Congress

Hard-liners balk at GOP’s failure to enshrine anti-transgender laws

Published

3 months ago

June 1, 2026

GOP hard-liners who promised voters they’d use their new majority in Washington to enact anti-trans legislation are increasingly frustrated their leaders don’t seem to share the same commitment.

A record number of bills that would roll back access to health care, sports participation and military service for transgender individuals have been introduced over the last year and a half after Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars campaigning on the issue in 2024.

The party has struggled, however, to get more than a handful to President Donald Trump’s desk, and some Republicans worry the weak showing could deflate red state voters come November as the GOP fights to keep control of Congress.

These members are now looking toward legislative packages — like the annual defense policy bill or party-line budget reconciliation bills — as their last chance to codify restrictions on the trans community this year. But leaders are still not making the issues a priority, they say.

“It just amazes me that they aren’t listening on this issue, I really don’t understand that,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a recent interview.

Hawley has failed to convince leaders to attach a provision in the current immigration enforcement-focused reconciliation bill that would defund Planned Parenthood, which offers gender-affirming care he called “risky” and “dangerous” for children.

While he successfully zeroed out Medicaid funding for the health care provider in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — one of the few anti-transgender measures Congress has enacted — that provision will expire in July, upping the pressure to get it reauthorized.

“I’ve absolutely been telling [leaders] I want this in the next bill because taxpayer money shouldn’t be funding transgender treatment for minors,” added Hawley, who is now looking ahead to the potential third reconciliation bill the party could advance later this year.

U.S. medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, support gender-affirming care for adolescents.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has introduced a bill that would bar funding from entities that allow individuals to use single-sex restrooms or locker rooms that don’t match their sex assigned at birth. Asked why that measure hasn’t moved through the House, Mace said in an interview, “It’s a great question for the speaker.”

A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson’s office noted that besides last year’s health care funding limitation, measures blocking trans women from joining women’s sports teams at military universities and cutting some diversity, equity and inclusion program initiatives have also successfully been enacted as part of the latest defense authorization bill.

And three GOP bills have passed the House this Congress, including former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) bill to establish criminal penalties for performing or providing gender-affirming care to minors.

A person familiar with Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s thinking, granted anonymity to speak candidly, disputed the claim that he doesn’t share the same urgency for anti-trans action as ultraconservatives, pointing to the South Dakota Republican’s moves to bring related GOP measures to the floor and attributing their failure to a lack of bipartisan support necessary to clear 60-vote procedural hurdles.

That roadblock has been the source of growing calls from frustrated conservatives for Thune to push through a Senate rules change to allow more bills to pass by a simple majority — a drastic action he opposes and says he lacks the votes to achieve.

“I’ve called on Thune to nuke the filibuster. It has to be done,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.). “There’s no other way conservative legislation like this passes.”

Steube introduced a bill, which passed the House last January, that would prohibit schools receiving federal funding from allowing trans girls to play on female sports teams. Senate Democrats have four times defeated a similar measure introduced by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), most recently as an amendment to a stalled partisan elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

“At some point it does get frustrating that we’re not doing every single thing we can get done,” Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) recently complained. “And until somebody picks this up and says ‘I am going to be a true advocate,’ then we have no way of pushing it any further.”

Owens co-sponsored a measure that passed the House before the recent weeklong recess that would strip federal funds from public schools that alter a student’s name or pronouns in their records without parental permission.

Conservative Republicans started 2025 eager to capitalize on an issue that, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, appeared to galvanize voters. House and Senate Republicans and their affiliated campaign arms unleashed over $110 million in ads on issues such as rejecting gender-affirming care for minors and banning transgender women from participating in women’s and girls’ sports, according to AdImpact data.

Trump, in the closing days of his presidential campaign, spent more on ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting rights for transgender people than on any other subject.

House and Senate Republicans sought to ride the perceived wave of public opinion by introducing record levels of legislation they say are designed to protect the rights of women and girls and shield taxpayers from paying for gender-affirming care they call harmful and exploitative of minors.

Gallup polling before and after the election found that 69 percent of U.S. adults believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex. Still, advocates counter that 85 percent of Americans surveyed believe transgender people should have the same rights as everyone else, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights group.

