authored.

What Letlow said about her own bill

On the House floor, she told her colleagues:

"This bill is not complex or complicated. Nor should it be partisan or polarizing, and contrary to what you may hear from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, it is not an attack on our hard-working teachers, who will always be the heroes in my eyes."

"It is not an attempt to have Congress dictate their curriculum or determine the books in the library. Instead, this bill aims to bring more transparency and accountability to education."

Both halves of that can't hold at once. A bill that requires every school in every district taking federal Title I money to hand parents a list of its library holdings at the start of each school year is Congress reaching into what's in the library. That may be a defensible thing to do — reasonable people think parents should be able to see it — but it is not "not an attempt."

And a bill that is "not partisan or polarizing" doesn't pass with zero votes from the other party.

Why it matters now

Letlow's district is one of the poorest in the country. When she was first elected, nearly 30% of families with children in Louisiana's 5th were under the poverty line, and she told CNN that education "can be used as a catalyst to lift a region out of poverty."

That is the right diagnosis. It's the kind of thing a former university administrator in a poor rural district is uniquely positioned to act on — school funding, teacher pay, broadband, early literacy, the community and technical colleges that feed the region's workforce.

Her signature contribution to the education debate instead was a bill about library inventories and pronoun disclosure. It received no Democratic votes and never became law.

If she wins in November, she will spend January in the chamber that killed it. It will be back.

We deserve better.

Sources

H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act, as passed by the House (118th Congress)
House Roll Call 161, March 24, 2023 — passed 213–208
Congressional Record, House, March 23, 2023 — floor debate on H.R. 5, including the Letlow, Foxx and Roy remarks
PEN America, "Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools", September 19, 2022
Lexi Lonas Cochran and Mychael Schnell, "House Republicans pass Parents Bill of Rights" — The Hill, March 24, 2023
Christopher Kane, "House Republicans pass anti-LGBTQ Parents Bill of Rights Act" — Washington Blade, March 24, 2023
Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill

Diana Harshbarger Called a 77-Year-Old Black Congressman 'Boy.' When He Explained Why That's a Slur, She Tweeted 'BOY oh boy.'

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:05 +0000

In April 2025, Rep. Diana Harshbarger sat for a half-hour interview with FAME Ministries, a local Christian group in her East Tennessee district. Near the end, the interviewer brought up Democrats holding signs during President Trump's address to Congress the month before — the night Rep. Al Green of Texas was escorted out of the chamber for heckling.

Harshbarger said she'd wanted to go grab a few of the signs, "but Al Green was over here with his cane."

"And I'm like gosh dangit boy, put that — he does not need that cane. That cane is a prop. I swear it's not real. And I'm wondering, one my colleagues said take the, screw the gold part off of it and see if there's a gun in there, and I'm like, I don't know about that, man. He's just weird Al."

Three things in one breath: a 77-year-old Black man called "boy," his mobility aid dismissed as a prop, and a colleague's suggestion that he might be smuggling a gun inside it — repeated on the air anyway.

What Green said

Green held a press conference the following Tuesday. He did not spend it defending his cane.

"It wasn't said to indicate that you are youthful," he said of the word "boy." "It was said to demean, to degrade, to denigrate."

He said he had heard people call his father that when he was a child.

"Friends, it's not about Al Green. It's about whether Black people in this society are going to allow slurs such as this to be normalized. We cannot allow the normalization of these kinds of slurs."

On the cane, he said simply that it gives him stability when he walks — and that no, there is no weapon in it, though he'd use it to defend himself if he had to.

He also made a point of not asking for an apology. "I never ask people to apologize. I ask people to tell the truth," Green said. "If you just tell the truth, no apology is necessary."

What Harshbarger said next

Her office didn't respond to WJHL's request for comment. She answered on X instead:

"The weather is warming up, so naturally, the snowflakes are starting to melt!

I was discussing one of my colleague's erratic behavior during President Trump's Joint Address, and now he—along with the rest of the Radical Left—is blowing it out of proportion in a desperate attempt to get attention.

BOY oh boy, you just can't catch a break between the FAKE NEWS and young men wielding canes!"

A colleague had just explained, on the record, that the word was used to demean his father. Her response used it twice more and called the 77-year-old a "young man."

That is not a slip of the tongue anymore. A slip is what happens before someone tells you. This came after.

"So many fairies in the White House"

The same interview included another passage. Asked about the Biden administration and transgender people, Harshbarger said:

"Listen, I never saw so many fairies in the White House, dancing around. I'm like, I don't know where they got them. But look, my job is to love them into the love of Christ, and I've got to watch what I say."

A few minutes earlier, on the same subject:

"But if you look at what some of these other countries are going back, they're pushing off on these stupid things like transgender — you can pretend to be a man if you're a woman or a woman if you're a man — and all this junk. They're getting back to what made them great. And we do want to make America great again. And it starts with God and with the family."

"I've got to watch what I say" is the part worth sitting with. She knew. She said it anyway, and then didn't take it back.

Why it still matters a year later

This could be filed away as a bad interview if she had no power over the people in it. She does.

In April 2026, Harshbarger introduced the STOP Act, federal legislation banning gender transition procedures for anyone under 18 — puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries — with civil penalties of at least $100,000 per violation, a private right to sue in federal court, and a compensation fund in the U.S. Treasury funded by the penalties.

People can and do disagree in good faith about minors and medical transition. Many parents, doctors and voters have real concerns, and Tennessee's own law on the subject was upheld by the Supreme Court.

But the person writing the federal version of it is the person who, a year earlier, described the people it governs as "fairies… dancing around" and their identity as "all this junk." She is also a member of the committee that oversees federal health policy. When she says that as a parent and pharmacist, protecting patients has been her priority, the interview is the context in which that claim has to be read.

And on Al Green: he sits with her in the same chamber. She will vote alongside him for as long as they both hold their seats. The measure of a member of Congress is not whether she can be provoked into saying something ugly on a podcast. It's what she does when the person she said it about explains, calmly and publicly, why it hurt.

What she did was say it twice more.

We deserve better.

Source

Slater Teague, "Harshbarger criticized for comments about Black congressman, trans people" — WJHL News Channel 11, April 23, 2025. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images — Rep. Al Green during the March 4, 2025 joint address, with Harshbarger seated behind him.

Two Days After 49 People Were Murdered at a Gay Club, Pete Sessions Said It Wasn't a Gay Club

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:13:57 +0000

On June 12, 2016, a gunman walked into Pulse in Orlando during Latin night and murdered 49 people. It was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ Americans in the country's history. Pulse advertised itself as Orlando's premier gay nightclub. Everyone knew what it was.

Two days later, a reporter for National Journal asked Pete Sessions — then the chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee — whether the massacre changed his position on protecting LGBTQ people from job discrimination.

This is what Sessions said:

"It was a young person's nightclub, I'm told. And there were some [LGBT people] there, but it was mostly Latinos."

The remark was reported by Daniel Newhauser of National Journal and picked up nationally within hours. Faced with the obvious problem — that Pulse was, in fact, a gay club — Sessions's communications director offered this: the congressman's words had been "taken out of context," and what he meant was that "there weren't only gay individuals at the club but people from all walks of life were present."

It didn't hold up. The Rules Committee's own chairman had been asked a direct question about anti-LGBTQ violence and answered by disputing that the victims were the people they were.

That Same Week, He Killed the Protections

The question wasn't hypothetical. There was a real amendment, sitting in Sessions's committee, waiting on him.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney had filed an amendment to a Defense Department spending bill that would have enforced President Obama's 2014 executive order barring companies that contract with the federal government from discriminating against LGBTQ people. It was not a radical measure. It had Republican cosponsors — Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York.

The House Rules Committee decides which amendments get a floor vote and which ones die without one. Sessions ran that committee.

Days after the Orlando massacre, the committee blocked the amendment from getting a vote. It was the third time in weeks House Republicans had stopped a version of it.

Maloney's reaction at the time:

"It's hard to imagine that any act that is so horrific could lead to anything positive. But if we were going to do anything, it would be a very positive step to say that discrimination has no place in our law."

That week, the House did the "moment of silence" — the flags, the floor speeches, the shared grief. Then the Rules Committee met and made sure a bill protecting the people who had just been murdered never reached the floor.

The Votes Since

Sessions lost his Dallas seat in 2018 and came back in 2021 representing Waco. His record since has been consistent with what he said in 2016.

On February 25, 2021, the House passed the Equality Act, which would write protections against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations into federal civil rights law. Sessions voted no. That's the same protection he'd been asked about outside Pulse five years earlier.
On December 8, 2022, the House gave final passage to the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects existing same-sex and interracial marriages if the Supreme Court reverses course. Thirty-nine House Republicans voted for it. Sessions voted no.

Same-sex marriage has been the law for more than a decade. A large bloc of his own party voted to leave those marriages alone. Sessions wouldn't.

Why an Old Quote Still Matters

Some politicians say something ugly, apologize, and change. That's not what happened here.

Sessions never really took it back — his office said he'd been misunderstood. And in the ten years since, every time he's had a chance to vote for the protections he was being asked about that day, he has voted against them. The Pulse comment wasn't a slip that contradicted his record. It was his record, said out loud, at the worst possible moment.

This is a man who has spent about 27 years in Congress and now sits on the Financial Services and Oversight Committees. He is asking Texas's 17th District for a fifteenth term. His pattern of standing by the wrong people is well documented — he wrote a letter vouching for the "character" of a man running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, and he testified for the defense of a former congressman convicted of secretly working for Nicolás Maduro's government. What he would not do, on the worst week in the modern history of LGBTQ Americans, was let his colleagues vote on whether those Americans could be fired for who they are.

Forty-nine people were killed. Sessions was asked one question about it. He used his answer to argue about who the dead were, and then he used his gavel to make sure nothing changed.

We deserve better.

Source

GOPer Suggests Site Of Orlando Attack Wasn't Gay Club: 'It Was Mostly Latinos' — Talking Points Memo. Photo: Talking Points Memo.

Same-Sex Marriage Became Legal Because of an Ohio Case. Troy Balderson Voted Twice Against Protecting It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:54:49 +0000

The Supreme Court case that made same-sex marriage legal across the country started in Ohio.

Jim Obergefell, an Ohio native, sued because the state refused to list him as the surviving spouse on his husband John Arthur's death certificate. The other name in Obergefell v. Hodges is Richard Hodges — Ohio's director of health. It is an Ohio case with an Ohio plaintiff about an Ohio law.

