In April, the Biden administration's Education Department announced a slew of changes to the Title IX anti-discrimination law that was swiftly challenged in court by a handful of Republican-led states and subsequently blocked from taking effect by two separate federal courts.

Now the Biden administration is urging the Supreme Court to intervene on its behalf and limit the lower court orders to allow at least some of the rule changes to go into effect next month, Bloomberg Law reported.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prologar asked the high court to modify the lower court injunctions to only apply to a couple of specific provisions about gender identity that were objected to rather than allow all of the sex discrimination-related changes to remain blocked from taking effect in August.

Major proposed changes to Title IX anti-discrimination law

The Education Department announced its Final Rule changes to Title IX in April and asserted that the proposed alterations were necessary to fulfill the law's mandate to guard against "discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics."

The department also released a 15-page summary of the major provisions of the proposed rule changes, some of which garnered objections from 10 Republican-led states across the country who collectively filed a pair of lawsuits that challenged some of those provisions.

The lawsuits in particular challenged provisions that would bar schools from prohibiting transgender students from using bathrooms of the gender they identified as along with the redefining of the term "hostile-environment sex-based harassment" to include harassment based on gender identity.

Federal judges in Louisiana and Kentucky both ruled separately in favor of the challenger states and imposed injunctions that blocked all of the proposed Title IX rule changes and not just the challenged provisions.

The Biden administration appealed those rulings, according to SCOTUSblog, but the appellate courts based in Cincinnati and New Orleans both declined requests to overrule or limit the injunctions and allow the administration to enforce all of the new rules except the challenged provisions.

Lower courts' injunctions were "both wrong and consequential"

CNN reported that the Biden administration has now taken their argument to the Supreme Court with a similar request for intervention in its favor to limit the lower courts' injunctions to only apply to the challenged provisions and not all of the rest of the proposed changes, some of which involve protections for pregnant students and other pregnancy-related issues like abortions.

In the pair of briefs filed with the high court on Monday, SG Prelogar asserted that the district courts "plainly erred" when they blocked the entirety of the Title IX changes from taking effect next month.

"The district court’s sweeping injunction prevents the Department from fulfilling its statutory mandate to effectuate Title IX," she wrote. "The harm is particularly acute here because Title IX is one of the core federal civil rights statutes that guarantees nondiscrimination in the Nation’s education system."

Prelogar also accused the lower courts, per SCOTUSblog, of using a "blunderbuss approach to preliminary relief" that was "both wrong and consequential" in that the injunctions blocked "dozens of provisions" that were not challenged and should be permitted to take hold.

Unchallenged provisions should be allowed to take effect

CNN noted that SG Prelogar warned that if the Supreme Court fails to overturn or limit the lower courts' rulings, then the Education Department "will be unable to vindicate the critical protections of that statute in a wide swath of the country because of an overbroad injunction."

The challenger states "do not contend -- and the lower courts did not purport to hold -- that those provisions conflict with Title IX, the Constitution, or any other federal law," she wrote of the unchallenged pregnancy-related changes, and added, "The legal disputes concerning Title IX’s application to gender-identity discrimination thus provide no justification for delaying or blocking the implementation of those important and unrelated reforms."