Grothman bill pushes back against Biden’s gender identity school funding policy
Schools must adopt federal gender identity policies or risk losing school lunch dollars
Before I get to the latest affront to democracy by the federal collectivist bureaucracy, just a note to say I’ll be analyzing more of the Roe decision this week. Perhaps a little overlooked is the concurring opinion by Brett Kavanaugh. I’ll look closer tomorrow but Kavanaugh agreed with pro-choice advocates that the constitution allows for the creation of new rights. It’s just that there are processes by which to create those rights, he observed—amending state constitutions and passing state laws, as well as federal legislation and amending the U.S. Constitution. Such processes allow for the democratic will of the people to play out. And, Kavanaugh reported, while the Fourteenth Amendment does allow for unenumerated rights, to create one of those rights should be a rare occasion indeed—having nine unelected justices create rights, often in the political passion of the moment, that attempt to settle explosively controversial issues should only be contemplated when the unenumerated right being considered is firmly rooted in the nation’s tradition and history. More this week.
Also, many have asked me to correct that the actual vote to overturn Roe was 5-4, not 6-3. Yeah, technically, but historically Roberts’s vote will be seen as a vote to overturn because the reasoning and compromise he tried to achieve—preserve the “right” to an abortion but give states the effective right to regulate it out of existence—convinced no one on either side. And rightly so. Roberts’s position would be like killing a person and then expecting everybody to believe the unburied corpse is still alive, so I’ll stick with 6-3. More on that, too.
Also, I’ve mentioned the court case West Virginia v EPA, and SCOTUS may well be ready to drop that bomb. It’s about the ability of the EPA to regulate any part of the economy that involves any emissions of greenhouse gases, but it’s much more than that—it’s a challenge to the collectivist bureaucracy itself, my favorite topic. Stay tuned for the court.
Meanwhile, U.S. Reps. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisconsin 6) and Diana Harshbarger (R-Tennessee)—joined by Northwoods U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin 7)—have introduced legislation to prohibit the U.S. Department of Agriculture from withholding federal funds from schools that do not adopt the Biden administration’s views and policies about gender identity discrimination.
A note here: The use of the word ‘discrimination’ to describe any opposition to woke gender policies is clever indeed, and the media gleefully plays along, calling conservatives who oppose biological males competing in women’s sports as favoring discrimination. But it’s actually the women in those sports who are being discriminated against, as the Democratic Party absurdly works to dismantle decades of progress in women’s rights.
The administrative stew started to simmer on May 5, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced in a memo that it would interpret federal Title IX anti-discrimination law in education to include “sexual orientation and gender identity.”Under the interpretation, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which administers the nation’s school lunch program, will require all state and local agencies, operators, and sponsors that receive funds from the FNS to investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, and they must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Practically speaking, the USDA could withhold funding, including school lunch appropriations, from schools that do not let transgender students use bathrooms of the opposite biological sex or play on sports teams with members of the opposite sex, or, as Grothman puts it, the administration intends to withhold federal nutritional assistance from schools that “maintain biological distinctions between boys and girls.”
The consequences could be enormous. The USDA spends more than $14 billion each year through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and feeds, on average, 29.6 million children each day. If passed, Grothman’s bill would block the USDA from moving forward with any gender identity interpretation that could strip federal funding for meal assistance programs. Grothman says:
Comply with radical transgender ideology or leave low-income students without meals. That is the choice President Biden’s USDA is setting up for schools. This mandate from the administration is a way to strong arm schools into falling in line with the ‘woke’ left’s worldview and it is disgraceful. If a school, parent, student, or teacher believes that there are biological differences between males and females, too bad, because their federal funding may be cut off if they don’t obey this mandate.”
So far, the bill has 14 cosponsors.
Nay, nay will they deceive …