Joe Biden was hoping to have his Title IX rules firmly in place before leaving office, but the Supreme Court has dealt him a rather significant blow on that front.
Last week, the court declined the White House’s emergency request to reinstate Biden’s Title IX rules.
Talking Points…
- Biden Title IX request rejected
- GOP celebrates big win
- Analysis
For the first time in any presidency, when Biden defined Title IX under his administration, it included sexual orientation and gender identity. Most of Biden’s rule changes went unchallenged, but multiple red states challenged the aspects related to these two issues in a major effort to protect women’s sports.
In a 5-4 ruling (Justice Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices), the emergency appeal by the Biden administration was rejected. This is not the final word on this matter, mind you, but it does give us a feel for how the court will rule once the issue formally goes before SCOTUS after the lower court appeals play out. The unsigned order stated:
“On this limited record and in its emergency applications, the Government has not provided this Court a sufficient basis to disturb the lower courts’ interim conclusions that the three provisions found likely to be unlawful are intertwined with and affect other provisions of the rule.”
Justice Sotomayor penned the dissent, writing:
“By blocking the Government from enforcing scores of regulations that respondents never challenged and that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries, the lower courts went beyond their authority to remedy the discrete harms alleged here.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) knows this is not the end of the battle, but he also knows it is a precursor to what will likely happen if and when the case finally goes before the Supreme Court. Keeping a possible defeat in mind later in the process, Johnson responded to the decision:
“Unlike Democrats, Republicans know what a woman is, and we know Title IX was written to protect the rights of women. We applaud the Supreme Court keeping the lower courts’ injunction in place.
“For now, the Court has stopped the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to undermine women’s rights and allow men to compete in women’s sports.”
As I noted above, most of the rule is not being challenged, but the GOP has been adamant it will do its best to protect women’s locker rooms and women’s sports from being infiltrated by middling male athletes looking for glory. We just saw how dangerous this can be in the Olympics, where one woman boxer claimed that she had never been hit as hard as she was by another boxer who had previously failed a sex chromosome test.
Democrats would love to make this a polarizing issue, but I think they are finding out that most liberal parents who have little girls are siding with conservatives on this issue. As I have noted in other reports, at some point, if this is allowed to continue, someone will be seriously injured, if not killed, but Dems are too worried about luring in the far left in the election to even consider those ramifications. Thankfully, Republicans have and will continue to hold the line on this issue.
