The U.S. Senate passed its version of the House of Representatives’ military spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, on Thursday, but omitting two amendments that the legacy media has spun as Republicans inserting the social issues of abortion and transgender medical interventions into routine legislation.
Don’t buy it.
The Republicans in the House had merely responded to President Joe Biden’s politicization of the military on social issues.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “senators largely sidestepped the polarizing social issues that had roiled the House weeks earlier,” specifically mentioning amendments that would “overturn a Pentagon policy allowing troops leave and travel funds for reproductive health care—including abortion” and another that “would prevent the Defense Department or Tricare, the military’s health care program, from providing gender-related surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., called it “shameful” that “House Republicans passed a bill bursting with outrageous amendments … that have absolutely nothing to do with the national defense. Their legislation is nothing but a vehicle for their relentless attacks on the LGBTQ community and pursuit of a nationwide abortion ban, and it has no shot of getting anywhere close to passage in the Senate.”
The House amendments do face an uphill battle as the NDAA moves into the reconciliation process—where House and Senate staff will seek to craft a version of the bill that both chambers are likely to pass—but that does not mean that House Republicans were the aggressors here.
Biden started the culture war in the military, while Republicans are seeking to restore common sense.
Under Biden, who issued a slew of executive orders promoting abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the Defense Department issued a policy Feb. 16 providing three weeks of taxpayer-funded paid leave and reimbursement of travel expenses for military personnel and dependents who are seeking an abortion. The Rand Corp. estimated that the number of abortions would skyrocket from 20 to more than 4,000 each year.
Meanwhile, members of the military struggle to secure leave for other purposes, such as attending funerals of friends or loved ones.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has held up the promotions of high-ranking military officers in response to the policy.
“Now, the burden is not on me to pass legislation to stop this illegal policy,” Tuberville said in May. “The burden is on the administration. The burden is on the administration to stop breaking the law.”
It seems ironic that Biden, who spent decades in the Senate championing the Hyde Amendment—legislation that prevents tax dollars from funding abortion—has weaponized the federal government to support killing unborn life in the womb.
When Biden reversed the Trump-era policy requiring members of the military to serve in accordance with their biological sex, rather than their claimed gender identity, his policy also led the military to offer controversial experimental transgender medical interventions, such as cross-sex hormones and surgeries often euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”
The Biden administration moved to allow taxpayer funding for experimental transgender procedures intended to make men and women look similar to the opposite sex in the budgets of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
While many medical agencies have endorsed these transgender interventions, claiming they are necessary to prevent suicides, doctors have testified that “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are experimental. There is insufficient data to tell whether they have any long-term positive benefits to compensate for the risks and known side effects, these doctors warn.
European countries that are often considered more left-leaning than the U.S. have started to backtrack on transgender medical interventions, warning that children may grow to regret altering their bodies.
The NDAA represents a chance for Congress to check an out-of-control president who has seized every opportunity to push an extreme social agenda.
Don’t let the Democrats’ narrative fool you. Their opposition to amendments like these is not about cooling passions but about distracting from the way Biden himself has politicized the military.
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