Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are lone votes against reauthorizing bill to help Leukemia patients
Conservative Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado were the only two House members to vote against a bill that would reauthorize the National Marrow Donor Program.
The bill H.R.941, or the TRANSPLANT Act, overwhelmingly passed the House in a 415-2 vote on Thursday night.
There were 12 lawmakers who didn’t cast a vote.
The bill would reauthorize a program that matches bone marrow donors and cord blood units with patients who have leukemia and other diseases. The bill would help thousands of people diagnosed with leukemia and other diseases by reauthorizing the National Marrow Donor Program and the National Cord Blood Inventory for another five years.
Boebert said in a statement to CNN, “This bill added hundreds of millions of dollars to the national debt, while not receiving a CBO score or going through the committee process,” a reference to scoring done by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency that, among other things, tells lawmakers how much legislation will cost.
And Greene, who often makes outlandish claims to seek headlines, claimed that “Nothing in this bill prevents the funding of aborted fetal tissue by taxpayers.”
The program keeps an inventory of cord blood and a database of bone marrow donors for matches with patients diagnosed with leukemia and other fatal blood diseases and is not related to the fetal tissue argument raised by Greene or the argument raised by Boebert.
In response to the false claims by Greene, the National Marrow Donor Program said in a statement, “National Marrow Program (NMDP)/Be The Match does not use fetal tissue/embryonic stem cells for transplant or research. For more than 30 years, NMDP/Be The Match has helped facilitate more than 105,000 transplants for patients battling blood cancers and blood diseases. We only use cells voluntarily donated by either an adult donor, or cells collected from the umbilical cord, which occurs only after a full-term delivery where both mother and baby are healthy and safe.”
There is a companion bill in the Senate that is still in committee.
This story has been updated with a statement from the National Marrow Donor Program.