The NPR Politics Podcast - The Supreme Court Avoids Ruling On Trans Rights, At Least For Now

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to wade into a major controversy over the use of bathrooms by transgender students, delivering at least a temporary victory to the trans community. But legislation across the country point to a mounting court battle in the future. Plus, the Biden administration faces criticism from climate activists.This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, and White House correspondent Scott Detrow.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Anne, and I'm in Cambridge, Maryland, and it's 5 o'clock in the morning. I'm at the starting line where my fellow triathletes and I are about to start a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and a 13.1-mile run. This podcast was recorded at 2.09 p.m. on Tuesday, June 29th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will be recovering from my half-Ironman race. Okay, enjoy the show. Oh, Anne, I hope you had a great race. That's so impressive.

That is badass. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Nina Totenberg. I cover legal affairs. And Nina, yesterday, the Supreme Court made some news by not giving their opinion and turning down a case. It was a pretty high-profile case involving a transgender teenager in a battle with his school over bathroom access. So can you remind us what this case was all about? Yeah, this case involved a young man named Gavin Grimm and his long fight against the Gloucester County,

Virginia schools, beginning with his freshman year in high school, when he identified as male and began taking male hormones. But after he was initially allowed to use the boys' bathroom, the school board passed a rule requiring transgender students to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex that they were assigned at birth. And since the case began, Grimm has graduated from high school. His case has gone up and down the federal court system twice, and the Court of Appeals has twice ruled in his favor. And now the Supreme Court has formally put an end to the case by saying, we are not going to hear the appeal from the school board. So for his case anyway, Gavin Grimm wins.

Danielle, there seems to be a bigger picture here we should talk about. I mean, this is something that you have followed as a political issue for some time now, the issue of trans rights and its role in the culture wars. We've talked about this before on the podcast, and specifically of late, the role of transgender people in sports. Yes, absolutely. This is one of the biggest culture war issues of this year and uniquely big. According to the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, there have been more than 20, as they call them, anti-LGBTQ laws passed in states around the country. A lot of those have been about sports. And in most, if not all of those cases, they have been about stopping transgender girls, that is people who

were assigned male at birth, who now identify as girls or women, from playing sports. The fear being that they might have some sort of advantage in the sporting arena. But there have been some other proposed laws as well about providing medical care, particularly to transgender youth. So, yes, there have been a lot of these. And it was a bit of a campaign issue in 2020 towards the end of the year in some lower level races. And you can definitely see that potentially being a much bigger issue in 2022. Oh, yeah. One other important political point here is that, like other culture war issues that we sometimes talk about, critical race theory is a recent one, gay couples adopting children. This is an issue that very much concerns children. And there are very important legal ramifications and reasons for that that I am not an expert on. But also that makes these very politically powerful arguments in campaigns because it allows a candidate to make the case that, hey, do you really want your child to live in a world in which X, Y, Z? And you will definitely hear candidates making those arguments going forward, as you do on many culture war issues.

Nina, can you put this in a broader legal context? Because I think, at least for the past three administrations under Presidents Obama, Trump, and now Biden, there has been this sort of back and forth over what protections the federal government should offer to transgender people. Are we just in the middle of a broader legal fight over transgender rights in the country right now? We are in the middle of it, but also the scales have been tipped somewhat. You remember last year, the Supreme Court, by a six to three vote, ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred discrimination based on sex in employment, the court ruled that that included not just gay but trans employees too. And Justice Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, wrote that opinion. So one can't tell what the Supreme Court's eventually going to do about this. And if the lower courts don't split,

they may not have to issue a ruling for some time. But for now, at least, the court slightly has tipped this towards the trans community. Do you see some parallels here between transgender rights and the fight for marriage equity and gay marriage? Because I feel like we went through years of cases involving gay rights going through the courts before we got a big landmark Supreme Court case on gay marriage. I guess I'm asking, do you feel like the Supreme Court eventually is going to have to weigh in in some major way on the rights of transgender people? Probably it will, and it probably will be inclined to ultimately to straighten out what the law is, assuming, again, that we have differing views from lower courts.

But you remember the fight for gay rights was a long time coming, and particularly for gay marriage. And it really only gathered speed when the court very definitely tipped its hand in an earlier case. And you could see the lower courts start to say, okay, we're reading the tea leaves from the Supreme Court, and we're going to say that people have the right to marry, even if it's somebody of the same sex, and we're going to strike down those laws that make that illegal.

I don't think we're there yet by any means with trans individuals, but at least the pathway has started. All right. Well, I'm confident we're going to need you back on the pod very soon to explain those decisions to us. So we're going to let you go for now. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. And we'll be right back. This message comes from NPR sponsor Hint,infused water with no calories or sweeteners. Hint water comes in over 25 flavors. The watermelon water actually tastes like watermelon.

The blackberry water tastes like blackberries. Hint is water with a touch of true fruit flavor. You can get Hint water at stores, or you can have it delivered directly to your door. When you buy two cases, you'll get a third case free and free shipping. Visit drinkhint.com and use promo code NPR at checkout. NPR's No Compromise podcast just won the Pulitzer Prize. We explore a breed of gun rights activism that's online, organized, and unwilling to budge. I'm Chris Haxel.

