BREAKING: Trump's Transgender Military Ban Blocked by Court. Updates.
…the President’s directives cannot survive such scrutiny because they are not genuinely based on legitimate concerns regarding military effectiveness or budget constraints, but are instead driven by a desire to express disapproval of transgender people generally…
No details yet.
An immediate response from Lt. Governor Newsom of California.
Here we go. It’s a Federal court in Washington, DC. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the ruling.
A federal court in Washington is barring President Donald Trump from changing the government's policy on military service by transgender people…
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote Monday that transgender members of the military who had sued over the change were likely to win their lawsuit and barred the Trump administration from reversing course.
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and was Presiding Judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Wikipedia Born April 17, 1943 (age 74)
And now parts of the order are available:
I am directing the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, to return to the longstanding policy and practice on military service by transgender individuals that was in place prior to June 2016 until such time as a sufficient basis exists upon which to conclude that terminating that policy and practice would not have the negative effects discussed above.
The Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, shall . . . maintain the currently effective policy regarding accession of transgender individuals into military service beyond January 1, 2018, until such time as the Secretary of Defense, after consulting with the Secretary of Homeland Security, provides a recommendation to the contrary that I find convincing . . . .
The effect of the Court’s Order is to revert to the status quo with regard to accession and retention that existed before the issuance of the Presidential Memorandum—that is, the retention and accession policies established in the June 30, 2016 Directive-type Memorandum as modified by Secretary of Defense James Mattis on June 30, 2017.In all other respects, the Presidential Memorandum is not enjoined.
It is further ORDERED that Plaintiffs are not required to pay a security deposit. Fed. R. Civ. P.65(c).
It is further ORDERED that the parties shall file a Joint Status Report indicating how they propose to proceed in this matter by no later than November 10, 2017.
there is also an opinion behind the order, which I don’t have a link for yet. The order begins…
For the reasons set forth in the accompanying Memorandum Opinion…
and is partially quoted here:
Plaintiffs are current and aspiring service members who are transgender. Many have years of experience in the military. Some have decades. They have been deployed on activeduty in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have and continue to serve with distinction. All fear that the directives of the Presidential Memorandum will have devastating impacts on their careers and their families….
This decision has already been made.These directives must be executed by a date certain, and there is no reason to believe that the ywill not be executed. Plaintiffs have established that they will be injured by these directives, due both to the inherent inequality they impose, and the risk of discharge and denial of accession that they engender. Further delay would only serve to harm the Plaintiffs. Given these circumstances, the Court is in a positon to preliminarily adjudicate the propriety of these directives, and it does so here…
The Court holds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their Fifth Amendment claim. Asa form of government action that classifies people based on their gender identity, and disfavors a class of historically persecuted and politically powerless individuals, the President’s directives are subject to a fairly searching form of scrutiny. Plaintiffs claim that the President’s directives cannot survive such scrutiny because they are not genuinely based on legitimate concerns regarding military effectiveness or budget constraints, but are instead driven by a desire to express disapproval of transgender people generally…
Heh.
The Court finds that a number of factors—including the sheer breadth of the exclusion ordered by the directives, the unusual circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement of them, the fact that the reasons given for them do not appear to be supported by any facts, and the recent rejection of those reasons by the militaryitself—strongly suggest that Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claim is meritorious.
