HRC Article:
WASHINGTON — Last night, President Biden signed the FY25 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law, which includes a provision inserted by Speaker Mike Johnson blocking healthcare for the transgender children of military servicemembers. This provision, the first anti-LGBTQ+ federal law enacted since the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, will rip medically necessary care from the transgender children of thousands of military families – families who make incredible sacrifices in defense of the country each and every day. The last anti-LGBTQ+ federal law that explicitly targeted military servicemembers was Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which went into effect in 1994.
Biden’s press release:
No service member should have to decide between their family’s health care access and their call to serve our Nation.
Fuck no. Biden, Harris, and the Democratic consultancy machine did not run a presidency or a campaign that came within a million miles of supporting that claim.
In a populist age, like we are in, what beats right wing populists (fascists) is left wing populists. The Biden presidency nudged the party in that direction, but neither he nor Harris were capable of running a populist campaign.
Well, the Biden administration briefly entertained some left-wing populist positions, which were unceremoniously jettisoned along with any credibility Democrats once had on the subject.
As Biden just did with the now-ridiculous notion that Democrats support trans people.
Biden made serious progress for unions, consumers, and in antitrust. I’m not putting him up for sainthood, but progress is progress. He was the most progressive president of the last 50 years which, sadly, is a super low bar.
Politics is compromise. Biden is not supreme leader of the United States. He shares power with Republicans. The Republicans will get some wins, and every one of them will be ugly and outrageous. If America wanted to support trans people, they should have elected a Democratic House.
no, he absolutely did not. He just lost an election for being out of touch with consumers, and he ended a rail strike he should have stayed out of, and then followed up with peanuts for the strikers and called it a win. Then when police started busting the amazon strike, he did nothing.
Your understanding of the railroad strike is deeply incomplete. The following is from an IBEW statement.
Here are 8 Ways the Biden Administration Has Fought for Working People by Strengthening Unions.
Here is an article covering Biden’s consumer protection and anti-trust initiatives. Lina Khan was Biden’s appointee to the FTC, and she did amazing work in her short time in office - even pissing off a lot of Democratic donors.
from : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute
"Congressional intervention In September 2022, U.S. Senators Richard Burr and Roger Wicker introduced a bill that would have required labor unions to agree to the terms proposed by the Presidential Emergency Board, to prevent a strike.[18] It was blocked by Senator Bernie Sanders, who noted that freight rail workers receive a “grand total of zero sick days” while railroad companies made significant profits.[19] In the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We’d rather see negotiations prevail so there’s no need for any actions from Congress.”[16]
In late November, after some unions had rejected the agreement, Biden asked Congress to pass the agreement into law. On November 30, the House of Representatives passed the existing tentative agreement along with an amended version that would require railroad employers to ensure 7 days paid sick leave.[20] On December 1, the Senate passed the tentative agreement with only 1 day of sick leave.[21] President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law on December 2.[4] The Biden administration’s intervention in the dispute was condemned by over 500 labor historians in an open letter to Joe Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh.[22]"
Seems to me that by the end of that 5 year debacle, Biden had taken away the strikers power and forced them to accept scraps compared to what they asked for, and the centrists want to be thanked and praised for that pathetic dog’s dinner. The presidents proposal to the strikers initially didnt include any paid sick time at all, but Sanders blocked it and forced it to change. So I give Biden a pretty low score for leadership there. Give Bernie the praise for those results. Biden was full speed ahead on the railroads side, as is his nature. Also, the strikes werent just about having no paid sick leave, there were other issues that werent addressed.
And where was Biden on the amazon strike? No help.
On Khan, yes Biden deserves some priase for that anti trust work. Whenever Biden does something progressive (and not centrist), we all seem to agree that its praiseworthy. Weird eh?
Seems like the stuff you linked in 2022 and the follow-up he linked (when they got the stuff) was 2023.
Seems to me that your talking out of your ass.
I didn’t link you to the centrists asking for credit, I linked to the union giving them credit.
