WE ARE SO MAD! The transgender ban tweeted out by That Orange POS yesterday is cruel, and shameful, and ALL THE BAD THINGS! It's also a gross political misstep that's blowing up in The Shit Gibbon's face. So...silver lining there!

Let's take a trip in the Fabulous Wayback Machine to see how Our Predisent™ drove the bus into a ditch. AGAIN. Buckle up, Nerds!

GOP Moderates Vote Against Kicking Transgender Service Members in the Privates

On July 13, GOP moderates decided to try a new thing. They would buck their party and acknowledge that it is 2017, transgender people exist, and kicking them for political advantage is just being an asshole. A bill to ban military spending on transition-related medical care was voted down 209-214 when 24 Republicans joined the Democrats to kill it. The Bigot Caucus had a hissy fit over the heathen defectors to Team Trans. If they couldn't jam their throbbing hatred down people's throats, they'd find a way to go in the back door!

Congressional Perversion

Luckily, Republicans already had another backdoor sexxxymoney scam going on for Donald Trump's Fuck You Mexico Wall. Because the wall is popular with the rubes, but not so much with people who can microwave a burrito without supervision. The GOP needed to find a way to fund it, without debating it in open session where people might call them out for being racists who waste money. Plus, you know...

So they attached $1.6 billion ameros of wall money to a defense spending bill in the House Rules Committee, and dared the Democrats to vote against the troops.

The Bigot Caucus noticed things were getting hawttt in the House Rules Committee, and they decided to join in for a budget-fucking three-way! But just as they were unzipping to stick their stupid Trans-Hate in between the troops and the wall, Paul Ryan busted in and told them to put it back in their pants. He's already having a nervous breakdown trying to destroy healthcare, and he doesn't have time for that pervy shit right now!

Vicky Plays the Nasty Girl

Queen of the Bigot Caucus Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) likes a man who plays hard to get. So she threatened to torpedo the defense spending bill if it didn't include her Trans-Hate. The Hill reported,

Hartzler claimed the cost of surgeries alone could reach $1.3 billion over the next 10 years.

“This is about addressing [North] Korea, Russia, ISIS,” Hartzler said, holding up pictures of each. “We need every defense dollar to go to meeting those threats, not anything else, and we need to make sure our troops are ready and can be deployed.”

Rumors that Hartzler's data came from some dude she met while trawling a truckstop restroom could not be independently verified. But the RAND corporation projects an actual total of between $2.4 and $8.4 million dollars, or about 0.1% of military healthcare spending.

Hartzler tried batting her eyes at Defense Secretary Mattis, but he gave her the brush-off, too. He'd already kicked that can down the road, promising to deal with the transgender issue once Afghanistan is fixed. So, like NEVER.

Poor Vicky! All dressed up in her Sunday hate, and no one to persecute!

The Man On Top

But then Vicky had A IDEA. She called up Donald Trump directly and told him that his Mexico Wall money was getting nixed because of those icky transgenders and their hormone injections. Or something? Honestly, we have no idea what she told him, or what that demented old loon heard. Anyway, President A.D.D. went berserk and started tweeting that transgenders were OUT of the military! Problem solved.

EXCEPT, no one was looking for this fight right now. And he hadn't actually deliberated with his generals. And the Pentagon's own study showed that allowing transgender members of the military to serve openly would have negligible cost and no impact on morale.

No matter! The White House flacks were sure they'd picked a terrific wedge issue to beat Democrats with in the upcoming election.

They haven't been this excited since Trump signed that first Travel Ban Order back in January! Man, that worked out awesome!

Nicetimes??? Whaaaaaaa???

Every once in a while, the universe surprises you.

Sure they want to discriminate. But not, like, in a super obvious way!

Oh, but we are to kid! The dozen or so Republicans that came out and said NO, JUST NO give us hope that hateful bigots won't be able to wreck the country entirely. Thanks for that!

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is ON MESSAGE!

Dear God we hate this woman! After she pulled that stunt with the fake letter from a kid who luvvvs the Dear Leader, she stood there with a straight face and insisted that it is normal for the President to fart out military policy on Twitter and then tell his generals to figure out how to make it happen. You can watch the video. Or not if she gives you a ragestroke.

Then she got all pissy because the reporters only wanted to talk about President Trump beating up on transgender people. Why weren't they asking about John Barron, err....Pickle! Unfair!

So, now what happens?

Who the hell knows! But a presidential tweet doesn't change policy overnight.

The only thing we know for sure is there will be lawsuits. And if we had to guess, we'd say they will go something like the Travel Ban and Sanctuary City suits, where Donald Trump's own words were used against him.

Here's a longish quote from Columbia Law Professor Jamal Greene writing for the Take Care Blog.

The military employs cooks, medics, attorneys, engineers, postal workers, journalists, photographers, chaplains, chemists, and workers in countless other fields. It employs approximately 1.3 million active duty personnel. The idea that a transgender person serving “in any capacity” endangers the readiness or effectiveness of the armed forces is not credible.

Indeed, such a blanket prohibition, tweeted out in advance of the Pentagon completing a policy review, is so lacking in credibility that its only motivation seems to be animus towards transgender people. As the Supreme Court held more than two decades ago in Romer v. Evans, enacting government policy motivated by bare disgust towards a population of Americans is unconstitutional as a matter of first principles.

“Animus” is not always a clear guidepost to determining unconstitutionality, but it is here. We know it because we are seeing it.

If animus is the motivation behind the policy, it should be struck down on its face even if a differently motivated law might have some constitutionally valid applications. Just as the President cannot institute a travel ban motivated by religious animus even if he could have reached a similar conclusion upon careful review, so too he cannot institute a transgender ban motivated by transgender animus even if he could have done so for legitimate reasons.

I doubt he could find such reasons, but his tweet shows that he didn’t even try.

It's ugly, and it's going to get uglier. And to our transgender friends, we can only say that we're sorry, we love you, and we're fighting with you. RESIST!

[The Hill / WaPo / NYTimes / Politico / Politico, again / Bloomberg / Take Care Blog]

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