In 2022, Congress voted on whether to protect that right in federal statute, in case the Supreme Court changed its mind.

Troy Balderson voted no. Then he voted no again.

The two votes

The Respect for Marriage Act repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and required the federal government and every state to recognize marriages — same-sex and interracial — that were validly performed elsewhere.

July 19, 2022. The House passed it 267-157. Forty-seven Republicans voted yes. Balderson voted Nay.

December 8, 2022. After the Senate amended it, the House passed the final version 258-169. Thirty-nine Republicans voted yes. Balderson voted Nay again.

He had five months and a bipartisan Senate rewrite to change his mind. He didn't.

Four of his Ohio colleagues voted yes

This is the part that makes it his choice rather than his party's.

On both votes, four Ohio Republicans in the House voted for the Respect for Marriage Act: Mike Carey, David Joyce, Mike Turner, and Anthony Gonzalez. Balderson voted with the other faction.

That matters because of how Balderson positions himself. He belongs to the Republican Governance Group and the Republican Main Street Partnership — the two caucuses House Republicans join specifically to signal they are pragmatists rather than hardliners. The Republican Governance Group's Tuesday Group PAC is one of his larger donors, at $37,000.

On a bill where 47 Republicans, including four from his own state, found a way to yes, the self-identified moderate from central Ohio did not.

Why this is not a symbolic old vote

Ohio's 2004 ban is still sitting in the state constitution.

The language reads that "only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state." There's a matching 2004 statute. Both are dormant — Obergefell overrides them — and both would take effect again the moment Obergefell doesn't.

Bennett Guess, executive director of the ACLU of Ohio, told NBC4 in Columbus that if Obergefell were overturned, Ohio's ban would automatically snap back into effect:

"The only way to take that constitutional amendment out of the constitution is for the voters of Ohio to be given the opportunity to vote again to remove that."

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the 2022 decision that overturned federal abortion rights, wrote that the Court should reconsider several precedents — marriage equality among them.

And here is where Balderson's vote lands. NBC4 spells out exactly what the law he opposed would and wouldn't do for Ohio:

"While a federal law passed in 2022, the Respect for Marriage Act, would require Ohio to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, it would not require the state to issue new marriage licenses if Obergefell was reversed and Ohio's ban reinstated."

So the Respect for Marriage Act is the floor. It is the one thing standing between Ohio couples and a state that doesn't recognize their marriage at all. Balderson voted against the floor. Twice.

Ohioans are now trying to fix it themselves

Because Congress didn't fully solve it and the state legislature hasn't, Ohioans are doing it by petition.

Ohio Equal Rights is gathering signatures for a "Right to Marry" amendment that would strike the 2004 ban from the state constitution, plus a companion "Equal Rights" amendment barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Organizers need more than 442,000 valid signatures for each to reach the November 2026 ballot.

Jim Obergefell himself endorsed the campaign:

"If our nation's Constitution becomes a mere suggestion of what rights every person enjoys, then Ohioans must propose and pass laws and amendments to protect those rights."

Ohio voters have done this before. In 2023 they passed constitutional amendments on abortion rights and marijuana — over the objections of most of the state's Republican officeholders.

He isn't around to explain it

Balderson has not made himself available to answer for this in person. When Knox County organizers invited him to a town hall in August 2025, he declined and they held it without him, collecting the questions the audience would have asked. A Columbus Dispatch letter writer summarized the experience: "Rep. Troy Balderson is ducking and dodging us."

Somewhere in Ohio's 12th District there is a married couple whose marriage exists because a man from their state sued over a death certificate. Their congressman voted twice against writing that into law, and won't take the question.

We deserve better.

Source

Roll call votes from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House — RC 373 (July 19, 2022) and RC 513 (December 8, 2022) on H.R. 8404. Ohio ballot-measure reporting and quotes from NBC4/WCMH Columbus, "What could happen to Ohio same-sex marriage rights in 2026." Photo: Congressman Troy Balderson sworn into office, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary Miller Filed a Resolution Saying the House Should "No Longer Recognize" Pride Month

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:50:44 +0000

On June 3, 2026 — two days into Pride Month — Mary Miller filed a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It's called "Supporting the designation of June as Family Month." It runs about a page. And the operative section has three numbered parts, of which the second is four words long.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives— (1) recognizes the benefit of marriage and family to men, women, children, and society; (2) no longer recognizes Pride Month; and (3) supports the designation of Family Month for the purpose of rededicating our Nation to the importance of this essential unit.

That's from the text of H.Res.1338 as she introduced it.

The word she chose

Plenty of members of Congress promote the family. There is nothing remarkable about a resolution saying kids do well with parents who love them.

This isn't that resolution. The "whereas" clauses that lead up to those three items include this one:

"Whereas Americans are inundated with perverse Pride Month displays and events throughout the month of June that denigrate the nuclear family"

Perverse. That's the word, in a document submitted to the House of Representatives with her name on it.

It sits alongside a clause noting that Pride Month was first declared by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and continued by Presidents Obama and Biden — an act Miller's resolution describes as "rejecting the importance of marriage and family."

So the argument being made is not that families deserve a month. It's that recognizing gay Americans is what's wrong with families.

What the resolution blames on the decline of marriage

The resolution's case builds like this: about half of marriages end in divorce, young people are delaying marriage, the birth rate has fallen below replacement, and tax and welfare policy penalizes getting married.

Then it gets to the payoff line:

"Whereas the decline of marriage and family has corresponded to a rise in crime, drug abuse, and other social ill"

And then:

"Whereas our survival as a country and civilization depends on the continuation of traditional marriage and family"

Read the chain the whole way through. Pride Month displays are "perverse." They "denigrate the nuclear family." The decline of the nuclear family causes crime and drug abuse. And our survival as a civilization is at stake.

Miller told the Daily Signal the same thing in her own voice: "Our survival as a country and civilization depends on the continuation of traditional marriage and family." She also said the traditional family "is the greatest obstacle to the Left's cultural agenda, which is why they have spent decades trying to redefine, weaken, and replace it."

Nothing in the resolution proposes to lower the cost of raising a child, expand child care, or address a single one of the economic pressures it lists as reasons people aren't getting married. It renames a month and withdraws recognition from a group of Americans.

Twenty-one cosponsors

Miller introduced the same resolution in 2025 and it went nowhere. She filed it again this June, and 21 other House Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors.

It won't get a floor vote. That's not really the point of a resolution like this. The point is the record — a document in the congressional archive, with 22 members' names on it, asking the House of Representatives to put itself formally on record as no longer recognizing Pride Month.

This is a pattern with her, not a one-off

Miller has a documented habit of using her position to single people out.

In February 2025, while presiding over the House, she introduced Rep. Sarah McBride — the first openly transgender member of Congress — as "the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride." Then she posted about it on X, bragging that she had "refused to deny biological reality" on the chamber floor.

In June 2025, after a Sikh granthi delivered the morning prayer in the House, she posted that it was "deeply troubling that a Sikh was allowed to lead prayer" there, adding that "America was founded as a Christian nation." An earlier version of her post had wrongly identified the man as Muslim. Both were deleted after bipartisan condemnation.

In January 2026, she joined the Sharia Free America Caucus, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations designated an anti-Muslim hate group — the first congressional caucus in the organization's 32-year history to get that label. We traced where that panic actually came from.

The Family Month resolution isn't a stray. It's the same move applied to a different group.

Meanwhile, in the 15th District

Miller's constituents in downstate Illinois have real problems, and she has been notably hard to find when they want to talk about them.

In March 2025, hundreds rallied outside her Mahomet office carrying signs that read "Where's Mary? 1,532 days in office, ZERO town halls." In February 2026, when constituents organized a "Takin' the Town Hall to Mary" meet-up in a Quincy park, she declined to respond to the invitation — so the roughly 40 people who showed up talked to her two primary opponents instead.

She had time to write a resolution about a month.

We deserve better.

Source

H.Res.1338 — Supporting the designation of June as Family Month, introduced June 3, 2026. Reporting: The Daily Signal, June 3, 2026. Photo: The Daily Signal.

Glenn Thompson Toasted His Son's New Husband Into the Family. Three Days Earlier He Voted Against the Law Protecting That Marriage.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:11:37 +0000

On a Friday night in July 2022, at a wedding southwest of Philadelphia, a man in a black tuxedo stood up next to his wife to toast the two grooms sitting in front of him in white blazers. One of them was his son.

Here is part of what he said, in a recording a guest gave to BuzzFeed News:

"As they grow and as they get a little older, we also hope and pray they're going to find that one true love so that they have the opportunity to experience that: Someone to grow old with. ... We love it when they find their one true love, especially when they become a part of our families then. That's what we're rooting for."

The man giving that toast was Glenn Thompson, the Republican congressman for Pennsylvania's 15th District. Three days earlier, he had gone to the House floor and voted against the bill that protects marriages exactly like the one he was toasting.

The vote

On July 19, 2022, the House passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill does one plain thing: it makes the federal government, and every state, recognize a legal marriage between two people of the same sex or of different races. It doesn't force any state to perform those weddings. It just says the government can't pretend an existing marriage never happened.

Forty-seven Republicans voted yes. Thompson was one of the 157 who voted no.

His office explained the vote to his hometown paper before anybody knew about the wedding. Press secretary Maddison Stone called the bill "nothing more than an election-year messaging stunt for Democrats in Congress who have failed to address historic inflation and out of control prices at gas pumps and grocery stores."

Three days later Thompson was at the reception, telling the room how blessed he felt to welcome a new son into the family.

The story broke when Gawker noticed the timing the day before the ceremony. NBC News confirmed on the Monday that Thompson had gone. His son told NBC he "married the love of [his] life" and that his "father was there." Thompson's own office confirmed it too: the congressman and his wife were "thrilled to attend and celebrate their son's marriage," and were "very happy" to welcome their new son-in-law "into their family."

"It's not anybody's business"

Two months later, a reporter asked Thompson about it. He was not sorry about the vote. He was angry about the coverage.

"It was wrong, it was just absolutely wrong," Thompson told HuffPost in September 2022. "It's not anybody's business — bottom line."