And consumer protections. Khan did good work on both.
Uh, no? Not weird at all. Credit where credit is due, and condemnation where that’s appropriate as well. I’ve got all kinds of problems with the Biden presidency. Gaza is probably the biggest one I have, but there are plenty of valid criticisms domestically as well.
Whatever pal. You just dont like that the facts dont agree with your narrative. If you are going to throw a tantrum about it, why dont you go have yourself a real nice day.
What facts? I pointed you to the facts and you just made shit up anyways.
Our Democratic Senate voted overwhelmingly against trans people.
The Senate doesn’t rule any more than the President. The Senate must also compromise with the House. If America doesn’t want Republicans to influence policy, then America has to stop voting for Republicans.
The real question is, why do Republicans choose to use their leverage on this shit? The answer is simple. It allows them to undermine Democrats by splitting the left. Your reaction is the exact reason why trans people just got screwed. You are personally more responsible than anyone in the Senate.
There need to be hard red lines. Human rights are one of these. This bill is literally, without any exaggeration, going to result in several thousand dead children. But the very survival of trans people is “political,” so it’s OK to sacrifice our lives for the sake of political expediency.
A few thousand dead kids is nothing, because deep down, people don’t see trans people as human beings.
I sincerely doubt it. The impact is limited to trans children of active service members who do not have a second parent with health insurance. Furthermore, trans healthcare for kids generally means puberty blockers, not surgeries or other expensive interventions. As far as I can gather, that’s about $5k-$12k per year if insurance pays, and likely lower with self pay discounts. That’s easily doable with a GoFundMe.
None of that is to say it’s OK. I’m just addressing the assertion of thousands of deaths.
Nobody should be thrown under the bus, but political reality in a split government says that someone will be. This gave Republicans the hate fix they so desperately wanted with probably less impact than with any other group. I still agree it sucks, but without knowing what the alternatives were, it’s not rational to assume Democrats just didn’t care to do better.
There are about 2 million minors on Tricare. Around 1% of the population is trans, then that’s 20,000 kids. The suicide attempt rate among trans kids untreated is about 40%. If only a quarter of those succeed, that’s 2,000 dead kids among Tricare’s current enrollees.
Now your despicable suggestion that people rely on GoFundMe for their life-saving healthcare? Or your hope that most families on Tricare have good insurance through their other partner? When military famously move so much that the other partner mantaining a good job is difficult? Those have obvious problems with them. The GoFundMe is a particularly demonic suggestion. Suffice it so say that no, thousands of families of trans kids are not going to find donors for thousands a year on fucking GoFundMe. This is healthcare, and that is what health insurance is for.
So yes, thousands of dead children is not in any way an exaggeration. Congress just willingly voted to murder several thousand children. And people like you are perfectly happy with it, as you do not consider trans people to be human beings.
The percentage of people who attempt suicide and eventually succeed is actually more like 10-15%. Receiving medical treatment is a factor in whether a trans child attempts suicide, but it is only one of many, and not the most important. In 2022 Tricare had a total of 2,500 kids receiving some form of gender affirming care, a far cry from your estimate of 20,000. I really don’t want to quibble too much on the numbers because 1 kid is too many, but it’s not going to be thousands in any case.
I was also not talking specifically about puberty blockers, not mental healthcare in general. Where I was mistaken, is that puberty blockers are actually not impacted by this bill at all, and will still be made available. Since you are an apparent activist on this issue, I would have thought that was something you would have caught. The treatments being disallowed are specifically those that might “result in sterilization” - treatments that are rarely ever performed on trans minors. I want to be clear here in saying that this does not mean I think the change is OK.
Lets be clear about the nature of my suggestion. It’s analogous to explaining how two people can share a gas mask in a chemical attack. It’s not how I think it should work, but it’s an option that’s better than nothing. My perspective is that the only people who should be involved in these decisions are doctors, patients, and if applicable patients. Medical care should be a right, but I know that’s not where things are today - for anyone.