I'm Lisa Hagan. Check out No Compromise wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and White House correspondent Scott Dutro is here. Hey, Scott. What up? Sorry, is that okay? We're keeping it. Not much. President Biden right now is working on two major plans. One is a more traditional bipartisan infrastructure plan. And the other is what Democrats are calling a human infrastructure package full of Democratic wishlist items. But a big question in all of this is how you divide up these two plans and what should belong in each bill. And Scott, yesterday at the White House, you asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki just

that. Yeah, the setup here was that across the street from the White House, there was a decently sized protest from the Sunrise Movement, which is, of course, a pretty high profile climate advocacy group made up mostly of young people. This is a group that has worked with the Biden campaign, worked with the Biden administration, you know, sometimes criticizes them, but is in close touch with them. And yet there they were outside across the street from the White House calling Biden a coward for not putting more climate proposals in this bipartisan deal, and then eventually blockading exits to the White House in a way that affected me when I tried to leave the White House that day. But really making a stand, you know, this is pretty unusual for a group that is working

with an administration. So I asked Jen Psaki what her message was to these climate advocates who said, wait a second, I thought Joe Biden was all about climate change. Why were all of these proposals in that initial jobs plan rollout not in this deal? Psaki ticked through some of the things that are in the bipartisan deal, including money for electric vehicle incentives, electric vehicle charging stations, money to do a lot of work, finding and capping abandoned oil and gas wells, which are actually a huge emitter of greenhouse gases, things like that. And said, look, the White House needs to do a better job messaging this. That was the way she phrased it. Now, whether or not everyone is aware of all those specifics, that's incumbent on us to keep conveying that, communicating it,

listening and making sure people understand that this is a down payment. And the president will continue to advocate for, press for, work for even more in the climate as he will in the reconciliation bill and process moving forward. Scott, not to discount the things you mentioned that are in the bill, but in the scheme of climate change policy priorities, it still seems like this infrastructure package doesn't have a ton of policies to combat climate change. Absolutely. And especially when you measure it against two things. First of all, the incredibly high bar that the Biden administration has set for itself, wanting the entire energy sector on clean energy, the entire economy carbon neutral in a matter of a few decades. I mean, that would

be a massive shift. You need massive policies to do it. And that is not these. And the second thing, and the reason why Psaki's answer really frustrated a lot of these activists, is that, you know, for years now, for decades now, environmental groups have been saying it is beyond too late to start working on climate change. And right now you are looking at so many extreme weather conditions, this massive horrific heat wave in the northwest, the wildfire season that's already begun, last year's hurricane season, which was record setting. And they're saying, you know, down payments, piecemeal chipping away at it. It's too late for that. They want to see a lot more done. Of course, the story that we talk about in so many ways, shapes and forms on this podcast

every single day is that Democrats are trying to get as much done as they can. But in a 50-50 Senate, that takes a lot of negotiating and a lot of time. Way back earlier this year, you'll recall we talked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the Green New Deal architects, a representative from New York, a Democrat, who said, look, we want $10 trillion over 10 years in terms of climate. That is something that climate activists, that's a lot, I know. But that is something that climate activists have long said, that look, yes, it's a lot, but that is what is necessary. Now, of course, Joe Biden did not propose that. He initially proposed two trillion, I believe, over eight years. And you'll recall that what she said, what other climate activists said was, OK, look, that is nowhere near enough.

On the other hand, we feel that that shows that we have moved the conversation. There were some climate activists who were pleasantly surprised, at least by that. Now, this, I believe we're at what, somewhere around one trillion dollars like that. This is even smaller. And it doesn't include some of those things that Scott mentioned. Some of those activists wanted a thing called the Civilian Climate Corps, which would be a sort of New Deal style jobs plan. Biden had proposed a small one. That seems to be gone. A renewable electricity standard is gone. Like there is a lot of just sort of ratcheting down of wins for climate activists. And I think it's really fair to say.

But if the expectations have not been met, does that just increase the pressure now on Democrats to deliver in this second budget reconciliation package that they plan on moving on, and of which many leading Democrats are saying that climate change should be a driving issue in this second bill? Yeah, that's definitely the case. And I was talking to one higher profile environmental advocate, and he was saying, look, we're basically at the exact same point we were in mid-March when the jobs plan was first released. And everyone was talking about all of these really aggressive policies Biden was proposing. And a lot of these groups were saying right off the bat, this needs to be done in reconciliation. Now we're about to hit July and they're saying, hey, great policies. They need to be done in reconciliation.

But the important thing to remember here is the reason that these bipartisan negotiations dragged out so long and went through so many different iterations is Democrats need them in order to get the votes of that handful of moderate Senate Democrats who just don't want to vote for a party line only thing unless they have exhausted every single means. Right. And on top of that, we've talked all about climate change, but the rest of what would be in that bill is, quote unquote, human infrastructure. Yeah. Also really big deal legislation. Right. We're talking about tacking something big onto something else that's really big and not not just price tag wise, but politically wise, to coin a phrase. It's something that many Democrats have advocated for, you know, both on the presidential campaign trail and on the congressional campaign trail. But one thing that I do wonder is once you tack climate onto that, of course, there are plenty of Democrats who advocate for both. But I don't know, if you're a more moderate Democrat, does the price tag of putting all this together

eventually spook you? Does one crowd out the other? This is just something to watch for. All right. I think that's a wrap for us for today, but we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.