He defended the no vote as a political calculation, not a moral one:

"It was the right vote because it was a political bill that was put on the floor by the Democrats for the purposes of ... getting political leverage, inappropriately, for this next election. No one's looking to step in the way of people choosing who they're going to marry. It was ridiculous."

Two things about that. First, "no one's looking to step in the way" was not true even when he said it. Congress took the bill up because the Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade, and Justice Clarence Thomas had written separately urging the court to reconsider other landmark rulings, including the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Thompson's answer was that he didn't believe the court would actually do it.

Second, and more to the point: a vote is a vote. If a bill is a stunt, you can say so and still vote yes. Forty-seven of his colleagues did. Thompson chose to be counted against it, and then to be counted at the wedding, and he wanted the second thing kept private.

In the same interview he described what he wants for his kids: "From the time they're born, we have all kinds of hopes and aspirations for them. One of them is that they find that person that they want to grow old with and spend the rest of their life."

That is, almost word for word, the thing the bill he voted against protects.

He got a second chance. He voted no again.

Thompson told HuffPost in September that he'd take another look if the Senate changed the bill. The Senate did change it. A bipartisan group of senators added two entire new sections on religious liberty — protections saying churches, religious schools and faith-based charities can't be forced to take part in a wedding, can't be sued for refusing, and can't lose their tax-exempt status over their beliefs about marriage. Twelve Senate Republicans voted for the amended version. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly backed it.

The bill came back to the House on December 8, 2022. Thompson voted no again.

His official statement that day was four lines long:

"Individuals have the freedom and the right to choose who to grow old with in life. However, the bill lacks the appropriate constitutional protections for religious liberties enshrined in the First Amendment."

He objected to the religious protections in the only version of the bill that had any. The July bill he also voted against did not contain a single word about religion. The December bill did. He voted no on both.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who negotiated those added protections with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, seemed genuinely puzzled when she heard. "He wasn't convinced by the changes we made?" she asked a reporter.

Thompson said he gave his son a heads-up before that second vote, because he knew reporters would come asking. He said he "shared with him the rationality" for it. He would not say whether his son agreed.

"I love my son, my son loves me, and he knows that I'm a principled man," Thompson said.

Thompson has never said he opposes gay marriage. That's what makes this different from an ordinary bad vote. He isn't a man voting his conscience against something he believes is wrong. By his own account he has no objection to his son's marriage at all — he celebrated it in a tuxedo. He just wouldn't extend the same legal security to anybody else's family, twice, when it cost him nothing but a press release.

He wasn't the only Pennsylvania Republican playing games with this bill. Dan Meuser voted yes in July and then flipped to no in December, blaming the religious-liberty language that had just been added — a switch we walked through line by line. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany voted no and is now running for governor.

Why this still matters in the 15th District

Pennsylvania's own 1996 law defining marriage as one man and one woman is still sitting on the books. A federal judge struck it down in Whitewood v. Wolf on May 20, 2014 — but the legislature never repealed it. The state House finally passed a repeal on March 26, 2026, by 127–72, and it's now waiting in the Republican-controlled state Senate, where the same effort has stalled before.

And people are still asking the Supreme Court to reopen the question. In 2025, former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis petitioned the court to overturn the 2015 marriage ruling outright. The justices turned her down on November 10, 2025, with no explanation. Someone will ask again.

So the federal law Thompson voted against twice is, right now, part of what keeps married couples in his district married — including couples in the same position as his own son. He also voted against the Equality Act in February 2021, the bill that would have barred discrimination against LGBTQ people in jobs, housing and public accommodations.

If you live in PA-15 and want to ask him about any of this in person, good luck. Thompson doesn't hold open town halls, and told the Centre Daily Times that going to one organized by county Democrats would be "not logical." His constituents have been standing outside his Bellefonte office every Tuesday since March 2025 trying to get a meeting.

He found the words at the wedding. He's had four years to find them for everybody else's family.

We deserve better.

Source

This post is built on NBC News's July 25, 2022 report that Thompson attended his gay son's wedding three days after voting against the Respect for Marriage Act, along with BuzzFeed News's recording of his toast, HuffPost's follow-up interviews, Thompson's own press release, and the official House roll calls for both votes on H.R. 8404. Photo: Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

Dan Meuser Voted to Protect Same-Sex Marriage. Five Months Later He Voted No on the Same Bill — After It Got More Religious Protections.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:29:34 +0000

On July 19, 2022, Dan Meuser voted yes on the Respect for Marriage Act — the bill that guarantees the federal government and every state must recognize legal marriages between same-sex couples and between interracial couples.

On December 8, 2022, the same bill came back to the House for final passage. Meuser voted no.

Same bill. Same protections. Different vote.

Out of 435 members of the House, only seven Republicans switched from yes to no between those two votes. Two of them were from Pennsylvania: Meuser and Scott Perry. The Daily Signal, a conservative outlet, wrote them up by name.

What he said in July

Meuser didn't cast that first vote quietly. He explained it, at length, to his hometown press.

"My vote in support of H.R. 8404 was to affirm the current law and support the rights and freedoms of all Americans," he told LebTown. "The passage of this legislation reflects current law, which was upheld by a Supreme Court ruling nearly 10 years ago."

And then the line that matters most:

"This vote was not difficult for me, as it does not infringe upon anyone's personal and religious rights."

Not difficult. Doesn't touch anyone's religious rights. That's his own reading of the bill, in his own words, a week after he voted for it.

It got him praise back home. His local paper ran an editorial titled "Meuser casts brave vote on same-sex marriage bill," noting he was one of 47 Republicans who voted yes.

What he said in December

Five months later, the same congressman had a very different explanation.

"It is unfortunate that the Senate missed a critical opportunity to affirm the current law by passing the House version of the 'Respect for Marriage Act,'" Meuser said. "The Senate version, unlike the original House version, includes language that puts religious freedoms in jeopardy and opens up organizations to civil suits."

"Therefore, I cannot support the Senate Amendment to the Respect for Marriage Act because it jeopardizes the basic religious liberties of every American."

That's a serious charge. It's also backwards.

What actually changed between the two votes

You don't have to take anyone's word for this. Both versions of the bill are public, and you can read them side by side.

Here is the version Meuser voted for in July. It has five sections. It repeals the Defense of Marriage Act, requires states to recognize each other's marriages, updates the federal definition of marriage, and includes a private right of action letting a harmed person sue. There is not one word in it about religion.

Here is the version that became law in December. The Senate added two entire new sections that did not exist in the bill Meuser supported:

Section 6 — "No Impact on Religious Liberty and Conscience." It says nothing in the law can be used to "diminish or abrogate a religious liberty or conscience protection" already available under the Constitution or federal law. It says churches, mosques, synagogues, religious schools, faith-based social agencies and their employees "shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage."
Section 7 — "Statutory Prohibition." It says the law can't be used to strip anyone of "tax-exempt status, tax treatment, educational funding, or a grant, contract, agreement, guarantee, loan, scholarship, license, certification, accreditation, claim, or defense." It also says the law can't be read to require federal recognition of polygamous marriages.

Now compare that to Meuser's stated reason. He said the Senate version "opens up organizations to civil suits." Section 6 of the final law says the exact opposite, in plain English: if a religious organization refuses to take part in a wedding, that refusal "shall not create any civil claim or cause of action."

And the private right of action he objected to? It's in both versions, word for word — subsection (c) of the new Section 1738C, identical in the July text and the December text, and limited both times to people "acting under color of State law." Meuser voted for that language in July and called the vote easy.

So the bill he rejected in December was the July bill plus religious protections. He voted for the version with fewer protections and against the version with more.

The churches disagreed with him

The religious liberty language wasn't dreamed up by Democrats. It was negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators — Tammy Baldwin, Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Kyrsten Sinema and Thom Tillis — and announced on November 15, 2022.

That same day, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — an institution whose doctrine on marriage hadn't changed at all — put out a public statement backing the approach:

"We are grateful for the continuing efforts of those who work to ensure the Respect for Marriage Act includes appropriate religious freedom protections while respecting the law and preserving the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. We believe this approach is the way forward."

A major church looked at the amended bill and said the religious freedom question had been handled. Meuser looked at the same bill and said it "jeopardizes the basic religious liberties of every American." One of those readings matches the text.

Thirty-nine House Republicans voted yes on the final bill. Meuser wasn't one of them — after being one of the 47 who voted yes the first time. In Pennsylvania's delegation, Brian Fitzpatrick was the only Republican who voted yes both times.

Why any of this still matters

Congress didn't take up the Respect for Marriage Act out of nowhere. It moved after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to urge the court to reconsider other landmark cases, including the 2015 decision recognizing same-sex marriage. The law was built as a backstop in case the court came back for marriage next.

That wasn't paranoia. In 2025, former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis asked the Supreme Court to do exactly that. The justices turned her down on November 10, 2025, without explanation — but somebody asked, and someone will ask again.

Here's the part that lands closest to home for Meuser's constituents. Pennsylvania's own 1996 law defining marriage as one man and one woman is still on the books. A federal judge struck it down on May 20, 2014, ruling that it "unconstitutionally discriminates against lesbians and gay men" — but the legislature never repealed it. The state House finally passed a repeal on March 26, 2026, by a vote of 127–72, and it's now sitting in the Republican-controlled state Senate, where the same effort has stalled before.

Which means the federal law Meuser voted against is, right now, a real part of what keeps married couples in his district married.

A pattern of explanations

This is not the first time Meuser has needed a story to explain a vote his constituents didn't like. In August 2026 he spent over an hour in front of a closed conservative group walking through why he voted against certifying Pennsylvania's own 2020 electoral votes — an explanation he has been happy to give behind a confidentiality pledge, while declining to name an open town hall he has held and refusing to turn up at his constituents' weekly protests because he doesn't want to "basically be a piñata."

He's not alone in the flip. Fellow Pennsylvania Republican Glenn Thompson voted no both times — and attended his own gay son's wedding three days after the July vote. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany voted no and is now running for governor.

But Meuser's case is its own thing, because he already told us what he thought. He read the bill in July and said protecting these marriages was easy and hurt no one's faith. Then the Senate added protections for people of faith, and he voted no and said the opposite.

Either his July explanation wasn't true, or his December one wasn't. It can't be both.

We deserve better.

Source

This post is built on the official House roll calls for the July 19, 2022 and December 8, 2022 votes on H.R. 8404, the full text of both versions of the bill at GovInfo, and The Daily Signal's December 8, 2022 account of the seven House Republicans who changed their votes. Photo: The Daily Signal.

