Wednesday, November 20, 2024

NANCY MACE IS HAVING FUN

I know I'm supposed to take House Republicans' expressions of contempt for incoming congresswoman Sarah McBride very, very seriously....
House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled support Tuesday for a Republican effort to ban Democrat Sarah McBride — the first transgender person to be elected to Congress — from using women’s restrooms in the Capitol once she’s sworn into office next year....

A resolution proposed Monday by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina would prohibit any lawmakers and House employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” Mace said the bill is aimed specifically at McBride, who was elected to the House this month from Delaware.
But it's hard to believe they're actually worried about sexual assault or the downfall of civilization when the leader of this witch hunt is so obviously having the time of her life:



This is fun for her! She's the center of attention now. She'll probably be on every Sunday talk show next weekend. It's fun for Mike Johnson, too -- almost as much fun as turning America into an unrecognizable theocratic authoritarian kleptocracy.



They know there's no urgent civilizational crisis here. As Charlotte Clymer noted on Threads,
... trans women have been using women's restrooms in the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings and the White House and the Pentagon for many years now, including during all four years of the Trump Administration.

Under Donald Trump's leadership, trans women were permitted to use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and there was never any issue.

In the four years that Rep. Nancy Mace has been in Congress, she's known that trans women use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and it's never been an issue for her. Not once. In all this time.

Until the first openly-trans person was elected to Congress. Then it suddenly became an issue.
They like winning. They like punching down. They like rallying their voters with manufactured rage, and they really like the votes and money they get as a result.

And most of their voters aren't really angry either. You can see that at Trump rallies. It was very obvious at the 2020 boat parades, which, by definition, were attended by Trump supporters who were quite well off.

In March of last year, I wrote this about supposedly angry GOP voters:
Deep down, they know that life is pretty sweet for people like them. No one's really coming for their guns -- they have plenty, and it's easy to buy more. No one's really coming for their red meat or their big-ass SUVs. No one's forcing them to be gay or bi or trans. Politically, they run half the states. They run the Supreme Court and will control it for decades. They run the House, and they have an excellent chance of taking the Senate and the White House next year.

And in the meantime, they make liberals squeal in agony any time they please. Hey, let's propose a bill to make being a Democrat illegal! A legislator in Florida actually did that. Let's hand out AR-15 pins on the House floor! Let's find creative new ways to make guns more available and abortions less available! Let's ban books and drag shows, and put up more and more barriers to being trans, until eventually it's illegal at every age! Past a certain point, it's all just sport. It's quite possible that most right-wingers don't even care about the actual policy outcomes -- as the man said, the cruelty is the point....

We want to solve big problems -- bigotry, economic inequality, a rapidly warming planet -- and all those fights are hard. But right-wingers, for all their complaining, mostly like our society just fine. All they want to do is fuck with us -- and they don't have very much trouble getting what they want.
What's the point of the Trump presidency? They're happy. We're miserable. That's the whole point.

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