Contact your senators and Biden!
(Quote above) Go, Rep. Julia Brownley!
Last week, the far right/Christian Nationalist wing of the GOP House hijacked the usually bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by cramming in all the regressive social baggage they could never hope to pass on their own. Their wishlist includes denying access to abortion and gender affirming care for service members marooned in regressive states, destroying diversity initiatives, rejecting climate change directives and a really sneaky one that violates of First Amendment rights to not be subjected to religious indoctrination. All these amendments go against the advice of the military.
Email or call – Tell our Senators that under no circumstance do we support using the NDAA to push a far-right agenda.
The Senate is set to vote as soon as this week on its own version of the bill (S.2226) , which excludes these extremist attempts to rewrite military policy. But at least one bad amendment proposals is lurking there too.
Minimal script: I’m calling from [zip code] and I expect Sen. [___] to vote “NO” on any NDAA bill containing any anti-democratic, racist, misogynistic, and transphobic, and unscientific amendments similar to those in the House version (H.R. 2670), including S.822, which nullifies the Department of Defense policy assuring access to reproductive care, including paid leave and travel expenses. Our service members did not pledge their lives to protect this country on the battlefield, to end up playing stupid games with their lives and health depending on which regressive state they happen to be stationed in.
I also want [him/her] to vote to approve ALL of Sen. Kaine’s amendments. These include preventing any US president from withdrawing from NATO or turning the merit-based Civil Service, including security forces, into a corrupt “spoils” system without congressional approval. One amendment also repeals of the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs, formally end the Gulf and Iraq wars, and reasserting Congress’ Constitutional role in authorizing military force.
When the senator has a chance, ask [him/her] to publicly call out their GOP colleagues for ignoring the military’s warnings on climate change and the importance of diversity within their ranks.
Contacts
Write to Joe about checking the fine print of the NDAA when it gets to him, and to stop the use of cluster bombs!
Write to him here.
Dear Joe,
The NDAA bill that came out of the House (H.R. 2670) included amendments that were anti-democratic, racist, misogynistic, and transphobic, and destructive to our modern military. Some of those same amendments are being proposed in the Senate, such as S.822, which nullifies the Department of Defense policy assuring access to reproductive care, including paid leave and travel expenses.
However the NDAA sausage gets made when the two chambers meet to hash out a solution, we expect that you to make it clear that you will refuse to sign anything that abuses women serving our country to nationalize a forced-birth agenda, that removes gender-affirming care, that ignores the lessons our country has learned on the importance of diversity in our armed forces (https://tinyurl.com/diversity-is-strength), that ignores the military’s warnings regarding the risks of climate warming, and removes the right of service members to reach out to one specific organization that protects them religious indoctrination, a clear violation of First Amendment rights.
I also want to talk to about the cluster bombs that have arrived in Ukraine. If they were running out of ammunition, surely there were other options that didn’t include a well-document history of maiming and killing non-combatants, including children, long after hostilities have ceased. Whatever the Ukrainians promised, they cannot guaranteed that land polluted with this weaponry will not be occupied by civilians in the future.
It is long past time for the US to join the 123 countries that have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions banning the use, production, transfer or stockpiling of these weapons. In 2017, the Trump administration canceled a plan to end the US military’s use of most cluster munitions, saying they are a “vital military capability” (Washington Post, 11/30/17), but he is now enjoying calling you out for using them! Do not spend our tax dollars on potential war crimes!
Deeper Dive!
TLDR?
The ACLU listed the issues here.
The proposed amendments would:
- Restrict access to abortion and reproductive health care for active duty members of the military by denying travel support;
- Block service members or their family members who are transgender from accessing gender-affirming health care through TRICARE and the Exceptional Family Member Program;
- Abolish established programs developed by uniformed and civilian leadership to end racism and other discrimination in the military through proven diversity, equity, and inclusion programming;
- Prohibit the renaming of military facilities currently named for members of the Confederacy and other defenders of slavery and racism;
- Ban books available in schools serving the children of military families;
- Selectively penalize contractors who participate in boycotts against Israel;
- Misdirect service academies admissions, infringing on academic research and speech rights; and
- Facilitate the further militarization and weaponization of state and local police.
Abortion – Reproductive care:
Their amendments would blocked access to abortion and gender-affirming care for service members, trapping service members who swore an oath to protect the entire country, into the regressive laws of whatever hellhole of a state they were assigned to.
“In 2021, women made up more than 17% of our active-duty force — 231,000 members — and 21% of our National Guard and Reserves. More than 23,000 of them are stationed in Texas. Every day the women of the United States military fight for our freedom, and yet today House Republicans are asking these women to fight for your freedom while they just voted to take away theirs,” Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston said.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., a former Navy helicopter pilot, told reporters she backed the bill coming out of the House Armed Services committee, but voted no on Friday because of the added measures on abortion and other social issues.
