F*ck Those Guys

Maybe you've heard about Lilly Ledbetter, as in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. You see, Lilly Ledbetter was a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama. When she was hired her pay was in line with her male colleagues, but over the years the smaller raises that she ALWAYS received created a significant pay gap, and in case you're saying "so what?" pay gaps are illegal, not to mention sexist and immoral. After years of the discriminatory pay, Ms. Ledbetter discovered her employer's duplicitousness and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A jury sided with Ms. Ledbetter and found that Goodyear had violated her civil rights. This decision was upheld by the court of appeals and was recently decided upon by the Supreme Court you know the one, the gender and racially conscious body made up of 7 white men and one woman and one black guy (it's Clarence Thomas, so I'm not sure he even counts).

Goodyear and it's supporters in such justice-oriented organization as the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce believed that the complaint with the EEOC and the subsequent jury award had violated the statute of limitations since her last discriminatory raise was before the 180 day limit. In previous cases the EEOC, the Courts of Appeal, and the Supreme Court ruled that each pay check based on discrimination violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Well, not any more, thanks to your favorite five male Justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts) a long standing precedent of civil rights law has been destroyed and an important protection for all of us has disappeared.

As the nation debated when life began, very few people actually saw that the Supreme Court rules on more than abortion cases (although they also upheld an amazingly offensive Partial-Birth Abortion Ban). Perhaps it's fitting that the last defender (ok, the last quasi-sometimes-defender) of our rights has been turned into a political arm of the ultra-conservative Republican Party. We are living in a time of unprecedented corporate power, a new Gilded Age, and now we have our Gilded Age Supreme Court.

However, the decision was 5-4, and that means there were 4 sane voices. These four voices were represented in the oral dissent of Justice Ginsburg, the court's only female. This was Justice Ginsburg's second oral dissent this year, which marks the first time in her career that she gave to oral dissents in one year. She is often regarded as a collegial member who is often focused more on etiquette and backroom chats than the spectacle of oral dissents (oral dissents are regarded as theatrical indulgences and are rarely used). Justice Ginsburg's new found boldness is profiled in the New York Times, Oral Dissents Give Ginsburg a New Voice on Court.