Another radical left-wing policy the Biden regime is attempting to impose on states has been blocked by a federal judge in Tennessee.
U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr., a Trump appointee, ruled on Friday that the administration could not force states to allow transgender students to play on sports teams of the gender they identify with.
Atchley sided with 20 state attorneys general who filed suit against the regime in August 2021, according to the Associated Press, arguing that a pair of federal agencies, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Education, were exceeding their authority mandated by Congress for writing new guidelines that ran afoul of existing or future state laws addressing the issue.
The Daily Wire adds:
In addition to affecting transgender athletes, the Biden administration policy would have allowed individuals who identify as transgender to enter locker rooms and use bathrooms of the opposite biological sex.
In June 2021, DOE said that discrimination based on their gender identity would be a violation of Title IX. The EEOC also issued new guidance for private businesses. Many of these states represented in the lawsuit had crafted laws that ran afoul of those federal policies and argued that the court needed to issue a temporary injunction on the federal guidance until their lawsuit could make its way through the system.
“As demonstrated above, the harm alleged by Plaintiff States is already occurring — their sovereign power to enforce their own legal code is hampered by the issuance of Defendants’ guidance and they face substantial pressure to change their state laws as a result,” Atchley wrote in his Friday decision.
Tennesee Attorney General Herbert Slatery led the lawsuit, arguing that the DOE’s and EEOC’s justification for issuing the guidance stemmed from a faulty interpretation of Bostock v. Clayton County, which declared it discriminatory for a private business to hire or fire someone based on their gender identity or sexual orientation under Title VII.
“These agencies also have misconstrued the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision by claiming its prohibition of discrimination applies to locker rooms, showers, and bathrooms under Title IX and Title VII and biological men who identify as women competing in women’s sports, when the Supreme Court specifically said it was not deciding those issues in Bostock,” Slatery argued in August 2021 lawsuit, according to a Courthouse News report at the time.
The 20 attorneys general argued that the federal agencies were “usurping authority that properly belongs to Congress, the States, and the people and to eliminate the nationwide confusion and upheaval that the agencies’ recent guidance has inflicted on States and other regulated entities.”
Before the injunction was issued, the Education Department could have imposed several sanctions on schools and colleges that failed to comply with the transgender guidance. And while the current injunction remains in place for now, ultimately, the attorneys general want federal courts to declare that the policies are “invalid and unlawful and to prohibit their enforcement.”
The Biden regime has suffered several legal setbacks regarding far-left policies the White House has attempted to impose.
Last month, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to cut so-called greenhouse gases in order to bring about a transition away from coal energy because Congress never specifically granted EPA that authority.
