Everyone talks about how the next President will get to choose new justices for the Supreme Court. The reasoning why this would impact on people's lives is sometimes directly relevant and sometimes not.
Recently there was a Supreme Court decision in the Ledbetter case that was both outrageous and striking to the heart of the difference between justices Obama and McCain would nominate. I understand there are women and men who were supporters of Hillary Clinton, and are deeply disappointed that this talented woman who had a shot at the presidency has lost. Some of these people feel like Obama doesn't deserve/unfairly got the nomination and are angry at him or the Democratic party.
I'm not saying to just grin and bear it. I'm saying that voting for Obama is voting for equality and justice. That your vote for Obama will make the country a place where equality for all is the law.
Below the fold is an email my father, Stanley Feingold, a political science professor wrote about the Ledbetter case. This is something that every Clinton supporter who is thinking about voting for McCain should think about.
A 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that wage discrimination against women could be corrected only if the woman brought the case within 180 days of the original act that established the discrimination. This means that if a woman was hired at a slightly lower salary than a man and the gap grew in later years, she would have no remedy unless she had filed a claim with a half-year of the original discrimination.
The jury that heard all the facts had awarded Lilly Ledbetter, a manager in a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant, three million dollars in damages, but the trial judge cut that amount to only $360,000 because of a limitation that was inserted in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, during the first Bush administration, which put a cap on damages for sex discrimination, regardless of the facts. For all practical purposes, the Ledbetter decision protects wage discrimination because the employee who is the victim of discrimination almost never knows the wages of other newly-hired employees, and may learn of any distinctions until long after the original discrimination.
In his opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas, ruled that a Title VII complaint under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to remedy pay discrimination was not valid when it related to ongoing and continuing discrimination against the employee, even though the discrimination was incremental, resulting in greater pay discrimination. The cumulative effects of her disparate treatment grew until she was being paid 15%-25% less than her male colleagues, even those with far less experience.
Justice Alito's cramped and narrow interpretation of Title VII is directly contrary to the law's broad remedial purpose of protecting working women and men from discrimination in employment. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out in her forceful and eloquent dissenting opinion, "the Court ... is totally at odds with the robust protection against workplace discrimination Congress intended Title VII to secure."
Worse yet, despite his repeated avowal of respect for Supreme Court precedent during his confirmation hearings in the Senate just last year, Justice Alito so narrowly restricted the scope of existing pay discrimination precedent in this case as to render it useless for most litigants. Ledbetter's majority opinion effectively overturns 20 years of federal court cases and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rulings which had consistently ruled that a prohibited act of discrimination occurs each time a woman receives a paycheck that is less than a similarly situated man.
Every senator who did not act to prevent Justice Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court bears some responsibility for this reprehensible roll-back of our ability to get fair treatment in the workplace and in the courts. Replacing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor with Samuel Alito shifted the balance on the court, and women will be paying the price for a long time. More recently, Supreme Court majorities have shown some sympathy for claims of age and race discrimination. A bill to overturn the Ledbetter decision and reaffirm the intention of the Civil Rights Act to outlaw wage discrimination has passed the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate, but the only way to ensure an end to wage discrimination based on sex is to change the composition of the Supreme Court.