The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to enforce a ban on transgender people serving in the military, after a federal trial judge blocked the ban nationwide.
The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices dissented from the majority’s decision to halt the trial court order as litigation continues.
The high court’s brief, unexplained order on Tuesday came as a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., is poised to rule on the issue in a separate case.
In this case, U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, a George W. Bush appointee in Washington state, ruled in March that transgender plaintiffs who sued over the ban raised “serious questions going to their Equal Protection, Due Process, and First Amendment rights.” Settle said they faced “not only loss of employment, income, and reputation, but also a career dedicated to military service.”
A federal appellate panel refused to block the trial court ruling, and the administration appealed to the high court.
“In this case, the district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch’s authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote, sounding a familiar plea from the administration in seeking relief from lower court judges unduly meddling with executive power. The Supreme Court has so far agreed with the administration in some but not all cases.
Sauer said that if Settle’s nationwide halt isn’t paused while the government appeals, that would be “a period far too long for the military to be forced to maintain a policy that it has determined, in its professional judgment, to be contrary to military readiness and the Nation’s interests.” He asked the justices to at least limit the injunction to the individual plaintiffs while litigation continues. Opposing the government’s application were seven transgender service members, one transgender person who wants to join the military and a nonprofit association with transgender members who are service members or want to join. They argued to the justices that the government didn’t meet the high standard for halting a ruling pending appeal. “The record is clear and indubitable,” they wrote in opposition to the administration: “equal service by openly transgender servicemembers has improved our military’s readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion, while discharging transgender servicemembers from our Armed Forces would harm all three, as well as the public fisc.” 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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