Nancy Mace Says Republicans Are the “Feminists of Today” With Anti-Trans Bill Passage

Republican Representative Nancy Mace thinks her party is the new wave of feminists because it passed a bill banning transgender women and girls from women’s sports.

The House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday that would amend Title IX, a civil rights law that bans sex- or gender-based discrimination, to limit a person’s sex to the one they were assigned at birth. The measure passed entirely along party lines and is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.

At one point during the debate, Mace suggested that Republican support for women’s equality in sports (except for trans women) makes them “the feminists of today.”

“As a woman who is pro-LGBTQ, I don’t care how you dress, I don’t care what pronoun you take, I don’t care if you change your gender, but we ought to protect biological women and girls in their athletics,” she said.

Mace suggested another amendment to conduct a study of the supposed adverse psychological effects on cisgender women and girls of letting trans women play women’s sports.

Democratic Representative Mark Takano clapped back that nothing is “further from the truth.”

“This amendment perpetuates false arguments that allowing transgender girls to participate in school sports teams will undermine the well-being of cisgender girls,” he said.

Democrat Pramila Jayapal pointed out that the only way for schools to enforce this rule would be to conduct genital exams on students.

Mace is rapidly becoming a classic “pick-me girl.” She keeps trying to show she’s not like other Republicans, even denouncing them to stand out from the crowd. Mace has repeatedly urged her party to adopt a more centrist stance on abortion rights. She also said she would oppose kicking Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

But at the end of the day, she voted with Republicans every time.

Florida’s drag ban has not yet been signed into law, and yet it is already stopping Pride celebrations in the state.

The measure passed the state House of Representatives Wednesday by a vote of 82–32 and is now headed to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis. If he signs it into law, the measure would prohibit government entities and employees from issuing permits to organizations that may hold “adult live performances” in the presence of minors. It would also ban businesses from allowing minors to attend such performances.

The Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast, which covers several counties in southeastern Florida, announced some dramatic changes late Wednesday to its Pride celebrations in light of the legislation.

“As all of you know, the political climate that we are currently in has us all very concerned for our community. After multiple meetings with city officials, it is with a heavy heart that Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast has to announce that this weekend’s Pridefest will now be a 21 and older event,” the group said on Facebook.

“We also regret to announce that we will have to cancel our plans to bring back our beloved parade.”

“This is the law working as intended: forcing queer people back into the closet,” tweeted New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen.

Florida is the latest state to advance a (vaguely worded, extreme) measure attacking drag performances, which have become a particular target for the right wing in recent years. It is likely to become the second state to pass a law, after Tennessee in March. The Tennessee law was blocked by a judge before it could go into effect on the grounds that it was overly broad and violated free speech rights.

The police do not seem to have been provoked when they shot and killed Manuel Esteban Paez Teran.

At least that is what the evidence continues to indicate. In January, the 26-year-old forest defender known as “Tortuguita” was shot and killed by police as they were protesting the construction of a $90 million police training facility in Atlanta, Georgia.

New autopsy results from DeKalb County reveal that Teran had no gunpowder residue on their hands, contrary to police reports that said Teran had shot first at a state trooper, provoking officers to respond with gunfire.

Even more appalling, Teran suffered at least 57 gunshot wounds, from head to toe. Officers shot at least 57 bullets into a person who was protesting the construction of a militarized police facility and defending a forest. Fifty-seven. If there was a point to be made about our overinflated police budgets, the police made it themselves.

Teran’s family reportedly conducted an independent autopsy that found Teran’s hands were raised during the shooting; the DeKalb County autopsy could not definitely come to a conclusion on that fact.

Conveniently, there is no body camera footage of the event, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The revelations follow an ongoing display of proof for why residents might be skeptical of giving the police more and more money. In March, at least 35 people were indiscriminately detained at a music festival organized by Cop City protesters. Twenty-three were charged with domestic terrorism.

Those arrested were accused of participating in vandalism and arson at a construction site over a mile away from where the music festival was held. There was no substantial proof that any were involved in illegal activity; some people were outright denied bond on the grounds of “evidence” like wearing black or having mud on their shoes (they were all in a forest, where it had just rained).

