Anti-LGBTQ Official Sues Biden Administration Over Firing
Continuing his effort to clear out house, Biden recently asked four officials currently working on the Administrative Conference of the United States to resign. Vice Chair Jennifer Dickey obliged, while Roger Severino, Andrew Kloster and Daniel Z. Epstein refused to. On Wednesday, Biden fired them. Severino has responded with a lawsuit, claiming Biden has no right to terminate him.
Roger Severino, a conservative lawyer, was initially appointed by Trump to head the Office of Civil Rights for the Department of Health and Human Services. At the end of Trump’s term, he was re-assigned to the Administrative Conference of the United States, an agency in the executive branch whose function is to recommend improvements to regulatory agencies.
During his time as the head of the OCR, he worked to remove protections for those in the LGBTQ+ community. He worked to advance policies that would allow hospitals to refuse queer patients and sought to change the anti-discrimination protections in the Affordable Care Act so that they would not longer apply to transgender individuals.
Before his appointment to the HHS, Severino, who is Catholic, was a vocal conservative activist. He is staunchly anti-abortion and he opposes same-sex marriage. The Human Rights Campaign has called him a “radical anti-LGBTQ-rights activist.”
During his tenure working for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, he expressed support for conversion therapy and said that being queer is “against your biology.” He has consistently fought for religious freedom bills that allow employers to refuse to cover birth control for employees and allow for businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Severino’s claim that Biden has no right to fire him exists in opposition to the modern conservative belief that the president is a “unitary executive” who should have the power to fire anybody in the executive branch in order to create a unified branch. To win the case, Sevrino has to prove that the ACUS functions outside of the executive branch.
Bolstering Biden’s case is the fact that he only fired four of Trump’s appointees from ACUS, and that there are no specific protections for ACUS employees.
“The law governing my appointment says it was for three years and was duly signed by the president when I took the oath of office,” Sevrino said to the Catholic Register. “I am well qualified for the position.”
While ACUS is intended to be a non-partisan entity with the goal of streamlining and improving regulatory agencies, Trump’s appointees show that it could be used as an arm to enact a partisan agenda. Trump only ever appointed far-right activists to ACUS and in a bid to keep them there, he reappointed both Jennifer Dickey and Richard Severino to the counsel, where they were already working, in order to restart their three-year terms.
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