Judge denies Moms for Liberty request to block federal LGBTQ school protections in 850+ counties

Also: The Guardian connects Leonard Leo to the anti-trans Bud Light boycott efforts through a group that issues "Woke Alerts." Did Sam Alito get one?

U.S. District Judge John Broomes, a Trump appointee in Kansas, rejected Moms for Liberty's request to expand the injunction he issued on July 2 blocking the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule to cover more than 850 counties across the U.S. in which the far-right group claims members.

Instead, in a Friday order, he gave the group until July 26 to provide the list he asked for — a list of the schools attended by children of Moms for Liberty members.

At the same time, however, Broomes ruled that current and future members of the organization — and two other plaintiff groups, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United — are covered by the injunction, creating the possibility of a constantly expanding injunction. To that, he suggested that if that makes implementing the rule difficult the Education Department should consider postponing the rule everywhere until court challenges are resolved.

It is the latest twist in several challenges to the rule, which was published earlier this year and it due to go into effect on August 1. Issued under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the rule is primarily being challenged because it would protect transgender students from discrimination. It does so through the rule’s defining of sex discrimination to include gender identity discrimination, as well as sexual orientation discrimination. The rule also sets forth new standards for addressing sexual harassment complaints and record-keeping, among other provisions.

Due to several lawsuits, brought largely by Republican state attorneys general, the rule is currently blocked in 15 states under five different injunctions, including the one from Broomes: Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Broomes’s injunction, however, is the only one in which the injunction covers members of plaintiff organizations outside of the states involved in the litigation. As such, Broomes’s order is the most broad in effect currently.

Friday’s order from Broomes, however, rejected a request that would have dramatically increased the scope by applying the injunction to all counties in which Moms for Liberty claimed members. A Law Dork review of Moms for Liberty’s submitted list showed that, had it been granted, the injunction would have covered all schools in all of the 25 largest counties in the U.S. and all 10 of the largest school districts in the nation.

The Friday ruling was not a decision on the merits of Moms for Liberty’s request. Instead, Broomes found that he lacked jurisdiction to consider the request — as well as the Justice Department’s request to stay the injunction as to non-challenged parts of the rule — because the Justice Department already filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

However, in a clarification of the injunction (over which he found he retained jurisdiction), Broomes ruled that the injunction applies to current and future members of the three plaintiff organizations. DOJ had asked the court to limit the injunction to those people who were members of the organizations when the lawsuit was filed.

“Defendants do not cite to any authority finding that injunctive relief cannot extend to prospective members of an organization that was granted injunctive relief,” Broomes wrote.

As such, should Broomes's injunction remain in place, it will block enforcement of the Title IX rule in nearly 700 colleges across the country and any K-12 schools attended by Young America’s Foundation or Female Athletes United members or the children of Moms for Liberty members.

Finally, in Friday’s order, Broomes dismissed concerns about the effect of his injunction, writing that “to the extent Defendants are concerned about the difficulties in managing patchwork enforcement in compliance with the preliminary injunction, this is a problem of DoE’s own making for the multiple reasons set forth in the court’s prior order” blocking the rule.

If that creates complications, Broomes suggested, “Congress gave DoE the authority to postpone the effective date of the Final Rule pending judicial review. Maybe DoE should use that authority.”

Instead, for now at least, the Justice Department is seeking a partial stay pending appeal in the Tenth Circuit. This is the request rejected in two other challenges by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit earlier this week.

---

Leonard Leo did what?

I was shocked — not really — to read Martin Pengelly’s report in The Guardian that a Leonard Leo-linked fund gave money to a group behind some of the spring 2023 efforts to call out “woke” Bud Light for having the audacity to give a beer can to a trans person.

The report details tax filings that Pengelly wrote show that the Leo-linked Concord Fund “gave $350,000 to Consumers Defense, an arm of Consumers’ Research” in 2022.

It then points to a January 2023 report in The Washington Post where Leo and the head of Consumers’ Research are praising each other. Just a few months later, Consumers’ Research launched “Woke Alerts” in April 2023, which the Washington Examiner reported Will Hild, the head of Consumers’ Research, “said was inspired by recent viral ‘woke’ marketing campaigns such as Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.”

A few months after that, on August 14, 2023, Justice Sam Alito sold at least some of his stock in Anheuser-Busch — which produces Bud Light — and bought stock in Molson Coors, as Law Dork exclusively reported in May.

Maybe he got a “Woke Alert.”