I realize that South Carolina Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is an attention-hungry partisan, trying to make a name for herself as a culture warrior by demonizing the first transgender woman to be elected to Congress.

And I understand that giving Mace’s proposal to ban transgender women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol any oxygen is probably just what she wants.

But I also don’t think it’s wise to allow her fear-mongering and demonizing to go unanswered.

Earlier this month, voters in the state of Delaware did something momentous: They elected Democrat Sarah McBride, a transgender woman, to the House of Representatives. At 34, McBride, a member of the Delaware state Senate since 2021 and a former spokesperson for the national Human Rights Campaign, will be one of the youngest members in Congress. Focusing on healthcare, reproductive rights and economic issues, she beat her Republican opponent by a hefty 16 percentage points.

Since then, Mace and her colleague Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have been waging a petty war against McBride, aided and abetted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who announced Wednesday that transgender people in the Capitol and House office buildings will be allowed to use only those bathrooms that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.

Also on Wednesday, Mace introduced a resolution that would ban trans women from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in federal buildings. Never mind that trans women have been using women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill and in the White House and Pentagon for years without issues, according to writer and trans activist Charlotte Clymer.

“I have PTSD from the sexual abuse I have suffered at the hands of a man,” Mace told Scripps News. “And I will tell you just the idea of a man in a locker room watching me change clothes after a workout is a huge trigger and it’s not OK to make and force women to be vulnerable in private spaces.”

Of course, we all want to be safe in private and public spaces.

“But the logic and coherence there is somewhat lacking,” said Andrew Flores, an associate professor of government at American University. “According to the data analysis, there is not a systematic relationship between allowing trans people to use bathrooms according to their current gender and experiences of predation. The correlation is just not there.”

In 2018, Flores, who is also a distinguished visiting scholar at UCLA Law’s Williams Institute, and his colleagues studied crime rates before and after cities in Massachusetts outlawed gender discrimination in public accommodations, i.e. bathrooms and locker rooms. They compared the rates in those cities with Massachusetts cities that had passed no such protections.

“We found nothing,” he told me — no change in victimization rates for a crime that is already vanishingly rare. “At the end of the day, we were surprised by how many agencies had such trouble producing data for us because they couldn’t find it.”

A 2017 survey by CNN found similar results when it reached out to 20 law enforcement agencies in states with anti-discrimination policies covering gender identity. “None who answered reported any bathroom assaults after the policies took effect,” the network reported.

To assume that a trans woman is a sexual predator is not just outrageous and wrong, it’s the same sort of thinking that conflates homosexuality with pedophilia. Most child sex offenders identify as heterosexual or bisexual men.

Anyway, I don’t know what’s more perverse — the fixation some Republican women have on being watched in bathrooms and locker rooms, or the way they readily stand by their male colleagues in the GOP, even if they are found liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room and boast about grabbing women’s genitals, allegedly have sex with underage teenagers or pay settlements to women who have accused them of rape.

On Tuesday, Politico reported that in a private House GOP conference meeting, Greene “indicated that she’d fight a transgender woman if she tried to use a woman’s bathroom on the House side of the Capitol.”

This possibility certainly tracks with reality. As many people can guess, and research shows, transgender people are far more likely than cisgender people to be assaulted in public spaces as a result of their gender identity.

Still, those facts did not stop Greene from telling reporters last week that “America is fed up with the trans ideology being shoved into our face. Women have been the victims of this garbage for long enough.”

I would suggest that Greene and Mace are shoving “transgender ideology” into their own faces.

As McBride herself put it in a social media post, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. … Each of us were sent here because voters saw something in us that they value.”

And of course, Mace’s mean-spirited proposal has apparently caused a backlash. “Men that want to use women’s restrooms are threatening to kill me over this issue,” she told the cable network NewsNation.

Now she can pose as a martyr. The skeptic in me thinks she was hoping for that all along.

Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian

FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is urging the Biden administration to halt a $1.25 billion “Digital Equity” program, calling it unconstitutional for using race-based criteria to expand broadband access.

“I urge you to withdraw the unlawful [Notice of Funding Opportunity] NOFO and halt issuing Program grants before you cause real harm,” Cruz wrote to Alan Davidson, the assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Thursday morning. “NTIA’s use of racial classifications, as set forth in the NOFO, does not serve a compelling governmental interest.”

The letter comes as Republicans push back against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as they gear up for the incoming Trump administration. Under the soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, such programs like the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program could be examined as government waste.

“Any source of government waste is in scope for DOGE,” a Ramaswamy spokesperson told Fox News Digital. 

DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKER RANTS ABOUT ‘THE WHITE MAN’ DURING A HEARING ON THE DISMANTLE DEI ACT

The letter criticizes NTIA’s guidance for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program, as Cruz claims it violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, lacking evidence of racial discrimination in internet access and failing to provide clear metrics for its race-based criteria.

The program was a key initiative under the Digital Equity Act, which was authorized by President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. It is the third of three digital equity programs established by the act.

Cruz asserts that the program requires grant applicants to prioritize “Covered Populations,” a category that explicitly includes racial and ethnic minorities in the program. He argued the approach includes impermissible racial discrimination, arguing that the federal government cannot use racial classifications without demonstrating a compelling interest and “narrowly tailored” measures. 

RAMASWAMY OUTLINES DOGE’S VISION

President-elect Donald Trump announced Elon Musk, left, and Vivek Ramaswamy, right, would be leading the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024. (Getty Images)

“The NOFO provides no evidence racial minorities face discrimination in accessing the internet, let alone specific instances of discrimination that NTIA is seeking to address,” Cruz wrote. “And it does not attempt to make any claim that this discrimination is necessary to avoid a prison race riot.”