More than 125 anti-transgender measures were introduced in 2026 alone — up from 109 in 2025 and 88 in 2024, according to counts from Trans Legislation Tracker, a research organization monitoring state and national bills that impact trans and gender-diverse people across the country.

But few of Congress’ legislative efforts have crossed the finish line.

Republicans have been foiled by mobilization from Democrats, who largely argue such restrictions amount to gender discrimination that contributes to serious considerations of suicide among two thirds of transgender youth. Democrats were also able to strip more than 40 “anti-LBGTQ+ riders” from annual government funding bills for the current fiscal year, according to the nearly-200 member Congressional Equality Caucus.

“Every time an anti-LGBTQI+ bill or amendment comes to the floor, members of the Congressional Equality Caucus organize a response and whip as hard as we can against them,” Caucus Chair Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

Meanwhile, despite the GOP’s lack of progress in Congress, White House executive actions and GOP-controlled legislatures have enacted a soaring number of anti-trans policies.

Trump, within the first days of his second administration, signed executive orders to: declare the government would only recognize two sexes, male and female; withhold federal funding for institutions that deliver gender-affirming care to minors; and ban transgender people from the military, among other efforts.

Before Trump started his second term, transgender women had been allowed to compete in women’s categories in the Olympics since 2003 and the NCAA since 2010.

At least 50 anti-trans bills have passed this year alone in red states like Florida, Tennessee, Utah, Kansas and Idaho. And states overall have passed more than 350 anti-trans bills since 2021.

The real-world impact of these efforts has jeopardized the mental and physical wellbeing of transgender individuals, many of whom have also faced violent threats as the issue becomes more deeply politicized, advocates say.

And since most major U.S. medical organizations say gender-affirming care is well-tested, safe and can be medically necessary, many parents of transgender minors have been forced to make a difficult choice: watch their child grapple with what can be extreme distress or move their families to less restrictive states or outside of the U.S to continue care that has been blocked or restricted.

“It would be a mistake to measure the threat to transgender Americans solely by what has or hasn’t passed Congress,” said David Stacy, vice president of government affairs at the Human Rights Campaign.

“The Trump administration has used executive overreach to dismantle hard-won protections, and state legislatures across the country are moving in lockstep.”

Back on Capitol Hill, Republicans insist that codifying some of these policies nationwide is important, while conceding the reality of doing so before November is unlikely.

“Look, it’s absurd that we allow men in women’s sports in our society when I think the vast majority of Americans don’t support it either,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis). “But are we going to get something done this legislative session? Time’s running out, to be honest.”

House Republicans have already packed at least 18 anti-LGBTQ+ policy riders in partisan versions of fiscal 2027 appropriations bills that Democrats are eyeing for removal, according to the Congressional Equality Caucus, and some GOP lawmakers aren’t interested in the risks involved in fighting for the survival of these partisan provisions.

“You could just run out of runway,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said in an interview. “And we’ve got to prioritize. If I’ve got a choice between some of those [trans] issues and getting the NDAA and farm bill out, then I’ve got to favor NDAA and farm bill.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: All the Democrats’ probes

Published

3 days ago

August 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are readying a long list of investigations they want to launch into Donald Trump.

Reps. Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin, who would lead the Oversight and Judiciary committees, respectively, if the party takes back the House, said they’re wasting no time in preparing an all-out oversight campaign targeting Trump, his family, and his administration.

Both know that House Dems’ efforts now could provide a backbone for the accountability message the party intends to continue into the 2028 presidential election season.

“We are going to be looking at systems of bribery, kickback and financial corruption and opportunities for disgorgement and restitution to the American people,” Raskin said. “That would be No. 1.”

Topping their long list of controversies they want to probe: Trump’s acceptance of a Qatari jet for use as his new Air Force One, and his family’s massively profitable cryptocurrency investments.

Raskin also said he intends to probe what he deems “fraudulent and vindictive prosecutions,” including those of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Leticia James. Garcia, meanwhile, said he is determined to fill in gaps he sees in the GOP-led investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales responded to Democrats’ plans by stating the president “will continue to draw a sharp contrast with his commonsense agenda and radical Democrats who want to massively raise taxes, defund the police, and are soft on crime.”

