Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.
This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made possible Tuesday’s vote to compel the administration to come clean about the web of degeneracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. In the end, all but one Republican joined every Democrat to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This victory speaks to the value of having women’s voices, and strength, inside the Republican echo chamber, a place that can still be tough for women to navigate.
Aside from Representative Thomas Massie, the Republicans’ chief crusader for Epstein transparency, Representatives Boebert, Greene and Mace did more than the rest of their conference combined to keep the heat on Mr. Trump by signing the discharge petition to force a vote on Mr. Massie’s bill, sponsored with Ro Khanna, a Democrat. No other Republicans dared cross the president, who, in characteristic mob-boss fashion, made clear that support for the measure would be considered “hostile act.”
True to his word, Mr. Trump worked to bully the rebels into submission. For months, he tried a variety of carrots and sticks on Ms. Boebert. His top aides even called her into the Situation Room for … a friendly chat. He has repeatedly torn into Ms. Greene, calling her a “traitor” and expressing eagerness to support a primary challenger against her in next year’s midterms. His toxic tirades have resulted in Ms. Greene receiving death threats from his followers, she has said. And, yes, she recognizes the irony, Ms. Greene told CNN.
Subtle this president is not. But his strong-arm tactics only caused Ms. Boebert to dig in, those close to her told The Times. Ms. Greene has responded with open aggression, leaning into her public feud with the president.
“As a woman I take threats from men seriously. I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women, who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal, must feel,” she said in a long social media post on Saturday. At a news conference before the vote on Tuesday featuring several of Mr. Epstein’s victims, Ms. Greene directly clapped back at the president for calling her a traitor: “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America, and Americans like the women standing behind me.” Ouch.
In some ways, the three Republican women were perfectly positioned to force the Epstein issue. Ms. Mace loves the media spotlight, has a history of going against her party’s leadership (just ask Kevin McCarthy, whom she helped oust as speaker) and, more to the point, has long championed the victims of sexual abuse, a horror she has talked about enduring herself. Ms. Boebert and Ms. Greene are some of the House’s rowdiest, most anti-establishment zealots, and while their ultra-MAGA credentials have led them stick with Mr. Trump in the past, those credentials now make it harder for Mr. Trump to dismiss them as faithless RINO squishes — though Lord knows he’s trying.
A tiny group of women taking a stand on a sex scandal may seem an awkward fit for a Republican Party awash in machismo. Girl power or women’s solidarity or “believing women” has never played all that well within the party. For all their talk about God-given gender differences, Republicans can be squirrelly when it comes to gendered political perspectives. For years, I listened to numerous party players pooh-pooh the very notion of “women’s issues.” More recently, the emerging view seems to be that the feminization of politics and culture is destroying America.
And yet. Women make up only 14 percent of the House Republican conference (almost 15 percent if you count nonvoting delegates), but they accounted for 75 percent of the Republicans who forced Tuesday’s Epstein vote. That math intrigues me.
Sadly, most of the Republican women in the House lacked the stomach for this fight. They sat on the sidelines for weeks, letting their more audacious colleagues absorb the president’s wrath. Then, after Mr. Trump folded and gave the go-ahead to support the bill, all but one member of the conference rushed to get on the right side of the vote. (Two members did not cast votes.)
This spineless opportunism disappointed me more in some lawmakers than in others. Representative Elise Stefanik, a member of leadership, spent her pre-MAGA years in Congress striving to make her party more friendly to women. Given that she recently announced a run for governor of New York, you’d think she’d be looking for ways to reassure home-state voters that she is indeed more than just a Trump toady. Throwing her weight behind the Epstein files petition could have been a prime opportunity. Heavy sigh.
It will be interesting to see where this fight goes from here. Following the House’s near-unanimous passage, the Senate was reportedly looking to quickly follow suit.
This speaks well of Republican senators’ sense of self-preservation. The G.O.P.’s pathetic showing in the recent elections suggests voters are growing weary of Trumpian chaos, corruption and moral degeneracy. Republican lawmakers would be smart to start distancing themselves from their president’s worst impulses and excesses, to begin scraping off the layers of moral grime accumulated through their years of bootlicking.
Mr. Trump will take such attempts badly. But if Republican lawmakers need any advice on how to man up and grow a spine, I can think of a few of their female colleagues in the House they can ask.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
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