The legislative push to establish a Smithsonian museum focused on women’s history had finally seemed to be gaining momentum — a rare bipartisan effort in a deeply polarized Congress. Then, Republican Rep. Mary Miller introduced an amendment in March that cost the bill all its Democratic support in Thursday’s House vote.

Miller, from Illinois, added the amendment to the bill in the Committee on House Administration, denying the inclusion of transgender women in the museum and giving President Donald Trump the ability to choose an alternate location for the museum if he deems the chosen one unfit. The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino, which had moved in tandem with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum since its authorization in 2020, was also left behind.

“The Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as female,” the amendment reads.

“Celebrating women is not, and should not be, a zero-sum game,” Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly transgender member in Congress, said Thursday before voting against the measure. “Allowing Donald Trump to decide what goes in and where this museum — this necessary museum — is located is not something that members of our caucus are comfortable with.”

The House rejected the bill, 214-206, with the Democrats who once championed the measure ultimately voting against it, along with a handful of Republicans. That, Democrats said, was a direct effect of the amendments Miller introduced.

When asked about the amendment, Miller derided transgender women as “men dressed up in women’s clothes” and asserted that the museum should only include “biological women.”

After the amended version of the bill was presented in committee, the Democratic Women’s Caucus, which had previously been one of the key stakeholders spearheading the museum push, condemned the new version of the legislation.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, who chairs the caucus, told NOTUS late last month that she saw the move to exclude the history of transgender women from the museum as an attack. Following Thursday’s vote, she called for a return to the original bipartisan legislation.

“Today, the House proved that the Women’s History Museum does not belong to Trump. It belongs to the women whose blood, sweat, and tears paint the picture of America,” Leger Fernández said in a statement. “Women deserve to tell our own story. That is why the Democratic Women’s Caucus and House Democrats worked tirelessly to block the radical, divisive Republican amendments to the Women’s History Museum bill that gave Trump and his ballroom buddies control.”

New Jersey Rep. Analilia Mejia, the newest member of the DWC, characterized the amendment as a “poison pill” injected into the legislation to “divide instead of uplift.” And California Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat who has been a staunch supporter of the museum, noted changes to the legislation were not communicated, but “just imposed.”

“I went through the process of having this bipartisan agreement on the Women’s History Museum, and it was actually a really great process up until recently,” Chu told NOTUS.

Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who sponsored the legislation for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino, told NOTUS before the vote that she decided to move the women’s museum forward on its own because it had received substantially more support. She said Democrats were overdoing the concerns about Trump’s influence on the museum, and that he would not oversee its contents.

Malliotakis, of New York, said in the original version of the bill, the location for the museum had not been chosen, and in this version, the amendment specified the South Monument site and gave the president flexibility to move away from the chosen location.

“This gave some flexibility, so if there’s a problem with the initial location for some reason and it’s not buildable, then we can choose another site,” she said, pointing to museums that have had location issues due to natural occurrences like flooding.

Before the Republican amendment was added, the bill had accumulated over 230 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, including more than 100 Republicans.

On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget put out a statement of administration policy that said it supported the amended bill because it would “dedicate” the museum to “presenting the history and experiences of actual women and prevents the museum from depicting males as women.”

Another point of contention, Democrats said, was the separation of the bills for the two museums. Democratic Rep. Norma Torres of California, the only Latina on the Committee on House Administration, said at the mark-up where the amendment was passed that the museums “belong together.”

“It is no secret that we are deeply divided as a country and as a Congress,” Torres said. “But this one should be easy. We hear a lot of talk about unity and bipartisanship in this room. But if we cannot come together to honor the hardworking Americans who shaped this nation, then those words are hollow.”