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And Then There Were Four: Utah Rep. Chris Stewart to Resign, Leaving the GOP Majority Even Slimmer

May 31, 2023 by Susie Moore Leave a Comment

Utah Republican Representative Chris Stewart is expected to announce plans to resign from Congress sometime on Wednesday. The cited reason is his wife’s health, though limited information is available on that. Stewart, a former Air Force pilot, has represented Utah’s Second District in Congress since 2013 and sits on the House Appropriations Committee and Intelligence Committee.

With the GOP holding a slim majority of five seats presently, this news also begs the question as to how Stewart’s departure may affect the power dynamics in the House.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will have even less room for error when whipping votes. Assuming united Democratic opposition, McCarthy can only afford to lose three Republican votes on any given legislation. Intra-party fighting between hard-line conservatives and moderates already threatened to tank a Republican border security bill this year, and current GOP disagreements on the debt ceiling deal demonstrate plenty of Republican lawmakers are willing to buck the party line.

Under Utah law, the governor will have to call a special election to replace Stewart.

Picking a replacement for the remainder of Stewart’s term will require a special election. Once Stewart officially announces he’s resigning, Gov. Spencer Cox has seven days to set the primary and special election schedule. Under state law, those dates will be the same as this year’s municipal primary and general elections, unless the Legislature appropriates money to hold an election on a different date.

Utah’s next municipal primary election is set for August 15, 2023 — which may explain, at least partially, the timing of Stewart’s announcement. Stewart’s district is fairly red, so presumably, his replacement will also be a Republican.

A Republican candidate is heavily favored to fill the vacancy. Stewart represents Utah’s 2nd Congressional District, a reliably GOP constituency in western Utah that stretches from the Salt Lake City metro area to St. George. In the 2022 midterm election, Stewart easily defeated Democratic challenger Nick Mitchell, winning re-election with a landslide 63.4% vote share.

The remaining question will simply be the timing and to what extent that may constrain McCarthy on critical votes.

One added wrinkle, though, is what impact this may have on Utah’s 2024 Senate race. Stewart was thought to be eyeing Mitt Romney’s seat. Given the stated reasons for his resignation, that obviously may be on hold as well.

During his tenure in the House, Stewart has been a fairly reliable conservative, with a few memorable moments:

Republicans Form “Anti-Socialism Caucus” and Leftists Lose It

With the rise of socialism in America thanks to the cheerleading of popular political figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Republicans have found it fit to create an anti-socialism caucus much to the dismay of those on the left.
According to Daily Wire, Republican Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah put in a request to form the caucus and look to “defeat socialism once again.”
“Socialism is a folly,” Stewart said on his official government site. “Not only is it doomed to fail wherever it rears its head, it leaves a wake of destruction in lives and freedoms lost. So much time has passed from the fall of the Iron Curtain that many have internalized — or never experienced— [s]ocialism’s ultimate price. If we fail to recall those dangerous times, the primitive appeal of socialism will advance and infect our institutions.”

Then, too, there was this fascinating exchange with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman:

Stewart shared the following message on Twitter just as this article was set to publish:

It’s been one of the great honors of my life to represent Utah in the People’s House.
God bless you all, and God bless America. pic.twitter.com/rEeg6G2ry3
— Rep. Chris Stewart (@RepChrisStewart) May 31, 2023

It’s been one of the great honors of my life to represent Utah in the People’s House. God bless you all, and God bless America.

Now We Know What NIH Was Funding at Boston Children’s Hospital

May 15, 2023 by Sarah Lee Leave a Comment

If you’re one of the many, many, many people who have looked around in the last several years and felt a little baffled by just how exactly the transgender craze took off so quickly and embedded itself so deeply into western culture, take heart: those answers are starting to come. Which is a good thing with regard to knowing how to protect your children from being convinced by agenda-driven adults they weren’t actually born in the wrong body.

