A federal judge in Texas Sunday blocked the Obama administration from enforcing guideline released by the Department of Education instructing public schools not to discriminate against transgender students.
The judge, George W. Bush appointee Reed O’Connor, ruled in favor of the 13 states led by Texas suing the Obama administration over the guideline, in which the administration urged school districts across the country to permit transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms matching their identity.
The judge said his order was not yet weighing the “difficult issue of balancing the protection of students’ rights and that of personal privacy when using school bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and other intimate facilities, while ensuring that no student is unnecessarily marginalized while attending school.”
Rather, Judge O’Connor said, he was placing an injunction on the directive because the states were likely to prevail on their argument that the administration did not go through proper rules and comment process for regulations, and that the Department of Education’s interpretation of civil rights law was not in line with how the text was understood when it was passed.
The Obama administration has argued that it has the authority to issue the directives protecting trans students because Title IX’s language barring discrimination on the basis of sex could be interpreted to include gender identity. The court Sunday said that the states would likely succeed in their arguments that the language was not ambiguous and thus does not lend itself to that interpretation.
The order placed a nationwide injunction on the policy, and said that the administration cannot force the states challenging the directive to implement the policy.
“Further, while this injunction remains in place, Defendants are enjoined from initiating, continuing, or concluding any investigation based on Defendants’ interpretation that the definition of sex includes gender identity in Title IX’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex,” the order said. “Additionally, Defendants are enjoined from using the Guidelines or asserting the Guidelines carry weight in any litigation initiated following the date of this Order.”
The order comes as the Supreme Court in a separate lawsuit had halted a lower court’s ruling allowing a trans student in Virginia to use the bathroom of his gender identity.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling in a statement Monday that said he was “pleased that the court ruled against the Obama Administration’s latest illegal federal overreach.”
Read the full order below:
Texas, land of the Conservative Judicial Walmart. The judge is who we think he is and yes, he was fucking shopped on purpose.
https://thinkprogress.org/judge-in-texas-hands-down-mean-spirited-last-ditch-attempt-to-strip-gay-couples-of-marriage-rights-353f0ec0402d#.k2fmjk70d
He also ruled that the executive branch has no prosecutorial discretion with respect to whether to initiate deportation proceedings. Why? Because Obama. Well, that and in 2003 and 2005, he was hand-picked by the GOP and Bush administration to serve as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s (Chaired by Sessions (R-A)) majority chief counsel for its Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Citizenship. Yeah, we all know what that was about.
He’s another rabid ideologue jackass who makes politicized rulings in an attempt to further the GOP/Teatrolls’ plans for manipulating judicial process to end-run the shifting of societal mores away from their white supremacist nativism and Christo-fascist bigotry.
Another Obama attempt to legislate from the Oval Office has hit the roadblock of judicial review. You can’t write laws from the Oval Office. Bush tried it with signing statements, and so much OUTRAGE!! SO WRONG!!
Obama has done it over and over and over, and, of course, for so many here, this fictional effort to create policy from pixie dust is just fine. Why, Obama is just correcting that dastardly congress which won’t pass laws. DACA, DAPA, this baroque and rococo distortion of Title IX, time and time again. You can’t legislate from the Oval Office. If a law about transgendered bathroom access is needed, the congress should write it and the President should sign it.
Horseshit.
The Executive branch is responsible for writing the rules and regulations governing implementation of law.
That’s what Obama did. A guidance on interpreting regulations—not trying to make law from the Oval Office.
Even you can’t be stupid enough to believe the swill you wrote.
This is an example of right-wing judge-shopping at its worst.
Question!
Where did everyone who is whining about their precious little snot-balls having to take a dump or whiz in a bathroom “where, just maybe” a transgender person might or might not be, do before this phony BS hit the screen!
So, where did all you backboneless whiners take a dump or whiz before this phony BS started?
Be phucking honest for one of the first times in your hate-filled lives, if that is even possible and answer my question!
The answer to this phucking made-up crisis is for those of you that are worried sick over it to just start buying cases of “DEPENDS!” Maybe you can a discount if you buy for the whole family at the same time!!
For those of you with reading or reading comprehension problems (Trump supporters) just look at the pictures!
There, the problem is solved!
Well, this is true, but the other side to this coin is that, IF the administration made the mistake of not dotting every single “i” and crossing every single “t” with respect to the process for passing new regulations, thus giving this douchenozzle an excuse to rule in this manner, then someone needs to be backhanded across the mouth, because that’s just sloppy and plays right into their hands. But, what may be going on here is that the judge is trying to retro-fit something that really isn’t regulation into the regulatory mold in order to place a requirement upon it that he can say was not met.
That being said, it’s easy for the imbeciles who follow Faux News and Breibart, at al., and swallow every derpy dollop of counter-factual, deliberately disinformative propaganda those outfits produce to get confused about what we’re really talking about here. Some of the policies are not regulations, but rather legitimate Executive Orders that fall under the POTUS’s powers as leader of the executive branch, such as prosecutorial discretion, and therefore do not require regulatory process. For example, Congress only provides so much funding for deportation. The funding, not to mention the systems in place, allows us to deport a finite number of illegal immigrants per year. Prioritizing which illegal immigrants should be a focus of the spending and the mobilization of enforcement resources is therefore an absolute necessity and is a uniquely executive function that does not require Congressional approval or regulatory enactments. It has, in fact, been accepted repeatedly throughout our history as solely within the discretion of the executive branch. To the extent that Congress wants to direct that discretion or limit it, it has to enact something more than directives that simply state that “illegal immigrants shall be deported” coupled with finite funding that permits a finite number of deportations, thus creating the practical necessity of choosing.