In this edition of Ballotpedia's Beyond the Headlines, the Ballotpedia team reviews the U.S. Supreme Court's 2021-2022 term, including accepted cases, upcoming argument sessions, rulings of the court, and some important statistical data.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Start your day right!
Get latest updates and insights delivered to your inbox.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Have 25 million undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. and stayed during the Biden-Harris administration?
Sep 09, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by Wisconsin Watch. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Have 25 million undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. and stayed during the Biden-Harris administration?
No.
Authorities estimate the number of undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. during the Biden-Harris administration and remained at far less than the 25 million that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance claimed.
Vance said Aug. 28, 2024, in De Pere, Wis.:
"Kamala Harris let in 25 million illegal aliens ... the 25 million people who are here in this country illegally."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 10 million migrant encounters — one person one or more times — from February 2021 through July 2024.
However, millions were turned away, returned or deported.
The nonprofit Migration Policy Institute estimates there were 6 million entries between January 2021 and April 2024.
Customs and Border Protection also estimated about 2 million “got-aways” — border crossers who evaded authorities — 385,707 in 2021, 737,244 in 2022, and 694,685 in 2023.
Vance's spokesperson cited conservative media reports, including one saying there may have been 1 million got-aways in one year.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
Sources
WLUK-TV FOX 11 JD Vance rallies voters in Wisconsin
Customs and Border Protection Nationwide Encounters
News release Chairman Green for RealClearPolitics: No, Biden and Harris’ Border Crisis Is Not Over
USA Today No, 51M 'illegals' have not entered US under Biden, Harris | Fact check
PolitiFact There aren’t 20 million to 30 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally, as Sen. Marco Rubio claimed
Google Docs Migration Policy Institute Aug. 29, 2024
Department of Homeland Security Fiscal Year 2025 Congressional Justification
Department of Homeland Security Fiscal Year 2024 Congressional Justification
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Don’t Miss Out
Get latest updates and insights delivered to your inbox.
Project 2025: How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
Sep 06, 2024
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Willie Carver has been a teacher in Kentucky since 2007, now working with college students. For over two years, he has worked with the American Federation of Teachers’ National LGBTQ+ Task Force, an advocacy arm of the influential labor union created to counter the rise and repression brought by anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
One of the country’s most draconian anti-trans measures became law in Carver’s home state last March. The law has required teachers to put politics before the wellbeing of their own students and reshaped how students see and treat each other. It bans them from being taught about gender identity or sexual orientation, using restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity and learning about human sexuality. The law also made gender-affirming care illegal for trans youth.
In October, after the new school semester started, Carver noticed a woman staring at him as he walked off stage at a Pride event in rural Kentucky after talking about issues faced by LGBTQ+ educators and students. He could tell she needed to talk.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
“Her voice was shaky,” he recalled. “She cried as she spoke to me.”
The woman, a fourth-grade teacher, told Carver about one of her students, a boy who was being bullied because he has two moms. His tormentors — two boys about the same age — lobbed slurs at him and chased him around. The teacher intervened, saying to all her students, “In this classroom, all families get treated with respect.”
And that’s when her problems started. Carver said the school administration reprimanded the teacher, telling her that she had broken state law by talking about gender and doing it in a way that infringed on the political choices of the boys’ families. The teacher became terrified of the prospect of losing her job and torn about what to do. If she tried to save the student from being bullied, she could endanger her own child by losing access to her income and their health insurance.
“She was trembling by the end of the story,” Carver said.
Kentucky teachers want to do the right thing, but they are “desperately scared,” he said. They are exhausted and afraid of repercussions if they speak out. Some have chosen to leave Kentucky, including the state’s previous education commissioner, Jason Glass, who decided to resign last September instead of enforcing the state’s new law.
After watching what has happened in his own state, Carver was not surprised to hear that conservative forces are pushing a vision and version of the country where trans-affirming teachers could be labeled as sex offenders.
