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NY Times on the Left’s Skrmetti Bungle: ‘Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb’

Posted on | June 21, 2025 | Comments Off on NY Times on the Left’s Skrmetti Bungle: ‘Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb’

Chase (née Kate) Strangio is not actually a man

The Left will sometimes admit to tactical mistakes, e.g., “Maybe it was a bad idea to pretend Joe Biden was ‘sharp as a tack’ and fit for another four years.” On rare occasions, the Left will even acknowledge errors of strategy, e.g., when Bill Clinton went out of his way during the 1992 campaign to prove he was “tough on crime,” thus to avoid a repeat of the 1988 Mike Dukakis debacle. What is impossible for the Left is to admit the ugly truth — their ideas are wrong and their policies are bad.

So the case of U.S. v. Skrmetti made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where ACLU lawyer Kate “Chase” Strangio made history as the first transgender lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Then the verdict came down and guess what? It’s an utter disaster.

The New York Times is Boohoo Whinin’ and Cryin’ That Unrealistic Extremists in the ACLU Brought the Tennessee Trans Case to the Supreme Court and Lost Bigly

That’s the Ace of Spades headline and he gives it a thorough fisking, so that all I have to do is pile on the snark. Let’s pause just a minute, however, to explain why the case is called U.S. v. Skrmetti. This is quite relevant to the current state of Democratic Party politics. Jonathan Skrmetti is a Harvard-educated lawyer who in 2022 was appointed Attorney General for Tennessee. In 2023, Tennessee passed a law “prohibiting surgical procedures and hormone therapies for transgender minors with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria”:

Upon passage of the law, the Biden Department of Justice sought an injunction in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee to prevent the law from going into effect on July 1, 2023.
The District Court granted a preliminary injunction . . .
[A lawsuit] was brought by three transgender teens and their families as well as a Tennessee doctor who treats youth with gender dysphoria. The Biden administration joined the plaintiffs under a law which allows the federal government to join in private suits which allege violations of the Equal Protection Clause. . . .
The District Court’s ruling was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. . . .
By a 2–1 vote in September 2023, the Sixth Circuit panel reversed the district court’s preliminary injunction . . .
On November 6, 2023, the United States [i.e., the Biden administration] petitioned the Supreme Court to hear this case on appeal. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on June 24, 2024.

So while Joe was sleeping on the beach or eating ice cream, the people who were actually running the White House decided to push this case all the way to the Supreme Court. The “nut graf” of that NY Times story:

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a new, crushing blow, upholding Tennessee’s ban in a 6-to-3 decision. In allowing Tennessee to outlaw blockers and hormones, the court not only shielded similar laws on the books in some two dozen states. It effectively closed the door on extending new constitutional protections to trans people.

Despite their belief that they are on “the right side of history,” the Left lost this case so decisively that it will likely be decades before they could even hope to undo the self-inflicted damage to their cause.

It could have been so easily avoided. If it were just a group of plaintiffs (Jane Doe, et al.) suing the state, would they have appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court? Perhaps, but it was the Biden administration that made that call, which is why the case is U.S. v. Skrmetti.

And now that it’s blown up in their faces, the Left is trying to obscure the truth — their ideas are wrong and their policies are bad — by pointing to tactical errors and, also, blaming Trump:

For other trans activists and their allies, Skrmetti is the culmination of a powerful Trump-era backlash against the entire progressive project of expanded rights and consciousness around gender identity, artfully stoked by right-wing politicians and abetted by biased media coverage. “I didn’t pick this fight around trans rights,” Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, told me in an interview not long before the decision. “The right-wing conservatives of the MAGA G.O.P. have made this one of their cause célèbre issues as a way to kind of scapegoat individuals, as a way to score cheap political points.” . . .
Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff — and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization. . . . Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation.

Translation: “Somebody set up us the bomb.”

But my repetition of old jokes is not nearly as enlightening as Ace’s brutal fisking of the New York Times story, so go read that.



 

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Category: New York Times, Supreme Court, The Transgender Cult

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