Hours After 19 Children Were Murdered in Uvalde, Paul Gosar Told the Country a Lie About the Shooter

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:11 +0000

On Tuesday, May 24, 2022, a gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed nineteen children and two teachers.

The bodies had not been identified. The parents outside the school did not yet know which of them had lost a child.

That same day, Paul Gosar told his followers who did it.

"It's a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos."

Every element of that sentence was false

The shooter was Salvador Ramos — Gosar got the name wrong — an 18-year-old who was killed at the scene.

"Illegal alien." Ramos was a U.S. citizen. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, confirmed it publicly.
"Transsexual." There was no evidence for it. There still isn't. FactCheck.org examined the claim and found none.
"Leftist." No evidence was offered for that either, then or since.

Gosar was not passing along a wire report. He was passing along 4chan.

Where it actually came from

NBC News traced the claim to its source. On the afternoon of the shooting, someone posted to 4chan a photo of a young woman under the words "here's the shooter's reddit," along with a link to her account and a transphobic slur.

The woman is named Sam. She is 20 years old. She lives in Georgia. She had posted the photo on Reddit three months earlier — she had started sharing pictures of herself and her art online to build up her confidence.

By that evening, strangers were telling her that her face was circulating as the face of a man who murdered children.

Trolls built collages pairing her photos with images from an Instagram account believed to have belonged to the shooter. Photos of at least two other transgender women were used the same way. A U.K. group that tracks online threats against trans people confirmed all three women were alive.

Sam spent the next day proving she existed. She posted a picture of herself in front of a transgender pride flag: "It's not me, I don't even live in Texas." She posted another photo of herself holding a piece of paper with the date written on it — the thing you do when you need to prove to the internet that you are a real person, alive, right now.

What she told NBC News:

"This isn't the first time I was harassed, but it is the first time I've been accused of murder."

And:

"I just want to live without being attacked when I leave my house."

She also said this, which is the part that should stop anyone cold: "I'm more worried about the families of the victims of the attack."

She was more worried about them than about the harassment campaign that had her face on it.

A member of Congress made it enormous

The lie was already moving on 4chan. What Gosar added was legitimacy.

He is a United States Representative. When he posted it, it stopped being an anonymous troll's claim and became something a sitting member of Congress had stated as fact. Alex Jones amplified the same falsehood. Candace Owens joined the next day, referencing "cross-dressing" photos. A conservative Facebook page with thousands of followers shared one of Sam's pictures.

Gosar deleted his post. NBC News: "Gosar has not returned a request for comment." FactCheck.org noted the same — the tweet was removed, with no correction and no explanation.

No apology has ever been issued. Not to Sam, not to the other two women, not to anyone in Uvalde.

Advocate Charlotte Clymer said at the time that Gosar "owes the public an apology" and called it "pathetic that @DrPaulGosar sought to exploit this horrific tragedy for anti-trans propaganda."

This has a pattern, and the pattern has a purpose

NBC News pointed out that this was not the first time. After a 2018 shooting at YouTube's headquarters, far-right accounts speculated without evidence that the shooter was transgender. After a 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Sen. Ted Cruz repeated an unsubstantiated claim that the shooter was a "transgendered leftist activist."

The mechanism is always the same, and it runs on a clock. In the first hours after a mass shooting, before facts exist, there is a window in which any claim can travel. The people who fill that window with "the shooter was trans, the shooter was an immigrant, the shooter was a leftist" are not confused. They are converting dead children into an argument, before the argument can be checked.

And the argument they are making is about guns. In the days after Uvalde, Texas was investigating the parents of transgender children under a directive from its governor. As trans advocate Erin Reed put it: a sitting congressman spread a lie about the shooter to pin it on transgender people, in a state "where they are spending more time banning trans kids than they are spending regulating guns."

What it costs

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary. In the hours when their families were still waiting for confirmation, a congressman from Arizona — a man with no connection to the case and no information anyone else lacked — told the country three false things about who killed them, and handed a 20-year-old stranger in Georgia the worst week of her life.

He deleted the post. He never corrected it. He has never apologized.

This was six months after the House censured him for posting a video of himself killing a colleague — a censure he answered by re-sharing the video within the hour.

There is no version of this where he didn't know what he was doing.

Source

Trans woman's photo used to spread baseless online theory about Texas shooter — NBC News, May 25, 2022
Social Media Posts Make Baseless Claims About Gender Identity of Uvalde Shooter — FactCheck.org, May 26, 2022

Darline Graham Was Appointed to Honor Her Brother's Legacy. Her First Big Move Was to Break With Him — to Make Voting Harder.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:04:00 +0000

Darline Graham has never held elective office. She was appointed to the U.S. Senate by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster two days after her brother Lindsey Graham died, at President Trump's urging.

On Tuesday, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans decide whether she keeps the seat for a full six-year term. She needs more than 50% to avoid an August 25 runoff, and she's running against nine challengers — including U.S. Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, and former governor Mark Sanford.

She has largely avoided the press. So the small number of things she has said publicly are worth reading closely, because they're nearly the entire record.

The ad

Graham's 30-second introductory ad is the first thing most South Carolinians will learn about her. Here it is, essentially in full:

"I'm honored to serve South Carolina and grateful for President Trump's endorsement, and I'll work hard every day to earn it. I'm a conservative Republican, and I believe this: every life is precious. Men don't belong in women's sports, and only American citizens should vote in our elections."

That's the whole pitch. Not the ports, not Medicaid, not hurricane recovery, not the cost of groceries. An abortion line, a line about transgender athletes, and a line implying noncitizens are voting.

Noncitizens are already barred from voting in state, federal, and almost all local elections. It has been illegal the entire time.

She made the connection between the two explicit on X, writing: "Democrats refuse to protect our elections or our children from the transgender agenda."

Those are two unrelated things welded into one sentence. There is no version of the SAVE America Act that has anything to do with transgender people. The link isn't policy — it's just two applause lines stapled together, aimed at the most reliable primary voters she can find.

Breaking with her brother, on purpose

The more revealing moment came at the Republican Senate debate in Columbia on Monday, August 3 — her first real public display of policy views since joining Congress.

She was asked how Republicans should pass the SAVE America Act. Her answer:

"One of the first things I did was co-sponsor the SAVE America Act. As I said earlier, I'm willing to stay through recess to get it done. What's up with recess anyway? Who gets a month off from work? I think we should stay up there and work and get it done."

Then this:

"This is where I differ from my brother, getting rid of the filibuster to get this done. Because eventually the Democrats are going to get rid of it anyway."

Sit with the shape of that. Trump's stated reason for wanting her in the seat was that "there would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey." Within about three weeks, her signature position was a public break with him.

And she picked the one to break on that Lindsey Graham had been most explicit about. Earlier this year he said: "Filibuster changes, I think, change the Senate. It may happen one day, but I don't think it's a good idea."

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. John Cornyn have also strongly opposed abolishing the filibuster. Trump wants it gone as a pathway to the SAVE Act. Graham chose Trump. She said flatly that she is "100 percent behind" the president.

She repeated it on X: "If the filibuster is the only thing standing in the way of passing the SAVE America Act, then I'm a YES vote to end it. There's too much at stake."

So a senator who has held office for a matter of weeks, and never won an election, is prepared to permanently rewrite how the Senate works — in order to pass a bill making it harder to register and vote.

This is the whole job so far

The SAVE Act isn't an afterthought for her. It's the through line.

Days into the job, the first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act — and the argument she made for it got the bill wrong.

Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, she was one of 52 Republicans who voted to advance a photo ID requirement for federal elections. That measure failed, 52 to 46.

She also inherited her brother's leadership PAC — the money apparatus he spent decades building — without having run a single campaign of her own.

Appointed to the seat. Handed the PAC. Endorsed by the president. And the agenda she chose with all of it is a bill that could keep millions of eligible citizens from voting.

What South Carolina isn't hearing about

The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. A national survey by the Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

Those are the people the bill actually touches. Not noncitizens — citizens whose birth certificate is in a box somewhere, or whose married name doesn't match it.

Graham hasn't made a public case for why that tradeoff is worth it. She hasn't had to. She's shied away from the press, ridden a presidential endorsement, and put two culture-war lines in an ad.

If she gets to 50% on Tuesday, that's the campaign that earned a six-year term.

Source

"Darline Graham Embraces Anti-Trans Attacks in Senate Bid" by John Riley, Metro Weekly, August 6, 2026. Debate and filibuster quotes from "Darline Graham breaks with brother on nuking filibuster" by Ashleigh Fields, The Hill, August 4, 2026.

Ken Paxton Took $10 Million From a Children's Hospital and Ordered It to Open a Clinic. Then He Made Sure the Doctors Who Could Staff It Were Fired.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:30 +0000

On August 5, 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that his settlement with Texas Children's Hospital had been "fully executed."

The terms, from his own office's press release: the hospital pays $10 million, with $8,576,000 of it going to the State of Texas. Multiple physicians lose their hospital privileges permanently and irrevocably. The hospital must rewrite its bylaws so that any doctor who provides gender-transition care automatically forfeits their medical staff privileges. And by the end of October 2026, Texas Children's must open the country's first-ever "Detransition Clinic."

Paxton's statement was not subtle:

"This historic settlement is a resounding defeat for the radical gender ideology that has preyed on Texas children under the guise of 'care.' ... Activist doctors who harmed children have been fired. This settlement sends an unmistakable message: if you put radical ideology over children's health, my office will go after you."

Here's what that press release leaves out.

The hospital didn't admit it did anything wrong

Texas Children's is the largest children's hospital in the country. It cooperated with a three-year investigation, produced more than 5 million documents, and ran multiple internal investigations of its own. It maintains it followed every law.

It settled anyway. The hospital's own statement, given to NBC News, explains why:

"To be clear — we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation. This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists."

That is not a confession. That is a hospital doing arithmetic about how much of a state attorney general's time and subpoena power it can afford to absorb. Paxton is describing a business decision as a moral verdict.

He fired the only doctors qualified to run the clinic he ordered

This is the part that doesn't hold together on any reading.

Five doctors who provided transition care to children were terminated under the settlement. Those five are, by definition, the physicians with the most direct clinical experience with these patients — which makes them the people best equipped to care for anyone who wants to stop or reverse that treatment.

Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Stanford University's medical school, said she was confused about why the settlement required firing them. The clinic, she said, "simply amplifies a fog of confusion" — "because it's a clinic created by legal intimidation on terms set by politicians."

Nobody has said who will lead or staff the new clinic. Officials also haven't detailed what it will actually offer. The hospital would only say the clinic "will formalize the supportive, multidisciplinary services we already deliver to all patients who need our care."

Read that carefully. The hospital is describing something it says it already does.

Detransition is rare, and the reasons aren't what he says

Paxton's framing is that a wave of Texas children were harmed and now need rescuing. The research says otherwise.

Studies estimate that between 1% and 10% of transgender people detransition. Fewer than 1% say they regret their transition.

And the most commonly cited reasons for detransitioning aren't medical regret at all. They are pressure from a parent, harassment or discrimination, and transitioning being too hard.

Sit with that. The leading causes of detransition are the social hostility and family pressure that people like Paxton spend their careers manufacturing. He helped build the pressure, and now he's built a clinic to treat the people it broke — and he's charging a children's hospital for it.

Meanwhile, the major U.S. medical associations — the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association — support access to gender-affirming care for minors. They do not recommend any medical intervention before puberty, and surgeries for minors are rare and not recommended.

What Texas actually can't get

Andrea Segovia of the Transgender Education Network of Texas put the priority question plainly:

"In Texas, the ability to get general regular healthcare is difficult. To prioritize a clinic that is based on political gain as your state continues to struggle with basic general healthcare is a slap to people's face."

She's right about the underlying numbers. KFF projects that 480,000 more Texans will be uninsured by 2034 because of Trump's budget bill, and that Texas will lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

So the state's top lawyer spent three years and an entire enforcement division making sure one hospital opens one free clinic for a condition affecting a fraction of a fraction of Texans — during the same stretch in which hundreds of thousands of Texans are projected to lose coverage for everything else.

He is not short on capacity. He is short on interest.

The same day, he went after the pediatricians

Paxton's office published this settlement announcement on August 5, 2026. On that exact same day, his office announced an investigation into the American Academy of Pediatrics — one of the very medical associations that supports the care he's spent three years prosecuting.

That's not two stories. It's one. The AAP's professional judgment is inconvenient to Paxton, so the AAP is now under investigation too.

This has been the arc the whole time. In early 2022, after the Texas Legislature failed to pass a ban on transition care for minors, Paxton simply wrote a legal opinion declaring that such care was child abuse. The state then began investigating parents. The Legislature caught up the next year.

When he couldn't get the law he wanted, he wrote an opinion. When the opinion wasn't enough, he opened investigations. When the investigations produced no criminal case, he extracted a settlement and called it a verdict.

He is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas — a record his own party signed off on knowing all of it.

Source

"Ken Paxton gloats after extracting $10 million from Texas Children's Hospital for 'detransition' center", The Advocate. Settlement terms from the Texas Attorney General's press release (August 5, 2026). Reporting on the settlement, the fired physicians, and detransition research by Jo Yurcaba for NBC News.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Used a Jim Crow-Era Tool to Block a Judge. Now He's on Her Ballot.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:00 +0000

In November 2026, Mississippians will pick a United States senator. One of the two names on that ballot is a man the other one personally kept off the federal bench.

That is not a figure of speech. In April 2023, Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked Scott Colom's nomination to be a federal judge in the Northern District of Mississippi. She didn't lose a vote. She didn't lose a debate. There was never a vote or a debate, because she made sure there couldn't be one — by declining to hand in a piece of paper.

Three years later, Colom won the Democratic primary in a landslide — the Associated Press called it with him at 73% — and became the man standing between her and another term.

What a "blue slip" is, and who invented the version she used

When a president nominates someone to a federal district court, the Senate Judiciary Committee sends a blue-colored slip of paper to each senator from that nominee's home state. Return it, and the process moves forward. Don't return it, and — under the way the committee has run for most of the last 70 years — the nomination simply stops. No hearing. No committee vote. No floor vote. Nothing.

That absolute veto is not in the Constitution. It's not in Senate rules. One man made it up, and Mississippians have heard of him.

Starting in 1956, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi became the first Judiciary chairman to let a single home-state senator kill a nominee outright, and he did it for a reason. Eastland used the blue slip to keep judges sympathetic to school desegregation off Southern courts, in the years right after Brown v. Board of Education.

You don't have to take a liberal group's word for that. Here is Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, writing in 2017 while he chaired the same committee:

"For the vast majority of the blue slip's history, a negative or unreturned blue slip did not stop the Senate Judiciary Committee from holding a hearing and vote on a nominee. In fact, of my 18 predecessors as chairman of the committee, only two allowed home-state senators unilateral veto power through the blue slip. The first to do so, Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.), reportedly adopted this policy to thwart school integration after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education."

Scholars who studied the practice landed in the same neighborhood. A paper by professors from Georgia, Michigan State and Wisconsin wrote that why Eastland changed the policy "is unclear, though racial politics likely had something to do with it, as Eastland could use committee rules to block pro-civil rights nominees from reaching the bench."

That is the tool Hyde-Smith reached for. And the man she used it on is the first African American elected district attorney for the 16th District in north Mississippi.

The two reasons she gave

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, Hyde-Smith gave a statement to the Magnolia Tribune explaining herself — a statement her own Senate website still carries:

"I will not return the blue slip on the nomination of Scott Colom to serve as a U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Mississippi. I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district. However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom's opposition to legislation to protect female athletes. The significant support his campaign received from George Soros also weighs heavily against his nomination in my view. I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime."

Two reasons. Look at both.

Reason one: school sports. Colom has never publicly said anything about transgender athletes in women's sports. Mississippi Today checked, and reported plainly that while he "has voiced general support for trans rights, he has never publicly commented on the issue of trans women competing in women sports." What he actually did was sign a 2021 letter opposing efforts "to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare" — a letter about putting people in jail and taking away medical care, not about who runs track. She took a position he never took and disqualified him for it.

Reason two: George Soros. A political action committee funded partly by Soros spent money on Colom's first race for district attorney — in 2015. Colom has said he didn't know the PAC had taken Soros money until he read it in the news. And he took no Soros money at all in his 2019 race.

So a prosecutor got vetoed for a stance he never took and a donation he didn't solicit eight years earlier.

The people who wanted him confirmed

This wasn't a party-line fight, which is the part that should stick with Mississippi voters.

Roger Wicker — Mississippi's senior Republican senator — returned his blue slip. He backed the nomination.
Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant, both former Republican governors of Mississippi, supported Colom.
Dick Durbin, then the Judiciary chairman, called Colom "highly qualified," and his office said Durbin was "extremely disappointed" by what Hyde-Smith did.

Wicker told reporters that "quite a lot of mainstream Mississippi Republicans" saw Colom as a strong law-and-order prosecutor. Mississippi's Republican establishment, in other words, was fine with him. One senator wasn't, and one senator was all it took.

The anger over it reached the Mississippi Capitol. In February 2024, when state lawmakers brought up a resolution honoring Hyde-Smith as the first woman Mississippi ever elected to Washington, 11 of the 16 state Senate Democrats simply didn't vote, and a 12th voted present. They said the resolution itself was fine — they were making a point about the judgeship.

"No Democrat opposes the worth of the resolution honoring her," said Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons. "But we do feel that it is important that the federal posts in Mississippi that deal with law and order be filled."

Why this is worth your time in an election year

It would be easy to file this under Washington procedure. Don't. This is the clearest look you will get at how Cindy Hyde-Smith uses power when nobody can stop her.

A federal judgeship in north Mississippi is not an abstraction. That court handles civil rights cases, voting cases, criminal cases, business disputes — the machinery of law and order for a big piece of the state. Two Republican governors, the state's senior Republican senator, and the Judiciary chairman all said the nominee was qualified. She overrode every one of them, alone, with a procedure a Mississippi segregationist built for exactly this purpose, and she justified it with two claims that fall apart the moment you check them.

It fits a pattern. When the Senate tried to pass a bill protecting IVF nationwide in 2024 after Alabama clinics started shutting down, Hyde-Smith stood up and killed it with a single objection — again acting alone, again on a bill that needed everyone's consent to move. Given the chance to be the one person who stops something, she takes it.

Mississippi is 48th out of 50 on the measures we track. It is a state that needs its federal posts filled and its problems worked on. What it got, in this instance, was a senator who spent her power on a veto — and who now has to explain it to voters with the vetoed man's name printed right underneath hers.

Source

Lawmakers honor Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, but Dems say it's time for her to allow vote on federal judge — Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today, February 1, 2024. Photo: Mississippi Today.

A Man Beat Paul Pelosi With a Hammer. Claudia Tenney Posted "LOL."

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:22:00 +0000

Early on the morning of Friday, October 28, 2022, a man broke into a home in San Francisco carrying a hammer. He was looking for the Speaker of the House. She wasn't there. Her 82-year-old husband was.

The intruder asked "Where's Nancy?" and then beat Paul Pelosi with the hammer. Pelosi managed to call 911. He was hospitalized with a fractured skull and spent time in intensive care.

Later that same day, Claudia Tenney — then a sitting member of Congress, a colleague of Nancy Pelosi's, eleven days from an election — went on Twitter and made a joke about it.

She shared a photoshopped image from an account called Right to Bear Memes showing a group of men holding oversized hammers outside a house said to belong to the attacker. Above it she wrote one word:

"LOL"

The joke had a conspiracy theory inside it

The meme wasn't just tasteless. It was an advertisement for a lie.

Within hours of the attack, parts of the right had begun insisting that the assailant, David DePape, was secretly a gay man in a relationship with Paul Pelosi, and that the hammer attack was really a drunken domestic fight. There was never any evidence for it. The Finger Lakes Times, which took a screenshot of Tenney's post before she pulled it down, described the claim plainly as one of "a number of debunked claims that circulated following the attack" that "contradicted police accounts."

The image Tenney boosted was built on that lie. It showed a Berkeley house with a rainbow flag out front — the supposed "proof" the attacker was a leftist — doctored to add a row of men with hammers, drawn to look the way the meme's audience thought gay men look. That's the joke. It required a homophobic smear about a man in the ICU to work at all.

