The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Maine legislators to temporarily restore the voting power of a state lawmaker after she had been censured for a social media post that criticized transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ sports.
The order was unsigned and did not provide the court’s reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. No vote count was listed, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted she would have denied the application, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent.
The court order provided no further explanation on next steps, but the legislator, State Representative Laurel Libby, had asked in her application to immediately be allowed to participate in the current legislative session, which ends in June.
Lawmakers had censured Ms. Libby, a Republican from Auburn, in February after she wrote a Facebook post criticizing the participation of a transgender athlete who had won a high school pole-vaulting competition. Ms. Libby included the name and photos of the student in the post, which went viral.
The formal reprimand of Ms. Libby prevented her from voting or speaking on the House floor until she apologized for the post. Lawmakers, in a party-line vote, had also found her in violation of the state’s Legislative Code of Ethics, which includes a provision asserting that a legislator is “entrusted with the security, safety, health, prosperity, respect and general well-being of those the legislator serves and with whom the legislator serves.”
Ms. Libby filed a lawsuit on March 11 in federal court in Maine, suing the House speaker, Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat. She claimed that her punishment violated the Constitution by stripping “a duly elected Republican member” of the “right to speak and vote on the House floor.”
The dispute between state officials has taken on greater significance against the backdrop of a national argument over transgender rights.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Libby argued that preventing her from voting disenfranchised “the 9,000 Mainers in her district.” She also alleged that the punishment was “retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern.”
Ms. Libby also argued that as a mother of five children, three of them girls, she had been “a staunch advocate of protecting the rights of Maine girls in athletics.”
In April, a federal trial judge, Melissa R. DuBose, rejected Ms. Libby’s request for a temporary block on the punishment while the court case proceeded.
Ms. Libby swiftly appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The court denied her request on April 25 for a temporary pause on the punishment.
She then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court on April 28. The application was assigned to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency filings from the First Circuit.
In her filing, Ms. Libby argued that the case presented “a true emergency.” Her lawyers had asked the court to take action by May 6, saying that if Ms. Libby could not cast a vote, it would mean that “her thousands of constituents in Maine House District 90 are now without a voice or vote for every bill coming to the House floor for the rest of her elected term, which runs through 2026.”
In response, Maine’s attorney general, Aaron M. Frey, defended the decision to block Ms. Libby’s voice and vote until she apologized.
In a brief to the justices, Mr. Frey called Ms. Libby’s predicament a “self-inflicted injury,” arguing that she had “targeted a Maine high school student on social media” and had been censured because a majority of legislators found that her conduct breached legislative ethics rules.
He argued that Ms. Libby was not being punished for her opinion on transgender athletes. The lawmaker was required to “apologize for her conduct — not recant her views,” he wrote.
“Representative Libby has steadfastly refused to comply with this modest punishment, which is designed to restore the integrity and reputation of the body,” Mr. Frey wrote.
He cautioned that if the justices intervened in the dispute, they would “for the first time” pierce the veil of legislative immunity, a doctrine that “recognizes the absolute immunity of state legislators and staff for legislative acts.”
Such a move by the Supreme Court, Mr. Frey wrote, would be “unprecedented.”
“The power of a legislative body to punish its members has been recognized in the common law since ancient times and has been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions, including Maine’s, since the birth of our Republic,” Mr. Frey argued.
Lawyers for Ms. Libby replied that since they filed the emergency application, she had been excluded from 20 roll-call votes, plus “countless other voice votes on bills and amendments, over four separate floor sessions.”
“There can be no do-over for the hundreds of votes taking place in the Maine House” for which Ms. Libby’s vote will not count, they wrote.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
The post Supreme Court Orders Maine House to Restore Voting Power to Censured Lawmaker, for Now appeared first on New York Times.
