The Supreme Court on Friday denied a White House emergency request to partially reinstate President Biden's new Title IX rules.
The 5-4 decision upholds injunctions issued by lower courts in nearly half of the states blocking new rules that for the first time include sexual orientation and gender identity in Title IX. According to filed in the high court, the administration sought to narrow the scope of those injunctions that would prevent the implementation of gender identity rules.
Supreme Court rejects Justice Department request to partially reinstate new Title IX rules https://t.co/SQjlTeedCJ pic.twitter.com/LEeorXDmCc
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The White House argued that the injunction should not prevent enforcement of other revised elements of Title IX, such as stronger protections for pregnant students and improved retaliation and record-keeping processes, the documents said. The court's unsigned order said the government had not presented sufficient grounds to overturn lower court rulings that found the provisions at issue were intertwined with other parts of the new rules. (RELATED: Biden Administration Releases Final Rule Expanding Title IX Protections to Transgender Students)
WASHINGTON, DC – July 11: In this handout provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. President Joe Biden listens to the NASA Administrator during a preview of the first full-color images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. (Photo by Bill Ingalls – NASA via Getty Images)
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by three other liberal justices and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch. She criticized the lower court's injunction as being overly broad. “By blocking the Government from enforcing a host of regulations that Defendants have never challenged and which are clearly unrelated to Defendants' alleged harm, the lower court exceeded its power to remedy the specific harm asserted here,” she wrote in The Hill. Reported.
The ruling is not a final decision on the new Title IX rules; the ongoing case will return to a lower appeals court for further review. According to The Hill, the ongoing case follows a 2020 Supreme Court decision that established protections against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
