Attorney General Keith Ellison is suing the Trump administration over two executive orders targeting transgender children and adults, alleging among other things that they amount to the federal government “commandeering the States to carry out federal law or policy,” which the 10th Amendment protects against.
“Trump’s unconscionable attack on this small number of vulnerable children is bullying, plain and simple,” Ellison said. “I’ve been around my share of bullies in my life, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you don’t give bullies an inch. We’re not going to cave at the expense of trans kids — or any vulnerable community that needs our compassion and protection.”
The orders in question attempt to ban transgender girls from competing in women’s sports and to impose a strict governmental definition of biological sex that does not recognize transgender individuals.
Executive orders are not laws, but rather statements of administration policy. “An EO is nothing more than an interoffice memo from a boss to his underlings telling them what he wants them to do,” as Fordham law professor John Pfaff describes them.
Ellison argues that by abiding by the White House orders, Minnesota would be violating its own Human Rights Act.
The administration is threatening to withhold federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line on transgender issues. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights had begun an investigation into Minnesota over the state’s refusal to ban trans kids from school sports.
The administration has been working to dismantle the Department of Education, however, and it is unclear whether its Office of Civil Rights even has enough staff to carry out such an investigation.
The office hasn’t officially opened up a new investigation since Trump’s inauguration, according to the Department of Education website, and the newsroom of the Office of Civil Rights hasn’t issued any updates since the beginning of February.
Bondi has nevertheless continued to make vague threats in Minnesota’s direction, and Ellison’s lawsuit is a response to those actions. He has asked the federal court to declare that specific parts of the administration’s orders are unlawful and constitutional, and to prohibit the administration from enforcing them against Minnesota.
This is at least the 14th lawsuit against the Trump administration that Minnesota has filed or joined. The others include challenges to administration actions on probationary federal employees; the dismantling of the Department of Education; cuts to museum and library services; other education cuts; sweeping voting restrictions; cuts to HHS grants; cuts to clean energy funding; the “Department of Government Efficiency”; birthright citizenship; federal spending; access to the Treasury payments system; restrictions on gender-affirming care; and multiple lawsuits challenging cuts to National Institutes of Health grants.
“Sometimes countries face a moment like this — faced with a leader bent on destroying entire communities and instilling fear in those who protect them,” Ellison said. “The lessons of history tell us a leader like that doesn’t stop at one community — after he’s destroyed one, he goes after another, and another, and another.”
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