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Matt Gaetz’s nomination for US attorney general is met with blowback

Fla. Republican opposes LGBTQ rights

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U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speaks at the 2024 Republican National Convention (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday picked U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to serve as U.S. attorney general in his incoming administration.

Even with Republicans retaking control of the U.S. Senate, the congressman’s path to confirmation is uncertain as he has been dogged by a U.S. House Ethics Committee investigation and criticism that he lacks the temperament and qualifications for the job.

While Trump called his nominee a “deeply gifted and tenacious attorney” in a post on Truth Social, Gaetz’s experience in legal practice is limited to a brief three-year stint at a small firm in Florida’s Okaloosa County.

Gaetz immediately resigned following Trump’s announcement, an unusual move that came just two days before the House committee was slated to make public their report on allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.

From 2020 to 2022, the Justice Department led a probe into possible violations of sex trafficking laws by Gaetz, but charges were never filed.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who was a top contender for the role of Senate majority leader, told reporters on Thursday that he and other lawmakers should have access to the findings from the committee’s investigation into Gaetz.

He will need to earn a simple majority of the 53 GOP senators who will be seated in the next Congress in January. So far, no Senate Republican has publicly vowed to vote against Gaetz’s nomination, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) promised retribution from the GOP conference against any who did.

Trump has demanded that the newly elected Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-S.D.) allow him to sidestep the Senate confirmation process for his nominees ā€” which will involve multiple hearings and, ultimately, a floor vote ā€” by making recess appointments.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled in 2014 that presidents cannot make recess appointments unless the Senate is not in session for 10 or more days.

A couple of Republican senators have either said publicly or told reporters anonymously that they do not believe Gaetz is a “serious” candidate to lead the Justice Department. Others, like U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), said they would do their due diligence. The senator from Maine told CNN, “If the nomination proceeds, I’m sure that there will be an extensive background check by the FBI and public hearings and a lot of questions asked.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) offered the most pointed criticism of Trump’s pick for AG.

ā€œThis one was not on my bingo card,ā€ she told reporters on Wednesday. ā€œI donā€™t think this is a serious nomination for attorney general. We need to have a serious attorney general.ā€

ā€œIf I wanted to make a joke, maybe I would say now Iā€™m waiting for George Santos to be named,ā€ Murkowski told the New York Times, referring to the disgraced former Republican congressman.

Gaetz has an anti-LGBTQ record

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Justice Department has fought for LGBTQ rights, from defending expanded anti-discrimination protections for gay and transgender students to filing briefs in support of access to gender-affirming health care.

Gaetz’s record in Congress suggests he would move the department in the opposite direction.

During the last Congress, he opposed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified legal protections for married same-sex and interracial couples, and the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in areas like housing, employment, education, public accommodations, federally funded programs, credit, and jury service.

Gaetz also supported legislation to prohibit transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports and the ban on military service by transgender people that was enacted during the first Trump administration.

Brandon Wolf, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, shared a statement with the Washington Blade following the news of Gaetz’s nomination:

ā€œThe attorney general must represent the United States, not act as the president’s personal attorney, in addition to upholding the rule of law, fighting for justice for all, and working to keep the American people safe.

“In nominating accused sexual predator and known conspiracy theorist Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump is making it clear that he intends to subvert the Department of Justice and weaponize the agency against people he deems as less than.

“Matt Gaetz is unqualified to be attorney general ā€” both ethically and professionally. The nation deserves better than these nakedly political nominations who threaten the safety and freedom of the American people. The Senate must reject this nomination.ā€

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Congress

Senate Dems object to House GOP’s anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion approps riders

45 senators signed a letter issued to leadership on Thursday

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U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

A group of 45 Senate Democrats sent a letter Thursday urging leadership to reject the 55+ anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ measures that Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have attached to must-pass FY25 spending bills, while also arguing that the “poison pill” policy riders must be kept out of the appropriations process moving forward.

The letter was addressed to the Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders, Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), along with the chair and vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Among the signatories are 11 of the committee’s 14 Democratic members ā€” including Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), and Cory Booker (N.J.), who led the effort.

The House, meanwhile, voted on Wednesday to approve the major annual defense funding bill, with a provision that would prohibit the children of U.S. service members from accessing gender-affirming health treatments under the Pentagonā€™s TRICARE program.

From here, the National Defense Authorization Act will face two major roadblocks that, for the past two years, have doomed other appropriations bills that were packed with partisan policy riders and passed by the House under the Republican leadership: first, the Senate’s Democratic majority, and second, President Joe Biden and his promise to veto legislation that would undermine reproductive rights or target trans and LGBTQ communities.

Of course, a path forward for these bills will become far clearer and easier next month when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House and the 119th Congress is seated with Republicans reclaiming control of the upper chamber.

In their letter, the senators explained that appropriations funding in recent years has typically been passed by the Senate in committee, usually with wide bipartisan margins, but the process is undermined when their conservative counterparts in the lower chamber pack the bills with right-wing policy riders.

Relative to concerns about harms to the legislative process, however, the authors placed a greater emphasis on the case for rejecting these measures because they are “partisan, discriminatory, and harmful.”

For instance, the letter notes that as House Republicans seeking to use the appropriations process as a vehicle for opening the door to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, or to ban access to transgender medical care, LGBTQ Americans are facing an unprecedented onslaught of legislative attacks, with 42 state legislatures introducing more than 574 anti-LGBTQ bills this year alone.