Garcia and Raskin’s preparations in some ways resemble how their predecessors planned ahead of the 2018 midterms. But that year, Democrats tiptoed around the prospect of impeachment for fear of alienating voters, then launched a flurry of investigations aimed at Trump once they were in power.

Now, after two impeachments that failed to remove Trump from office and with a party base intent on pulling no punches, House Democrats are reluctant to take anything off the table — while also recognizing the limitations of impeachment as a check on Trump’s power.

“Nobody on the Democratic side is afraid of impeachment,” Raskin said this week, adding that he considers it a “tool in the toolbox.”

What else we’re watching:

— SCANDAL-PLAGUED CANDIDATES TEST PARTIES’ LIMITS: Democrats and Republicans this election cycle keep playing whack-a-mole as candidate after candidate becomes embroiled in controversies ranging from domestic violence to sexual misconduct. Neither party has developed a clear playbook yet for when to step in or what counts as disqualifying. But identifying that line could become a key effort in determining who controls the next Congress, as several races with problematic candidates have been or could become battlegrounds.

— LAWMAKERS BRISTLE OVER POCKET RECISSION SEASON: With less than 45 days left in the fiscal year, the time is right for pocket rescissions — the controversial tactic Trump used last year to cancel billions of dollars in foreign aid without Congress’ consent. If the White House takes that tack again, it will not be well received on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers in both parties continue to bristle over Trump’s ongoing assault on their funding power.

Chris Marquette, Riley Rogerson, Erin Doherty, Andrew Howard, Alec Hernandez and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Democrats want to probe Donald Trump, his family and his administration. But mostly Trump.

Published

3 days ago

August 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats haven’t yet won the House majority. But top party leaders are wasting no time in preparing an all-out oversight campaign targeting President Donald Trump, his family and administration should they flip the chamber in November.

At the center of the effort are California Rep. Robert Garcia, who is poised to lead the Oversight Committee under a Democratic takeover, and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is in line to lead the Judiciary Committee. They are each already planning to use their potential gavels to investigate key Trump controversies — such as his acceptance of a Qatari jet for use as his new Air Force One and his family’s massively profitable cryptocurrency investments.

Garcia and Raskin both said in interviews they have a long list of administration officials that they plan to probe and possibly bring before their committees. But each said they intend to focus intently on Trump himself.

“Ideally, it’s the president’s sons and the president and the family,” Garcia said, adding a litany of other members of the Trump inner sanctum he wants to hear from. They include chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and son-in-law and foreign envoy Jared Kushner, as well as former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Cory Lewandowski, who served as her chief of staff.

In addition to the crypto profits and the much-criticized Qatari 747, Garcia said he planned to probe federal contracts awarded to members of Trump’s family and the series of pardons Trump has granted early in his second term.

Raskin, a veteran of the investigative onslaught that took place in the second half of Trump’s first term, said he planned to focus on allegations of self-enrichment by Trump and his family — as well as illicit foreign influence on American institutions and rising authoritarianism in government.

After playing a key role in probing Trump's first term, Rep. Jamie Raskin could have more power this time atop the Judiciary Committee.

Asked to comment on Democrats’ oversight plans, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales responded with a statement outlining Trump’s legislative achievements.

“The President will continue to draw a sharp contrast with his commonsense agenda and radical Democrats who want to massively raise taxes, defund the police, and are soft on crime,” she said. “The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning agenda or far-left liberal policies and partisan gridlock.”

Raskin and Garcia are forging ahead even as voters reject some Democrats who were at the forefront of the Trump accountability effort that unfolded eight years ago. And while the preparations Garcia, Raskin and others are making now in many ways resemble how their predecessors planned ahead of the 2018 midterms, there are differences.

Democrats in the leadup to the elections that year warily tiptoed around the prospect of impeachment in fear of alienating voters, and they laid out some investigative targets that did not implicate Trump personally.