We now know what DePape's motive was, because he testified about it. He said he had planned to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and break her kneecaps if she lied to him, and that he believed news outlets had repeatedly lied about Donald Trump. A federal jury convicted him on November 16, 2023 of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault on the immediate family member of a federal official. He was sentenced to 30 years.

There was no lovers' quarrel. There was a man with a hammer and a head full of internet conspiracies, and a congresswoman who thought the internet conspiracies were funny enough to pass along.

When people objected, she turned off the replies

The part that says the most about Tenney isn't the post. It's what she did next.

People — including other members of Congress — told her it was cruel. Rep. Eric Swalwell of California wrote to her directly:

"The husband of one of your colleagues is being treated in an ICU right now and this is your response? To mock his attack? When you were raising your son, did you ever tell him to laugh at the pain of others? Or did you teach him better? This is disgusting. Delete it."

She didn't delete it. She switched off the replies so people couldn't answer her, and left the post up. The journalist who first flagged it called that "cowardly" — she had turned off criticism instead of taking down the thing being criticized.

The post stayed up through the weekend and into the following Tuesday, four days later, before it quietly disappeared. There was no explanation. Her campaign did not respond to reporters asking about it, and no apology came with the deletion. She stopped letting people talk back, waited, and hit delete.

Other Republicans managed to do the normal thing

It would be easy to write this off as the political climate. It isn't, and the proof is in her own party, in her own state, the same week.

Rep. Joe Sempolinski — the Republican whose district included counties that were about to become part of Tenney's — put out a statement the day of the attack: "Lawless violence is wrong. I wish Mr. Pelosi a quick recovery and thank our first responders who are there when we need them most. Just like the recent attack on Congressman (Lee) Zeldin, violence must be condemned."

That's the whole assignment. A Republican said it about a Democrat's husband and connected it to an attack on a Republican three months earlier. It took him three sentences.

Asked days later whether Tenney's meme changed his support for her, Sempolinski said he was still backing her, and offered this: "everybody has their own reactions to situations. My reaction is I hope he (Paul Pelosi) is fine, that we should have no political violence and that I hope we have total transparency."

Even the colleague defending her couldn't bring himself to defend the post.

The hometown press was blunter. The Buffalo News editorial board ran a piece on November 3, 2022 under the headline "Claudia Tenney's retweet of a vile post reveals a broken moral compass." The campaign of her Democratic opponent, Steven Holden, issued a statement saying it found it "extremely distasteful that Claudia Tenney, a sitting member of Congress, would make fun of the attack on her colleague Nancy Pelosi's husband."

Eleven days later, voters in the 24th District elected her anyway.

What she says when it's her own house

Here is where it stops being about one bad post.

On January 6, 2022 — ten months before the LOL — Tenney issued a statement on the anniversary of the Capitol attack. In it she wrote: "I have and will always condemn unlawful acts like these that destroy property and abuse our right to peacefully assemble. Using violence to advance a political cause is wrong."

She had also, in May 2021, voted against creating the independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol attack — the vote her own report card documents.

On November 20, 2025, someone broke a window at Tenney's private residence in Washington. No one was hurt, and the motive was never established. She put out a press release the same day:

"This incident at my residence in Washington was disturbing and unacceptable... Violence, intimidation, and attacks against public officials or their families have no place in our society."

Read those two sentences next to each other.

Attacks against public officials or their families have no place in our society — written about a broken window at her own home, by the same person who wrote "LOL" about a man who was beaten unconscious with a hammer in his living room, in the very category she just named.

She knows the right words. She can produce them within hours when the target is herself. When the target was the 82-year-old husband of a woman she disliked, the words she reached for were the ones that got laughs from the meme accounts.

Why this matters in 2026

This is not a gaffe from a long-ago news cycle. It's a window into how someone treats people when she thinks the cost is zero.

We've watched other Republicans make the same calculation. Darren Bailey went live on Facebook ninety minutes after seven people were killed at an Independence Day parade and told Illinois to move on and celebrate, while the shooter was still at large. Brinker Harding, asked by Latino leaders in Omaha to take down a sombrero meme and apologize, went on camera and defended it instead. In every case the pattern is the same: the cruelty is the content, and the apology never comes.

Tenney is asking the voters of New York's 24th District to send her back to Washington. This is the same representative who won't sit down with the people she represents — constituents in Sackets Harbor had to hold a town hall with an empty chair where she should have been, and more than 200 of them showed up to address it.

She had one chance to say something decent about a man in intensive care. What she said was "LOL." Then she turned off the replies so nobody could tell her otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney Laughs at Paul Pelosi Attack, Deletes Tweet — The Daily Beast, November 2, 2022. Photo of Rep. Tenney via Getty Images.

Brad Little Signed a Law That Can Send an Idahoan to Prison for Using the Wrong Bathroom

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:55:00 +0000

There are a lot of things Idaho could have criminalized this year. On March 31, 2026, Brad Little picked using the bathroom.

The law is House Bill 752. The Legislature's own one-line description of it reads:

"INDECENCY AND OBSCENITY – Adds to existing law to prohibit a person from entering a restroom or changing room of the opposite sex, to provide a penalty, and to provide exceptions."

The House passed it 54–15 on March 16. The Senate passed it 28–7 on March 27. Little signed it on March 31, and it became Session Law Chapter 263. It took effect on July 1, 2026.

What the penalty actually is

This is not a fine or a citation. Idaho Education News laid out the ladder: a first offense is a misdemeanor, and a second offense within five years is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Five years in a state penitentiary. For which restroom door someone walked through.

Idaho has real problems. It spends less per student than any other state in America. It ranks 48th of 50 for public education. Brad Little's Legislature spent its 2026 session building a felony offense out of a bathroom.

The exception clause tells you everything

Every law has exceptions. Read this one — it's the part of House Bill 752 that carves out when entering the "wrong" restroom is allowed. As Boise State Public Radio reported, the statute permits it:

"when the person is in dire need of urinating or defecating and such facility is the only facility reasonably available at the time"

Idaho lawmakers had to write the words "dire need of urinating or defecating" into the state code, and Brad Little had to sign them, because they wrote a law so sweeping that it needed an emergency-bathroom escape hatch to function at all.

That is not a serious public safety measure. That is a law written to make a point about a group of people, patched afterward so it wouldn't be completely absurd in practice. The other exceptions — for custodial staff, medical personnel, and emergencies — exist for the same reason.

The second law: $100,000 fines for not reporting kids

House Bill 752 wasn't the only one Little signed. He also signed House Bill 822, which requires schools to notify parents within 72 hours if a student asks for help with "social transitioning" — including asking to be called by different pronouns, or asking about which bathroom or sports team to use.

The enforcement mechanism is $100,000 fines on schools and health care providers that don't comply.

Think about what that does to a school counselor. A kid comes to them scared, in confidence, and says something about who they are. Under this law, the counselor has 72 hours to report that conversation to the child's parents — or the school faces a six-figure penalty. The law does not ask the counselor what they think is safest for that particular kid. It sets a clock.

The bill's sponsor was Rep. Bruce Skaug of Nampa. The floor sponsor on the bathroom bill was Rep. Cornel Rasor of Sagle. But bills don't become law without a signature, and Brad Little signed both.

This is a pattern, not a session

Little didn't stumble into 2026. He's been building this record for six years.

In 2020, he signed House Bill 500, barring transgender girls from girls' sports, and House Bill 509, which locked an "immutable" biological sex onto Idaho birth certificates so transgender Idahoans could never correct them.
In 2023, he signed House Bill 71, making it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a transgender minor. That ban became fully enforceable in June 2025 after a lawsuit against it was dismissed.
In 2026, he added the bathroom felony and the school reporting mandate.

Doctors face a decade. Repeat "offenders" face five years. Schools face $100,000. Every year the list of Idahoans exposed to criminal or financial penalty gets a little longer, and every year Brad Little signs.

Who this actually reaches

Transgender Idahoans are plainly the target. The law bars people from using the restroom that matches their gender identity, and it arrived alongside a second bill about transgender students in schools.

But here's the practical problem with a law like this. The statute makes it a crime to enter the restroom "of the opposite sex." Nobody checks a birth certificate at the door. In real life, the question of who belongs in a restroom gets settled by whoever is standing in it and decides someone looks wrong — and now that person has a criminal statute to point at.

That's not a hypothetical harm to one group. That's every Idahoan's next bathroom trip becoming something the state has an opinion about.

The choice he made

Brad Little is running for a third term in 2026. He is not a bystander to any of this. Idaho's governor holds a veto pen, and he has used it — in the same 2026 session he line-item vetoed a $478,600 cut to medical residencies, warning it would signal "that the state may not honor its commitments" during one of the worst physician shortages in the country.

So he knows how to say no. He knows how to tell his own party that a bill goes too far.

He just didn't do it here.

Brad Little had a pen, a veto, and a choice. He chose to make Idahoans criminals over a bathroom door. We deserve better.

Sources

House Bill 752 (2026) — Idaho State Legislature: full text, vote tallies, and signing date
Find out what passed and what didn't. A look back to the 2026 legislative session — Idaho Education News, April 2026. Photo: Idaho Education News.
Idaho's 2026 legislative session closes. Here's what passed — Boise State Public Radio, April 5, 2026

Vivek Ramaswamy's Website Says He's 'Fighting to Lift All Ohioans.' Equality Ohio Just Gave Him an F.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:20:00 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign website says he is "fighting to lift all Ohioans."

Equality Ohio's 2026 Candidate Scorecard gives him an F — the grade reserved for a candidate with a "poor record and likely to harm LGBTQ+ civil rights."

Ken Schneck at The Buckeye Flame assembled the record behind that grade, using research from the Flame and the GLAAD Accountability Project. The Ramaswamy campaign was asked for comment and did not respond.

Here's the short version of what's in it.

The part that wasn't rhetoric

Most of a candidate scorecard is made of statements. One item on this list is not.

After the 2024 election, Ramaswamy was appointed to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk. Under his direction, DOGE staffers used keywords — including "homosexual" and "LGBTQ" — to identify federal grants for elimination. More than 1,400 active grants were canceled, amounting to $100 million in funding.

That is not a debate-stage line. That's a search query used to decide which grants stopped existing. Whatever those 1,400 grants were funding — research, health services, community programs — the method for finding them was to look for the word.

Ramaswamy left DOGE early to run for governor of Ohio. We wrote about how the whole operation ended: its charter expired on July 4, 2026 with no final report, having promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed $215 billion.

