A Bad Omen?

This doesn’t bode well for us, I hope that this doesn’t foreshadow where the court is heading.

Supreme Court, for Now, Blocks Expanded Protections for Transgender Students in Some States
The order maintained halts by lower courts on federal rules prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in schools.
The New York Times
By Abbie VanSickle and Michael D. Shear
August 16, 2024

The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily continued to block Education Department rules intended to protect transgender students from discrimination based on their gender identity in several Republican states that had mounted challenges.

The emergency order allowed rulings by lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain in effect in about 10 states as litigation moves forward, maintaining a pause on new federal guidelines expanding protections for transgender students that had been enacted in nearly half the country on Aug. 1.

The order came in response to a challenge by the Biden administration, which asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a number of Republican-led states sought to overturn the new rules.

The decision was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency petitions. But all nine members of the court said that parts of the new rules — including the protections for transgender students — should not go into effect until the legal challenges are resolved.

This has me worried! Years of precedent could go out the window, even a ruling made by this court.

The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.

I am concerned that Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board will be tossed out, and the case was heard by this very court, it seems to fly in the face of the ruling. The ACLU wrote in 2021,

The Supreme Court today declined to hear Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, allowing lower court decisions in support of transgender students to stand.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit have both ruled that the school board violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause by prohibiting Grimm from using the same restrooms as other boys and forcing him to use separate restrooms.

[…]

The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.

So where is the court heading with this injunction? Why did they block the whole and not just the section in question? It doesn’t make sense. The Times article goes on to say,

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the liberal wing and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, issued a partial dissent arguing that the court should have allowed other, undisputed parts of the new regulation to go into effect immediately.

“A majority of this court leaves in place preliminary injunctions that bar the government from enforcing the entire rule — including provisions that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Those injunctions are overbroad.”

We will have to wait all the way until next June for the answer and in the meantime the injunction remains in effect.