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‘Middle Finger to Parental Rights’: SCOTUS Conservatives Scorched Over Trans Kids Ruling

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Legal experts, advocates for transgender youth, and the liberal justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are condemning SCOTUS’s 6–3 decision to uphold a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. All six conservative justices sided with the ban—some going further to disparage scientific expertise, dismiss the value of medical consensus, and signal that transgender Americans should not be granted protected class status.

Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion upholding the ban, known as SB1.

“An estimated 1.6 million Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender, meaning that their gender identity does not align with their biological sex,” Justice Roberts wrote at the opening of his opinion, acknowledging that transgender youth exist. In his footnotes he also acknowledged their use of pronouns: “We use ‘transgender boy’ to refer to an individual whose biological sex is female but who identifies as male, and ‘transgender girl’ to refer to an individual whose biological sex is male but who identifies as female.”

Approximately 25 states across the country have some form of ban on medical care for transgender youth. Those bans—including puberty blockers—likely will now stay in place, affecting more than 100,000 transgender youth (as of 2023), according to the Williams Institute.

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett took extra steps to write that “transgender status” does not constitute “suspect,” class deserving of strict scrutiny, a higher level of judicial review.

“The Equal Protection Clause does not demand heightened judicial scrutiny of laws that classify based on transgender status,” she also wrote.

Justice Clarence Thomas denigrated what he called “the expert class.”

“There are several problems with appealing and deferring to the authority of the expert class,” he wrote. Justice Thomas added, “whether ‘major medical organizations’ agree with the result of Tennessee’s democratic process is irrelevant.”

“To hold otherwise would permit elite sentiment to distort and stifle democratic debate under the guise of scientific judgment, and would reduce judges to mere “spectators . . . in construing our Constitution.”

Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent is being praised by transgender advocates and trans-supporting legal experts. And in her dissent she directly opposed Justice Barrett’s claims.

“To give meaning to our Constitution’s bedrock equal protection guarantee, this Court has long subjected to heightened judicial scrutiny any law that treats people differently based on sex,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

She said in her opinion that Tennessee’s law discriminates against transgender adolescents, and “expressly classifies on the basis of sex and transgender status.” In its ruling, the Supreme Court, Sotomayor wrote, “abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.”

“Tennessee’s ban applies no matter what the minor’s parents and doctors think, with no regard for the severity of the minor’s mental health conditions or the extent to which treatment is medically necessary for an individual child,” she noted.

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“This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with . . . sex,’ contains a sex classification,” Justice Sotomayor concluded. “Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet the majority refuses to call a spade a cspade. Instead, it obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute, all to avoid the mere possibility that a different court could strike down SB1, or categorical healthcare bans like it.”

“The Court’s willingness to do so here does irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight. It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them. Because there is no constitutional justification for that result, I dissent.”

Attorney Andrew L. Seidel labeled Sotomayor’s dissent, “Clear, concise, and brilliant.”

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, responding to the ruling, wrote: “Solidarity with trans people today, who are facing growing state oppression here and globally.”

Writer and former Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer wrote on the ruling: “The Supreme Court’s ruling prioritizes the discomfort and fear of some non-trans people over the health and wellbeing of trans youth. It disregards science and every major medical authority. It endorses the state controlling parents and doctors. Every resulting suicide is on the hands of these anti-trans justices.”

Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, responding to news of the decision, wrote: “Illinois has enshrined protections to meet this very moment. In a time of increasing overreach and hateful rhetoric, it’s more important than ever to reaffirm our commitment to the rights and dignity of the LGBTQ+ community. You have a home here always.”

Political scientist Dr. Norman Ornstein, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, declared: “In effect, the Supreme Court has given a middle finger to parental rights by accepting a Tennessee law banning gender- affirming care for youth. This is a decision that should be made within the family. They love parental rights when it fits right wing aims.

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Republicans Moving to Give Trump Something He’s Wanted Since 2019

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Claiming President Donald Trump was “wrongfully accused” when he was impeached, twice, based on “withheld” and “false” information, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is leading a move to have both impeachments expunged.

“The fact is that the Constitution doesn’t spell out what to do when you’ve wrongfully indicted somebody,” Issa told Fox News. “An impeachment is basically an indictment and it’s an indictment that you can’t really be acquitted from. If you are impeached by the House, famously where do you go to get your reputation back, is the question.”

