The Supreme Court 5-4 decision It rejected an emergency request by the Biden administration to partially reinstate new Title IX rules.
Republican state attorneys general have persuaded judges to block a sweeping overhaul of Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in schools, to cover sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time.
The Biden administration has argued that those injunctions go too far and asked the Supreme Court to narrow them to primarily block the core of the issue, bans on gender identity discrimination, while allowing other changes to take effect.
The changes, which are set to take effect Aug. 1, range from accommodations for pregnant students to retaliation protections and record-keeping requirements.
“With this limited record and emergency filing, the government has not provided this court with a sufficient basis to reverse the lower court’s tentative conclusion that the three provisions it has determined to be likely unlawful have an intertwined effect with other provisions of the rule,” according to the court’s unsigned order.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s two other liberal justices and conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch in dissent, agreed with the Biden administration that the lower court’s ruling was “overbroad.”
“The lower court exceeded its authority to remedy the specific harms asserted in this case by blocking the Government from enacting a host of regulations that Defendants never challenged and that are clearly unrelated to Defendants’ alleged harms,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
The ruling is not a final decision in the various lawsuits challenging the new Title IX rules, as those cases will go back to lower appeals courts. The issue could ultimately return to the Supreme Court.
The change comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling that found employers who fire employees because of their sexual orientation or gender identity violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Biden administration has defended its Title IX changes targeting schools as consistent with Supreme Court principles, and the court’s unsigned opinion showed all nine justices unanimously agreed that it was appropriate for lower courts to block significant changes regarding gender identity at this early stage of the challenge.
But Gorsuch’s alignment with the court’s liberal wing on Friday mimics a 2020 Supreme Court decision in which Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion.
Updated 6:35 p.m.
