This piece originally ran in them.
The U.S. government narrowly avoided a shutdown this past weekend, with Congress passing a bipartisan agreement at the eleventh hour to keep the government funded through November 17. House Republicans had created a deadlock over a number of issues, including opposing additional funding for Ukraine, an unsubstantiated impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, and what they call “woke” policies in the military. Now, advocates and elected officials are slamming the Republican party for its willingness to derail the entire federal government at least in part due to an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda. And with the shutdown only averted for 45 days, the GOP still has time to try to cram “anti-woke” provisions into essential budget bills.
House Republicans have added at least 45 anti-LGBTQ+ “riders” onto must-pass funding bills, as The 19th reported in August. Many of those bills included provisions to cut funding for gender-affirming care, which would have affected people who receive such treatment through Medicare and Medicaid, as well as incarcerated trans people, government employees, and others. The Republican version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for example, included bans on gender-affirming care for military employees and their families. It also would have barred Pride flags and drag shows on military bases. Democrats in both chambers opposed these measures.
Similar riders were added to bills that affect funding for a number of federal agencies. But in August, the House Freedom Caucus, a bloc of the most conservative Republicans, issued a statement specifying its opposition to any bills that did not work to “end the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon.” The group also promised to oppose any bills that would not resume the construction of a southern border wall, and which didn’t address the “unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI.” (The latter is ostensibly a reference to the federal criminal charges that Donald Trump is currently facing.)
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New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on CNN on Sunday to criticize Republicans for their willingness to shut down the government in order to further this anti-trans agenda, telling State of the Union host Jake Tapper, “I think the Republican party right now is completely out of step with the American people.”
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“What we saw this week leading up to this final hour compromise — not even a compromise but a capitulation by the Republican party — we saw them go through every single possible iteration of cutting benefits,” she said. “They finally realized that we should not shut down the government in order to deny trans service members the ability to get healthcare, in order to deny female service members the ability to get an abortion, and they filed an extension for 45 days until we’re back in here.”
Representative Summer Lee, who is the first Black woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania, also took to Twitter on Saturday to criticize Republicans.
“For months, we’ve fought to stop MAGA Rs from forcing a shutdown to starve & evict our families, cut our neighbors off from essential services, bankroll their billionaire donors, attack trans folks, and criminalize abortion at the expense of their own voters & our entire economy,” she said. “We will spend the next 45 days fighting to stop Republicans from shutting down the government and forcing millions of workers, mothers, children, and veterans to go without paychecks, formula food and shelter – again.”
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Last week, the Human Rights Campaign also launched an ad campaign against the GOP’s draconian proposals. Kelly Robinson, the president of the organization, called a shutdown “the height of irresponsibility” which “would interrupt critical government services, hurt working families, and endanger our national security.”
“This outcome was entirely avoidable, but House Republicans have instead hijacked the appropriations process to attack LGBTQ+ communities rather than doing their jobs,” Robinson said in a press release. “It’s past time for them to stop pushing an extremist agenda that’s a danger to us all.”
As the HRC’s press release noted, House Republicans haven’t limited their attacks on the LGBTQ+ community to the spending bills. In April, the House passed HR 734, which would ban trans girls from playing on public school girls’ sports teams on the federal level. (The bill is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Joe Biden has promised to veto it if it reaches his desk.) The House also passed HR 5 in March, which would have created a national “Parents’ Bill of Rrights” that would endanger trans students who aren’t out to their parents; the bill has yet to be voted on by the Senate, and according to CNN, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Republican bill “will not see the light of day” in his chambers calling the bill “Orwellian to the core.”
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