A once-bipartisan effort broke down Thursday as the House rejected a bill to pave the way for construction of a Smithsonian museum honoring women.
Previously championed by both sides of the aisle, the legislation saw last-minute changes at a House Administration Committee markup in March that led Democrats to withdraw their backing. The new version would prohibit exhibits from including transgender women or girls, as well as give the final say on location to President Donald Trump.
“They have shown that they are willing to destroy a bipartisan bill in order to respond to the White House,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, D-N.M., who chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus.
The bill would allow the museum to be built within the reserve of the National Mall, an area where construction is tightly restricted. Although the bill names the South Monument site across from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, it would also give the president the ability to “designate an alternative site” at his discretion. Democrats have decried the changes as a “poison pill” that derailed years of work.
The floor vote this week was supposed to be a chance for Republicans to position themselves as defenders of women’s rights and to paint their opponents as unsympathetic to the cause.
“They claim, the other side, to be the party of women … [but] it will be the Republican majority in Congress that gets this done,” the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, N.Y., said earlier Thursday on the floor.
But Republicans couldn’t stay united to pass the bill on their own, with several of their members breaking away to vote with Democrats to defeat it. GOP leaders circulated around the chamber, trying to convince the holdouts.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who voted against the bill despite being a co-sponsor of it, said there wasn’t a need for a stand-alone museum about women.
“Show me where in the Smithsonian women are being discriminated against. To me, we ought to be about unifying instead of separating,” he said.
Burchett also said he was concerned that Democrats would find a way to feature transgender people in the museum.
“When the Democrats get back in power, they’re just going to flip it, and that’s what the museum will be about,” he said.
Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., who leads the Republican Women’s Caucus, said the arguments she heard from members of her own party opposed to the bill “fell flat.”
“I did have some conversations with them and at the end of the day, all of their reasons in my mind were bullshit. People said that they didn’t think that women deserved a location on the Mall, they brought up other issues,” she said.
After roughly an hour, leaders gave up and closed the vote at 204-216, with six Republican men opposed: Reps. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., Michael Cloud, R-Texas, Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, Andy Harris, R-Md., Keith Self, R-Texas, and Burchett.
“I look forward to the conversations that they have with their wives, their daughters, their mothers, their aunties, their sisters and their constituents, half of which are women,” Cammack said, about her colleagues who voted against the bill.
Now the path forward is unclear. The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum was originally authorized by Congress and signed into law by Trump in 2020, alongside plans for a Museum of the American Latino. Both museums have been stuck in limbo as they wait for Congress to give the go-ahead on where they will be built. Lawmakers had once hoped to see the two construction bills packaged together, but they became separate as anti-immigration and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion rhetoric increased over the last few years.
And Democrats say they worry about future interference by the president in the Smithsonian museums, especially after Trump issued an executive order last year promising to root out “divisive narratives.”
Until Congress acts, construction of the women’s museum cannot begin on the National Mall, leaving it stalled for now.
“This bill used to be a bipartisan success story,” Rep. Emily Randall, D-Wash, said on the floor.
