The Obama Administration Provokes a Legal Crisis — the War against North Carolina

May 10, 2016 by Jill

By David French, National Review:

The state of North Carolina and the federal government are now in a state of declared legal war. On Wednesday afternoon, the Obama administration sent a letter to North Carolina governor Pat McCrory demanding that the state “not comply with or enforce H.B. 2,” its so-called transgender bathroom law. According to the letter, a state requirement that people use the bathrooms reserved for their biological sex violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department of Justice gave the state until today, May 9, to assure the federal government that men can use women’s restrooms and showers in state facilities.

Today, the state answered the Department of Justice — with a lawsuit. In its complaint, filed in federal court, North Carolina accuses the DOJ of engaging in a “baseless and blatant overreach,” an “attempt to rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the courts.” Simply put, Title VII does not establish “transgender status” as a protected class, and any effort to do so by executive fiat violates the law.

Then the DOJ escalated again. At an afternoon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a “significant law enforcement” action — its own lawsuit. At the same time, Lynch indicated that the DOJ retained the authority to federal funding to key state entities, issuing a not-so-veiled threat of dramatic action before the courts issue a definitive ruling. At the same time, she preposterously compared the act of preserving bathrooms for people of the same sex to, of course, “Jim Crow” and hearkened back to the days of segregated water fountains.

A public-relations battle over bathrooms and showers has transformed into a fight over the meaning and indeed authority of the Constitution itself. In its zeal to advance the sexual revolution, the Obama administration has defied the will of Congress, unilaterally rewritten federal law without even bothering to go through a statutory rulemaking process, and now seeks to bring a sovereign state to heel through a combination of threats and lawsuits.

Read here