House Defeats Bill Designating Women’s History Museum Site (1)

The House unexpectedly rejected a bill allowing the Smithsonian Institution to build a women’s history museum on the National Mall Thursday after six Republicans joined Democrats in opposition to the measure.

The failed vote was a stunning addition to a day of setbacks for Republicans, coming just hours after the Senate went home for recess without finishing a party-line immigration budget bill they’d hoped to pass due to intraparty turmoil. House GOP leadership also delayed a vote Democrats forced seeking to rein in President Donald Trump’s Iran war powers because absences meant Democrats could’ve succeeded in passing it.

The women’s history museum vote flamed out after a handful of conservative hardliners voted no. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said he opposed the bill because women are already represented in Smithsonian museums. He also voiced concerns that such a museum could become too progressive under a future Democratic administration.

“Show me where in the Smithsonian women are being discriminated against,” Burchett told Bloomberg Government.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who also opposed the measure, said he’d support a museum but not on the National Mall, which he said is already too crowded.

“When I was a kid, it used to be all grass,” said Harris, one of the House’s few Republicans whose district is near the Washington area.

House Democrats opposed the long-stalled legislation, which had once been a bipartisan effort, after Republicans added a provision allowing exhibitions on only “biological women.”

The legislation stalls out and now faces an uncertain future after the 204-216 vote. Its failure to pass in the chamber follows years of delays, after a 2020 spending bill greenlit both the American Women’s History Museum and the Museum of the American Latino. Democrats criticized the bill for leaving out the Latino museum, which has until now moved alongside the women’s museum.

Read More: BGOV Bill Analysis: H.R. 1329, Women’s Museum Site & Exhibit Ban

The devolvement of the bipartisan effort underscores partisan divides over how much power to hand to Trump and the role of transgender women in single-sex spaces.

“The House’s loud rejection of this partisan bill is a signal that we need to return to the original bipartisan version that honors the diverse contributions women made to this country,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.), the chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said in a statement.

The women’s history museum bill is the second bipartisan legislative effort to break down into partisan squabbling this week. Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus earlier announced unified opposition to student athletics legislation, killing the bill that had been on the House schedule this week. Black Democrats—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)—opposed the legislation because they said it would benefit Southern sports leagues that haven’t spoken out against GOP efforts to redistrict them out of power.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who sponsored the bill, said she was “disappointed” but not surprised by the failure. She specifically called out Democrats, who she said should have supported the once-bipartisan bill. Malliotakis suggested the museum could still be built by executive action.

“I still think there’s a possibility here,” Malliotakis said. “If the president wants to still build this museum, he can actually probably pick a site on the Mall that does not require new construction, and he could probably still get it done on his own.”