The Maine House, run by leftist Democrats, has just been blocked by the Supreme Court from continuing to punish a Republican lawmaker for posting a photo critical of a transgender pretender/biological male who won a pole vault competition in a female sport.
Here’s the news via NBC:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that the Maine House of Representatives cannot bar a Republican lawmaker from speaking in the chamber or voting as a result of comments she made about a transgender student athlete.
In a brief order, the high court granted an emergency request from Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby, who faced considerable blowback from a social media post in February when a transgender girl won a pole vault event in the state championship earlier this year.
The Trump administration has offered its support to Libby, with the Justice Department filing a brief in a federal appeals court. Litigation will now continue in that court.
Two of the court’s liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, disagreed with the outcome. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Libby, a critic of the state’s policy to allow transgender athletes to compete in high school sports, posted a photo of the child athlete alongside a photo of the same student competing in the boys’ event in a previous year.
The Maine House of Representatives, which is controlled by Democrats, subsequently censured Libby.
The issue before the Supreme Court was not the censure, but a separate punishment that barred Libby from speaking or voting in the House of Representatives until she apologized.
As a result, Libby was unable to properly represent her constituents, leaving them without a voice in the legislature, her lawyers argued. A group of voters joined Libby in filing suit.
They asked the Supreme Court to immediately allow her to participate in the current legislative session, which ends in June, arguing that the punishment violates the voting rights of her constituents under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Lower courts refused to intervene, saying that her claims were barred by legislative immunity.
This wasn’t a tough decision at all and should have been a unanimous decision by all nine members of the Supreme Court, but of course the two most leftist justices dissented. At its heart this is an issue of free speech, and when Libby exercised her free speech on this issue, she was punished by leftists who disagreed with her.
Thank goodness President Trump turned the Supreme Court in the right direction during his first term. Pun intended. It ain’t perfect, by a long shot, but it is much better than it was.