As he sees it, war has been declared on LGBTQ+ people — and the idea of protecting children is a linchpin for that war.
“What they want is a very clearly defined society in which straight White men are on top, men earn money and women are subservient,” Carver said. That society is built on strict definitions of marriage, family, femininity and masculinity — a binary lens that excludes many Americans and creates a divisive narrative that ascribes value to people based on gender.
This vision is articulated in a 920-page policy blueprint known as Project 2025. Created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in the nation’s capital, it lays out a far-right Christian vision for Donald Trump’s second term in the White House if he wins in November and draws on the same harmful rhetoric that states have written into anti-transgender legislation.
Though these laws target LGBTQ+ communities, advocates say that their reach and harm impact all families because of the exclusionary version of country they embrace.
“No one fits the very narrow view of what a person is supposed to be under Project 2025,” Carver said.
Project 2025 equates being transgender — or adopting “transgender ideology” — to pornography and declares that it should be outlawed. Under this plan, the federal government would enforce sex discrimination laws on the “biological binary meaning of sex,” and educators and public librarians who spread the concept of being transgender would be registered as sex offenders. The plan says that children should be “raised by their biological fathers and mothers who conceive them,” unless those biological parents are found unfit by a court.
These ideas have drawn national attention for their far-reaching scope, but they didn’t appear out of thin air. They all have roots in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation that conservative lobbying groups and think tanks have supported for years, like the law that took effect in Kentucky. Contributors to Project 2025 include senior staff from Alliance Defending Freedom, whose lawyers have helped write anti-transgender legislation in a number of states and defended those laws in court. Members of the conservative groups Family Research Council and the American Principles Project, which have similarly pushed anti-LGBTQ+ bills and anti-trans rhetoric, have served on the Project 2025 advisory board.
“The content of Project 2025 has been the goal of the people pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation at the state level and across the country. It's been their goal all along,” said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.
Democrats have pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of a Republican party gone off the rails. The project’s director, who once had a role in the Trump administration, recently stepped down after Trump and his campaign publicly disavowed Project 2025. Despite the Trump campaign’s insistence that Project 2025 does not speak for the former president, many of Trump’s own proposals align with those laid out by the Heritage Foundation, as The Washington Post reported. This includes policies targeting LGBTQ+ Americans.
“It is a big escalation of attempts that we’ve seen on the state level, and they’re trying to find ways to nationalize this and to continue to take this to the extreme,” said Julie Millican, the vice president of progressive research group Media Matters. Republicans have been most effective at implementing anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation in schools, she said, in part by framing the issue around “parental rights.”
To Carver, requiring that educators who spread “transgender ideology” are classified as sex offenders would impact all families and students, if anything because of the simple fact that broad policies with unclear language and enforcement risk impacting everyone. In the face of such a vague policy, teachers would back away from any topic that might be tangentially related to “transgender ideology,” he said.
“The real effect is that you’re going to have teachers in the classroom who start maintaining these hyper-rigid forms of gender that are being enforced on everyone,” he said. “Even if you are the politically conservative family that has a boy who’s a little sensitive, you’re going to start seeing that boy criticized in class for his sensitivity.”
States have tried — and failed — to define “male” and “female” based on reproductive organs and to base definitions of “mother” and “father” on rigid views of gender defined by “biological sex.” In many ways, these attempts were early previews for Project 2025 proposals, drawing on the same narrow definition of sex that underlines the majority of anti-trans state policy.
For example, in Missouri, a failed state law introduced this year would have placed teachers and school counselors on the sex offender registry for providing any support to a child regarding their social transition. When someone socially transitions, they start using a new name and new pronouns, or they might change outfits or hairstyles to better match their gender expression or identity. Although this is a standard part of gender transition for many transgender people, cisgender people also express themselves in similar ways as they explore their own identities.
Under Project 2025, narrow definitions of sex and parenthood would become the official stance of the federal government.