Once in power, though, they launched a flurry of investigations aimed at Trump — including the president’s tax returns, his acceptance of foreign “emoluments” and later his effort to leverage aid to Ukraine for political favors. In virtually every case, the administration stonewalled Democratic investigators.

“Nobody on the Democratic side is afraid of impeachment,” Raskin said this week, adding that he considers it a “tool in the toolbox.”

The Qatari-gifted Air Force One is a top target for Democratic investigators.

The larger project for Democrats if they win power in November is to use subpoena power and public hearings to provide a backbone for the accountability message they intend to continue into the 2028 presidential election season.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized the wide-reaching scope of oversight inquiries during his campaign kickoff speech last month, in which he unveiled House Democratic midterm messaging that included a pledge to “hold the crooks accountable.”

“Anyone,” Jeffries said, “who is stealing from the American people, screwing over the American people, or shortchanging the American people is going to be held accountable beginning on Day 1.”

While the Oversight and Judiciary panels would be the leaders of the investigatory push in a Democratic House, other committees are set to target Trump as well in a bid to deliver the bold action Democratic primary votes have demanded.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said he expected the oversight subpanel would be a highly sought-after assignment should Democrats win gavels — with a potential “big” emphasis, he said, on probing Trump family corruption.

He added he was “very concerned” about how the Trump administration has managed the IRS and Social Security, particularly after the Department of Government Efficiency upended federal agencies last year.

“We certainly will exercise our oversight responsibility,” said Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, who is expected to return as Ways and Means chair in a Democratic majority.

Garcia and Raskin, meanwhile, have other pet priorities beyond the personal benefits Trump and his family have allegedly garnered in office.

Raskin said he intends to probe what he deems “fraudulent and vindictive prosecutions” including those of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Leticia James.

“The prosecution function has been utterly tainted and the Judiciary Committee obviously can’t let that go,” he said.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has come under Democratic scrutiny for his Trump ties.

He has also set his sights on Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110 billion buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal Democrats have blasted not only as an antitrust violation but also a threat to national security and free speech.

Previewing his intentions for the majority, Raskin requested a transcribed interview with Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison in a letter last week. While he cannot haul Ellison, a close Trump ally, before the committee now as a member of the minority party, Raskin said his inquiry into Paramount would be a “priority” if Democrats win subpoena power.

Garcia, meanwhile, said he is determined to fill in gaps he sees in the GOP-led investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He said he wants to bring key witnesses back to testify under oath, potentially in public hearings “because most of them were not called under oath and most of them were not called under subpoena.”

That could include big names in the world of finance, such as Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management, and Jes Staley, a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase — both of whom had substantial communications with Epstein and met with the committee privately.

“I think we’re going to have, in the majority, public Epstein hearings,” Garcia said.

The Epstein investigation is similar to the Trump corruption probe in that it would potentially span multiple committees, and Garcia and Raskin both praised each other and said they are planning to work in concert on both issues.

Raskin said he doesn’t envision any issues with coordination between two panels

“There’s enough Trump family corruption to go around,” he said. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We will just be dividing it up.”

Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

In Year 2 of Trump’s funding grab, Congress fights back

Published

3 days ago

August 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Republican lawmakers are still locked in a power struggle with the White House over control of federal cash, long since President Donald Trump swept back into office with unprecedented orders undermining Congress’ power of the purse.

Earlier this month, GOP senators overwhelmingly agreed to a bipartisan government funding bill that would temporarily block the Trump administration from finalizing a federal rule to let political appointees steer money toward grants “aligned with the president’s agenda.” The House could clear that bill next month, and Trump is expected to sign it to avert a shutdown before the midterms.

And while the days of widespread funding freezes might be over, the Trump administration continues to create new rules for federal grants and then deny funding based on them — only to be repeatedly shot down in court this summer.

Lawmakers in both parties have also blasted White House budget director Russ Vought this year for delaying the release of cash for congressionally backed programs for antipoverty services, foreign assistance, banking in underserved areas and more.

“Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chastised Vought this spring over the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump administration is supposed to send quarterly to states.

Now Republicans are watching for clues about whether Vought, between now and Sept. 30, will claim the authority to nix appropriations in the final weeks of the fiscal year through what’s known as a pocket recession. He used the move last year to unilaterally cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid through the legally dubious maneuver.

