Denver, Colorado — August 24, 2021 — On August 20, Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that asks the question: Can you trust the Biden Administration?
The question arises because in 2020, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos accomplished what no previous administration had achieved: enshrining protections against sexual harassment under Title IX into federal regulations, balanced with robust due process protections for students. The regulations overrode the Obama-Biden administration policies, which schools used to declare the accused guilty until proven innocent.
Activist groups sued DeVos over the reforms, including in federal court in Massachusetts. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (or FIRE) tried to intervene in the lawsuit, to help defend Secretary DeVos’s signature achievement. But the trial court rejected the effort, saying that the Administration could defend itself on its own. Then in February 2021, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that rejection. Now, under the Biden administration, FIRE is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. MSLF is supporting FIRE’s effort to make sure the Title IX regulations are properly defended in court.
The MSLF brief praises the Department of Justice’s civil servants as “some of the best in the country,” who are “capable of defending a wide array of federal statutes and regulations promulgated by executive branch agencies,” like the Department of Education. But it also notes that Biden’s political appointees at higher levels of the Executive Branch might not be willing to keep defending Secretary DeVos’s reforms.
President Biden expressed opposition to the stronger due process protections for college students when they were issued in May of 2020, when then-candidate Biden issued a tweet calling the new protections “wrong” and declaring that they would “be put to a quick end in January 2021,” meaning when Biden became President. That tweet is just one of numerous pieces of evidence MSLF uses to build an open and shut case for why the Biden Administration can’t be trusted to defend Secretary DeVos’s due process protections in court.
Follow this link to read the brief.
Follow this link to read the case page.
“Students deserve the same due process rights that President Biden had when he was accused of sexual harassment,” MSLF General Counsel William E. Trachman said after filing the brief. “FIRE just wants to defend the validity of the Title IX regulations, and they deserve the chance to have their day in court.”
“President Biden has tried to reverse many of President Trump’s other accomplishments,” concluded Trachman. “It’s not clear that we can trust his Administration to defend this one.”