Latest news with #EqualProtection
Washington Post
4 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
Trump, DOJ threaten Calif. with legal action, fines after trans athlete's win
Days after a 16-year-old transgender athlete placed first in two events at the California state track-and-field championship, the Trump administration is threatening legal action and 'large scale' fines over the state's policy allowing trans athletes to compete in high school sports. In a letter addressed to the state's public school districts, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said on Monday that the California Interscholastic Federation violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause with its bylaw stating that all students 'should have the opportunity to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student's records.' The letter directed school districts to certify in writing by June 9 that they wouldn't follow the bylaw.
New York Times
4 days ago
- General
- New York Times
A Trump Official Threatens to Sue California Schools Over Trans Athletes
The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday threatened legal action against California public schools if they continued to allow trans athletes to compete in high school sports, calling the students' participation unconstitutional and giving the schools a week to comply. In a letter sent to public school districts in the state, Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the California Interscholastic Federation's 2013 bylaw that allowed trans athletes to compete violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and discriminated against athletes on the basis of sex. 'Scientific evidence shows that upsetting the historical status quo and forcing girls to compete against males would deprive them of athletic opportunities and benefits because of their sex,' Ms. Dhillon wrote, referring to trans girls as males. Elizabeth Sanders, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Education, said on Monday that the department was preparing to send guidance to the state's school districts on how to respond, and that it would do so on Tuesday. The Justice Department's move came two days after a trans girl won championships in two girls' events at the California state track and field meet, and less than a week after President Trump decried her inclusion in the competition, saying that he would cut federal funding to the state if it let her participate. At the meet, held over two days in Clovis, Calif., the trans girl, AB Hernandez, won the girls' high jump and triple jump, and also finished second in the long jump for Jurupa Valley High School, in what is arguably the most competitive high school meet in the nation. In a statement provided by the group TransFamily Support Services, her mother, Nereyda Hernandez, said that it was her daughter's third year of competing in sports. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Bloomberg
4 days ago
- General
- Bloomberg
Trump Administration Orders California to End Trans Athlete Rule
The US Department of Justice is pressuring California's public high school sports authority to abandon a policy allowing transgender girls to compete on women's teams, following a transgender athlete's first-place wins at the state track and field championships. In a letter to the California Interscholastic Federation, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division said the policy violates the constitution's Equal Protection Clause by 'depriving girls of athletic opportunities and benefits based solely on their biological sex.'
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Supreme Court lets transgender military service ban take effect while litigation continues
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration's request to enforce a ban on transgender people serving in the military, after a federal trial judge blocked the ban nationwide. The court's three Democratic-appointed justices dissented from the majority's decision to halt the trial court order as litigation continues. The high court's brief, unexplained order on Tuesday came as a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., is poised to rule on the issue in a separate case. In this case, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, a George W. Bush appointee in Washington state, ruled in March that transgender plaintiffs who sued over the ban raised 'serious questions going to their Equal Protection, Due Process, and First Amendment rights.' Settle said they faced 'not only loss of employment, income, and reputation, but also a career dedicated to military service.' A federal appellate panel refused to block the trial court ruling, and the administration appealed to the high court. 'In this case, the district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch's authority to determine who may serve in the Nation's armed forces,' U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote, sounding a familiar plea from the administration in seeking relief from lower court judges unduly meddling with executive power. The Supreme Court has so far agreed with the administration in some but not all cases. Sauer said that if Settle's nationwide halt isn't paused while the government appeals, that would be 'a period far too long for the military to be forced to maintain a policy that it has determined, in its professional judgment, to be contrary to military readiness and the Nation's interests.' He asked the justices to at least limit the injunction to the individual plaintiffs while litigation continues. Opposing the government's application were seven transgender service members, one transgender person who wants to join the military and a nonprofit association with transgender members who are service members or want to join. They argued to the justices that the government didn't meet the high standard for halting a ruling pending appeal. 'The record is clear and indubitable,' they wrote in opposition to the administration: 'equal service by openly transgender servicemembers has improved our military's readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, while discharging transgender servicemembers from our Armed Forces would harm all three, as well as the public fisc.' Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration's legal cases. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
One Threatened Supreme Court Precedent Ties the Fates of LGBTQ+ People and Immigrants Inextricably
