11 States Sue Over Obama’s Transgender Bathroom Directive
Eleven states are moving to sue the federal government over President Obama’s transgender bathroom directive. States that refuse to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice would risk losing federal funds under the directive.
The lawsuit was announced Wednesday in Austin, Texas, by Texas Attorney General Kenneth Paxton. In addition to Texas, 10 other states joined the suit, and they aren’t all Republican-controlled or located in the South.
USA Today reports that Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin are also party to the suit against the Obama administration.
According to the complaint, which is available from the Texas Attorney General, the Obama administration has attempted to “rewrite [the law of the land] by administrative fiat.”
My statement on A.G. Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against the Federal Government over the President’s Transgender Policy: https://t.co/8zlNh6QGfa
— Dan Patrick (@DanPatrick) May 25, 2016
Several conservative states have voiced opposition to the directive since it was announced. As previously reported by Inquisitr, lawmakers in Oklahoma even want to impeach President Obama over the directive that schools need to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that correspond to their gender identities rather than the genders on their birth certificates.
“Defendants have conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department announced in 2014 that discrimination against transgender people should be barred under the same laws that prevent sex-based discrimination. The Obama administration claims that this is the basis that was used to threaten schools with a loss of federal funds if they bar transgender students from using the bathrooms of their choice.
Texas Attorney General Kenneth Paxton disagrees with that idea and claims that the federal government “didn’t follow the proper procedures.”
“This isn’t an interpretive case of law, this is a rewrite of law,” Paxton said of Obama’s transgender bathroom directive.
According to the Texas Tribune, this is far from the first lawsuit that Texas has filed against the Obama administration. In fact, Texas filed 38 lawsuits against the federal government between 2008 and 2015 at a cost of more than $5 million to Texan taxpayers.
Texas won six of their cases, lost 10, and eight were withdrawn. At the time the report was written in July 2015, the other 14 were still pending. Some of those lawsuits, like the one that challenged Obama’s plan to combat climate change, were also joined by other states. Texas was just one of 24 states involved in that lawsuit, some of which were led by Democrats at the time the suit was filed.
MSNBC reports that eight of the states that joined Texas to sue the federal government over Obama’s transgender school bathroom directive are Republican-controlled, while two currently have Democrat governors.
If the directive remains in place, states that fail to comply stand to lose all federal funding for their schools. Texas alone would lose $10 billion in federal education funds, but the Associated Press reports that Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has already said that his state will never comply with the directive and will choose instead to forfeit that money.
What Obama is doing is unconstitutional. I will fight him all the way to the Supreme Court.
— Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) May 20, 2016
Do you think that the 11 states suing the Obama administration have any chance of succeeding, or is this new suit just a waste of taxpayer money?
[Photo by AP Photo/Elaine Thompson]
