America's Talking - Biden’s Title IX Rewrite Threatened by New Legal Landscape

Episode Date: July 6, 2024

President Joe Biden’s attempt to re-interpret Title IX and thereby implement a sweeping LGBTQ agenda at schools around the country may be put on hold after a few key court rulings. The Biden administration’s overhaul of Title IX is set to take effect Aug. 1, but a flurry of court decisions in recent weeks may be enough for critics to stop the changes before they fully take effect. One of those cases included a win for “Moms for Liberty,” a group that successfully sued the Department of Education and obtained an order this week blocking the enforcement of the Title IX changes in several states. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to America and Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulip, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday, July 5th. The regulatory power of federal agencies took a massive hit this week when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges had the authority over federal bureaucrats to interpret federal statutes when there is a dispute over congressionally passed laws. joining me to discuss the impacts of this decision is Casey Harper, the Senate scores Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Casey, tell us about this decision.

Yeah, Dan, I mean, this is hard to overstate the importance of this decision. Of course, we talk a lot about and we live in a new cycle where it's dominated by chaos, by Trump versus Biden, by the debates, by the presidential immunity case and so many other things. But if you miss this Chevron case, you really miss something important. And it really goes back to 1984 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. And, you know, they were trying to decide what is the role of federal bureaucrats when it comes to, you know, making highly specific rules off of sometimes vague laws passed by Congress. And the Supreme Court created something called Chevron deference, which is kind of giving federal regulators the benefit of the doubt whenever they make. rule, just saying, hey, the Supreme Court ruled, you know, regulators, they know more about this issue. We're going to trust their judgment. And for the most part, you know, defer to them on how to

interpret the rules because they are the regulators. And so that's been the law of the land for a few decades now. And it's had some huge implications on the growth of the power of the executive branch. In this case in particular, there's been a lot of focus on environmental policy versus energy policy in that relationship. But it's wide-ranging. And the U.S. Supreme Court in this decision said, you know what, federal bureaucrats don't actually have that much power. And it's up to the courts to decide if the rules that are created by the federal government are actually in line with the law that was originally passed. The critics of the 1984 decision in the Chevron case largely said that it gave unelected bureaucrats, people who were not accountable to voters, wide-powered

to decide things that Congress didn't grant them the authority to. And essentially what this Supreme Court did is rolled back that 1984 decision and allowed the courts to settle disputes over law. And the wide-reaching implications are on this. It can go so much as far as, like, for example, and you wrote about that this week, Casey, but the Biden administration's changes to Title IX. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, this in some ways seems unrelated, but it's actually a perfect, you know, case of exactly what we're talking about here. So Title IX is a law that was passed, I believe in the 70s.

And the basic point of it, among other things, was to protect women's facilities, protect women's sports in K through 12 schools and colleges. And so, you know, a school couldn't have a really nice, amazing locker room for the boys football team and have no locker room for the women's softball team. I mean, they had to have some kind of, you know, parity in the facilities and having sports teams. Women had to have their own sports. You couldn't just tell the girls, well, if you want to play, play on the boys team, knowing that that wouldn't be a good experience for them and they may not even make it. They had to have separate girls teams. They had to have their own facilities. And so that was the reason Title IX was passed.

And it basically protected these categories by sex as the language it used. And so recent, and that's been the law of land for years now. And, you know, it is what it is. And now the Biden administration upon taking. power decided to reach across several agencies. This is a coordinated effort across Department of Education, USDA, other agencies to change the interpretation of the word sex in law, this decades on law, well before transgenderism or the LGBT issues were at the forefront. Did they change the word sex to mean gender identity and sexuality? And so these strong,

broad protections for women have been basically co-opted. by regulators to apply to, you know, transgender athletes, transgender bathrooms. And so schools that don't comply by August 1st and allow transgender bathrooms, allow, you know, boys who identify as girls to be on the girls swim team or whichever team they choose, they can lose their federal funding, which is really a death blow to a school and shut a whole school down. And so it's going to force widespread compliance on the LGBT issue at schools all around the country of August 1st if it's not stopped. And there have been a lot of court rulings that we can get into or not that have started to slow this down or possibly stop it. But the reason that's a good example is because Congress clearly did not mean, you know, transgender athletes when they passed that law decades ago before it was really even a issue. Right. And if Congress wanted to pass that law, they could and it would go into effect immediately. And that's kind of the court's point is if Congress wants to make that law, let Congress make it.

but federal regulators and the Department of Education can't go back decades and reinterpret the meaning of old laws to push an agenda. And that's what Chevron puts it into. So regarding Title IX and its real impact on the Chevron, the most recent Chevron decision. So there have been lawsuits filed across the country challenging the Biden administration's changes to Title IX. In many instances, or at least a few instances, courts have ruled in favor of the states saying the Biden administration has, had no authority to change this congressional passed law. Now that Chevron's been overturned, does it help the state's cases who are challenging Title IX? Yes, for sure.

I mean, and I kind of misspoke. Chevron is the older case from the 80s. Right. The Chevron, there was already other cases in the courts that were really hampering in Title IX's enforcement. But with the overturning of Chevron, they say that this is almost certainly going to go to the Supreme Court now. And with this new legal landscape, I think it's very likely that the Supreme Court will slap down this Title IX because it's really, to me, a textbook case of exactly what the concern was with Chevron and why it was overturned. because it just goes too far. This has really been a theme, Dan, of the Biden administration, really pushing the limits of

executive power to see what they can get away with. They did it with the eviction moratorium, right, during COVID, which was the courts were kind of, the Supreme Court was just kind of aghast at and said, there's no way you can do this. And they turned down. But Biden got the political points for trying. Same with the student loans. He tried twice now. Yeah, to say, to do these sweeping, like for instance, the first student loan forgiveness,

10,000s per person, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. he took an old law that was meant for veterans to get some college funding, and he applied it to basically the whole nation and to forgive their loans. And so that's a good example. Taking an old law, reinterpreting it to mean what you need it to mean as an agency to do what you want. And so that, you know, this is a pattern. This is the power of the Supreme Court has not tolerated it. And so I think that that could very well happen again and put an end to these Title IX changes here pretty soon. Casey, thank you for joining us. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.