The plan states that policies supporting single mothers and LGBTQ+ equity should be replaced with those “that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families,” the authors write — and it lays out specific ideas of how American families should have kids. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate with ties to the Heritage Foundation's president, Kevin D. Roberts, has shared similar views publicly.
A year before he was elected to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate, Vance suggested that parents should have a greater ability to use their voice in the country’s democracy than people without kids, by being able to cast more votes. During his campaign, he also pledged to oppose federal protections for same-sex married couples.
It’s a vision that dovetails into a Project 2025 proposal to ban three-parent embryo research. (Mitochondrial replacement therapy, a controversial procedure that treats infertility via a three-parent embryo when conventional in vitro fertilization has failed, is already effectively banned in the United States due to FDA requirements, but is legal in the United Kingdom and a few other countries). Although the document does not suggest restricting IVF, it does suggest that adults trying to conceive or have children in alternative wayswould be subject to higher scrutiny by the federal government.
“In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies,” write the authors, using the abbreviation for the federal Department of Health and Human Services, “should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.”
At least 17 states have laws in place that protect parents who have children through in vitro fertilization or through the use of egg or sperm donors, regardless of their marital status, according to the Movement Advancement Project. These laws ensure that such parents are legally recognized. Casey sees Project 2025as a threat to these protections for same-sex couples and heterosexual couples who rely on assisted reproductive technology.
“I think it’s not only a threat to assisted reproduction statutes, I think it’s a threat to marriage equality itself, to basically any pathway to parental recognition for people who are not in Project 2025’s vision of a heterosexual, nuclear, married family,” Casey said. “So it’s not just about LGBTQ+ people.”
As Project 2025 purports to protect families, it also lays out familiar anti-trans policies in an effort to protect children from being exposed to LGBTQ+ people. This playbook that has been carried out in states as politicians portray gender-affirming care as the mutilation and forced sterilization of children. This kind of anti-trans rhetoric is an entry point to restrict freedoms elsewhere, Millican said. It capitalizes on a lack of public knowledge about trans people in order to garner support for the government restricting what kind of medical care people can have.
Part of that effort to limit children’s exposure to LGBTQ+ identities has been taking place online. Within the last several years, at least two states, Florida and Iowa, removed online content geared towards the safety of LGBTQ+ and transgender students with little to no explanation.
Project 2025 calls for the closure of telecommunications and technology firms that spread the concept of being transgender. To Casey, the proposal to restrict online information about trans identity is related to the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Major national LGBTQ+ rights groups now support the revised legislation, but when it was first introduced, the Heritage Foundation appeared to endorse the bill in a commentary piece falsely claiming that big tech turns children trans.
Last year, two West Virginia bills aimed to protect minors from “indecent displays of a sexually explicit nature” — including “transgender exposure.” The bills failed to pass in 2023 and again this year. Many other states have tried to ban drag performances in the name of protecting children from sexually explicit content, but West Virginia stands out for making the effects of its proposed law on transgender people especially clear. Now,Project 2025 declares that “transgender ideology” should be labeled as pornography and outlawed.
In Kentucky, Carver, who advises the American Federation of Teachers on the needs of LGBTQ+ educators and students, has seen how anti-LGBTQ+ laws that pledge to protect children from harm actually enable it. The story he heard from the fellow teacher at the Pride event is one example of how the state has instituted bullying as a formal policy.
Teachers in his state are terrified, he said — and looking for answers in situations that have become impossible to navigate.
“There is no easy way out of this other than better laws. There’s no easy way out of this other than protections for teachers, who try to keep students safe,” he said.
Originally published by The 19th.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
Keep ReadingShow less
Project 2025: The Schedule F threat to democracy
Aug 27, 2024
Barker is a program officer at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the lead editor of the foundation’s blog series “From Many, We.”
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
One small change to the rules classifying federal employees could significantly advance the U.S. toward authoritarianism. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to staff the government with far-right movement activists, hinges on an executive order that could be implemented with surprising ease.
