Ignoring The Law… So What Else Is New?

The Trump administration doesn’t care what the Supreme Court ruled, they are above the law and they do whatever they want because they know that the Senate will not do their Constitutional duty.

Supreme Court ruled on a landmark LGBTQ rights case, but Justice Department has yet to enforce it
USA Today
By Kate SosinThe 19th
August 5, 2020


[…]
The Justice Department traditionally enforces new laws by issuing nonbinding guidance aimed at alerting the public and other agencies to their rights and responsibilities. Federal agencies like the Department of Labor, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Education then take those instructions and craft their own. But so far, the DOJ has not withdrawn guidance no longer in compliance with the law and issued a new one. The department did not respond to a request from The 19th to comment. 

In 2017, the DOJ argued that Title VII, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, does not cover gay or transgender people because Congress has not passed specific LGBTQ protections. The department submitted a brief to the Supreme Court last year arguing the same in the cases that ultimately secured LGBTQ workplace protections. Its 2017 memo regarding transgender workers has not been withdrawn.

“That memo should be rescinded immediately,” said LGBTQ law group Lambda Legal’s Omar Gonzalez-Pagan. 

Does anyone really think that the Trump administration will actually back down from their attacks on the trans community? Trump hates us. Period.

What Trump hates gets no reprieve, he is like a mad dog, once he sinks his teeth in you there is no letting go.

On July 16, Lambda Legal, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Women’s Law Center and other advocacy organizations sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr, urging him to direct agencies to release guidance on the law, adding that failing to do so “would undoubtedly result in needless confusion.” 

Ha! Did they really expect an answer?

Pagan [A Lambda Legal lawyer] still wants other agencies to correct what he says is now incorrect guidance. He cites a series of rollbacks of transgender protections under the Department of Education starting in 2017 that rest on the argument that sex discrimination excludes gender identity. 

Dream on, dream on.

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The Trump administration is doing everything it can to hamstring federal agencies including the EEOC that agency that enforces the federal labor laws.

EEOC proposed regulation would impede its ability to combat workplace discrimination
The Hill
By David Lopez
August 20, 2020


As our nation undergoes an historic reckoning with structural racism, a pandemic that has left many out of work and vulnerable, and a 3-year-old #MeToo Movement that has emboldened many women to come forward with complaints of sexual harassment, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), our government's chief anti-discrimination enforcement agency, has chosen to create new avenues for employers to escape accountability for discrimination.

The EEOC is the bipartisan federal agency charged with enforcing the workplace anti-discrimination laws. Created by the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, it has remained steadfast in its commitment to its mission, regardless of which political party was in charge of the executive and legislative branches. Unlike other federal agencies, whose agendas can shift depending on who occupies the White House, the EEOC has avoided capture by politics - until now.

The EEOC held a public hearing this week on a hastily-proposed rule unilaterally put forward by the agency's Trump-installed chair, Janet Dhillon, that is designed to impede the agency's ability to file lawsuits against employers found to have violated the anti-discrimination laws.

Now that a rat is in charge of the EEOC…

Unable to convince even one Supreme Court justice to adopt its view of the law, for the past five years the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other pro-business lobbyists have sought to overrule Mach Mining, through legislation or otherwise. Chair Dhillon's proposed rule would do just that. After announcing in late May that the agency was launching a 6-month "pilot program" of Chair Dhillon's own creation that imposed precisely the sort of procedural "code of conduct" on the EEOC rejected by the Supreme Court, the chair now seeks to make those requirements permanent. Only after the EEOC's sole Democrat, Commissioner Charlotte Burrows, insisted on the meeting did the chair accede to make the agency's consideration of the rule open to the public.

So even if the Department o Justice and the Department of Labor updates their policies to the Supreme Court ruling the EEOC will not do anything about discrimination in the workplace.

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The Trump administration is also ignoring the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling that allowed marriage equality back in 2015.

State Dept. fighting to deny US citizenship to gay couple's child

A federal judge ruled in June that the agency had to grant citizenship.

ABC News

By Conor Finnegan

August 20, 2020 

The State Department is appealing a federal judge's decision that it must recognize the U.S. citizenship of a young girl born via surrogate to a gay couple -- prolonging one of many legal fights over its controversial policy that was deemed unconstitutional in June.

Roee Kiviti and Adiel Kiviti of Chevy Chase, Maryland, are legally married and both U.S. citizens. Their daughter Kessem was born in Canada via a surrogate, so the State Department has argued in federal court that she is "born out of wedlock" and not entitled to birthright citizenship.

Specifically, the department's policy on "assisted reproductive technology" says, "A child born abroad to a surrogate, whose genetic parents are a U.S. citizen father and anonymous egg donor, is considered for citizenship purposes to be a person born out of wedlock."

If that seems antiquated, that's because the policy is based in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, crafted years before in vitro fertilization or legal same-sex marriage. The policy was first developed in the 1990s to be compliant with that law, although critics have questioned why the Trump administration has so vigorously defended it decades later.

In June a lower court ruled in favor of the parents so the State Department is dragging it out in court running the parents over the coals and they are not the only couple that the Trump’s administration are fighting in court.

According to Immigration Equality, Derek Mize and Jonathan Gregg, a gay couple in Atlanta, are also awaiting a ruling by a federal judge over their daughter Simone's citizenship.

The group also represents Allison Stefania and Lucas Zaccari -- a lesbian couple fighting for their daughter's citizenship. She was born to Lucas, an Italian citizen, via in vitro fertilization, so the State Department ruled she was born out of wedlock to a non-U.S. citizen, disregarding Allison's U.S. citizenship and their marriage. The couple is also awaiting a decision.