And, again, we don’t know what was on the table that might have been even worse. What we do know is that if the bill didn’t get passed that all healthcare benefits would be impacted for every military family, not to mention delays in pay. If the Democrats held a hard line and refused to compromise, the Republicans could just hold off a month and bypass the Democrats altogether. Then we might actually have seen all gender affirming care pulled, instead of just care for minors that might result in sterilization.
I’ll say this again too. I don’t give the Democrats a complete pass on this. In this particular situation I don’t think they had a choice, but in the past several years they have avoided this topic almost completely and allowed Republicans to frame the entire issue. I have deep problems with what Democrats did leading up to this situation that helped put them in this spot.
What group did Republicans object to throwing under the bus?
Oh yeah, that only ever works one way, and it only ever works with people that Democrats consider expendable.
What? Who said they did? Republicans need to throw someone under the bus. That’s fascist strategy 101. They just don’t care who it is.
Let’s put you in charge of the party then. Who do you choose to sacrifice instead? The Republicans are going to insist on some red meat. If the bill gets pushed off until January 20, it’s just going to result in far worse for more people. One small charity could completely mitigate this issue for everyone, so why aren’t you working on that?
This is just the beginning of the shit this country will be dealing with for at least the next couple of years. If the Democrats don’t absolutely crush it in 2026, it will be a lot longer than that. You want to play these fucking games and pretend that Democrats are the enemy, then the blood can be on your hands.
I say this fully aware that the Democrats are on the wrong side of lots of issues that I care about, but there is no issue where they are worse than the Republicans. We can help by fixing the culture. Politicians are not good at doing the work of activists. (And activists generally make lousy politicians.)
Compromise is not enthusiastic capitulation, which is what we got. This wasn’t a squeaker. Democrats overwhelmingly voted for this in the senate. The party abandoned trans people and you’re defending them for it.
Well, Democrats’ last word to trans people for the foreseeable future was “we’re doing what Republicans want.” Democrats had an opportunity to do better here.
Because they know that Democrats will break solidarity with any vulnerable minority and then blame anyone who is upset about it, like so:
This is bullshit. Centrists are responsible for their own cowardice and their own complicity. Don’t blame people who are upset because you got everything you wanted.
An overwhelming vote is not the same as an enthusiastic vote. The bill got 100% of the Democratic vote in the executive branch, yet Biden was far from enthusiastic about that provision.
The Democrats had to compromise with Republicans on something, and Republicans choose which issues to compromise on, and which to hold firm to. The Republicans chose trans people, not the Democrats. It’s possible that the Democrats could have offered some other group, but they don’t have the power for it not to screw any vulnerable minority. That bill was never going to arrive at the Senate.
Cowardice and centrism have nothing to do with this bill. I’m the first to agree that Democrats are cowardly centrists, but not in this context. When Democrats have to compromise with Republicans to pass critical legislation, that legislation will definitionally be more “centrist” than the Democrats themselves.
Where cowardly centrism comes into play is in presenting their case to the American people. I absolutely do blame Kamala and her consultants for totally avoiding trans issues in her campaign. But, when the election is done, the country doesn’t operate without compromises with elected Republicans.
I’m not sure why you would assume I got everything I wanted. The trans stuff is just the start of what I don’t like about this funding bill. I also have no doubt that if the Democrats owned both branches that there would still be a lot I don’t like, but I think the trans provision would be gone.
It was unfair of me to say it was your fault that Republicans chose to force the trans issue in this bill. It’s not. It will be your fault when they do it next time though, because you are rewarding them for it.
Yes it is.
He says he isn’t. You give him the benefit of the doubt. You trust him. I do not.
Or capitulation, as in this case.
Because you’re carrying water for a lame duck president whose career is over.
I don’t.
And the next time Democrats throw trans people under the bus, it’ll be your fault for defending them. Not that this isn’t the intended outcome.
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