How Nancy Mace went from being a ‘caucus of one’ to the lead anti-trans voice in Congress

Last week, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace made headlines when she introduced legislation that would ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill. Mace, of course, did this in response to the election of Sarah McBride, who in January will become the first openly transgender member of Congress.

Mace’s move was successful in two ways: House Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to ban trans people from using Capitol bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth — and the Republican lawmaker gained the notoriety that she clearly desired, even earning praise from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing firebrand with whom she regularly feuded during their first term in Congress.

On the surface, Mace going on the warpath against trans people may seem jolting, as she’d once positioned herself as a different kind of Republican. In 2021, she’d even insisted she was a supporter of LGBTQ rights, saying “Religious Liberty, gay rights and transgender equality can all co-exist,” as one of her former communications directors pointed out on X this month.

When The Independent profiled her in early 2023, she called herself a “caucus of one.” She mostly voted in line with other mainstream Republicans and voted to make Kevin McCarthy speaker at the beginning of 2023.

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Things changed later that year, when Mace joined some of the same obstructionists who had voted against McCarthy — an effort led by former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz — to oust the speaker. She gained further notoriety when during one meeting with House Republicans, she wore a giant red “A” emblazoned on her shirt.

All of these moves have allowed her to move up the ranks in the Republican Party. And it explains how the current Republican Party operates, rewarding controversial, headline-grabbing stunts over thoughtful policy.

Mace first won her seat in 2020, when Republicans significantly pared down Democrats’ majority in the House. House Republican leader McCarthy — who once bemoaned that his party looked “like the most restrictive country club in America” — had aggressively recruited women and people of color to run in swing districts.

And Mace had a quintessential American story. After being raped as a teenager, Mace dropped out of high school before she worked at a Waffle House, got her GED and became the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, a prestigious military academy.

Her status as a single mother who was unafraid of a bit of trash talk made her seem like the kind of Republican who could lead the GOP beyond Trump, even though she had worked on his 2016 campaign. While she opposed Trump’s impeachment after January 6, she did vocally criticize him.

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She did not back away from picking fights with fringe figures like Greene. When Greene attacked her for supposedly being “pro-abort” — which Mace isn’t except in the cases of rape, incest and the life of the mother — Mace said bless her f**king heart” and called her a “religious bigot.”

On the policy side, she tried to find a middle way at times, introducing legislation to decriminalize cannabis. She voted with Democrats and a handful of Republicans to codify protections for same-sex and interracial married couples and to protect access to contraception.

After Democrats did better in the 2022 midterm elections in part because of the anger about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision, she warned that “We're not going to win hearts and minds over by being a**holes to women.”

But Mace and other fresh-faced Republicans had one problem: The GOP did not want to move on beyond Trump. Ultimately, Trump did not exit the stage after January 6 and her policy proposals largely went nowhere.

He endorsed Mace’s primary challenger in 2022, which famously led to her filming a selfie video in front of Trump Tower, which he proceeded to mock. She would survive, but it would teach her — and other Republicans — a lesson: The Republican Party was not interested in policymakers who could offer something different from Trump. Rather, it wanted more of the same.

Mace has since taken a rightward turn.

This can also explain the hard-right shift of some of the GOP’s other female policymakers. Elise Stefanik, who previously worked for George W Bush and Paul Ryan, would go from being a moderate who voted against Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 to being his most vocal defender during his impeachment trial.

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Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, a former chief of staff to Senator Richard Shelby who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee and can bring home millions of dollars to her home state, gave her State of the Union response in a kitchen in a heavily affected and strained voice.

All three got behind Trump fairly early this time around. While more policy-oriented Republicans like Lisa Murkowski find themselves having to answer uncomfortable questions about Trump’s latest cabinet pick, the lawmakers who glom onto social issues or grandstanding have been rewarded handsomely.

Britt is now a regular in Republican circles. Stefanik will become Trump’s US ambassador to the United Nations and Mace got to speak at the Republican National Convention.

Democrats, led by McBride, have responded by calling Mace’s legislation as a “distraction.” But anyone who has been to a conservative conference knows that if anything, conservatives see tax policy or the retirement age for Medicare as a distraction and banning trans women from sports and bathrooms as an animating policy alongside restricting immigration.

Politics is all about incentives. And as of right now, GOP politics rewards culture war crusaders.