While the police continue to prove why they warrant more scrutiny and less leeway, their behavior has yet to change; it is unclear how much more damage they will need to cause to inspire enough change to stop them from causing such damage at all.

It turns out that every person who pays taxes is also paying for Fox to further radicalize their neighbors.

On Tuesday, Dominion Voting Systems decided to settle with Fox and its cable networks after a months-long battle in a defamation lawsuit alleging that Fox had knowingly spread lies about the 2020 election. And now, The Lever has revealed that Fox will get to obtain a tax break as large as $213 million off the $787.5 million it owes Dominion.

“Thanks to an arcane line in the tax code, Fox can deduct that settlement payment from its income taxes,” The Lever reports, “because federal law allows taxpayers to write off many legal costs, providing that they are ‘ordinary and necessary’ business expenses.”

The revelation is shocking at its face: With a settlement, Fox had weaseled out of a potentially deeper inquiry into the lies undergirding its operation. And now the American taxpayer, whether they watch Fox or not, gets to help the crooked company wade through the costs of its own actions.

The revelation is all the more shocking given reporting from the Kansas City Star on the role Fox played in the radicalization of the shooter of Ralph Yarl, a Black 16-year-old boy who went to the wrong home in Kansas City, Missouri, to pick up his siblings.

Andrew D. Lester, who has been charged with shooting Yarl last week, was apparently immersed in a “24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia,” according to Lester’s grandson.

“He’s become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and Covid conspiracies, and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line,” his grandson, Klint Ludwig, told the Star. “I feel like it’s really further radicalized him in a lot of ways.”

And how has Fox covered this shooting? Media Matters reports that between the day of Yarl’s shooting and Tuesday Fox had spent a whopping 13 minutes covering the violent incident. The only prime-time coverage, Media Matters notes, came while Tucker Carlson downplayed the shooting and used it to somehow attack the Biden administration. The figures are especially rich given Fox is ostensibly so “tough on crime”—but apparently not for the vicious acts it helped incite in the first place.

Republicans seem to be getting exactly what they want on abortion, and yet suddenly none of the party’s top members want to talk about it.

In the past few weeks alone, a Texas judge ruled that mifepristone, one of the medications used to induce an abortion, had been improperly approved by the FDA and should be pulled from the market. A chaotic battle over access to the drug is now playing out in the courts. Meanwhile, under cover of night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning abortion after six weeks—before most people know they are pregnant.

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination and the man primarily responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned, has not commented publicly on any of it.

“President Donald J. Trump believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level,” a Trump campaign spokesman said in a statement to The Washington Post.

Trump has repeatedly touted himself as “the most pro-life president” ever, and yet now he’s evading the issue. His campaign refused to answer questions about what policies he would support if reelected. Other top Republicans have similarly changed their tune when it comes to abortion.

In January, the Republican National Convention urged the party to “go on offense” against abortion rights and pass new restrictions, including six-week bans. But now, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has begun telling candidates to back a 15-week ban instead. According to the Post, she doesn’t believe the six-week bans are popular or helpful to the GOP (she’s right). And even 15-week bans are tricky: Last year, when Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a federal 15-week abortion ban just before the midterms, many of his colleagues slammed the move. The bill never made it to the Senate floor.

After the initial mifepristone ruling, only a handful of Republicans reacted, most of whom gave mealy-mouthed answers that sought to deflect attention onto other issues. Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has generally adopted a waffly stance designed not to alienate anyone. She maintains she is “pro-life” but doesn’t “judge anyone who is pro-choice.” Another candidate, Tim Scott, struggled to form a coherent sentence about abortion rights last week but ultimately said he supports a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks and would consider a ban at 15 weeks.

Simply put, abortion wins elections. Every time an abortion-related issue has been on the ballot, the people vote in favor of protecting reproductive rights, not taking them away. Republicans must know this, but they don’t want to alienate the one-third of Americans who still oppose abortion rights. So rather than address the issue, they’re burying their heads in the sand.