Additionally, the senators wrote, policy riders that would further restrict access to reproductive healthcare come as Americans are reeling from the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs, which overturned protections that were first established when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1933. As a result, the letter notes, total abortion bans are now enforced in 13 states with a handful of others setting early gestational limits.

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Congress

House passes defense spending bill with anti-trans rider targeting military families

‘Not since DOMA’ has ‘an anti-LGBTQ+ policy been enshrined into federal law’

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U.S. Capitol (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to pass the annual military appropriations bill with a rider that would prohibit the children of U.S. service members from accessing gender-affirming health treatments under the Pentagon’s TRICARE program.

After clearing the floor vote with a comfortable margin of 281-140, the bill’s future is uncertain provided that Senate Democrats are unlikely to move on a National Defense Authorization Act that contains a discriminatory, partisan policy advanced by House Republican leadership and President Joe Biden promising to veto any legislation that targets transgender rights.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reportedly insisted on amending the NDAA to add the anti-trans policy after a final version of the bill had already been negotiated by the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees over the weekend, earning a sharply worded rebuke from the later committee’s top Democrat, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.).

“Blanketly denying health care to people who clearly need it, just because of a biased notion against transgender people, is wrong,” the congressman wrote. Johnson is “pandering to the most extreme elements o this party to ensure that he retains his speakership,” he said, and in the process the GOP leader has upended “what had been a bipartisan process.”

Just after the NDAA was passed, Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson shared a statement with the Washington Blade.

ā€œMilitary servicemembers and their families wake up every day and sacrifice more than most of us will ever understand. Those families protect our right to live freely and with dignity ā€” they deserve that same right, and the freedom to access the care their children need.

Today, politicians in the House betrayed our nationā€™s promise to those who serve. Not since the ā€˜Defense of Marriage Actā€™ passed almost 30 years ago has an anti-LGBTQ+ policy been enshrined into federal law.

For the thousands of families impacted, this isnā€™t about politics. Itā€™s about young people who deserve our support. Those who have courageously stepped up to serve this country should never have their families used as bargaining chips.

Now, the Senate has the opportunity to reject this and any bill that includes these dangerous anti-trans, anti-military family provisions, and remember the fundamental promise of our democracy: That everyone deserves dignity, respect, and the right to healthcare.ā€

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Politics

Heritage Foundation praises effort to ban transgender healthcare for military families

House GOP signals eagerness to implement Project 2025’s anti-LGBTQ policies

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Donald Trump, gay news, Washington Blade
President-elect Donald Trump addresses the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation in 2017. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

In a statement released Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation praised House Republicans’ military spending bill, including the provision added by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that would ban gender-affirming healthcare interventions for the children of U.S. service members.

Victoria Coates, vice president of the organization’s Kathyrn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said the National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by the U.S. House Rules Committee along party lines on Monday, marks an “important step toward a defense budget that flows from strategy and directs DOD to become as lethal as possible to protect the national security of Americans.”

ā€œThe bill authorizes resources for DOD at the border, retains the Houseā€™s ban on corrosive race-based policies, eliminates the Senate’s provision to draft our daughters, prohibits transgender surgeries for minors under TRICARE, supports military construction in the Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding, including a third Arleigh Burkeā€“class destroyer, and incremental funding for a second Virginia-class submarine,” Coates said. “These policies in this bill, combined with new military leadership, will make America stronger.ā€ 

In April 2022, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a comprehensive 920-page governing blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term that proposes radical reforms to imbue the federal government with ā€œbiblical principlesā€Ā and advance a Christian nationalist agenda, including by stripping rights away from LGBTQ Americans while abandoning efforts to promote equality for sexual and gender minorities abroad.

“The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors,” the authors explain on page four, beginning “with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (ā€œSOGIā€), diversity, equity, and inclusion (ā€œDEIā€), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term … out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

The document also lays the groundwork for the incoming administration to revive the ban on military service by transgender troops that Trump implemented during his first term, arguing that “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”

Leading up to the election, when Project 2025 became a political liability for Trump, he tried to distance himself from the document and its policy proposals, but as the New York Times documented, an “analysis of the Project 2025 playbook and its 307 authors and contributors revealed that well over half of them had been in Mr. Trumpā€™s administration or on his campaign or transition teams.”

The Times also noted that Trump has held meetings with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and a co-founder, Edwin Feulner.

In October, the Congressional Equality Caucus published a report entitled, ā€œRipping Away Our Freedoms: How House Republicans are Working to Implement Project 2025ā€™s Assault on LGBTQI+ Americansā€™ Rights.ā€

The group’s openly gay chair, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), noted that ā€œWhen Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year, we saw an avalanche of attacks against the LGBTQI+ community.ā€

The congressman added, ā€œDuring the past two years, they forced more than 70 anti-LGBTQI+ votes on the House floor. And nearly every bill and amendment idea was ripped out of the pages of Project 2025ā€™s ā€˜Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.’ā€

The NDAA filed by House Republicans is unlikely to pass through the U.S. Senate while the chamber remains under Democratic control, and President Joe Biden has vowed to veto legislation that discriminates against transgender and LGBQ communities, but the spending package will face far fewer obstacles after the new Congress is seated on Jan. 3 and Trump is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Objecting to the spending bill’s inclusion of language prohibiting military families from accessing gender affirming care are congressional Democrats like U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), who serves as the ranking member of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, and advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

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