EXCLUSIVE — Texas Republican state Rep. Brian Harrison called on the state legislature to reject all federal education dollars received by his state so Texans will not be beholden to the Biden administration's Title IX overhaul.
On Friday, the Biden administration finalized the rules governing Title IX, which redefined sex to include claimed gender identities and stripped some due process rights from students accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses. The rule goes into effect on Aug. 1.
"Biden is trying to force sexual predators into elementary girls' bathrooms and let woke D.C. bureaucrats take over Texas schools," Harrison told the Washington Examiner. "Texas is a sovereign state. We should act like it, and stop bowing down to Washington's tyrannical edicts. The legislature can protect Texas women, students, and teachers by telling the federal government to keep its damn money and the strings attached to it."
Harrison's Tuesday letter, obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner, was sent to Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, and it asked the leadership commission of the Texas House Public Education Committee to develop a plan to start moving away from federal education dollars, which Harrison said would not only allow the state to sidestep President Joe Biden's new Title IX rules but "all other crushing federal regulations which for decades have burdened our public schools."
The committee, of which Harrison is a member, would need to look into every aspect of how Texas receives federal education money, the regulatory framework that comes with the money, the cost of compliance, and how Texas could fund its own education system without federal intervention.
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The Texas Republican argued that Biden's Title IX rewrite would allow boys in girls' locker rooms as young as elementary school, make it "a federal offense if students and teachers fail to use preferred pronouns," would allow men to "steal academic and athletic scholarships from women," and would bring back the campus "kangaroo courts" adjudicating sexual misconduct that drew criticism from Republicans during the Obama administration.
"The only reason Texas schools are subject to these dangerous requirements is because the State of Texas voluntarily accepts federal education funding," Harrison wrote in the letter. "Texas must act like a sovereign state, stop prostrating ourselves at the altar of the almighty federal government, and combat the move to a post-constitutional America."
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