The Whole World Is Watching!

… To Republican lawmakers they are ready to censure a Democratic legislator for what she said.

Montana GOP caucus calls for censure of legislature’s only openly transgender member

The Hill

By Brooke Migdon

April 19, 2023

A group of Republicans in the Montana legislature have called for the immediate censure of Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr — the state’s first and only openly transgender legislator — after she told lawmakers on Tuesday that there will be “blood on your hands” if a bill to ban minors from accessing gender-affirming health care is approved by the state House.

“If you are forcing a trans child to go through puberty when they are trans, that is tantamount to torture. This body should be ashamed,” Zephyr said Tuesday during a floor debate over amendments to Montana’s Senate Bill 99, a wide-reaching bill that would prevent medical professionals from administering gender-affirming health care to transgender youths under 18.

“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” Zephyr said. 

Responding to Zephyr during Tuesday’s floor debate, Montana House Majority Leader Sue Vinton (R) said the legislature will “not be shamed by anyone in this chamber. We are better than that.”

Pardon me while I stop laughing over the Majority Leader’s comment “not be shamed by anyone in this chamber. We are better than that.” If the shoe fits!

The Montana Freedom Caucus, a coalition of state House and Senate Republicans, called for the immediate censure of Zephyr, in a statement posted to the group’s social media late Tuesday. The group said she attempted to shame members of the legislature by using “inappropriate and uncalled-for language” during Tuesday’s floor debate.

“This kind of hateful rhetoric from an elected official is exactly why tragedies such as the Covenant Christian School shooting in Nashville occurred,” the group wrote in its statement, referring to a mass shooting in Tennessee last month that left six people dead, including three 9-year-old students.

Stop gaslighting!

After years of anti-trans legislation you are trying to lay the blame on us! After calling for our extermination and criminalizing us you think saying that “you have blood on your hand”s inflammatory?

The Montana Freedom Caucus in its statement also repeatedly misgendered Zephyr by referring to her using male pronouns.

Of course for the Republicans they don’t see that as being disrespectful of another legislator?

AP reported that,

A group of conservative Republican lawmakers in Montana deliberately misgendered a transgender colleague in demanding that she be censured for language she used on the floor while speaking against a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for children.

The Montana Freedom Caucus posted its demand on Twitter Tuesday evening — on letterhead bearing the names of 21 lawmakers — arguing that Democratic Rep. Zooey Zephyr should be punished “for trying to shame the Montana legislative body and by using inappropriate and uncalled-for language during a floor debate.”

The caucus called for a “commitment to civil discourse,” while misgendering Zephyr in the same sentence. The caucus also misgendered Zephyr in the Tweet.

The Republicans are so blind that they don’t even see that what they are accusing her of doing they are doing the same thing but in Aces.

“The language used by the so-called Freedom Caucus, including the intentional and repeated misgendering of Rep. Zephyr, is blatantly disrespectful and the farthest thing imaginable from the ‘commitment to civil discourse’ that these letter writers demand,” House Minority Leader Kim Abbott said in a statement. “I find it incredibly ironic that these legislators are making demands of others that they refuse to abide by themselves.”

The whole world is watching how the Republicans are manipulative, throwing out party members who don’t toe the party line, planting their own party members in-place of the voters choice, changing elections rules in their favor, and attacking LGBTQ+ community. People are starting to recognize their tyranny.

Their attacks on our rights is a toll on us and the Republicans don't even care what they are doing to us...

Zephyr said Tuesday that lawmakers and the governor had received a letter from an emergency room physician who said a transgender teenager cited the legislature’s actions as the reason for their suicide attempt. “My state doesn’t want me,” the doctor reported the patient as having said.

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And file this under if you can’t win… cheat!

Also from Montana

Montana Republicans aim to change election rules — for one key Senate race

The Hill

By Al Weaver

April 9, 2023

Republicans in Montana are trying to change the rules for next year’s Senate primary to make it easier to defeat Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and win back the Senate majority.

A bill moving through the statehouse in Helena would change the structure of the election from the party primary system currently in place to a jungle primary in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of party. The move would essentially box out Libertarian candidates.

The thinking among Republicans is that this would, theoretically, push those would-be third-party voters toward the GOP candidate and give the party a leg up against Tester, the three-term Senate Democrat who they are pining to take down this year. 

Perhaps most galling to Democrats is the provision that the law would sunset in 2025 and not be applicable to congressional races — meaning that it would only affect Tester’s race. The bill passed the state Senate on Tuesday and is expected to pass the state House, which is controlled by a GOP supermajority, in the coming weeks.

This is right out of the Republican’s playbook of dirty politics.

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A follow-up on the two Tennessee legislators who were kicked out of the legislature and were reinstated.

Karma? Tennessee Republican Who Voted To Expel Tennessee 3 Resigns In Disgrace

Tennessee GOP lawmaker Scotty Campbell who voted to expel Black lawmakers resigns over ethics violations.

The Root

By Jessica Washington

April 21, 2023

Two weeks ago, Republican State Representative Scotty Campbell joined the crusade to get rid of the “Tennessee Three” for joining a gun control protest on the House floor. But as is so often the case in politics, it turns out his hands were far from clean.

On Thursday, Rep. Campbell resigned after it was revealed that he had violated the legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy. The report itself doesn’t go into details. But Local news station WTVF reported that Campbell was found guilty of “sexually harassing at least one legislative intern, likely two, by an ethics subcommittee acting in secret.”

What’s even more bizarre about this case is that the ethics committee found that Campbell violated the ethics policy on March 29th. Campbell voted to expel the two Black lawmakers, Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, and Rep. Gloria Johnson (who ultimately kept her seat), on April 6th. That means he knew that he had violated the state legislature discrimination and harassment policy when he cast a vote to expel the three members for violating House decorum. It also means, that it’s likely House Speaker Cameron Sexton (who the letter was addressed to), saw the findings before he led the charge to oust Jones and Pearson. Sexton has not clarified when he first saw the letter.

Just another typical Republican "good old boys."