By Suzanne Bowdey

At 1,813 pages, the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) isn’t exactly light reading, but the fact that Congress has a bipartisan bill at all is as close as it gets to a Christmas miracle. While the proposal’s been on the front-burner of most leaders’ priorities, no one was quite sure if the two sides would be able to hammer out a deal before the holidays. In the end, they not only managed to agree on the text, but conservatives won a string of victories in the process.

It’s a shocking departure from the Senate version of the NDAA, which Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had threatened to stand by if House Republicans insisted on some of their hard-fought policy wins. But, in the first real sign that Democrats are waking up to Americans’ election mandate, the legislation that dropped Saturday takes a sincere stab at some of the worst forms of military wokeness.

While the bill isn’t perfect, Family Research Council’s Quena Gonzalez stressed, conservatives can celebrate three major gains. Thanks to outspoken Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the latest version of the NDAA strips out the language that would have drafted American women into the military against their will, which, as far as Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) was concerned, was “a hill to die on.”

As he and others warned, “It will be over my dead body that I’m going to allow my daughter to get drafted,” he told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Friday. “[I]f she wants to serve, she can serve,” the Texan reiterated. “We can have all those debates. If somebody wants to end the draft or start the draft, they can debate that. But you’re not going to draft my daughter. And unfortunately, there are some senators like Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), for example … and others who are committed to expanding the draft to our daughters. It’s just nonsense in a country of 330 million people.”

Other hugely significant changes included what many believe to be the first statute protecting minors from gender transitions in federal law. Under this latest NDAA text, American taxpayers will no longer be forced to fund the hormones, puberty-blockers, and gender mutilation surgeries for the troops’ minor children. “The fact that Democrats didn’t burn down the Senate over this is remarkable,” Gonzalez emphasized. But again, it “points to the weakness of this issue in the electorate.” It also suggests that the once-powerful Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is losing its grip on Joe Biden’s party. If Democrats refused to do the HRC’s bidding on this issue, then times really are changing.

That’s not to say the country’s largest LGBT activist group didn’t have something to say about it. HRC President Kelley Robinson called out Congress’s rejection of trans drugs and procedures as an “attack” on military families. Of course, old habits die hard, and some leftists are having a hard time swallowing the changing times. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) argued that the decision somehow “undermined the bipartisan tradition of the bill. … [I]f you want to play the role of doctor and ban the care for everybody when it is not debatable that there are some minors with gender dysphoria who benefit from the treatments that this bill would ban — so you are denying health care to the children of servicemembers that they need to serve a partisan agenda — I think that’s extraordinarily problematic.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) vehemently disagrees. “Taxpayer dollars should never be used to support procedures and treatments that could permanently harm and sterilize young people,” he told The Daily Wire. “In this year’s NDAA, we’re taking a critical and necessary step to protect the children of American service members from radical gender ideology and experimental drugs.” And, he promised, more legislation is coming to “protect America’s kids.”

Another course correction worth cheering was the members’ decision to shelve the radical expansion of in vitro fertilization in the military, which FRC publicly opposed for moral and ethical reasons.

Other rebukes of the current commander-in-chief’s agenda include “gut[ting] DEI bureaucracy,” stopping the Defense Department from contracting with advertisers who “blacklist conservative news services,” ending the president’s witch-hunt for extremists in the ranks, and a freeze on “climate change programs,” among other things. Unfortunately, one explosive issue that wasn’t addressed was the taxpayer coverage of abortion travel, which Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) bravely fought for so many months.

Even so, “This year’s Annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) ensures our men and women in uniform have the resources and support they need to defend our great nation,” Johnson underscored in a statement. “The NDAA refocuses our military on its core mission of defending America and its interests around the globe by supporting law enforcement operations and the deployment of the National Guard to the southwest border, expediting innovation and reducing the acquisition timeline for new weaponry, supporting our allies, and strengthening our nuclear posture and missile defense programs.”

As the speaker explained, “This legislation includes House-passed provisions to restore our focus on military lethality and to end the radical woke ideology being imposed on our military by permanently banning transgender medical treatment for minors and countering antisemitism.”

Of course, the revamped bill will still have to survive House and Senate floor votes to keep the 60-plus year streak of passing the NDAA alive. If far-Left Democrats decide to revolt over the transgender provisions, this could be a much more painful saga. But experts point out that the legislation has usually enjoyed bipartisan support. That started to change with the Clinton presidency, Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Robert Maginnis explained to The Washington Stand, when Democrats started “aggressively using the annual defense bill as a means to advance a radical social agenda [like] gays in the military, women in direct combat, and most recently, trans-identifying servicemembers.” And this year is no exception, he noted.

“Even though most Americans are opposed to the radical transgender agenda, some congressional Democrats oppose the common-sense legislation that restricts transgender medical care for servicemembers’ children.” It’s incredible, Maginnis continued, that extremists like Smith “want scarce military medical funds to be spread even thinner — wasted — to accommodate ‘gender-affirming care’ for military dependents. That issue is quite controversial and questionably scientific.”

Still, Gonzalez insisted, the fact that the House speaker was able to manage this language is a feat of its own. “Given that he was effectively bargaining with Majority Leader Schumer and President Biden for a vote this month — neither of whom have anything to lose by insisting on hyper-liberal priorities — the joint House/Senate NDAA language that Mike Johnson has negotiated is impressive on our issues. It doesn’t ‘draft our daughters,’ which the Senate version did. It doesn’t recklessly expand IVF without regard for pro-life concerns. It did protect military kids from gender ideology that would target them for lies that they were somehow ‘born in the wrong body.’”

Is this bill perfect, he asked rhetorically? “Nope. But is it better than we have any right to expect given who was opposite Speaker Johnson at the negotiating table? Definitely. Do we want to see more protections for kids? Of course, and we’ll be sharing ideas on how to build on this momentum when Republicans take over Washington next year.”

For now, Maginnis and others implore, “Members of Congress must pass the NDAA that refuses to advance a radical social agenda. … Our armed forces have a critical mission focused on serious security threats, and our defense dollars are already over-stretched. The Pentagon must be free from the demands of our culture’s fringe.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.