Democratic states sue Trump admin over ending sex change surgeries for minors
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration effectively wants to impose a nationwide ban on sex change procedures by threatening providers with "baseless criminal charges" and investigations.
"The federal government is running a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children," New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition of states in the suit, said in a statement.
"This administration is ruthlessly targeting young people who already face immense barriers just to be seen and heard, and are putting countless lives at risk in the process," she added. "In New York and nationwide, we will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community."
The lawsuit names President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department as defendants. It challenges Trump's Jan. 28 executive order barring government support for sex change operations and treatments and two memos by Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate.
Bondi's memo directs the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute those who offer sex change treatments to minors. Shumate's memo directs prosecutors to prioritize investigations against doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that perform such procedures.
The Justice Department has launched probes into three children's hospitals for allegedly providing such treatments.
"On Day One, President Trump took decisive action to stop the despicable mutilation and chemical castration of children – which everyday Americans resoundingly support," White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Fox News Digital. "The President has the lawful authority to protect America's vulnerable children through executive action, and the Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue."
In July, Kaiser Permanente announced that it would pause sex change surgeries for patients under 19 beginning Aug. 29 in response to the Trump administration's efforts on the matter. The same month, Children's Hospital Los Angeles shuttered its Center for Transyouth Health and Development, one of the nation's largest clinics for transgender young people.
The Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., also announced that it will no longer provide gender transition-related medical interventions.
"These changes have been touted by Defendants as precisely what was intended by their unlawful and disingenuous targeting: the end of healthcare for transgender individuals under 19," the complaint reads.
Many states have laws restricting or banning sex change surgeries for children. The states named in the lawsuit -- California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington D.C., and Wisconsin. – allow such treatments.
Other nations have pushed back on sex change procedures for children. In March, the United Kingdom banned puberty blockers – a class of drugs that suppresses sex hormones in adolescents by continually stimulating the pituitary gland -- for children seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.
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Associated Press
a few seconds ago
- Associated Press
In rejecting the jobs report, Trump follows his own playbook of discrediting unfavorable data
WASHINGTON (AP) — When the coronavirus surged during President Donald Trump's first term, he called for a simple fix: Limit the amount of testing so the deadly outbreak looked less severe. When he lost the 2020 election, he had a ready-made reason: The vote count was fraudulent. And on Friday, when the July jobs report revisions showed a distressed economy, Trump had an answer: He fired the official in charge of the data and called the report of a sharp slowdown in hiring 'phony.' Trump has a go-to playbook if the numbers reveal uncomfortable realities, and that's to discredit or conceal the figures and to attack the messenger — all of which can hurt the president's efforts to convince the world that America is getting stronger. 'Our democratic system and the strength of our private economy depend on the honest flow of information about our economy, our government and our society,' said Douglas Elmendorf, a Harvard University professor who was formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office. 'The Trump administration is trying to suppress honest analysis.' The president's strategy carries significant risks for his own administration and a broader economy that depends on politics-free data. His denouncements threaten to lower trust in government and erode public accountability, and any manipulation of federal data could result in policy choices made on faulty numbers, causing larger problems for both the president and the country. The White House disputes any claims that Trump wants to hide numbers that undermine his preferred narratives. It emphasized that Goldman Sachs found that the two-month revisions on the jobs report were the largest since 1968, outside of a recession, and that should be a source of concern regarding the integrity of the data. Trump's aides say their fundamental focus is ensuring that any data gives an accurate view of reality. Not the first time Trump has sought to play with numbers Trump has a long history of dismissing data when it reflects poorly on him and extolling or even fabricating more favorable numbers, a pattern that includes his net worth, his family business, election results and government figures: — Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in a lawsuit brought by the state of New York that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans. — Trump has claimed that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were each rigged. Trump won the 2016 presidential election by clinching the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a sore spot that led him to falsely claim that millions of immigrants living in the country illegally had cast ballots. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but falsely claimed he had won it, despite multiple lawsuits failing to prove his case. — In 2019, as Hurricane Dorian neared the East Coast, Trump warned Alabama that the storm was coming its way. Forecasters pushed back, saying Alabama was not at risk. Trump later displayed a map in the Oval Office that had been altered with a black Sharpie — his signature pen — to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm. — Trump's administration has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites. — As pandemic deaths mounted, Trump suggested that there should be less testing. 