The U.S. Senate on Wednesday cleared a national defense authorization bill celebrated for troop pay raises but condemned by Democrats for targeting transgender children in military families, sending the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Senators voted 83-12, with five not voting, to approve the $884.9 billion National Defense Authorization Act that received bipartisan praise for the pay bump, upgrades to military housing and investments in artificial intelligence and other advanced technology.
But the annual legislation drew ire this year from Democrats for a provision banning the military’s health program from covering certain treatments for youth experiencing gender dysphoria, defined by doctors as the mismatch between a person’s sex assigned at birth and the gender they experience in everyday life.
All Democrats present for the Dec. 11 U.S. House vote opposed the defense package, which passed along party lines under the Republican majority.
The White House has not released its position on the bill, as it generally does with legislation ready for the president’s signature.
The roll call for the vote (linked in the summary) is embarrassing for the senate Democrats. This is well beyond a few moderates dismissing the anti-trans measures as being unimportant and carried through to the core of the party and even some progressive senators. And it needed 60 votes to pass so it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The amendment to remove the provision didn’t even receive a vote.
The Democrats who voted against:
It would be if they weren’t deliberately sending a message to trans people that they consider them expendable.
Nice job, Washington state… aren’t we supposed to be progressive or something? Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell are both corpo sellout nightmares.
I’m in Hawaii, usually Hirono is pretty reliable and Schatz is the “usually good but sometimes bad” camp. And Case is just reliably as bad as he can be without being fully mask off. I really wish someone would challenge him that isn’t a “who the hell is that”, but to be honest we don’t have any good state-level politicians that would fit the bill.
The Democratic party is a right wing party
Glad to see my Merkley and Wyden remaining based as always
Massachusetts and Oregon are the only states that can just be happy with good senate representation. I suppose Wisconsinites probably didn’t expect their Republican senator to do anything good too, but that’s a larger problem.