Cruz added that “the NOFO does not define ‘minority,’ making it impossible to determine whether it is underinclusive, but in any event, it is overinclusive because it includes anyone who falls into some racial group, without any determination that that specific group has faced discrimination in access to broadband.”

ELON MUSK, VIVEK RAMASWAMY TO LEAD TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

Congress is racing to be ready to execute the recommendations of President-elect Donald Trump’s new DOGE commission. (Getty Images)

Cruz, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee, urged the NTIA to respond by Dec. 12, either by confirming the withdrawal of the guidance or by providing a detailed explanation of how it complies with constitutional requirements.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the NTIA for comment. 

The speaker of the House, the man second in line to the presidency — Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana — had to photobomb the much-shared shot taken aboard the so-called Trump Force One airplane last weekend. There was no room for him at the four-top table where the real power bros — Donald Trump, of course, son Don Jr., world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk, and supposed health nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — were grabbing for greasy McDonald’s burgers and fries during their night out to see the UFC fights at Madison Square Garden.

But at least Johnson was in the picture. JD Vance was not.

The man soon to be first in the line of succession was cut out of the clique — as he seemingly has been since the election of the Trump-Vance ticket two weeks ago.

That’s raised a question around Washington that would be louder but for the cacophony about whether Trump’s Cabinet picks — alleged fellow sexual bad boys Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth; fellow admirer of murderous tyrants Tulsi Gabbard, and Kennedy, the conspiracy-minded anti-vaxxer who’s usually not a fan of fast food — will win Senate confirmation to head the Justice, Defense, intelligence and health departments, respectively.

Where’s the vice president-elect?

“Y’all seen JD Vance?” former Republican Party Chair Michael Steele wondered on MSNBC over the weekend.

The future veep was finally spotted on Wednesday, not beside Trump but back on Capitol Hill, ducking in and out of offices. Vance, a senator from Ohio for less than two years, was squiring Gaetz around to his Republican colleagues’ offices in hopes of persuading them to support confirmation of the manifestly unqualified Cabinet pick. As if Vance, rather than a vengeful Trump, has that kind of pull with the senators.

Meanwhile, Musk has been so ubiquitous at the president-elect’s side that Trump advisors are reportedly getting sick of him. The satirists at the Onion headlined an item, “Trump Locks Bathroom Door So Elon Musk Can’t Follow Him In.”

For the megabillionaire (and mega Trump donor), whose fortune owes much to his federal auto and aerospace contracts over the years, the joined-at-the-hip comradery with Trump — at Mar-a-Lago, day-tripping in Washington, courtside in Madison Square Garden and then in Texas for a SpaceX rocket launch on Tuesday — is already good for business.

“He’d be worthless” but for government subsidies, Trump sniped in 2022, before the two formed their mutually beneficial bond only months ago. Since the election, Musk’s net worth has increased nearly 25% based on future growth assumptions, Bloomberg estimated. And the federal largesse he enjoys isn’t likely to be threatened by the spending cuts that Trump has promised: Welfare of the corporate kind is rarely on Republicans’ chopping block, but certainly not now, given that Trump has put Musk in charge of a Department of Government Efficiency to identify targets to slash.

In past administrations, that’s the kind of role that presidents would delegate to their vice presidents, much as Bill Clinton assigned Al Gore to “reinvent government” and George W. Bush allowed Dick Cheney to essentially call the shots in his “war on terror.”

More than two weeks into Trump’s transition back to power, we know what he wants Musk to do, as well as Gaetz, Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard and more. Vance, not so much.

Aside from shepherding Trump’s nominees, Vance has been missing in action not just in Mar-a-Lago but in the Senate, too. That provoked intraparty grousing this week, even from Trump, when Vance’s absence in the closely divided body helped Senate Democrats, who still run the joint until January, to push through the confirmations of some of President Biden’s final nominees to federal judgeships. Vance posted on X that one of his right-wing critics was a “mouth breathing imbecile” and then deleted the post.

“No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day,” the boss warned Republican senators. (That’s rich coming from the man who, after his 2020 defeat, had Senate Republicans ram through a number of judges — including U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, Trump’s judicial helpmeet who delayed and then stunningly dismissed the case against him for making off with classified documents in 2021.) As in his first term, Trump will get to fill whatever vacancies Biden leaves behind.

Vance’s deleted post did provide one clue to his activities lately: He’s been interviewing candidates to be the director of the FBI. That suggests both that Trump will indeed fire Christopher Wray, his first-term pick who subsequently enraged him by, among other things, approving the successful search of Mar-a-Lago for classified material in 2022, and that Vance may be carving a niche for himself as Trump’s retribution deputy.

When Trump tapped 40-year-old Vance for veep, the Ohioan was described by many Republicans as the future of a MAGA-fied party and country. Yet he embodies a future at odds with the nation’s challenges and trends.

Vance will play his T.B.D. part in an administration that seems hellbent on exacerbating climate change with a full-on embrace of fossil fuels. That would hasten the nation’s fiscal insolvency by further cutting taxes for the rich. That would threaten that economy (and the United States’ moral standing) by mass-deporting migrants when an aging population needs their labor. And that would purportedly make America great again by returning to a system in which white men continue to dominate, despite the country’s ever-growing diversity and women’s advancement.

Whatever Vance’s role, at least by his virtual invisibility he’s not running the risk that Musk is: Stealing the spotlight from the narcissist in chief. That never ends well.

@jackiekcalmes