July 14, 2023 12:30 PM UTC

Boebert Emerges as Face of Ridiculous Military Funding Bill

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• by: Colorado Pols

We wrote on Thursday about Colorado Democrats’ opposition to Congressional Republicans holding military funding hostage for a variety of pet causes. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) has been refusing to approve Department of Defense (DoD) reprogramming requests — which significantly impact many service members in Colorado — as part of an effort to ensure that Space Command HQ moves from Colorado Springs to Alabama. At the same time, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has been holding up military promotions for months because he thinks white supremacists are being treated unfairly.

Late Thursday and into Friday, the action was on the floor of the House of Representatives for a critical vote on approving annual military funding via the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). As POLITICO explains, Republicans stuffed the NDAA with reams of nonsense social issue complaints before narrowly passing a bill that is already DOA in the U.S. Senate:

House Republicans united to narrowly pass major defense policy legislation on Friday that restricts the Pentagon policies on abortion access, medical care for transgender troops and diversity in a narrow vote.

But the many culture war provisions Republicans packed into the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act to win conservative votes are doomed in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The 219-210 vote on Friday saw all but four Democrats oppose the bill, which authorizes a national defense budget of $886 billion for fiscal 2024. Conversely, only four Republicans opposed the measure as Speaker Kevin McCarthy held his conference together to clear the legislation.

“I take solace in the fact that this is not going to become law and we have an opportunity to correct it,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, of the path forward. “But it’s really very disturbing how divisive all this has become, the degree to which the Republican majority wants to attack diversity. Bottom line. Attack trans people. Attack women. Attack people of color.”

The typically bipartisan bill dissolved into a nearly GOP-only measure Thursday as ugly fights over abortion, transgender medical care and diversity programs that have shown up in other bills in the House took center stage. As the rightward tilt became clear on the House floor, Smith and other Democrats who had previously supported the NDAA in the Armed Services Committee derided the revamped bill as “an ode to bigotry and ignorance.” [Pols emphasis]

Included in the NDAA, which is supposed to just be about military funding approval, were a litany of right-wing grievances, including:

♦ Eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and staff in the DoD;

♦ Prohibiting the reimbursement of expenses related to abortion services;

♦ Prohibiting health care programs for service members from covering hormone treatments and gender confirmation surgeries;

♦ And providing for the reinstatement of service members who were discharged for refusing to receive COVID-19 vaccinations.

Also added to the NDAA was an amendment sponsored by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-ifle) to ban certain books from school libraries on military bases and other facilities. 

Here’s Boebert yammering about her amendment late Thursday:

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle will mischaracterize this amendment as extreme. All the while, the Biden administration has spent the last two years promoting radical gender ideology to impressionable young children in K-12 schools throughout our country, including our military schools. Now THAT’S extreme… 

…I don’t send my boys to school to receive indoctrination from the woke mob or to be sexualized by groomers. And the same can be said for our service members, who are also parents sending their children to DODEA schools.

Boebert listed off six different books that she finds to be particularly bad: “All Boys Aren’t Blue”; “This Book is Gay”; “Gender Queer”; “Middle School is a Drag”; “Some Girls Bind”; and “Julian is a Mermaid.” The latter example is particularly silly, considering that the story is about a boy who wants to be a mermaid — something Boebert theoretically understands is not a real thing.

Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan — a former teacher and herself a former student of military schools as a child — then rose to oppose Boebert’s amendment:

“My colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to say that they are for individual rights and freedoms. But it is perhaps more accurate to say that some of them want the individual right to deny OTHER people and OTHER families their rights and freedoms as well.”

Houlahan also warned that Boebert’s amendment is so overly-broad that it could eventually lead to banning childhood staples such as Judy Blume’s beloved book, “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret.”

[mantra-pullquote align=”center” textalign=”left” width=”90%”]“Extreme MAGA Republicans have chosen to hijack the historically bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act to continue attacking reproductive freedom and jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.

“House Republicans have turned what should be a meaningful investment in our men and women in uniform into an extreme and reckless legislative joyride.”

— Statement from House Democratic Caucus[/mantra-pullquote]

For some inexplicable reason, House Republicans then decided to let Boebert take center stage on the NDAA debate and during the subsequent gloating press conference. Here’s what Boebert had to say during today’s presser:

“We dealt a major blow to the Biden regime’s efforts to politicize our military by defunding his policy of using DOD funds to traffic service members out of red states so that they can receive taxpayer-funded abortions.”

Sure. You dealt a “major blow” by narrowly passing a bill that is going nowhere in the U.S. Senate and will just have to be renegotiated at the expense of military families worldwide. Congratulations!

Boebert continued by PRAISING SENATOR TOMMY TUBERVILLE, who made headlines earlier this week for his crusade in defense of white supremacists. 

“The conservative movement is getting fired up everywhere. Just look at what is happening over in the Senate. Senator Tuberville is dealing devastating blows to the Biden regime’s woke military agenda.”

Whaaaaaa???

You’re really going to defend a guy who has spent months holding up military promotions because he thinks white supremacists are being treated unfairly by the DoD?

In short, Lauren Boebert spent her week in Congress trying to ban books and backing a Republican Senator who has chosen to die on a political hill in support of white supremacists. This is not what voters in CO-03 want Boebert to be doing, but she just can’t help herself.