(The Center Square) – President Joe Biden’s attempt to re-interpret Title IX and thereby implement a sweeping LGBTQ agenda at schools around the country may be put on hold after a few key court rulings.
The Biden administration’s overhaul of Title IX is set to take effect Aug. 1, but a flurry of court decisions in recent weeks may be enough for critics to stop the changes before they fully take effect.
One of those cases included a win for “Moms for Liberty,” a group that successfully sued the Department of Education and obtained an order this week blocking the enforcement of the Title IX changes in several states.
“…This is now the third federal court to formally enjoin the final title nine rule- but remember that two federal courts have now enjoined the informal guidance that led to the rule,” Sarah Perry, a legal expert at the Heritage Foundation, told The Center Square. “That brings the total to 14 states shielded from the rule’s enforcement on August 1. But that does NOT include ‘every school in which Moms For liberty member has a child.’ That organization has members in every state across the country except three.”
This battle began when the Biden administration began redefining the meaning and purpose of Title IX across several agencies. Title IX is a law that was originally passed in 1972 to, among other things, create legal protections for women to have equal access to school locker rooms, sports teams, etc in K-12 schools and colleges.
When Biden took office, however, his regulators decided to reinterpret the protections based on “sex” in Title IX to also include gender identity and sexuality.
Now, under the Biden administration’s changes, schools that do not embrace transgender athletes, similar bathroom policies and more would lose federal funding.
Recently, though, several federal courts have pushed back on the changes. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to overturn “Chevron deference,” a key legal framework that essentially gave federal regulators broad power to enforce and interpret laws passed by Congress as they thought best.
Under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, agencies have far less power to interpret laws as they see fit. While the battle over Chevron deference largely centered around energy and environmental questions, the long-awaited ruling happened to come just in time to apply to the Title IX changes.
Critics argue the Title IX rewrite is exactly the reason why Chevron deference needed to be overturned.
Perry said that the Chevron changes mean the U.S. Supreme Court will probably review the Title IX changes.
“In short, 5 Federal Court victories in such a short amount of time nearly guarantee Supreme Court review, and now that Chevron is overturned, the administration is in real trouble as concerns the viability of the rule,” Perry told The Center Square.
Now, a legal battle that has been brewing for a long time may finally come to a head.
“Even without the Supreme Court decisions in Loper Bright and relentless, over-reaching regulations like President Biden's Title IX rule have faced intensive scrutiny from the courts, with three federal courts issuing preliminary injunctions against the Title IX rule in the last several weeks,” Defense of Freedom Institute President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel told The Center Square. “With the reversal of Chevron, when faced with ambiguous language in a statute, judges may now use their independent judgment to interpret a law without deferring to the Education Department’s regulators. Rulemaking just got a lot more challenging for the federal bureaucrats in the department looking to push the statutory envelope on Title IX.”
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