Should legislators be allowed to express their opinions–and the opinions of the people who voted for them?
Apparently not, according to the Democratic legislature in Maine. Some views are so heinous that they should never be uttered. Views like “men should not be allowed to play in women’s sports.”
This seems to run contrary to the longstanding belief in legislative speech and debate. Indeed, Rep. Libby is advocating for a change in policy position. Surely the Maine House of Representatives can accept advocacy for policy change?
Full brief here: https://t.co/dZP1VolCh4
— Eric W. (@EWess92) April 30, 2025
Representative Laurel Libby is a heretic–and in this case, I mean that word literally. Alphabet ideology has attained the status of religious doctrine on the far left, and the far left is in charge of the Democrat Party. You can say anything you want about gender issues, as long as it is precisely what the alphabet people want you to say.
Representative Libby will not comply because she challenged two bits of unquestionable orthodoxy: that men who say they are women are, in fact, women, and that Donald Trump is correct that the practice of allowing men into women’s sports should be banned.
She must be crushed, along with the rights of her constituents.
In February, she publicly criticized Maine’s policy allowing biological males identifying as transgender to compete in girls’ sports. Rep. Libby posted on Facebook: “This is outrageous, and unfair to the many female athletes who work every day to succeed in their respective sports. . . . I will continue to vigorously oppose all efforts to allow male athletes to compete in female athletic competitions and to demand that President Trump’s Executive Order be enforced in Maine to ensure fairness for all female athletes.”
In retaliation for her social media post and comments about women’s sports, the Democrat-controlled House passed a party-line resolution censuring Libby. The resolution required her to “accept full responsibility for the incident and publicly apologize to the House and to the people of the State of Maine”—a requirement completely flying in the face of the First Amendment.
When Libby refused to apologize, House Speaker Ryan Fecteau barred Libby from speaking from the floor—or voting—depriving her of her vote and her constituents of their guarantee of equal representation under the 14th Amendment. While it’s certainly not unusual for legislatures to censure their members, it is quite unprecedented to deny a legislator her right to vote; only three other Maine legislators have been censured in the state’s 200-year history—and none has ever been stripped of her vote before. The same is true across the nation.
Libby’s opinion is shared by the vast majority of Americans, and was the opinion held by almost every American (and liberal) not much more than five minutes ago. But that isn’t the point that Libby is making in her appeal to the Supreme Court, nor is she fighting the right of the Maine House of Representatives to censure her.
What she is fighting is the antidemocratic nature of her “punishment” for not complying with the demand that she recant her opinions.
Luckily, we don’t burn heretics at the stake, or even–yet–put people in reeducation camps. In these more civilized times, the punishment is censorship and loss of voting rights, both for herself and her constituents. By stripping Libby of her right to speak and vote–to represent her constituents–the Maine Democrats are doing what they do best: censor speech and oppress anybody who disagrees with them.
We saw this happen during COVID, when a vast government effort was made to shut dissenters up and change voting laws to ensure that our voices were swamped through illegal voting law changes–many of those changes have since been declared unconstitutional and were justified by declaring an “emergency.” This move is intended to do the same thing using different means.
The District Court chose not to force the Maine legislature to reinstate the voting rights of Libby, so she has appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Unfortunately, her emergency appeal (it is an emergency because the Maine legislature is in session and hundreds of votes have already been taken without her participation) is going before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She gets to decide whether the case is granted emergency status.
Who knows what she will do? And, in a larger sense, the loss of one vote for a member of a minority party could be said to be of modest import in a nation facing many issues.
But the principle is not. Can a majority exclude entire swathes of the population from participation in politics because they hold the “wrong” views? That question is of vital importance.
When Democrats talk about preserving democracy, this is what they really mean. Sit down, shut up, and comply.