Unfortunately, those answers are coming with some pretty terrible news.

First, the answers:

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting the Human Rights Campaign — last suspected of being the wind beneath the wings of Bud Light’s rather disastrous decision to make Dylan Mulvaney the voice of women for Bud Light — is behind the lightning-fast pervasiveness of trans imagery and ideology in the health care space.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index became a flashpoint last month when commentators posited that the scorecard was behind Bud Light’s decision to air an advertisement featuring the transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. Well, it has a sibling.
Meet the Healthcare Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard for hospitals that purports to measure the “equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ+ patients.” The index, which uses a 100 point scale, is funded by Pfizer and PhRMA, the trade association that lobbies on behalf of large pharmaceutical companies. And, Rempe noticed, it awards points for all of the policies Children’s National implemented.
To earn a perfect score, hospitals must display LGBT symbols, solicit and use patients’ preferred pronouns, and conduct trainings on LGBT issues approved by the Human Rights Campaign, according to the scoring criteria. They must also provide the same treatments for gender dysphoria that they provide for other medical conditions—meaning a hospital that uses puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty cannot withhold the drugs from children who say they’re transgender. And though the index does not mention medical conscience exemptions explicitly, it does penalize hospitals for allowing “discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy.”

The Human Rights Campaign has some interesting associations, detailed here at Influence Watch.

HRC’s charitable arm, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which is freer under tax law to receive contributions from charitable nonprofits and foundations like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Soros Fund Charitable Foundation, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, provides substantial transfers to the main HRC lobbying arm.

Is it becoming reasonable to ask yet, why, if these progressive ideas about equity and inclusion are so very good for society, society must be blackmailed to adopt them? And lest anyone think that “society” is the rube in this equation that must be convinced by the much smarter and sophisticated progressive elites to mend their hick ways, I give you the accompanying terrible news:

Fifteen Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health Tuesday, demanding answers about a study on experimental medical interventions for youth who claim to identify as transgender.
Two of the study participants committed suicide, 11 experienced suicidal ideation, and the drugs participants took will likely sterilize them, the Republicans noted.
“It is sickening that the federal government is preying on young people and using our taxpayer dollars to advance its radical gender ideology,” Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal in a statement on the letter, exclusively provided to The Daily Signal. “We are rightfully demanding answers from NIH and we are committed to holding those responsible accountable for this tragic loss of life.”
The National Institutes of Health granted $477,444 in a five-year grant to the Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of California at San Francisco, and the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago for the study, “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones.” Dr. Diane Chen at the Lurie Children’s Hospital led the study, which the New England Journal of Medicine published in January.

I wrote about this last August.

When Elon Musk recently requested the GOP should stay out of people’s bedrooms, he glossed over a very real phenomenon he apparently thinks only happens with the support of one side of the political aisle. But if he’s truly interested in getting the government out of people’s bedrooms, he’ll have to broaden his condemnation. Because Democrats and progressives are very much in people’s bedrooms. So much so, in fact, that an argument could be made that part of why the transgender debate seems to be everywhere now is because the left has funded it to ensure it’s relentlessly culturally pervasive.
Look no further than Boston Children’s Hospital, which has become the face of the transgender youth movement, and not in a good way. It’s no mystery why people are horrified by what’s been going on in these hallowed, Harvard-adjacent halls. A look at some of their videos selling “gender affirming” surgery makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up, especially when considering the mutilation involved in using forearm flesh to create fake phalluses for young girls.

It looks like Congress and The Daily Signal did the legwork, and thank God for them both. While demanding answers is certainly a shift in the right direction, the damage already done to the children in this study, and to the countless others who will only determine much later their very bodies were used to score political wins, should keep the good people still looking around, wondering what happened, vigilant in their questioning.

If we’re to survive the appropriation of the gender dysphoric to be used as a political cudgel, we’re going to need a lot more letters, demand for answers, and acceptance of the horrors already done.