What he says about trans people

The Buckeye Flame's list runs in reverse chronological order. The rhetoric is consistent across three years.

May 2023 — On Sean Hannity's show: "Here's my deal with this LGBTQIA+, especially the trans cult. Dress how you want, behave how you want as an adult, live your life freely, but leave our kids alone and do not demand that we change our language or the way we live our lives."

May 2023 — He equated gender-affirming care to "genital mutilation" and "chemical castration," called being trans a "mental health disorder," and said, "Affirming their confusion is not compassion to me." He said he'd sign a national ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Care for transgender people is supported by every major American medical association.

May 2023 — He attacked Target for selling trans-friendly swimwear, saying it "spit in the face" of conservative customers, and added: "Just ask Budweiser how that worked out for them."

June 2023 — On X, he called the trans community a "cult" and "often a mental health disorder."

June 2023 — His campaign ad listing "10 Truths" put "There are two genders" as truth number two, directly after "God is real."

September 2023 — At the GOP presidential primary debates, he said "transgenderism … is a mental health disorder." Medical consensus is that being transgender is not a mental-health condition.

June 30, 2026 — After the Supreme Court upheld state bans on trans students in school sports, he told the Toledo Blade: "Ohio has barred men from competing with women in women's sports, and the Supreme Court has now held that it's constitutional. I'll enforce [the ban] after I'm elected."

That last one is from five weeks ago. This isn't an old record he's moved past — it's the current campaign.

Who he's proud to be endorsed by

A candidate's endorsements are a choice, and Ramaswamy has advertised these ones.

In March 2025, he announced the endorsement of Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, which the Flame identifies as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. Baer's endorsement opened by touting his own record of having "spearheaded campaigns to end transgender procedures on children and stop boys from playing girls' sports."

Ramaswamy's response: he was "humbled to earn the support of one of Ohio's top Christian leaders, and it is hands-down one of my most important endorsements."

In April 2025, he promoted endorsements from a slate of Ohio state representatives whose legislative records the Flame lays out in detail. Among them:

Rep. Gary Click — sponsor of the Ohio law banning gender-affirming care and barring trans girls from girls' sports; co-sponsor of a bill to protect parents who reject their trans children.
Rep. DJ Swearingen — co-sponsor of the law requiring teachers and school staff to out LGBTQ+ students to their families.
Rep. Jonathan Newman — sponsor of a bill to bar students from using pronouns matching their gender identity, and on record saying trans people do not exist.
Rep. Beth Lear — co-sponsor of the bathroom-ban law, who once said adults who affirm trans youth should "have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the deepest sea."
Rep. Angie King — co-sponsor of a proposed drag ban, who the Flame reports once stood alongside neo-Nazis to protest her community's Pride celebration.
Rep. Rodney Creech — author of the language, now law, banning menstrual products from men's rooms in public buildings.

These are not people who happened to endorse him. He put out press releases about it.

The pattern this fits

Ramaswamy's campaign has a habit of saying one thing on the website and something else at the microphone.

When he named four Ohio public universities he wanted to defund to pay for a tax cut and then faced bipartisan backlash, he said he never said it. Asked point-blank by the Wall Street Journal whether he'd push "right-to-work" in Ohio, he wouldn't say no. Now his site promises to lift "all Ohioans" while his record earns the lowest grade a state LGBTQ+ advocacy group hands out.

His Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, is currently graded "Pending" on the same scorecard.

Ohio voters can decide what "all Ohioans" means to a candidate whose federal agency used "LGBTQ" as a search term for deciding what to defund.

Sources

"Vivek Ramaswamy earns an 'F' in LGBTQ+ rights; here's a look at his track record" — Ken Schneck, The Buckeye Flame, August 4, 2026

Photo: The Buckeye Flame.

The Feds Are Threatening a School District's Funding for Not Outing Trans Kids to Their Parents

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:06:00 +0000

On Monday, July 27, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education announced it is coming after Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan — and the penalty on the table is the district's federal funding.

The offense? The district has a policy saying school staff shouldn't disclose a student's transgender status without that student's permission.

What the government is demanding

The Education Department's Student Privacy Policy Office determined that Ann Arbor's policy "requiring school employees to hide a child's 'transgender status' from his or her parents likely violates FERPA" — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Per reporting from Michigan Advance, the department gave the district until August 10 to explain why it and the Justice Department shouldn't move to enforcement. FERPA violations can end an institution's federal funding.

The department is also demanding the district justify keeping records about a student's gender identity in a separate file.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon: "School districts that hide information from parents are violating federal law. FERPA is not optional."

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the policies "an affront to basic moral principles," and said the two departments "will use every tool available to hold them to account for this egregious behavior."

The law doesn't say what they're saying it says

Here's the problem with all that certainty.

FERPA is a records access law. It gives parents the right to see their child's education records, to ask that they be corrected, and to control the disclosure of information in them. That's what it does.

It is not, on its face, a mandate that schools proactively report things to parents. As Chalkbeat reported, a FERPA expert put it this way: the law requires districts to hand over written records — like a gender support plan — if a parent asks for them, but FERPA "doesn't appear to create a duty to proactively disclose that students are expressing a different gender at school."

That's a meaningful difference. Ann Arbor's policy doesn't say records are hidden from parents who request them. It says staff won't volunteer a student's gender identity without the student's say-so.

The administration is stretching a privacy statute into an outing requirement — and then threatening a district's funding over the stretch.

What the policy actually says

Worth reading the district's own words rather than the press release's characterization of them:

"The Superintendent shall ensure that all personally identifiable and medical information relating to transgender and gender nonconforming students shall be kept confidential in accordance with applicable state, local, and federal privacy laws. School staff shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student's transgender status to others, including the student's parents or guardians and other school staff, unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure."

Note "unless legally required to do so." The district built in compliance with the law. And note that the confidentiality applies to other school staff too, not just parents — this is a privacy rule, not a scheme against families.

The policy also directs staff to use a student's legal name and birth-assigned pronoun unless the student, parent, or guardian has specified otherwise.

Why the confidentiality exists

Supporters of these policies aren't trying to cut parents out of their kids' lives. Most trans kids do tell their parents.

The policies exist for the kids whose parents aren't safe. As the reporting notes, forced-disclosure rules can endanger students with unsupportive parents — physically and emotionally. A school counselor who is legally required to report a kid's gender identity home is a counselor that kid will never talk to again.

That's the practical result here: not more informed parents, but fewer kids willing to tell an adult at school anything at all.

This is a campaign, not a one-off

Ann Arbor isn't a random target.

In March 2025, McMahon sent a letter to state superintendents saying the department would "insist that schools apply FERPA correctly," and that compliance means schools "must allow parents to review all education records of their student, including any document related to a student's 'gender identity'."
In June, the Education Department and the Justice Department formed a partnership specifically focused on privacy policies and parental rights — the same partnership now aimed at Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor was already under a Title IX investigation by the department over letting students compete on teams and use locker rooms matching their gender identity.

So one district is facing two federal investigations at once, both about transgender students, from an administration that set up an interagency task force for exactly this purpose.

The bottom line

A federal agency is threatening to pull the funding that pays for teachers, buses, meals and special education in a Michigan school district — over a confidentiality rule protecting a small number of vulnerable kids, under a reading of a privacy law that privacy experts don't share.

Every student in Ann Arbor has a stake in that funding. None of them had a say in this fight.

"Parents' rights" is a real principle worth taking seriously. But a policy whose actual effect is to make school staff report on children, and whose enforcement mechanism is defunding a whole district, isn't about parents. It's about using kids as leverage.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Katherine Dailey for Michigan Advance / States Newsroom. Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom.

Juan Ciscomani's New Ad Puts a Word in His Opponent's Mouth That She Never Said

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:02:00 +0000

Juan Ciscomani, the Republican congressman from Arizona's 6th District, is running a new ad against his Democratic opponent, JoAnna Mendoza. In it, a mother from Tucson looks at the camera and says Mendoza "even called parents like me toxic."

Mendoza never said that.

What she actually said

The word "toxic" is real. The target isn't.

It comes from a 2020 state Senate candidate forum, where Mendoza was asked about proposed legislation banning transgender girls from playing on girls' teams. Here is the full quote, as reported by American Journal News:

"I think legislation, like the one that you mentioned, it's harmful, it's toxic. It takes away from who we are as Americans; to want to be inclusive, to want to fight for those that can't fight for themselves, to want to make things better for everyone."

She called a bill toxic. That's it. She didn't call parents toxic, or supporters of the bill toxic, or the mother in Ciscomani's ad toxic.

Ciscomani's campaign took a criticism of a piece of legislation and rewrote it as an insult aimed at moms. That isn't spin or a matter of interpretation — it's a swapped noun, and the tape shows the swap.

Why the ad had to distort it

Here's the thing that makes this worse: Ciscomani didn't need to lie to draw a contrast. He and Mendoza genuinely disagree about this issue. He could have run an ad saying so.

Ciscomani is a cosponsor of H.R. 28, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 — a federal ban on transgender student athletes. He signed on as a cosponsor on January 3, 2025, the first day of the new Congress. The bill passed the House and went to the Senate on January 15, 2025.

That's a real, documented, on-the-record position. He could have simply said: I voted for a national ban; my opponent opposes one. Voters could then decide.

Instead the ad manufactured a personal attack that the record doesn't support. When a campaign has a true version of the argument available and picks the false one, that tells you something about how confident it is in the true one.

For her part, Mendoza's stated position is that these calls shouldn't be made by politicians at all: "Rules about keeping sports fair and safe for young people should be made by the people who know the most—parents, coaches, and sports associations—not politicians."

Arizonans will vote on a referendum on this exact question in November. Voters deserve to weigh it with both candidates' actual positions in front of them — not an invented quote.

Ciscomani has a pattern of saying one thing and doing another

Putting words in an opponent's mouth is a new low, but it fits a habit AZ-06 voters have seen before.

Ciscomani repeatedly promised to protect clean energy tax credits that were creating jobs described as "life-changing" in his own district. Then he voted to gut them. After that vote, he signed a letter asking the Senate to undo the cuts he had just voted for — and then voted for the final bill anyway.

Vote for the cuts. Send a letter saying you're worried about the cuts. Vote for the cuts again. Then run an ad about somebody else's honesty.

You can see the rest of his record on Juan Ciscomani's report card.

