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.A spokesperson for Fecteau did not immediately respond to a request for 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.
