The US supreme court has restored Maine lawmaker Laurel Libby’s right to vote in the state house for the time being, saying in a brief order that she cannot be censured and barred from voting despite a controversial post on social media about a transgender student athlete.
The court’s decision did not explain its reasoning, though two of the court’s liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Jackson said in her scathing dissenting opinion that she did not think Libby had met the high bar required for supreme court intervention.
“The watering down of our court’s standards for granting emergency relief is, to me, an unfortunate development,” Jackson wrote.
“By lowering the bar for granting emergency relief, the Court itself will bear responsibility for the resulting systemic disruption, as a surge in requests for our ‘extraordinary’ intervention – at earlier and earlier stages of ongoing lower court proceedings, and with greater and greater frequency – will undoubtedly follow.”
Jackson posited: “Why would any applicant who thinks the lower courts are mistaken wait for those courts’ final word on an issue if real-time error correction via our emergency docket is readily available?”
Libby, who has been highly critical of her state’s policy to allow transgender athletes to compete in high school sports, posted a photo on 17 February of a student athlete who had won a girls’ pole vault event alongside a photo of the same student participating in a boys’ competition in a previous year.
The post garnered significant backlash, in part because it included the student’s name and photo – prompting concerns about the student’s safety and privacy.
After her refusal to take down the post, Libby has been barred from speaking on the chamber floor since the end of February. Libby was censured along party lines in a 75-70 vote.
In response, Libby, along with six constituents, filed a lawsuit arguing that her punishment silenced the voices of voters in her district. Though lower courts initially rejected her request for relief, the supreme court – which now has a 6-3 conservative supermajority – stepped in and granted a temporary injunction.
Maine’s attorney general, Aaron Frey, warned the court against interfering in what he called an “intra-parliamentary dispute”, saying it could undermine legislative independence.
Libby, elected in 2020, is serving a term through 2026.
Transgender athletes have been a major focus for the Trump administration. Just last month, Libby joined the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, at a press conference during which Bondi announced that the justice department would be suing Maine’s department of education for allowing transgender athletes to compete on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
“President Trump, before he was elected, this has been a huge issue for him,” Bondi said. “Pretty simple: girls play in girls’ sports, boys play in boys’ sports. Men play in men’s sports, women play in women’s sports.”
The lawsuit follows the Trump administration’s various executive orders targeting trans people. Since he’s taken office, Trump has signed executive orders banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports; asserting that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex”; decrying that the government would only recognize two sexes, female and male; and more.
