Madness on the Plains

What possessed Nebraska Senator Machaela Cavanaugh to filibuster in support of Child Abuse?

One State Senator in Nebraska is holding up the entire work of Nebraska’s unicameral legislature for the dumbest reason possible.

It was a mundane, unanimously supported bill on liquor taxation that saw state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh take to the mic on the Nebraska Legislature floor last week. She offered her support, then spent the next three days discussing everything but the bill, including her favorite Girl Scout cookies, Omaha’s best doughnuts and the plot of the animated movie “Madagascar.”

She also spent that time railing against an unrelated bill that would outlaw gender-affirming therapies for those 18 and younger. It was the advancement of that bill out of committee that led Cavanaugh to promise three weeks ago to filibuster every bill that comes before the Legislature this year — even the ones she supports.

That’s right, Cavanaugh is sabotaging the entire legislative process because she is mad that a common sense, pro-science bill is advancing through the Legislature.

“If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful — painful for everyone,” the Omaha married mother of three said. “I will burn the session to the ground over this bill.”

True to her word, Cavanaugh has slowed the business of passing laws to a crawl by introducing amendment after amendment to every bill that makes it to the state Senate floor and taking up all eight debate hours allowed by the rules — even during the week she was suffering from strep throat. Wednesday marks the halfway point of this year’s 90-day session, and not a single bill will have passed thanks to Cavanaugh’s relentless filibustering.

Cavanaugh’s rhetoric would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Instead of doing the right thing by Nebraska’s children, she is railing against a bill that would outlaw the physical and mental abuse that is so-called “gender-affirming care.”

If this strategy sounds familiar, it should:

On Tuesday, the Texas state Senate was scheduled to pass major bills on funding transportation, permitting the death penalty for 17-year-olds, and putting sweeping restrictions on abortion in the state. Then, at 11:18 a.m., Sen. Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat, took to the Senate floor and started what she hoped would be a 13-hour filibuster of the abortion bill.

If Davis managed to keep the floor until midnight, the special legislative session would end without the bill passing. She didn't make it — Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) ruled her out of order at about 10 p.m., two hours shy of the deadline. But the bill didn't make it, either.

Davis of course became a national celebrity, even though it was the practical end of her political career. She ran for Governor of Texas the following year and lost to Greg Abbott by 21 points. She resurfaced in 2020 to run for Congress and lost by 7 points.

On top of it, the bill Davis filibustered may have failed but was passed in a Special Session just four months later.

Nebraska has two U.S. Senate elections on the ballot next year, and you have to wonder if Cavanaugh’s bogus filibuster of the entire legislative process is just a political ploy to run for one of those seats next year. It’s the same Wendy Davis playbook.

1. Filibuster

2. Lose

3. ?????

4. Profit!

Cavanaugh is sharing a sob-story about a constituent:

On Tuesday, the 12th day of her filibuster, she shared a story from a constituent about a child who told his mother he felt like God made a mistake making him a boy instead of a girl. 

“If people don’t want to take responsibility for their role in the body and their positions of leadership, if they want to put it squarely on my shoulders, that’s fine,” Cavanaugh said. “I’m not going to stop doing what I’m doing. We will just pass fewer bills.”

Other than the sacrilegious nature of the story, it doesn’t change the fact that the boy is biologically a boy. No surgery, no drugs, and no other ways that “gender-affirming care” abuses children is going to change the fact that this child was born a boy and will die a boy. And that is true for all children born in this country.

Cavanaugh is filibustering in support of child abuse. Arguably, Cavanaugh is filibustering under the legal definition of genocide.

¹

And yet, Cavanaugh thinks herself the hero and is being treated as such by MSNBC and others. And that such anti-science, abusive rhetoric is celebrated on the left shows us the slippery slope our country and our society is truly on.

1. As I wrote in September: Arguably, the insistence on allowing “transgender” children to undergo hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgery itself meets two of the five qualifications of genocide (Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group)