Not only does Rep. Issa want to alter the historical record of Trump’s impeachments, it appears he wants to allege “misconduct” on the part of those who were part of the process of impeaching him. Issa added, “the very people who brought it knew was wrong.”

“More importantly,” Issa said, the process of expunging the record will “make sure that the facts and the reality that there was misconduct in the process gets a hearing.”

READ MORE: Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

Issa is sponsoring a resolution to expunge the record of the impeachments, and he already has more than 20 co-sponsors.

Fox News reports that Issa’s resolution “argues that the 2021 impeachment was rushed and procedurally flawed, noting that the House moved from introduction to passage in two days and did not conduct a full evidentiary process.”

“They impeached him for essentially an insurrection, a true high crime, and it’s false,” Issa said. Many have called the events surrounding the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol an “insurrection.”

In January, the Trump White House launched a website claiming, “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters, all while Pelosi’s own security lapses invited the chaos they later exploited to seize and consolidate power.”

Fox News notes that some legal scholars say impeachments cannot be expunged. The House can pass a resolution expressing disapproval with the impeachments, it can “annotate its records,” but “it cannot erase the historical fact of an impeachment or undo the constitutional process once it has occurred.”

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Ex-National Security Official Is Already Warning About the Next ‘Trump Pandemic’

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By many accounts, during his first term, President Donald Trump botched the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latest hantavirus outbreak has some worrying the same thing could happen again if there is another Trump pandemic.

Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff during the first Trump administration is out with a stern warning, offering three reasons why Americans “won’t survive another Trump pandemic.”

Under President Trump, the U.S. response to COVID resulted in far higher infection rates and rates of death than many other high-income nations. The Guardian in 2021 reported that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of COVID deaths.

“Trump won’t just mishandle the next global health crisis,” he’s “prepared to weaponize it,” Taylor warns.

The “worst thing” about Trump’s “first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons.”

“Trump broke the pandemic response system,” says Taylor. “And it remains broken.”

Trump threw out existing pandemic response plans, and instead convened “a hastily assembled White House ‘task force,’ made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law.”

READ MORE: Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

Congressional investigations “found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly,” says Taylor, who relays one example from his time at DHS.

“I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror,” he writes.

“It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed,” she told him.

The interagency structure remains broken to this day, and the people who were “supposed to save our lives” have been purged from the government workforce.

Calling the situation “dire,” Taylor explains the bodycount.

“Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly,” he writes. “The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.”

Going forward, those who are being replaced are political hires with less experience.

“So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice,” Taylor says, “the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists.”

It gets worse.

During the next pandemic, “Trump will be motivated by ‘revenge’ rather than ‘response,'” Taylor writes, noting that FEMA has become part of Trump’s “revenge machine.”

If you live in a blue state, you are three times less likely to receive federal disaster assistance than if you live in a red state. Citing analysis, Taylor says that out of 106 federal disaster relief requests, Republican-leaning states received 101 approvals, Democratic-leaning states only five.

Taylor warns that Trump “is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents?”

“Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely,” he writes. “You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.”

“The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.”

Which brings Taylor to his very specific warning to blue states: prepare for the next pandemic now, and prepare as if there will be no help from the federal government.

“Plan for it like the feds will be a foe,” he warns.

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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Taxpayers to Pick Up Massive Cost Overrun of Another Trump Project

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President Donald Trump promised work to resurface the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, painting it American flag blue, would cost taxpayers $1.8 million in a no-bid contract to a company that hadn’t worked on a pool at one of the president’s golf courses.

That figure has ballooned more than seven times, to $13.1 million, The New York Times reports. The Interior Department, which awarded the contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, said $6.2 million of that was from doubling the size of the contract.

According to the Trump administration, the work is being done as a no-bid contract because not doing the work would cause “serious injury” to the federal government. The Times notes that the federal government has not specified what that injury would be, but President Trump reportedly wants the pool ready for the nation’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4.

The Times adds that Interior Department spokesperson Katie Martin said the higher price “reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project — more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

The Reflecting Pool cost increase mirrors another Trump project, his White House ballroom. Originally slated to cost $200 million, the price tag now appears to be over $400 million in donated funds plus one billion in taxpayer funds for security enhancements.

Critics blasted the Reflecting Pool cost increases.

“Trump is robbing American taxpayers blind,” wrote political commentator Tara Setmayer, the CEO of the Seneca Project.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote: “No money for Medicaid.”

READ MORE: ‘Bracing for Higher Prices’: Economy Looks Bleak for Lower-Earning Americans Report Says

 

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