While much attention has been paid to the initiative’s extremist policy agenda, a rules change called Schedule F would massively expand presidential power and fundamentally change the character of the federal government. Understanding the Schedule F threat is critical to stopping it.
What is Schedule F?
Schedule F is an executive order that former President Donald Trump issued in October 2020 to remove the employment protections that prevent career government employees from being replaced for partisan reasons. It was rescinded by President Joe Biden as soon as he took office in January 2021. If Schedule F were to be reinstated, the president would be virtually free to fire dedicated civil servants and replace them with loyalists and ideologues.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
Although the Project 2025 website does not specifically refer to Schedule F, this obscure rule change is essentially synonymous with the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to install as many as 50,000 conservative movement activists in the government. The reinstatement of Schedule F on “day one” is also the first step of Trump’s campaign platform, Agenda47, under which he plans to “dismantle the deep state.”
How does Schedule F threaten democracy?
By politicizing the civil service, Schedule F could have numerous, far-reaching implications for American democracy.
- Abuse of power. Under Schedule F, presidents would be free to reward cronies and even family members with jobs or use law enforcement agencies to punish enemies and shut down protests, creating endless opportunities for corruption. Independent agencies that currently provide oversight and accountability, such as the Department of Justice, would be rendered useless.
- Expansion of executive power. Schedule F, which was itself issued by executive order rather than legislation, would enable the president to effectively make policy without Congress. By invoking Schedule F, a president could also refuse to enforce existing legislation. The plan to expand executive power is informed by the “unitary executive theory,” which essentially removes any limits to presidential authority and is championed by conservative legal scholars.
- A chilling effect. In a climate where any expression contrary to the president’s ideology could result in termination, government employees would be strongly discouraged from speaking out. Agencies obligated to tell the truth to the American people could be incentivized to suppress the truth and spread misinformation.
- Trust in government. Trust in government is already historically low. By further politicizing the government and creating chaos within it, Schedule F could contribute to further polarization and mistrust, both of which could lead to further democratic backsliding.
According to scholar Don Moynihan, “Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883.” Schedule F demands urgent attention from every pro-democracy citizen and organization. Now is the time to raise awareness of this critical threat to American democracy.
Schedule F Resources
- Protect Democracy distinguishes Schedule F from legitimate reform efforts.
- Leading policy scholars and former government executives have signed the Working Group to Protect and Reform the US Civil Service Statement voicing their concerns.
- Schedule F would have a significant impact on government performance and accountability, according to Moynihan.
- Finally, Moynihan’s short paper provides a more detailed overview of Schedule F and its intellectual underpinnings.
This article was initially published by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
Keep ReadingShow less
Congress must get serious about its capacity or cede power to courts
Aug 21, 2024
Swift is director of government capacity at POPVOX Foundation.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down a cornerstone of administrative law known as the Chevron doctrine represents a seismic shift in the balance of power between the three branches of government.
After 40 years of relying on federal agencies to interpret legislative ambiguities when implementing regulations, it’s now up to courts to discern congressional intent. The Supreme Court did not “return” power to Congress, but it did put the onus on an under-resourced legislative branch to be much more clear in writing laws. If Congress fails to exercise its lawmaking power, it will cede power to the judiciary.
As the “first branch,” Congress must now reassess its ability to fulfill this increased responsibility effectively. A recent House hearing highlighted the urgency of this issue: Witnesses called for Congress to increase its resources to ensure that lawmakers can respond to the needs of constituents, engage in effective lawmaking and maintain robust oversight.
Even with a spotlight on its diminished capacity, the House began summer recess early after failing to pass its latest legislative branch appropriations bill, underscoring the difficulty in securing the necessary funding to strengthen congressional operations. Provisions to increase funding for member and staff salaries should not be controversial, but are typically dead on arrival, leading to chronic underfunding and a congressional “brain drain” that has crippled the institution.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
After decades of underinvestment, Congress must rebuild its workforce and equip its employees with the tools they need. The legislative branch operates with roughly 1/120th of the resources of the executive branch. The legislative branch has only 31,000 employees across the House, Senate and support agencies with an annual budget of $7 billion, while the executive branch employs 2.97 million individuals and operates with trillions of dollars annually. Funding for congressional operations has not kept pace with other increases in government spending, causing further imbalances and resource constraints. Legislative branch appropriations have increased only 50 percent from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2022 while non-defense discretionary spending grew by over 90 percent in the same period. And most increases in the legislative branch budget went to maintaining buildings and policing the Capitol rather than enhancing legislative capacity.
