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The House passed a bill on Wednesday that would criminalize gender transition treatment for minors.
The measure, sponsored by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., passed by a 216-211 vote with some bipartisan support.
Reps. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas, and Don Davis, D-N.C., voted with most Republicans for the bill, while Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., Gabe Evans, R-Colo., and Mike Kennedy, R-Utah, voted with most Democrats against the measure.
“Children are NOT experiments. No more drugs. No more surgeries. No more permanent harm. We need to let kids grow up without manipulation from adults to make life-altering decisions! Congress must protect America’s children!!!” Greene wrote on X ahead of the vote.
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Greene had reached a deal with House leadership to bring her bill to the floor in exchange for her backing a rule last week to advance the National Defense Authorization Act.
The bill faces a significant hurdle to pass the Senate, as Republicans would need Democrat support to approve the legislation in the Upper Chamber.
The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the House passage, saying the measure “would have immediate and devastating effects on the lives and transgender youth and their families across the country.”
“Politicians should never prohibit parents from doing what is best for their transgender children,” Mike Zamore, National Director of Policy & Government Affairs at the ACLU, said in a statement. “These families often spend years considering how best to support their children, only to have ill-equipped politicians interfere by attempting to criminalize the health care that they, their children, and their doctors believe is necessary to allow their children to thrive.”
“But this bill also creates an incredibly dangerous precedent far beyond the specific care at issue, criminalizing care based on ideology and placing Washington politicians between families and their doctors,” he continued. “We strongly condemn the passage of this measure and urge members of the Senate to do everything in their power to prevent it from ever becoming law.”
Greene and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, butted heads over the bill before its passage. The Georgia congresswoman, set to resign next month, had criticized Roy, who sits on the House Rules Committee, for introducing an amendment she argued would “gut the commerce clause.”
Roy’s amendment attempted to modify the bill to limit federal criminal liability under certain circumstances “by defining when prohibited conduct falls within federal jurisdiction,” according to the Rules Committee.
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But Greene contended that her bill “criminalizes ALL pediatric gender affirming care (transgender surgeries, puberty blockers, and hormones) NOT just those receiving federal funds and protects ALL children allowing them to grow up before they make permanent changes to their body that they can never undo!!!”
“WTF is Chip Roy doing????? And this guy wants to be attorney general of Texas but refuses to protect children??!!!” she wrote on X.
Roy responded that “the constitution matters & we should not bastardize it to use ‘interstate commerce’ to empower federal authorities.”
The Texas Republican, however, said in a statement on Wednesday that he would not offer the amendment “to avoid any confusion about how united Republicans are in protecting children from these grotesque procedures.”
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