Remember when Maine Governor Janet Mills made Trump seethe under his hairpiece when she said Maine wouldn’t obey his delusional, made-up Executive Order about kicking trans kids out of sports, and told him she’d see him in court? Well, she did, and he lost. Fart noise!
To refresh, back in February, Grampy McRambles blathered in an epic one-sentence blarge at the Governors Association dinner:
“And it’s just crazy, if you look at what happened with the boxing, if you look at what happened with the with the weightlifting numbers, where a record that hadn’t been broken for 19 years got shattered, but you know they put up an eighth of an ounce here, and eighth of an ounce there, and it’s 218 pounds or whatever, a lot, and it hadn’t been broken in 19 years, and then guy walks up, he transitioned, he transitioned, and he knocked out that record by about 100 pounds, that will be a record that not going to be broken again, so we put a ban on it, and to protect women, I mean the women, if you watch the Olympics, you had two transitioned people that were fighting in the women’s boxing, they have women’s boxing category and if you saw that, it was brutal, what happened to the Italian woman was really good boxer, after one punch she said ‘no more, no more,’ it was just a left, it was a left jab and she got hit so hard she said ‘I can’t do it,’ they forced her to go out, go out again, gets hit again, ‘no no that’s it,’ she didn’t want to die, and it’s crazy, the NCAA has complied immediately by the way, that’s good, but I understand, Maine, is the governor of Maine here?”
“I’m here.”
“Are you not going to comply with it?”
“I will comply with the state and federal law.”
“Well, I’m, we are the federal law. Well, you’d better do it. You’d better do it. Because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t. And by the way your population, even though it’s somewhat liberal, although I did very well there, your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports. So you better comply. Because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.”
“I’ll see you in court.”
What do you know, nothing in his ramble-sentence was true. Except the court part! Those boxers are women, and he is not The Federal Law, or The Biology, or The Olympic Charter. And probably the only place you will see eighth-of-an-ounce weight plates is at a very old-fashioned crackhouse. Trump and his Project 2025 weirdos may have whipped up an Executive Order fantasy about big cells and little cells, but to date, no judge ever, anywhere, at any time, has ever ruled that letting a trans child play sports violates Title IX. And in 2018 Maine passed a Human Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in education against transgender people, and the Supreme Court decided in 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex, too. So following his dumb order would be against the law, actually.
And Janet Mills, woman who spent her entire pre-politics professional life as a lawyer, knows it. So she sipped her water and raised the glass his way.
The backstory here, there was apparently ONE transgender athlete in Maine, a girl at Greely High School in Portland who won a pole-vaulting event two years ago. Not a single team member of hers or parent or anyone at the school ever had a problem with it, but state representative Laurel Libby took a picture of her and posted it on Facebook. Doxxing minor children, to save the minor children! And there don’t appear to be any transgender athletes on teams in Maine right now that anybody knows of either, making Maine not in violation of the Executive Order anyway.
But, you know nothing makes rambledaddy angrier than an uppity woman, unless she’s spanking him with a rolled up magazine in a sexy way, and so he went NUTS, even more than usual. The Washington Post detailed last month how the administration hopped quick as a Talmadge tick to punish Maine whatever way they could think of. Leland Dudek was going to pull all the Social Security contracts and not let newborns’ parents apply for Social Security numbers at a hospital, emailing his staff that “no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” meaning Mills. Which is funny because she is a grown-woman governor, and Dudek is an IT toolbag who literally looks like a giant baby. But Susan Collins called Dudek and made coochie-coo noises at him, and he backed down from his stupid idea.
But then three other agencies launched investigations into Maine, including the Department of Health and Human Services, which decided after a couple of weeks of an “investigation” (which involved not interviewing a single person) that the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association, and Greely High School were GUILTY of discrimination against girls “by allowing males to compete in sports reserved for girls,” and HHS demanded that Maine self-confess and right their ways within 10 days or Pammy Jo Bondi was going to JUSTICE DEPARTMENT them.
And the USDA emailed Maine that $35 million in funding was being frozen, and $3 million for programs that feed over 170,000 children and vulnerable adults in the state. And then for good measure NOAA cut $4.5 million from the 54-year-old Marine Sea grant, because the grant was full of “references to climate justice and diversity.” But Susan Collins made some concerncalls to Howard Lutnik, and the USDA and NOAA grants were restored.
Furious and realizing he was losing loseringly and getting bested by a lady smarter than him, Trump then TruthRanted he’d give in if Mills would him a “full-throated apology.” And the next day he claimed “Maine” DID apologize, LOL. A stupid lie that Mills disavowed all over.
“I read the Constitution. The Constitution says the President, the chief executive, shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. It doesn’t allow him to make laws out of whole cloth by Tweet or Instagram post or press release or executive order.”
YA BURNT.
So, the USDA reversed their reversal, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins sent Mills a letter that Mills says “smacked of a ransom note written by a school child.” Rollins has no agricultural experience at all, by the way, other than being former Cotton Bowl Classic Queen. But she is a lawyer, and knows better.
Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey sued, and a federal judge told the USDA that their dog was not going to hunt, and rather than risk a more sweeping injunction, the administration backed down, gave Maine their USDA money back, and said they wouldn’t freeze it any more. Enjoy!
Of course the fuckery isn’t over, the administration is still threatening to revoke $250 million of Maine’s funding through the Department of Education. But, outlook not good for this administration of hateful idiots. Two weeks ago, the administration lost in federal court three times in one day over yanking schools’ “DEI” funding. And two of those three judges handing out the Ls were Trump appointees, too.
…
Welp, right after I finished this, the Supreme Court issued a one-page ruling that 6-3 effectively lets Commander Bone Spurs and Sec. Def. Boozehole kick trans people out of the military, even though two lower courts have already thrown that Big Cells bullshit out after the government offered no evidence that the 4,240 trans people serving have hurt anybody with their pronouns. This is textbook Not Equal Protection, and against what Gorsuch his very own self wrote four years ago. But that was a different time, and since then six of the justices have apparently been huffing JK Rowling farts and scrolling their own research on Rumble. None of the six explain their reasoning, but if we were to guess, something about how Plenary Executive Commander is Lord of all He Surveys, and his feelings don’t have to care about facts.
Sigh, nice time is now much less nice. But thank you for your service, trans warriors and Janet Mills! Thank you for standing up! We’ll all keep standing up to them, all day every day, however best we can, until the glorious morning when all the genital-obsessed weirdos have retired to the island of Minding Their Own Business.
OPEN THREAD!
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[NBC / WMTW / Advocate / New York Times archive link ]