This constrained funding has taken a toll on the institution and its capacity. From 2011 to 2021, House staff salaries were effectively cut 20 percent when adjusting for inflation while the cost of living in the nation's capital significantly increased. And since the original Chevron decision in the 1980s, Congress has seen a 41 percent reduction in House committee staff and a 25 percent downsizing in critical support offices like the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office.
This decades-long lack of investment has also coincided with an increase in legislative activity and oversight. The number of legislative drafting requests to the House Office of Legislative Counsel has surged by 76 percent since the 115th Congress, while the number of proposed amendments has increased by 39 percent. Despite this growing workload, the Office of Legislative Counsel's operating budget has increased by only 17 percent when adjusted for inflation.
Congress must build on recent modernization efforts to enhance its capacity and reassert its legislative authority. To provide stability, Congress could mandate that annual legislative branch appropriations increase proportionally with non-defense discretionary spending each fiscal year. Implementing this policy beginning in fiscal 2025 would tie legislative funding growth to the overall growth in federal discretionary budgets. Excluding the Capitol Police funding from this proportional growth policy would account for its unique budget needs.
This approach would prevent legislative capacity from lagging and enable investments in staff, technology, operations and infrastructure to support congressional duties. Stable funding would allow congressional offices and agencies to better project budgets over the long term and — most importantly — fortify the first branch of government’s ability to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities.
The overturning of Chevron is a wakeup call for a Congress that has often found it difficult to invest in itself or hold its constitutional ground. The ball is on Congress’ court, but if lawmakers don’t step up, it will be the courts that run the game.
Keep ReadingShow less
Bill of the month: Redefining 'sex-based discrimination'
Aug 20, 2024
Rogers is the “data wrangler” at BillTrack50. He previously worked on policy in several government departments.
This month IssueVoter and BillTrack50 take a look at joint resolution that would disapprove of and disapply a rule from April 2024 that redefined the term “sex-based discrimination” to include sexual harassment, parental status or gender identity as it relates to Title IX regulations for educational programs receiving federal funding.
To understand the impact of this resolution, introduced by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), let's look at some of the background.
Title IX: A history
The term refers to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. It states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
Title IX applies to schools, local and state educational agencies, and other institutions that receive federal financial assistance from the Department of Education. These recipients include approximately 17,600 local school districts, over 5,000 postsecondary institutions, charter schools, for-profit schools, libraries and museums. Also included are vocational rehabilitation agencies and education agencies of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.
While Title IX itself has remained constant, given its very broad brush wording there are accompanying rules that interpret what it actually means in different contexts, and those rules have been subject to changes and redefinitions over the years. Initially, Title IX was used to expand access to schools and colleges, and it required that support for female-dedicated athletics programs equal that of male-dedicated programs.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter
A major expansion of its remit began in 1992, when its protections were interpreted to cover sexual harassment and sexual assault. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Education issued guidance explaining that transgender students are protected from sex discrimination under Title IX, and should be treated consistent with their gender identity in academic life. The Trump administration later began rolling back these protections. In 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos withdrew the guidance on gender identity and in 2018 announced that Title IX did not allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their gender identities. In 2020, the Trump administration went further and contended that the rights of cisgender women athletes were infringed upon by transgender women.
The Biden administration attempted to reinstate protections for transgender students with the Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation in January 2021 and the Executive Order on Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity in March 2021, though implementation was limited in a number of red states.
