Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced his refusal to comply with the Biden administration’s overhaul of Title IX, which mandates sexual equality in federally-funded educational institutions.
In a defiant letter to President Joe Biden, Abbott launched a scathing critique on the administration’s updated regulations, specifically those enhancing protections for transgender students.
Abbott condemned these modifications as “illegal” and characterized them as a “ham-handed effort to impose a leftist belief onto Title IX,” a move he argued “exceeds your authority as President.”
“You have rewritten Title IX to force schools to treat boys as if they are girls and to accept every student’s self-declared gender identity,” he penned.
The Texan Republican said that he would direct the state officials to disregard the new mandate, suggesting they clash with existing Texan statutes.
“I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate,” Abbott added.
“Your rewrite of Title IX not only exceeds your constitutional authority, it also tramples laws that I signed to protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting men from competing against female athletes. Texas will fight to protect those laws and to deny your abuse of authority.”
The Lone Star State joins a growing roster of GOP-dominated states vocally opposing the Department of Education’s recently enacted Title IX provisions.
A group of Republican states’ attorneys general, including those from Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho, filed a lawsuit over the new rules on Monday.
They argue that the rule exceeds the Education Department’s purview and stomps all over women’s rights by redefining sex to incorporate gender identity.
Louisiana’s Attorney General Liz Murrill denounced the policy, claiming it was created to pander to a “political agenda” while disregarding “significant safety concerns for young women students in pre-schools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across Louisiana and the entire country.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) also filed a legal challenge against the Biden administration on Monday aiming to obstruct the enactment of the new rules.
Among other stipulations, the rules aim to prevent schools from denying access to bathrooms and locker rooms that represent gender identities of trans students and teachers.
Paxton labeled the expanded policies as a “compliance with radical gender ideology.”
Below are listed the enumerated powers (those powers delegated by the superior states to the inferior federal gov) in which the Feds were delegated authority over bathrooms, sports, marriage, education:
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Each action by the feds in the above-listed areas is a violation of state authority and of the Tenth Amendment.
According to the Congressional Research Service, there is no direct “definition of executive orders, presidential memoranda, and proclamations in the U.S. Constitution, there is, likewise, no specific provision authorizing their issuance.”