'When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people,' Trump said at a June 2020 rally in Oklahoma. 'You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'' While Trump's actions have drawn outcry from economists, scientists and public interest groups, Elmendorf noted that Trump's actions regarding economic data could be tempered by Congress, which could put limits on Trump by whom he chooses to lead federal agencies, for example. 'Outside observers can only do so much,' Elmendorf said. 'The power to push back against the president rests with the Congress. They have not exercised that power, but they could.' White House says having its own people in place will make data 'more reliable' Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, took aim at the size of the downward revisions in the jobs report (a combined 258,000 reduction in May and June) to suggest that the report had credibility issues. He said Trump is focused on getting dependable numbers, despite the president linking the issue to politics by claiming the revisions were meant to make Republicans look bad. 'The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable,' Hassett said Sunday on NBC News. Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who oversaw the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden administration, stressed that revisions to the jobs data are standard. That's because the numbers are published monthly, but not all surveys used are returned quickly enough to be in the initial publishing of the jobs report. 'Revisions solve the tension between timeliness and accuracy,' Kolko said. 'We want timely data because policymakers and businesses and investors need to make decisions with the best data that's available, but we also want accuracy.' Kolko stressed the importance in ensuring that federal statistics are trustworthy not just for government policymakers but for the companies trying to gauge the overall direction of the economy when making hiring and investment choices. 'Businesses are less likely to make investments if they can't trust data about how the economy is doing,' he said. Not every part of the jobs report was deemed suspect by the Trump administration. Before Trump ordered the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, the White House rapid response social media account reposted a statement by Vice President JD Vance noting that native-born citizens were getting jobs and immigrants were not, drawing from data in the household tables in the jobs report. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also trumpeted the findings on native-born citizens, noting on Fox Business Network's 'Varney & Co.' that they are accounting 'for all of the job growth, and that's key.' During his first run for the presidency, Trump criticized the economic data as being fake only to fully embrace the positive numbers shortly after he first entered the White House in 2017. White House says transparency is a value The challenge of reliable data goes beyond economic figures to basic information on climate change and scientific research. In July, taxpayer-funded reports on the problems climate change is creating for America and its population disappeared from government websites. The White House initially said NASA would post the reports in compliance with a 1990 law, but the agency later said it would not because any legal obligations were already met by having reports submitted to Congress. The White House maintains that it has operated with complete openness, posting a picture of Trump on Monday on social media with the caption, 'The Most Transparent President in History.' In the picture, Trump had his back to the camera and was covered in shadows, visibly blocking out most of the light in front of him. ___ Associated Press writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
CNN
a few seconds ago
- CNN
Analysis: Why Trump's Texas battle over the House could end up affecting every American
Democrats might finally have learned something about Donald Trump — if they hope to beat him, they must get down in the gutter alongside him. Party leaders in powerhouse blue states on Monday vowed to emulate the president's methods to create new Democratic-friendly seats in the House of Representatives in response to his bid to carve out five new GOP districts in Texas. Their promises came as they celebrated Democratic Texas state lawmakers who suddenly became the fresh faces of the anti-Trump resistance after facing arrest warrants for fleeing the state in an exodus that ground a special legislative session called by the president's allies to a halt. This all might look like yet another twist in a generationslong struggle by both parties to gerrymander districts to get a leg up in elections. And some voters' eyes might glaze over at what seems like an internal Texas tussle. But the fight has profound national implications. In the short term, the House of Representatives — which Democrats hope to win back in midterm elections next year to rein in Trump's presidency — could be at stake. Democrats currently need a net gain of three seats to take the majority. If the Texas plan passes without a response by another state, they will need eight. That could dash their goal of imposing a clamp on Trump's runaway presidency. In the medium term, the Texas redistricting fight must be seen against the backdrop of a fraught political age. There are growing signs American democracy is fraying. Republicans will argue, correctly, that Democrats have mounted their own egregious redistricting schemes in states such as Illinois and Maryland. But the instigator of the effort to make the Texas congressional delegation even redder was a president who already has a dark record of trying to subvert the verdict of voters. Longer term, the national political fight that has erupted over Texas looks almost certain to further erode the checks and balances of democracy, however it ends. If both parties now simply go all-out in a national gerrymandering frenzy, they will produce a House of Representatives where it will be even more difficult for incumbents to lose their seats and that will make meaningful political change even harder. If nothing else, the furor demonstrates the imperative of winning power and forging transformational change before the opportunity is lost. Republicans over the last decade have built an unassailable conservative Supreme Court majority that enabled GOP redistricting efforts based on race, including in Texas. And they've elected and supported