North Carolina is fighting back against what it calls egregious federal overreach, now that President Obama is threatening to withhold funds states over the contentious transgender bathroom issue.
Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., on Wednesday introduced an appropriations amendment which states that the state “would not have to forfeit” federal aid over how its localities managed their public schools. “This is less about the ‘bathroom issue’ — which I personally find disgusting to talk about — than it is about this administration’s egregious executive overreach,” Pittenger told me on Wednesday night, shortly after introducing his amendment.
“It is the response of North Carolina to what can only be called intimidation and coercion to intimidate our state into compliance with the Obama White House’s interpretation of the law.” Pittenger added, “North Carolina cannot be bullied for its beliefs” under his amendment.
The amendment would cover federal dollars dispensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Departments of Interior and Energy.
A spokesman for the lawmaker told me Pittenger plans future amendments to cover the U.S. Departments of Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services.
When I asked Pittenger if this was akin to any of the efforts of Southern states in the 1950s and 1960s to halt federal integration of schools, he cited a recent article by one of his state’s civil rights heroes Clarence Henderson.
As a student at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in 1960, Henderson was part of an historic sit-in at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s that led to its integration.
“Mr. Henderson wrote [in the “Charlotte Observer”] that any attempt to draw a parallel to the problems of being transgender today to those young black people in the South faced in the 1960’s was insulting,” said Pittenger, “and that you can’t somehow lump the two together.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.
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