Supreme Court Orders Maine House to Restore Voting Power to Censured Lawmaker, for Now
The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Maine legislators to temporarily restore the voting power of a state lawmaker after she had been censured for a social media post that criticized transgender athletes' participation in girls' sports.
The order was unsigned and did not provide the court's reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. No vote count was listed, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted she would have denied the application, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent.
The court order provided no further explanation on next steps, but the legislator, State Representative Laurel Libby, had asked in her application to immediately be allowed to participate in the current legislative session, which ends in June.
Lawmakers had censured Ms. Libby, a Republican from Auburn, in February after she wrote a Facebook post criticizing the participation of a transgender athlete who had won a high school pole-vaulting competition. Ms. Libby included the name and photos of the student in the post, which went viral.
The formal reprimand of Ms. Libby prevented her from voting or speaking on the House floor until she apologized for the post. Lawmakers, in a party-line vote, had also found her in violation of the state's Legislative Code of Ethics, which includes a provision asserting that a legislator is 'entrusted with the security, safety, health, prosperity, respect and general well-being of those the legislator serves and with whom the legislator serves.'
Ms. Libby filed a lawsuit on March 11 in federal court in Maine, suing the House speaker, Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat. She claimed that her punishment violated the Constitution by stripping 'a duly elected Republican member' of the 'right to speak and vote on the House floor.'
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