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Rep. Laurel Libby can speak and vote in the Maine House while her lawsuit proceeds.
The U.S. Supreme Court has restored the voting privileges of Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, who was censured and barred from voting in the state House of Representatives after she outed and deadnamed a transgender student athlete.
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Libby and six of her constituents sued Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau and others over the censure, claiming it had interfered with her work as a legislator and violated her constituents’ voting rights. The high court Tuesday granted her request for a preliminary injunction that restores her vote while the lawsuit proceeds. The court’s vote was 7-2, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the minority. Lower courts had refused to intervene in the case, citing the doctrine of legislative immunity, which protects lawmakers from certain legal actions.
“Not very long ago, this Court treaded carefully with respect to exercising its equitable power to issue injunctive relief at the request of a party claiming an emergency,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “The opinions are legion in which individual Justices, reviewing such requests in chambers, declined to intervene — reiterating that ‘such power should be used sparingly and only in the most critical and exigent circumstances.’”
“Those days are no more,” she continued. “Today’s Court barely pauses to acknowledge these important threshold limitations on the exercise of its own authority. It opts instead to dole out error correction as it sees fit, regardless of the lack of any exigency and even when the applicants’ claims raise significant legal issues that warrant thorough evaluation by the lower courts that are dutifully considering them.”
Libby had posted a photo of a trans female athlete on Facebook in February and deadnamed her. Libby has frequently denounced the presence of trans girls and women in female sports. “It is fundamentally unfair to allow biological males to compete in girls’ sports, yet that is what's happening in Maine,” she wrote in one Facebook post. She has also praised Donald Trump’s executive order that threatens to take federal funding from any state that allows trans girls and women to compete alongside cis females in school sports.
A few days after she posted the photo of the athlete, the Maine House voted 75-70 to censure Libby, with Democrats in favor and Republicans against. That meant she couldn’t vote or speak on the House floor unless she apologized, which she refused to do.
Libby defended her post as free speech, but Democrats said it was wrong to target the student. “There is a time and place for policy debates,” Fecteau, a gay Democrat, said at the time. “That time and place will never be a social media post attacking a Maine student. Maine kids and all Maine people deserve better.” Fecteau said he had not asked Libby to deny her beliefs but merely wanted her to apologize to the girl. He had previously spoken to Libby and asked her to remove the post, but she refused. It has been shared widely and helped spur a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills.
At a White House meeting in February, Trump demanded that Mills comply with his executive order, and she said she’d see him in court. She recently won a settlement with the U.S. Department of Agriculture that restored Maine’s school meal funding, which the USDA had frozen because of her support for trans youth. The Trump administration is still pursuing other legal action against Maine.
Libby praised the high court’s action in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
