The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted emergency relief restoring voting privileges to a Maine state legislator who was censured for her social media post critical of a transgender female student’s victory in a state high school track and field championship event.
The Feb. 17 Facebook post by state Rep. Laurel D. Libby led to other posts and media appearances in which the Republican lawmaker criticized Maine officials for allowing transgender students to participate in girls’ athletics. It also helped lead to President Donald Trump’s Feb. 21 confrontation with Maine Gov. Janet T. Mills, a Democrat, at a White House event.
The Trump administration has since ratcheted up its confrontation with Maine over the issue, with several federal agencies launching investigations into the state’s compliance with Title IX, including the U.S. Department of Education starting the process to terminate federal funds and the Department of Justice suing the state over allowing transgender participants in female sports. (Libby stood on stage with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Education Secretary Linda McMahon as they announced the suit against Maine.)
Libby’s initial social media post led to her censure by the Maine House, with lawmakers in the Democratic majority citing potential harm to the transgender athlete who won the Class B pole vault championship. When Libby refused to apologize, the House speaker invoked a rule that bars her from floor debates and votes in the full House.
Libby and six of her constituents sued in federal court, arguing that they have been disenfranchised. Both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, declined emergency relief, leading Libby to ask the Supreme Court for an injunction restoring only her voting privileges pending further review of her case.
The lawmaker is not challenging the censure and not seeking relief from the Supreme Court with regard to her speaking privileges on the floor, she said in her Supreme Court filing.
“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,” lawyers for the legislator said in the brief.
Maine Attorney General Aaron M. Frey, representing the House speaker and clerk, told the high court that the censure required only that Libby apologize, not recant her views on the transgender issue.
“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,” Frey said in a brief.
Two justices dissent from an order granting relief to lawmaker
In its May 20 order in Libby v. Fecteau, over the dissent of two justices, the Supreme Court granted Libby’s request to restore her voting privileges while her case continues to make its way through lower courts.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she would deny Libby’s application but did not elaborate.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent that said there was little urgency for the Supreme Court to act because the 1st Circuit had scheduled oral argument “in a few weeks” and Libby and her constituents “have not asserted that there are any significant legislative votes scheduled in the upcoming weeks.”
Jackson noted that the Maine House sanctioned Libby for violating its ethics rules “when she engaged in behavior that a majority of the House determined ‘may endanger [a] minor.’”
The case raises several major questions about whether the rights of a lawmaker or her constituents have been violated by a censure accompanied by sanctions, Jackson said, noting that in a 2022 case the court upheld a school board’s censure of one of its members but declined to decide whether a censure accompanied by other punishments would amount to retaliation in violation of the First Amendment. (That case, Houston Community College System v. Wilson, involved a member of a higher education panel but was relevant for K-12 school boards as well.)
And amid a flood of emergency applications pending at the court, many involving Trump administration policies, Jackson went on to criticize her colleagues for no longer treading as carefully in deciding whether to take up such emergency matters as they once did.
The court “opts instead to dole out error correction as it sees fit,” she said.