a president with an expansive and constitutionally questionable thirst for imposing his own personal power that has shattered most political norms. Most presidents would not be as blatant in Trump in trying to change the electoral battlefield. Over the same period, Democrats failed to bolster ranks of liberals on the Supreme Court — for instance, by not persuading late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire when a liberal replacement could be confirmed while the party controlled the presidency and the Senate. In 2024, Democrats initially backed an aging and unpopular President Joe Biden, despite warnings that his candidacy could open the door again to Trump and his anti-democratic project. This loss of power has been disastrous to progressive aspirations and to protecting the liberal victories of the last 50 years, including the nationwide constitutional right to abortion. Some top Democrats see the Texas redistricting showdown as a moment for their party to show more ruthlessness. 'We are at war,' New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday, alongside several exiled Texas lawmakers, warning that Democrats should forget independent redistricting panels intended to draw fairer maps that represent a complex electorate. 'The playing field has changed dramatically, and shame on us if we ignore that fact and cling tight to the vestiges of the past,' Hochul said. 'That era is over. Donald Trump eliminated that forever,' she said. California Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a plan for a mid-decade redistricting in his state to match the one underway in deep-red Texas. His proposal would come before voters in November — the latest skirmish in a long-running ideological feud between the two states. But it will only be triggered if Texas moves ahead with its own plan. Newsom said he still favored a national independent districting body, but warned that Democrats needed to respond to the GOP's hardline tactics. 'Things have changed. Facts have changed. So we must change,' Newsom said. 'We have got to think anew. We have got to act anew. And we are reacting to the change — they have triggered this response, and we are not going to roll over.' Potential 2028 Democratic primary candidates, including Newsom and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois — who has also rushed to back the Democratic Texas lawmakers — have compelling personal interests in joining the fight. In two years, candidates will be asked on a debate stage what they did in the battle over Texas. But they're also seeking to revive a national party pummeled by Trump, which lacks leadership and has left its supporters listless. Grassroots progressives have been pining for someone, anyone, to show some stomach for the fight — even though Democrats lack any power in Washington to meaningfully hurt the president. The Texas uproar also coincides with multiple examples of Trump's widening authoritarianism, following his cowing of Congress, crushing of constraints within the federal government, and co-option of the Justice Department and some intelligence services into instruments of his whims. On that score, a source told CNN on Monday that Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into Obama administration officials over the Russia investigation. Given all this, if the Democrats don't fight back now, when will they ever fight? As CNN's Eric Bradner reported Monday, the proposed new GOP maps could force two prominent Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett, into a primary against one another. They'd also merge two other seats and make two south Texas seats held by Democrats more Republican-leaning. While the Democrats made a statement by leaving Texas, their chances of ultimately prevailing seem thin, given the financial pressure of $500 daily fines for non-attendance and their interrupted livelihoods when they are away. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a key Trump ally, could call further special sessions later in the year. This is why some Democrats believe that if they can threaten Republican seats in their own states, they might convince House Speaker Mike Johnson to call off his allies in Austin. 'Perhaps the Republican members of Congress here in New York could say to their Republican colleagues in Texas — 'Hey, slow down on this because this could affect us,'' Carl Heastie, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, said. This seems a long shot, however, not least because there are considerable impediments in New York to a swift redrawing of maps. Hochul admitted that that even if everything goes smoothly, redistricting that would bypass New York's current nonpartisan commission could only be in place for the 2028 election — a lifetime away in Trump-era politics. And attempts by Democratic states to rebalance electoral maps might convince more GOP bastions to do the same. So, if an outside Texas strategy is unlikely to force the Texas Republicans to back down, why are Democrats pursuing it? This may be one of those times in politics when a party can win something by losing. Democrats might not only engage their demoralized partisans by taking the fight to Trump on Texas; they can use the battle to organize and focus their message as they grapple for traction after a grim political year. Defending democracy might be a desirable project in the abstract. But in the past, especially when Biden was warning that Trump imperiled America's 'soul,' the idea felt distant from voters infuriated by high grocery prices and the cost of housing. And impassioned warnings from Democratic leadership about how Trump would threaten democracy didn't stop his reelection. Hochul and other Democrats seemed on Monday to be reaching for a way to connect the democracy question to more immediate voter concerns through the prism of the Texas power grab. She argued that stopping such schemes was critical to charting a path back to power so Democrats could reverse Trump's policies on tariffs and deportations. That will require a toughening of the Democratic approach, one that underscores the distance traveled since former first lady Michelle Obama warned that when Republicans like Trump go low, 'we go high.' 'With all respect to the good governance groups, politics is a political process,' Hochul said, dismissing 'purity tests' that would make electoral maps fair to everyone involved through nonpartisan commissions. 'If Republicans win the legislature, they can have at it. But until then, we are in charge, and we are sick and tired of being pushed around.'