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On June 15, 1982, in a narrow 5–4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Plyler v. Doe, striking down a Texas law that sought to deny public education to undocumented children. In doing so, the court affirmed that access to basic education is a vital public good—essential not only to individual development, but to the functioning of a democratic society—and that states cannot arbitrarily withhold it from children based on immigration status. While Plyler did not formally alter the tiers of judicial scrutiny, it deepened the court's engagement with this more searching form of rational basis review—particularly when evaluating laws that burdened disfavored or politically powerless groups. Today, with a Supreme Court that has shown a readiness to overturn long-settled precedent and a growing number of state legislatures openly suggesting that Plyler should be revisited, the case—and the doctrinal architecture it helped shape—is under threat. At least four states—Texas, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Oklahoma—are actively advancing measures to restrict undocumented students' access to free public education, with a fifth state—Indiana—poised to follow. These bills are part of a broader policy road map outlined in Project 2025—a blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation to reshape federal law during the second Trump term—which explicitly contemplates a legal challenge to Plyler as a mechanism for narrowing Equal Protection guarantees for immigrant students. But this isn't just a story about education or immigration. If Plyler falls, the consequences will reverberate across constitutional law, potentially unraveling the fragile protections that underpin modern LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, and more. To understand why, we need to examine a subtle, but powerful, legal concept that Plyler helped reinforce: rational basis review 'with bite.' Under traditional rational basis review—the lowest, most permissive tier of judicial scrutiny—laws are upheld so long as they are 'conceivably' related to a legitimate government interest. This form of judicial review is deeply deferential, often functioning as a judicial nod to legislative authority. But Plyler followed a different path. Rather than simply accepting Texas' justification for denying education to undocumented children, the Plyler court interrogated whether the Texas law's purported aims—budgetary savings and discouraging unauthorized immigration—actually justified the harm imposed. It concluded they did not. This more probing approach mirrored the logic the court had used a decade earlier in U.S. Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, where it struck down a law that excluded households with unrelated individuals living together from food stamps. Indeed, in reviewing the legislative history, the court found that the law's true purpose was 'to prevent so-called 'hippies' and 'hippie communes' from participating in the food stamp program.' That aim, the court held, could not justify the law, as 'a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate government interest.' What sets rational basis review with bite apart from its namesake, then, is its focus on substance over form. Courts applying this framework do not simply rubber-stamp the government's stated rationale; they examine the actual purpose and impact of the law. If the true aim is punishment, stigma, or exclusion of a disfavored group, the law is constitutionally suspect—even if it avoids triggering intermediate or strict scrutiny. This approach has become indispensable in expanding and protecting LGBTQ+ rights. In Romer v. Evans, the court used it to strike down a Colorado amendment that barred anti-discrimination protections for members of the LGBTQ+ community. In Lawrence v. Texas, it was key to invalidating laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy. And in Obergefell v. Hodges, the same logic helped support the recognition of marriage equality. These decisions didn't just rest on abstract ideals—they reflected the court's willingness to move beyond formal classifications and engage seriously with the actual purpose and impact of the laws at issue. But despite its doctrinal importance, rational basis with bite has always rested on shaky ground. As I've written elsewhere, the Supreme Court has never clearly defined when and how it applies. Its deployment has been inconsistent, and its contours remain vague. This lack of clarity makes the framework dangerously susceptible to revision or outright rejection by a court more interested in deference to ideological fellow travelers than in equality. If the decision is overturned, the result would be more than the exclusion of undocumented children from school—it would signal that laws targeting politically unpopular groups need not survive any meaningful judicial inquiry, unless a suspect classification or fundamental right is at stake. That shift would ripple across Equal Protection law, inviting states to pass legislation that once would have been struck down as constitutionally impermissible. We've already seen the playbook. In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, conservative states wasted no time pushing aggressive anti-abortion laws. But the rollback didn't stop there. Many of these same states are now advancing policies targeting trans youth, LGBTQ+ families, drag performers, and anyone who deviates from a narrow vision of identity and family. If Plyler is overturned, it could open the door to even broader legislative attacks, this time shielded by the most permissive form of judicial review that permits discriminatory laws to survive so long as any conceivable justification—no matter how speculative—can be asserted. And the stakes could not be higher. Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs explicitly invited the court to reconsider Obergefell and Lawrence, hinting at a future in which the very legal foundations of LGBTQ+ dignity and autonomy are once again up for debate. Reversing Plyler could provide the doctrinal means to follow through on that invitation—by collapsing the analytical framework that has protected so many from majoritarian overreach. Ultimately, Plyler embodies a constitutional insight as urgent today as it was in 1982: that equality is not achieved through formal neutrality alone. It requires courts to engage with the real-world consequences of laws—and to reject those that operate as tools of unjustified exclusion. If we abandon that insight now, we risk unraveling not just one case, but a generation of hard-won protections built on its logic. The question before us isn't whether the court is willing to revisit precedent. We already know the answer. The question is whether we will recognize Plyler for what it is: a keystone. And if we let it fall, we may find far more collapsing in its wake.
