House Republicans are doing everything they can to punish the LGBTQ+ community for existing, and that means millions of dollars in cuts to eliminate federal projects entirely.
House Republicans struck three Democratic projects that would provide services to the LGBTQ community during Tuesday’s fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD Appropriations markup, enraging Democrats on the committee.
The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26.
Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill.
That amendment remained pending as the committee recessed around 3:45 p.m. as it awaited advice from the parliamentarian, after Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., asked that a statement Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. made be struck from the record.
“There’s a saying, how do you show you’re a bigot without saying you’re a bigot," Pocan said during debate over the GOP amendment. "I’m just saying, there’s a saying."
Pocan also said Harris was too tired from reading the websites of the organizations he opposes to listen to what Pocan was saying, another comment Harris objected to.
Earlier in the meeting, Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious.
“This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”
The earmarks that are set to be stripped include two in Pennsylvania: $1.8 million that Rep. Brendan F. Boyle requested for an expansion project at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia and $970,000 that Rep. Chrissy Houlahan requested for a transitional housing program at the LGBT Center of Greater Reading.
“This cruel and unjust decision is not rooted in any legitimacy, but instead in bigotry and hatred,” Houlahan said on Twitter.
The third project is $850,000 that Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., requested for LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. to convert a former Boston Public School building into 74 units of affordable housing for seniors.
Harris criticized the Greater Reading center for offering services to children as young as 7, and argued the Philadelphia center promotes protests held by the Young Communist League of Philadelphia. And he said the Massachusetts project would discriminate against those who are not LGBTQ or allies.
Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. said taxpayers should not be paying for the resources for transgender individuals that the LGBT Center of Greater Reading offers.
“The question is, should taxpayers pay for this?” he said. “The answer is no.”
And there you are.
Republicans are now instituting a dollar cost for keeping the T in LGBTQ+ in an effort to punish and split the community. Pretty soon it's going to be a legal and criminal cost as well if Republicans have their way in states they control, but these cuts are specifically happening in blue states too.
And yes, this is all part of hundreds of billions in cuts that House Republicans want to defund from President Biden's infrastructure and green energy bills.
A series of GOP bills to finance the federal government in 2024 would wipe out billions of dollars meant to repair the nation’s aging infrastructure, potentially undercutting a 2021 law that was one of Washington’s rare recent bipartisan achievements. The proposed cuts could hamstring some of the most urgently needed public-works projects across the country, from improving rail safety to reducing lead contamination at schools.
Some of the cuts would be particularly steep: Amtrak, for example, could lose nearly two-thirds of its annual federal funding next fiscal year if House Republicans prevail. That includes more than $1 billion in cuts targeting the highly trafficked and rapidly aging Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston and Washington, prompting Amtrak’s chief to sound early alarms about service disruptions.
In recent days, Republicans have defended their approach as a fiscally responsible way to reduce the burgeoning federal debt. They’ve largely tried to extract the savings by slimming down federal agencies’ operating budgets next year, technically leaving intact the extra funding that lawmakers adopted in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
But the effect would be the same: The GOP bills would reduce the federal money available for repairs. The cuts would come at a time when the country is grappling with the real-life consequences of its own infrastructure failures, from train derailments in Ohio and Pennsylvania to the collapse of a key portion of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia last month.
I guarantee you that these same House Republicans will blame Democrats when these cuts are forced into must-pass legislation later this year.
The cruelty is the point.
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