Texas Attorney General has won yet another victory against the Biden Administration’s social justice regulatory overreach, this one against transsexual health care mandates.
The State of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton have been granted a nationwide stay against the Biden administration’s new rule that would defund federally-funded healthcare providers found to be refusing patients “gender transition” procedures.
The Biden administration announced a rule change last April under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), described as seeking to hold the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) “health programs and activities to the same nondiscrimination standards as recipients of Federal financial assistance.”
On August 30, U.S. District Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle ruled in favor of Texas and Montana, ordering that the modification of the Affordable Care Act at issue is precluded from implementation across the nation.
“Here, federal agencies are attempting to impose a sweeping new social policy by manipulating and perverting the statutory text that constrains them,” Kernodle wrote in his opinion.
“Nothing in these statutes authorizes HHS — or any federal official — to require healthcare providers to perform novel “gender-transition” procedures or force States to subsidize them.Texas and Montana seek a stay or preliminary injunction to prevent the irreparable harm that will undoubtedly follow. The Court grants the States’ request.”
Snip.
Texas and Montana sued HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in June for allegedly requiring “healthcare providers and States to perform and pay for so-called ‘gender-transition’ procedures — or else lose federal funding.”
The filing asserted that the new rule would “defund healthcare providers across the country who refuse to perform or pay for experimental, unproven, and potentially dangerous ‘gender transition’ procedures.”
Montana and Texas were then both granted a statewide stay the following month, banning the application of the new HHS rule.
The victorious states then requested a nationwide stay in order to extend the relief granted by the court against the HHS rule across the country.
Paxton reacted to the stay, saying in a release, “When Biden and Harris sidestep the Constitution to force their unlawful, extremist agenda on the American public, we are fighting back and stopping them.”
“By blocking this destructive policy, which would have forced taxpayer-funded hospitals to conduct unproven and dangerous ‘gender transition’ procedures, Texas has delivered a major victory for Americans across the country.”
For anyone that thought the Democratic Party’s creepy love of child transsexism was a passing fade, the Biden Administration’s institutional determination to mandate child mutilation services into law should belay that naive hope. It also indicates that the evil ObamaCare has wrought on America’s health care is far from over. Fortunately, the vast majority of ordinary Americans have not fallen prey to this madness, and Paxton et al. have put a stop to this particular transsexual madness for now.
Also, any appeal will be heard in the Fifth Circuit Court, which has previously frowned on the Biden Administration’s previous attempts to mandate transsexism by judicial fiat.