“They’ve turned a bipartisan defense bill into a vehicle to drive a really out-of-touch culture war agenda – an agenda that attacks service members … who are women, LGBTQ and people of color,” she said….
…Another female veteran who opposed the bill, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa, said “This is absolutely a back door to banning abortions across the nation.”
Transgender personnel:
The military appears to have their act together on this. The GOP’s snit is their own problem.
“People are the strength of our Army. Our ability to assess and retain qualified personnel provides a more diverse and stronger Army, enhancing readiness.” – Maj. Gen. Douglas F. Stitt, military personnel management director.
“Every Soldier is different,” Stitt said. “When a military medical provider gives diagnosis of gender dysphoria, that Soldier will need to sit down with their chain of command and medical provider to determine what is medically necessary for an effective transition.”
Commanders should approach a Soldier’s gender transition in the same way they approach any Soldier receiving any other necessary medical treatment…. Leaders must also do their part to minimize the impact on mission readiness, all while balancing the Army’s needs with the desires of the transitioning individual.
Once a Soldier is stable in their self-identified gender, they can then request to change their gender marker in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, or DEERS. Once the change is complete, all policies and standards for that given gender will then apply, the policy reads.
Individuals will then be expected to meet all uniform, grooming, body composition, physical readiness, and drug-testing standards. Similarly, a Soldier’s identified gender in DEERS will permit them to access gender-specific facilities, such as bathrooms and showers.”
Diversity:
Were we the only one who thought of this clip when Rep. Eli “I-call-them-“colored-people“-at-home” Crane, R-AZ explained that the GOP was blocking diversity initiatives, because they kept our military from getting “the best of the best?”
He then went on to state that “Russia and China do not mandate diversity measures in their military operations and neither should the United States.” Oh, does he mean the Russian military that’s just grabbing men off the street to replace the dead, deserters and those surrendering to Ukrainians and drones? The Chinese military that’s still struggling with the “One Country, Two Systems” for Hong Kong and has no viable plan to peacefully dominate Taiwan? Maybe he should talk to actual military members, who say : “Failing to recruit and retain a diverse force would come at the military’s own peril—perhaps best exemplified by U.S. competitors China and Russia, which both perceive their demographic diversity as a security threat to be neutralized. While all three countries could be considered diverse, the U.S. approach provides an opportunity the armed forces should embrace to promote cohesion and prevail in the next war. ..Today, promoting diversity and inclusion is more than a morale-building activity; it is a warfighting imperative.”
But concentrating on diversity is not just for morale – it’s also tied to rooting out extremism in the military. The name of the job the GOP would like to defund is the Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military. Veterans were represented in disproportionally large numbers at the Jan. 6 insurrection, and most bets would place them as GOP supporters.
A 2022 Rand poll found that “almost 18% of the veterans surveyed who agree with one of four cited extremist ideologies also support violence as a means of political change. That finding is scary, too, because extremist groups can take advantage of such veterans’ support for political violence to recruit them for their often all-too-violent purposes.“
The military has historically not done a great job in rooting out White Supremacists and other extremists, but removing all eyes on the problem is a terrible trade of civilian safety for domestic terrorist votes.
Climate Change:
Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.
—President Barack Obama, 20 May 2015
At a time when our country is suffering from record-setting heatwaves, the same GOP intelligence that agreed that Trump’s inauguration crowd WAS bigger, were able to ignore years of the military’s warnings, including a new study by Rand, and voted to bar the Defense Department from carrying out President Biden’s executive orders on climate change. Even Trump’s Space Force officials agree that something must be done!
First Amendment:
And for supporters of the website designer whose SCOTUS victory pemitting her to refuse creating an imaginary wedding site for a fictitious couple on first amendment grounds, they are pretty keen on removing that right from DoD personnel, slipping in an amendment that would prohibiting military members from communicating with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which combats unwanted proselytizing in the armed forces.
“Members of the military have the right under the First Amendment to free speech, as curtailed appropriately by the Supreme Court; they also have the right to petition their government for grievances,” Weinstein told Military Times. “Both of those have been viciously violated today by the actions of the far-right Christian nationalists in Congress.” MRFF’s founder, Mikey Weinstein
This is interesting, as belonging to a white supremacist or neo-Nazi group (For those who’ve forgotten, Nazis were the ENEMY in WWII) won’t necessarily get a U.S. service member tossed out of the military, but complaining about overt religious imagery under this proposed NDAA would be prohibited.
INDIVISIBLE VENTURA 