“Pocket rescissions would be a very interesting way to curry favor with the legislative branch — especially the one part of the legislative branch which has delivered on all of the administration’s shit,” Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, a senior Republican appropriator, said in a recent interview.

Indeed, the White House needs the support of GOP appropriators in both chambers to advance Trump administration priorities.

Those top lawmakers have already taken some modest steps to stop the White House from shirking Congress’ intent on spending by inserting stricter language into bipartisan funding bills Trump signed into law for the current fiscal year. That included new rules for shifting money between accounts and more explicit instructions for how dollars should be spent.

Some Republican lawmakers have also been resisting the administration’s push this summer to enact billions of dollars for the military and agriculture programs through another party-line budget reconciliation package. Top House Republican appropriators slammed the White House in June for pursuing a “risky and uncoordinated” strategy to enact funding for the Iran war through a party-line bill that’s not guaranteed to pass.

Relying on the reconciliation process to skirt the Senate filibuster is a key step to achieve the “paradigm shift” Vought has touted throughout Trump’s second term, designed to make funding negotiations “less bipartisan” so Republicans don’t have to agree to nondefense increases in order to get enough votes to boost military budgets.

“At what point did we stop legislating?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another senior appropriator, said last month after Vought privately pitched Senate Republicans on the latest party-line plan, which would inherently take funding power away from the appropriations committees.

Murkowski was also among the Senate Republicans who chided the White House for not seeking input from lawmakers before forging ahead with its plan to put political appointees in charge of approving federal grants and minimize the role of the objective peer-review process for selecting recipients of those dollars.

“There was no consultation at all,” she said. “When you start issuing grants based on political connections, that’s not good for the system here.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) publicly called on Vought to extend the public comment period for the plan last month, to no avail.

She also continues to pan the pocket rescission gambit, saying in a recent interview that the administration should “go through the proper process with the Appropriations Committee” if it wants to rescind money intended for a specific program.

Under a decades-old law, the White House is allowed to send Congress a request to revoke funding, then withhold the cash for 45 days while lawmakers consider whether to approve, reject or ignore the proposal. Republicans last summer voted to approve Trump’s request to rescind $9 billion for public media and foreign assistance.

Then Trump used that same law weeks later to send Congress a request to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid — this time with less than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year. Vought immediately declared the funding canceled, arguing that the administration had to withhold the funding until it expired at the end of September, regardless of congressional action.

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment on whether the White House plans to execute new pocket rescissions in the coming weeks. But Trump’s new pick for deputy director at the agency, Hal Duncan, told lawmakers this summer that the agency isn’t ruling out any “fiscal tools.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said White House officials have given him no assurances that they won’t deploy the tactic again this year and that his reaction would hinge on the type of funding eliminated.

“It would depend on what it is — it really would,” the Oklahoma Republican said last month.

In courtrooms throughout the country, federal judges continue to weigh in on whether Trump is illegally encroaching on Congress’ funding power.

Last month a federal judge declared that the administration can’t cancel grants based on new rules or goals established after the fact. The Trump administration later admitted in a different case that it canceled $7.6 billion “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Then a federal judge halted changes to teen-pregnancy prevention grants, concluding that it’s unlawful “to impose conditions … that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained.”

The Supreme Court has yet to conclusively rule on the president’s spending tactics, and many Democrats on Capitol Hill argue Republicans shouldn’t rely on the courts to defend Congress’ authority. GOP leaders have repeatedly bucked Democratic calls for action, including to reverse the cancellation of specific grants, nullify Trump’s pocket rescission last fall and head off a future end-run around Congress by barring rescissions requests in the last months of the fiscal year.

“When are our Republican colleagues going to assert our legislative authority?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a top appropriator, said in an interview. “I mean, why in the hell did they run for Congress?”

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a senior appropriator in line to be the No. 2 Democrat in the next Congress, was more charitable.

“I just think there’s a bipartisan desire to get back to the way the Constitution is supposed to operate,” he said in an interview, “where we decide how the money is spent.”