Donald Trump's campaign made Kamala Harris pay dearly with the infamous "Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you" ads hammering her support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for prison inmates. Trump went on to win every single swing state. Two years later, Democrats have a Senate nominee who's handed Republicans material for a sequel, and the amusing part is that he saw it coming years ago.
For years, Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.) has been remarkably upfront about just how far he wants government-run medicine to reach. Until recently. He’s trying to backtrack on it now, but we have the receipts. In podcast remarks from 2021 and 2022, he called for a taxpayer-funded universal health system that would cover gender-transition surgery for illegal immigrants.
According to a report from the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed made the remarks while working as a commentator and podcaster after his failed bid for Michigan governor. He pitched a "truly inclusive" universal healthcare entitlement that would include "care for transgender people" and "care for immigrants." The system, he said, should cover the "full gamut of health care that any and everyone would need." Run that through a plain-English filter, and you get coverage for illegal immigrants to get transgender procedures on the taxpayers' dime.
"A lot of the most difficult conversations break on the question of who deserves what care, right?" El-Sayed said in a Feb. 15, 2022, episode.
Recommended: The Democrats’ Lead in the Polls Is Not As Solid As You Think
Later in that same episode, he tried to get ahead of his critics. "The prime example that conservatives will impose on a conversation about Medicare for All will be 'Well, what do we do with the undocumented person who comes to this country and wants to get gender reassignment surgery on Medicare for All,'" he said.
According to El-Sayed, conservatives would push that example "because it captures a group of multiple marginalized people whom they want to cast as being undeserving." He then accused conservatives who object to footing the bill for these treatments of "the original sin of racism." So he correctly predicted the attack ad years in advance, and his game plan for answering it was to call anyone who runs it a racist.
Pardon me while I laugh.
It's worth revisiting exactly what Kamala said that got her into so much trouble.
"It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition," Kamala wrote in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire. "That's why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates."
She also bragged that she "made sure they changed the policy in the state of California, so every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and needed." In her words, "it's a civil rights issue, it's a justice issue, and it's an issue of humanity."
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers would be smart to take a page out of Trump’s playbook and run ads featuring these remarks during the campaign's final weeks.
