President Obama can pocket his pen and hang up his phone now. The U.S. Constitution does not allow him to absorb legislative and judicial functions into the executive branch, or to usurp powers properly belonging to the states.
That's the underlying message of the injunction issued by a federal court in Texas, halting implementation of our presumptuous president's directive to withhold federal funding from local school districts declining to let male and female students play on opposite-sex athletic teams and use opposite-sex facilities.
Give Obama credit for being honest about his intentions and following through on them. He said he wanted to radically transform America and he's been trying to for eight years.
The means he's used to try to achieve his ends may be more radical than the ends themselves, for they undermine the fundamental principles of our republic: the rule of law, the separation of powers, checks and balances, states' rights, etc.
If Congress and the courts had not called him to account, repeatedly, our country and the freedoms we enjoy as citizens might have slipped away from us.
“This is a crucial victory in our fight against federal overreach,” said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in response to the court's affirmation of the obvious. “We are pleased that the court recognized the threat this mandate poses to students’ privacy and local decision-making over school policy. Halting implementation will protect vital West Virginia school funding while litigation is still pending.”
That litigation, initiated by West Virginia and 12 other states against the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, challenges the end desired (expanding the definition of sex or gender to the point of meaninglessness) as well as the means employed: the violation of due process, the circumvention of Congress, the usurpation of state and local prerogatives, etc.
Kudos to the court. The end of our eight-year national nightmare cannot come too soon.