George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Wednesday that Maine has “a serious problem” after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the Department of Justice was suing the state.
Bondi and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon unveiled the lawsuit Wednesday, joined by former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines and Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby of Maine over its refusal to prohibit biological men from competing in women’s sports. Turley said that a unanimous Supreme Court ruling would likely lead to a legal defeat for Maine.
“I think that Maine has a serious problem on their hands, you know, there is no entitlement to federal funds,” Turley told “Fox and Friends” co-hosts Lawrence Jones, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade. “Now, the Supreme Court says that the government cannot commandeer states, so the government can, in a heavy-handed way, violate the Constitution but it was in Rumsfeld versus FAIR, the Supreme Court voted unanimously to say that federal funds could be withheld for failure to comply with federal law.”
“Now, in that case there was a thing called the Solomon amendment. In this case, they are arguing this is Title IX and in 1972, certainly the drafters had no intention of extending definition of gender this far,” Turley continued.
Turley noted that the British Supreme Court recently ruled that the term “women” in the Equality Act of 2010 referred to biological women, and predicted the Supreme Court of the United States would also have to rule on the question.
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“I think this is heading their way like so many other things,” Turley said. “This is going to force them, in all likelihood, to deal with this conclusively. They have had opinions on both sides, it’s not clear where the majority stands in past cases. This will force the issue.”
The issue of biological males who identify as transgender competing in women’s sports made national headlines following Lia Thomas’s participation in the 2022 NCAA championships, where the biological male won the 500-yard women’s final.
Multiple college teams elected to forfeit matches against San Jose State University’s women’s volleyball team in 2024 due to the presence of a biological male on the San Jose State roster, according to the Los Angeles Times.
North Carolina high school volleyball player Payton McNabb suffered a career-ending concussion when a transgender player’s spike hit her in the face during a September 2022 volleyball match. McNabb described ongoing medical symptoms in testimony she gave in April 2023 to the state Legislature.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
