05.31.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Politics
• Jamie Malanowski
The next time anybody tells you that elections don’t matter, remind them of yesterday’s decision by the Roberts Court.By a 5-4 decision, the Court said that workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination that happened years in the past. The Court found that Lilly Ledbetter, the lone female supervisor at a tire plant in Alabama, may well have been discriminated against throughout her career, but did not file her lawsuit in the timely manner specified by the law. The Court held that Ms. Ledbetter had 180 days from the time when the act of discrimination took place—in other words, from the moment she received the first paycheck that was lower than a male peer’s—to file her suit.
Of course that’s ridiculous. It can take a very long time before an incident of discrimination becomes apparent. People are not accustomed to asking about, or sharing, information about their salaries. The Court has elected to render the law meaningless, and moved Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to take the unusal step of reading her dissent from the bench. "In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination," she said. Ouch.
Look for Congress to make clear to the Court how errantly it interpreted the law.
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Comments on this entry:
It may be "ridiculous", but laws matter and that's the way the law is written. I for one am glad that the Supreme Court had the wisdom to read the law the way the Congress actually wrote it and acted accordingly. Even if you don't like the outcome in this case, it is the correct ruling.
And the Congress can not "make clear to the Court how errantly it interpreted the law", because there was no error. The Congress can change the law. Maybe they should. But that debate belongs in the Congress, and not in the Supreme Court.