The Supreme Court has granted emergency relief to a GOP lawmaker in Maine who was barred from speaking or voting on the state House floor until she apologized for her viral social media post negatively highlighting a transgender student-athlete. Rep. Laurel Libby instead went to court, and the justices sided with her Tuesday as litigation in her appeal continues.
The high court’s intervention prompted dissent from two of its three Democratic appointees, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Sotomayor simply noted she would’ve denied Libby’s application, while Jackson went further with a five-page dissent lamenting what she called the majority’s “watering down of our Court’s standards for granting emergency relief,” which she called an “unfortunate development.” The Biden appointee wrote that whether Libby’s punishment violated her rights or those of her constituents “raises many difficult questions” but added that emergency relief is inappropriate in the absence of binding precedent answering those questions.
The majority didn’t explain why it sided with Libby, which isn’t unusual for the court’s actions on the so-called shadow docket.
The majority didn’t explain why it sided with Libby, which isn’t unusual for the court’s actions on the so-called shadow docket. The matter is still being litigated and could come back to the justices for a fuller airing, but the high court’s injunction in Libby’s favor will stay in place in the meantime. If her case comes back to the justices after being decided in the appeals court, Tuesday’s order doesn’t guarantee the justices will side with her again, but it could at least show that a majority of the court is broadly sympathetic to her appeal.
The emergency application the justices granted Tuesday came from Libby and several of her constituents. “Libby and her district had no vote on the State’s $11 billion budget, had no vote on a proposed constitutional amendment, and will have no vote on hundreds more proposed laws including — most ironically — whether Maine should change its current policy of requiring girls to compete alongside transgender athletes,” they wrote in their application.
Calling the action against Libby unprecedented, they told the justices that they wanted an injunction pending appeal requiring the House clerk to count her votes. “That interim relief simply restores the status quo of equal representation, bringing the Maine House back into conformity with every other State and Congress,” they wrote. Opposing emergency relief, the state argued that it’s the high court’s intervention that would be unprecedented. Representing the House speaker and clerk, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office called Libby’s injury “self-inflicted.” He recounted that after the lawmaker “targeted a Maine high-school student on social media, she was found by a majority of her fellow Maine House members to have breached Maine’s Legislative Code of Ethics and was censured.” Frey said Libby didn’t have to recant her views but only to apologize, adding that she “has steadfastly refused to comply with this modest punishment, which is designed to restore the integrity and reputation of the body.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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