The bottom line

Voters in Arizona's 6th District are dealing with grocery prices, health insurance costs, and a housing squeeze. What they got from their congressman this week was an ad built on a quote that doesn't exist.

Ciscomani has a real position on transgender athletes and he's entitled to defend it. Fabricating one for his opponent is a different thing entirely — and it's the kind of thing candidates do when they'd rather not run on their own record.

Source

This post is based on reporting from American Journal News, with cosponsorship records from Congress.gov. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

The DAR Voted to Keep Its Members. Gary Palmer and Robert Aderholt Want Congress to Overrule Them.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:05:00 +0000

The Daughters of the American Revolution is a private women's group founded in 1890. It has about 175,000 members in 3,000 chapters. To join, you have to prove by bloodline that an ancestor of yours helped the American side in the Revolutionary War.

It is a genealogy club. It runs historic preservation projects, hands out scholarships, and puts up plaques.

In June, its members held a vote about who gets to be in it. Then two Alabama congressmen decided the members got it wrong, and asked Congress to fix it.

The members already decided — and it wasn't close

On June 27, 2026, delegates at the DAR's 135th Continental Congress in Washington voted on a proposal to bar transgender women from the organization.

They rejected it, 1,481 to 984.

That's about 60% of the delegates voting to keep the group open. These are the DAR's own dues-paying members — women who traced their own bloodlines back to the 1770s to get in. Nobody made them vote that way. There was no court order, no federal mandate, no lawsuit. They talked it over at their own convention and they took a side.

Even the people on the losing end of that vote said so out loud. Laura McDonald, treasurer of one chapter that backed the ban, put it plainly afterward: "I do believe the will of the assembly was heard today."

That's what a private organization governing itself looks like.

Two weeks later, Congress got involved

On Wednesday, July 15, Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia introduced the Daughters of the American Revolution Membership Integrity Act. It would amend the DAR's federal charter to write a membership rule into law — one the members had just voted down.

Twenty Republicans signed on as cosponsors. Two of them were Gary Palmer of Hoover and Robert Aderholt of Haleyville.

Palmer put out a statement on Friday explaining why:

"It should be common sense that to be a part of the Daughters of the American Revolution, you have to be a daughter. Unfortunately, common sense has become a casualty of the left's radical agenda."

He went further:

"Congress will not allow radical activists to erase womanhood from one of our nation's oldest patriotic organizations."

Read that sentence again, because the word doing the work is Congress.

The "radical activists" he's describing are 1,481 members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The thing he says Congress "will not allow" is the outcome of their vote. Palmer is not defending the DAR from outsiders. He is proposing that the federal government override the DAR's own membership, at the request of the faction that lost.

Cline was equally direct about the goal, saying his bill "amends the DAR's congressional charter to ensure biological men cannot become members." According to Cline's office, the dispute traces back to a nondiscrimination provision the organization adopted in 2024, which DAR leadership reads as barring chapters from rejecting applicants for being transgender.

The bill hasn't had a committee vote yet.

What small government means, apparently

Both of these men run on getting Washington out of people's lives.

This is a bill to have Washington rewrite the bylaws of a private women's club, because the club's members voted the wrong way. It is the federal government reaching into a volunteer genealogy society to settle an internal argument about paperwork.

There's no crisis here. Nobody is being defrauded. No public money is at stake. No Alabamian's life gets better or worse depending on the DAR's membership roster. The only thing that changes is that a group of women who voted one way get overruled by a group of congressmen who weren't in the room.

And Cline's own reasoning gives away how thin the ground is: he says the organization has "departed from those founding principles by embracing a radical, leftist gender ideology." The "radical, leftist" body in question is the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Meanwhile, back in Alabama

Here's what Palmer and Aderholt could be spending a week on instead.

In Palmer's district, an estimated 19,869 people in AL-06 are projected to lose health coverage because of the cuts he voted for — 18,200 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 1,669 losing Medicaid, according to the Joint Economic Committee. Another 22,024 households in AL-06 rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 12,136 with children and 6,774 with someone 60 or older.

In Aderholt's district it's worse. An estimated 23,527 people in AL-04 are projected to lose health coverage — and he chairs the House subcommittee that writes the health funding bill. North Alabama leans hard on food assistance: 36,500 households in AL-04 are on SNAP, about 13% of every household in the district, including 17,377 with kids and 12,922 with a senior.

Those are the people who would show up at a town hall to ask about it. Which is part of why neither man holds one.

Palmer has called constituents who come to ask questions "paid agitators" — "These are not constituents, most of them." He offers Pastries with Palmer instead: a coffee chat, not a public forum where everyone hears the question and the answer.

Aderholt hasn't held a public in-person town hall in years. When constituents in Northport organized their own in March 2025 and left an empty chair for him, he didn't come. He says he prefers "one-on-one" meetings at his district offices — private, one voter at a time.

So the pattern is: no public forum for the 23,527 people losing their health insurance, but a press release and a cosponsorship for a membership dispute inside a 175,000-member heritage club.

The tell

Palmer said Congress "will not allow radical activists to erase womanhood."

Nothing was erased. A private organization held a vote, counted the ballots, and 1,481 of its own members chose to keep their group as it is. The losing side went to Washington. Two Alabama congressmen picked up the phone.

If you're a working family in Hoover or Haleyville watching your grocery bill and your insurance premium climb, this is where your representative's attention went in July.

Source

Reporting by Sawyer Knowles for Yellowhammer News, July 20, 2026. Photo: Yellowhammer News.

Lauren Boebert Spent the Week Trying to Ban Trans Troops. Then She Missed the Actual Defense Vote.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 21:05:00 +0000

The National Defense Authorization Act is the bill that funds the American military. It comes up every year. It's about as must-pass as legislation gets, and this year's version carried $1.1 trillion.

Lauren Boebert had two jobs on it.

The first was the one she chose for herself: an amendment to write President Trump's transgender military ban into permanent law. She lost that one — and four Republicans helped beat her.

The second was just to show up and vote on the bill. She missed it. She was in a back room, waiting for a phone call.

The amendment failed, and Republicans killed it

On Tuesday, July 21, the House voted 212-217 to reject Boebert's amendment to the 2027 NDAA. The amendment would have codified Trump's January executive order barring transgender people from serving in the military — turning a presidential order into a law that a future president couldn't simply reverse.

Trump's order says that "expressing a false 'gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service." That's the language Boebert wanted to make permanent.

Every House Democrat voted against it. So did four Republicans: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, James Moylan of Guam, and Kimberlyn King-Hinds of the Northern Mariana Islands.

That's the part worth pausing on. Republicans control the House. Boebert didn't lose this to Democratic obstruction — she lost it because members of her own party wouldn't go along.

There's context she left out, too. In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's push to expel currently serving transgender troops was "motivated by animus against transgender people," violating their constitutional rights. Boebert's response to a court finding the policy unconstitutional was to try to make it law.

These are people who already volunteered. They already passed the physical standards. They're already doing the job. The "readiness" argument requires you to believe that troops who are currently serving are simultaneously unfit to serve.

Then she missed the vote on the whole bill

The next day, Wednesday, July 22, the House voted on the actual NDAA — the $1.1 trillion one.

Boebert wasn't there.

Her explanation, reported by AOL, is that she was waiting to hear from Hegseth about a different provision, Section 219, which would have the Defense Secretary designate an "executive agent" to synchronize U.S.–Israel cooperative efforts. Boebert opposed it, calling it "a big tech swap between us and Israel."

In her own words on X:

"Unfortunately, the vote was closed sooner than expected and before my conversations with DoW concluded."

And on camera to TMZ DC, describing what happened:

"It's a big issue on the left and the right, and many of my constituents have reached out. They don't want this provision in the bill. Well, White House doesn't want it in the bill, Secretary Hegseth doesn't want it in the bill. So I'm in the back, waiting for a call from the Secretary. I'm told that call is coming; I'm talking to someone underneath him, and I'm told the vote's going to stay open. They close the vote."

She says she wanted to vote for the NDAA. Seven Republicans, including Thomas Massie, voted against it. Boebert voted neither way. Only two other members missed it: Republican Andy Biggs of Arizona and Democrat Frederica Wilson of Florida.

Massie's amendment to strip Section 219 — the thing she was in the back room about — was defeated 314-104 anyway.

Boebert says she did eventually get a commitment from Hegseth that Section 219 would be stripped in conference, and that she'll get another vote on the bill when it comes back. Maybe so. But the annual defense authorization passed the House of Representatives, and the congresswoman from Colorado's 4th District is not recorded on it.

In the same TMZ interview where she explained missing the vote, she also had this to say:

"I don't want to be on camera this week and I've been on camera more than any other week. My Botox hasn't caught up on this side. Maybe in two days, this side will catch up to the other side."

That's the week. An amendment targeting transgender servicemembers that her own party helped kill, a missed vote on a trillion-dollar defense bill, and a Botox update.

This is the pattern

Boebert's time in Congress has a shape to it, and it's not legislating.

She refuses to hold in-person town halls, telling reporters, "For me personally, it's just not safe to do an in-person town hall because I don't know what to expect." She does telephone town halls instead — like the March 2025 call where she defended Elon Musk and DOGE against constituents' questions about federal workforce cuts.

Her record of controversies is long and well documented — including being ejected from a Denver production of Beetlejuice in September 2023 for vaping and causing a disruption, then telling reporters she'd been removed for "singing too loudly" until the venue's security footage said otherwise.

The through-line is that the performance is the point. Attacking transgender troops is a bill she can post about. Showing up for the defense authorization vote is not.

The bottom line

Transgender Americans serving in the military didn't ask for a culture war. They volunteered. A federal appeals court has already found that expelling them was driven by animus, not readiness.

Lauren Boebert's answer was an amendment to lock that policy into law. She lost — because four Republicans wouldn't vote for it.

Then, on the actual bill that pays for the entire United States military, she didn't vote at all.

Colorado's 4th District sent her to Washington to legislate. Last week she managed neither the culture war nor the day job.

Source

Faith Miller, Lauren Boebert Reveals Why She Missed Big NDAA Vote, AOL/Daily Caller News Foundation, July 23, 2026; Sudiksha Kochi, House rejects amendment banning transgender individuals from serving in military, The Hill, July 21, 2026; and Dems defeat Boebert's anti-trans amendment, LGBTQ Nation. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.