Politics
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AUGUSTA, Maine — The Republican lawmaker whose posts about a transgender high school athlete kicked off Maine’s war with President Donald Trump sued a legislative leader on Tuesday in an attempt to get her floor privileges back.
Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, was censured last month for those posts by the Democratic-led House of Representatives. After Libby refused to apologize to members, House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, invoked a rule that bars her from speaking and voting in the chamber.
Libby and a group of constituents, including former Auburn Mayor Jason Levesque, sued Fecteau in federal court Tuesday, saying his actions “effectively disenfranchised” the lawmaker and her 9,000 constituents. The lawsuit says that violated the First and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee rights to free speech and due process, respectively.
The lawsuit highlights the role that Libby’s viral posts played in getting Trump’s attention on Maine’s policies allowing transgender athletes to play sports according to their identified gender. The president threatened Maine’s federal funding, got into a war of words with Gov. Janet Mills and his administration launched unprecedented investigations into institutions here.
Those moves have had major consequences. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funding to the state university system. In moves that only affected Maine, the Trump administration also briefly paused the Maine Sea Grant and shut off a program allowing parents to sign newborns up for Social Security numbers from maternity wards.
In public statements and after a four-day investigation of the Maine Department of Education, the Trump administration has alleged the state’s transgender athlete policies violate Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex-based discrimination in schools. Legal experts have challenged that theory, which is untested in the courts.
Maine is one of 23 states to have similar policies, according to the LGBTQ+-rights Movement Advancement Project. Mills and the Democratic-led Legislature passed a law in 2021 that led the Maine Principals Association to allow automatic participation in sports based on gender identity. Before that, the group considered individual requests to participate.
A spokesperson for Fecteau declined comment on the lawsuit. Libby and her constituents are being represented by Patrick Strawbridge, a conservative Maine lawyer who defended Trump from a congressional attempt to get his financial records that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.
Libby has gained outsized attention since her original posts, which she and supporters have defended by saying they drew attention to an important issue. Fecteau and Democrats said the lawmaker could have endangered the Greely student, with the speaker telling reporters last month the censure was strictly “about the conduct of a member of this body.”