Bill Maher Mocks Elizabeth Warren for Wanting a Transgender Child to Vet Education Secretary

Comic and political pundit Bill Maher mocked Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren for promising to have a transgender child interview her nominee for secretary of education.

During his opening interview on Friday night’s episode of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the host tried to get former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg to agree that Bernie Sanders is beating Elizabeth Warren because “Bernie don’t care about that woke stuff,” but Mayor Pete politely told him to go pound sand.

Maher shopped the same premise to his panel — GOP strategist Rick Wilson, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Democratic former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu — later in the show, and singled out one particular issue to deride.

“Elizabeth Warren, who I’ve always liked, but she kind of like did some stuff I didn’t like, and today she came out, listen to this, she wants her Secretary of education to be vetted by a high school student, I’m not kidding,” Maher said, and added “she said a young trans person, I believe in high school, ‘I’m going to have a secretary of education that this young trans person interviews on my behalf, and only if this person believes our secretary of education nominee is absolutely committed…'”

“Now Obama said people just don’t want crazy stuff, Is this not crazy stuff?” Maher asked. “Is she running for president of Berkeley?”

Wilson replied that “There’s a fundamental rule in politics that Republicans have used for a long long time, don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation,” and said that trans issues are “something that is so narrowly focused, how did that help her win voters in the upper Midwest, in Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania? It’s just too narrow gauge.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Rep. Sherrill said, disappointingly, and added “I have not heard that phrase and I love it, but when we won, we won because we were talking about things that keep you up at night.”

“The last thing you think of if you’re a single mom is how am I going to pay for my kids health care? Or how am I going to make sure that I can pay for my rent, and what is it going to take to succeed in this economy, and that’s what you run on,” Sherrill added.

Maher went on to say that Democrats are “the party of this bullshit,” and asked Sherrill “What if she’s the candidate and they, ‘What do you think, Congresswoman, about letting a high school student, forget the transgender part, a high school student have veto power over the cabinet? Good idea? I mean that’s, that puts you in a tough spot right?”

“I have four kids so that does, that idea puts me in a real tough spot,” Sherrill joked.

Maher was referring to a recent exchange at a town hall meeting in Iowa in which Warren related the promise to which Maher alluded, although it wasn’t made to a “high school student.”

At a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids this week, Warren did tell a voter “I’m going to have a Secretary of Education that this young trans person interviews on my behalf,” and that “only if this person believes that our Secretary of Education nominee is committed to creating a welcoming environment, a safe environment, and a full educational curriculum for everyone, will that person be advanced to actually be Secretary of Education.”

Maher and a bunch of conservative bigots you can Google if you want their names are throwing a fit about this now, but Warren actually made that promise almost four months ago, on national television, during a CNN town hall.

A 9 year-old trans boy named Jacob Lemay asked Warren “What will you do in your first week as president to make sure that kids like me feel safer in schools?”

Warren told him, in part, “I’m going to find just the right secretary of education. But here’s what I plan to do. I want to make sure that the person I think is the right secretary of education meets you and hears your story. And then I want you to tell me if you think that’s the right person, and then we’ll make the deal. Does that sound good?”

So, I expect a hostile proven bigot like Bill Maher to be like this — and I was actually surprised by Wilson’s relative moderation and fluency, if not his analysis — but it was very disappointing to hear a Democrat from my home state cosign this garbage.

Maher is a lost cause, but to Wilson and Rep. Sherrill, I would point out two things. The first is that Elizabeth Warren isn’t “running on” this — she’s responding to questions that people are asking her, not cutting ads about it. Bigots like Bill Maher and others are “running” against her on it.

But the second thing is, I wish Warren was cutting ads on this.

Jacob was asking how he could feel safe, and I’d be willing to bet that a lot of parents think about their kids feeling safe in schools.  Warren’s got the right idea, let Jacob interview the next education secretary, and let other kids do it too, children who are scared about gun violence, or of being over-disciplined because of their race, or ripped away from their parents by ICE, or bullied suicidal. See how the nominee interacts with disabled children who can’t necessarily speak for themselves.

We are a diverse party, and Democrats need to develop the vocabulary to explain why the issues Maher dismisses as “woke stuff” should be important to every American instead of piling on because it might get a laugh.

Watch the clip above via HBO.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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