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Most ethics complaints filed against NM lawmakers resolved quietly
Aug. 4—SANTA FE — The recent internal ethics investigation into top Senate Democrat Mimi Stewart marked the first time in years that a complaint against a New Mexico lawmaker led to a public hearing. But there have been no shortage of filed complaints. With the exception of the complaint against Stewart, all other allegations of misconduct filed against lawmakers in the last five years — there have been a total of 17 — were quietly resolved without any details being publicly released, according to legislative records. Some of the complaints that date back to January 2020 were dismissed following an internal investigation, while others were informally settled or withdrawn. The recent trends have prompted some current and former legislators to say flaws in the system need fixing. Former state Sen. Mark Moores, a Republican who stepped down last year, said New Mexico's current legislative ethics system is tainted by partisan politics. "The system is working as intended, because the system was set up so leadership could still retain control," Moores said . He said the system should be changed to more closely model the congressional ethics system, which features an independent, nonpartisan office that reviews allegations of misconduct against members of Congress and staffers. The public currently lacks confidence in New Mexico's legislative ethics system, Moores added, in large part because leading legislators function as gatekeepers of sorts who determine whether complaints filed against lawmakers should move forward. "You're never going to have a fair hearing against anyone in leadership because they appoint their cronies," he said. Sen. Katy Duhigg, D-Albuquerque, said lawmakers have struggled to find the right balance between transparency and protecting themselves from possible politically-driven complaints. "I think each time we see this process used, we see areas that need improvement," said Duhigg, who chairs the Senate Rules Committee. She said she would support changes to the legislative ethics system such as simplifying the wording of ethics policies and protocols, along with mandatory mediation to try to resolve complaints involving legislators and staffers. "I think we are on the right road, but there is room for improvement," Duhigg said. A recent history of tie votes The complaint against Stewart, the Senate's president pro tem since 2021, was filed by a legislative staffer in February after the veteran lawmaker allegedly shouted at her during a heated moment during this year's 60-day legislative session. After an initial panel of lawmakers found probable cause existed to advance the complaint, a legislative ethics hearing subcommittee recommended last week the complaint against Stewart be dismissed. But the recommendation was made via a party-line 4-3 vote, with retired state Supreme Court Justice Richard Bosson siding with the subcommittee's three Senate Democrats. The three Senate Republicans appointed to the panel voted against dismissing the complaint, while maintaining that sanctions should be imposed in the case. The presence of a retired judge or attorney on the subcommittee was due to a 2022 rule change that was intended to allow for tie votes to be broken, said Randall Cherry, the Legislative Council Service's assistant director for legislative affairs. Before that change was made, several internal ethics probes stalled due to tie votes, according to legislators familiar with the investigations. Transparency issues and concerns One of the reasons the public is left in the dark about most legislative ethics investigations is the existence of confidentiality provisions in both state law and the Legislature's anti-harassment policy. Specifically, the policy stipulates that harassment complaints and documents related to any investigation shall be kept confidential, even under New Mexico's public records law. The confidentiality provision was challenged in a 2022 lawsuit filed by a lobbyist who had accused then-Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto of sexual harassment. But the lawsuit was dismissed a year later. Amanda Lavin, the legal director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said citizen complaints are generally required to be made public under a Court of Appeals ruling. She also said the open government group believes any disciplinary action taken by the Legislature against its own members should be public information. But Lavin also pointed out the Legislature is not subject to New Mexico's Open Meetings Act, and state law allows legislators to hold certain types of meetings behind closed doors. "There are a lot of things they can discuss in private and then not even have to disclose what was discussed," Lavin said. Solve the daily Crossword
