Louisiana, Texas AGs announce lawsuits against Biden administration over Title IX rule

Louisiana and Texas Attorneys General Liz Murrill and Ken Paxton announced lawsuits on Monday against President Biden’s Department of Education over the new Title IX rule.

"Today, I am announcing that we have officially filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Education, to save Title IX and protect the myriad of interests threatened by these new regulations," Murrill wrote on X on Monday.

Murrill described the rule as "regulatory overreach."

She said the department's final rule will "gut the very essence of Title IX and destroy decades of advances in equal educational opportunities, especially for women and girls."

Murrill also said that "the consequences will be shocking and severe. Boys and girls will be forced to share bathrooms, locker rooms, and perhaps even lodging on overnight field trips with members of the opposite sex."

Meanwhile Paxton's office argued that the new regulation "violates existing federal law, ignores the Constitution, and denies women the protections that Title IX was intended to afford them."

“Texas will not allow Joe Biden to rewrite Title IX at whim, destroying legal protections for women in furtherance of his radical obsession with gender ideology,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “This attempt to subvert federal law is plainly illegal, undemocratic, and divorced from reality. Texas will always take the lead to oppose Biden’s extremist, destructive policies that put women at risk.”

The lawsuits come on the same day Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told Biden that he was instructing his state officials to ignore the new Title IX regulations. 

“I am instructing the Texas Education Agency to ignore your illegal dictate,” Abbott wrote in a letter to the president, per The Hill. “Your rewrite of Title IX not only exceeds your constitutional authority, it also tramples laws that I signed to protect the integrity of women’s sports by prohibiting men from competing against female athletes. Texas will fight to protect those laws and to deny your abuse of authority.”

Abbott has signed two laws that ban transgender students from playing on a sports team that matches their gender identity in public schools and at colleges and universities.