In April 2024 the Department of Education issued yet more guidance, called Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs or Activities Receiving Federal Financial Assistance. This is the rule the joint resolution seeks to disapply. The new rule, which took effect Aug. 1, represents a significant redefinition of Title IX. It clarifies that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity. It also makes changes to simplify how complaints are handled and has a new definition for sex-based harassment that includes a definition for hostile environment harassment.
The new rule ‘only hurts women and girls’
Proponents of H.J.Res 165 claim the rule redefines "sex" and takes away rights from women and girls. They focus on the possible implications of the reintroduction of gender identity and how that could impact sport and the safety of women and girls. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), in her own executive order, claims it is "a plainly ridiculous change that will lead to males unfairly competing in women’s sports; receiving access to women’s and girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and private spaces; and competing for women’s scholarships."
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) states, "It is a backward rule that only hurts women and girls, by stripping away opportunities and rights they have enjoyed for decades." They both argue that the new rule actually undermines Title IX and is part of a left-wing, radical gender ideology that ignores biological reality and will both remove female-only spaces such as locker rooms and bathrooms and also allow “biological males” to compete in women's sports. This is unfair, they say, and will leave women and girls vulnerable to all manner of threats.
The rule will restore and strengthen essential protections’
Opponents of the resolution claim that the new rule is essential to creating safe school environments for all by combating sex-based discrimination and harassment.
"After Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos took an axe to the Title IX rule and went out of their way to gut enforcement of protections for survivors of sexual assault, the Biden administration’s rule will restore and strengthen essential protections for survivors and make sure schools don’t get away with silencing students and sweeping sexual assault under the rug. At a time when we’re seeing an alarming rise in violence against transgender people, this rule explicitly clarifies that Title IX protects LGBTQ+ students and employees from unfair treatment and discrimination." Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, called on schools to implement the new rule now: "School administrators should take note and immediately act to implement anti-bias and anti-bullying and harassment programs that ensure misgendering stops, that cruelty against LGBTQ+ students ends and that every student has access to an education free of discrimination."
Robinson noted that numerous courts that have found discrimination on the basis of sex includes sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2020 the Supreme Court found in Bostock v. Clayton County that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination because of sexuality or gender identity. This has far-reaching implications for other areas of the law, and legal scholars have argued that this ruling also ensures similar protections for students through Title IX.
Will the resolution pass?
On July 11, H.J.Res 165 passed the House, 210-205, with the vote split exactly along party lines. It's likely to face a rocky road in the Senate and is unlikely to be called for debate. And President Joe Biden would be sure to veto it should it make its way to his desk. But the resolution is much more about setting battle lines for the upcoming election, with Republicans wanting to make transgender rights an issue as part of the ongoing culture wars.
It is certainly an emotive issue, as the recent furor over female boxer Imane Khelif in the Paris Olympics demonstrates. Khelif was disqualified from competing by the International Boxing Association in 2023 after she defeated the only Russian boxer in a competition, over claims she failed an unspecified gender test. She has called this a conspiracy, given the IBA president is a Russian and reportedly an acquaintance of Vladimir Putin.
The International Olympic Committee rejected the ban and allowed her to compete in Paris, which sparked a storm of false allegations and abuse regarding her gender, claiming that she was in fact transgender or intersex. Khelif was born a woman and has always competed as a woman and has been strongly defended by the IOC. Politicians around the world seized on the case, including ex-President Trump. “I will keep men out of women’s sports!” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, in all caps.
Project 2025
Looking ahead, Title IX features prominently in the conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, a playbook for the next Trump presidency should he win in November. The document sets out that the Biden rule should be “reviewed,” including removing all the data-gathering requirements that help in monitoring such things as proportions of males and females engaging in different sports. It then recommends rolling back the rules to the Trump/DeVos era and redefining "sex" to mean biological sex at birth. It also seeks to “restore due process” for those accused of sexual misconduct by removing the changes that make it easier for complaints to be brought.
Regardless of the success of H.J.Res 165, political wrangling over gender identity isn't going away any time soon.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More