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<p>[www.kansascity.com</a> | 04/23/2008 | McCain opposes equal pay bill in Senate](<a href=“http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/588894.html]www.kansascity.com”>http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/588894.html)</p>
<p>Even though the GAO found that it would NOT lead to more lawsuits. (But what do they know?)</p>
<p>We already have all the equal pay laws we need. It is not lawfull to pay a women less than a man for the same work, same job because she is a women. It has been that way for a while. The vote is a non-issue. More liberal B.S.</p>
<p>The change focuses on the length of time to file a discimination complaint. Saying McCain opposes fair pay is a lie. At most you can say he opposes expanding the time frame to file suit when a woman believes she has been unfairly discriminated against.</p>
<p>We do indeed have a law, but because of the Supreme Court, women can’t readily gain access to its protections. That’s the issue.</p>
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<p>“The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would have overturned a Supreme Court decision that employees can only file a discrimination claim in the first 180 days from the time the discriminatory pay begins.”</p>
<p>This is what the bill is about. A woman has to file a suit within the first 180 days from THE VERY FIRST TIME THE DISCRIMINATION OCCURRED. It doesn’t matter if the employee worked there for two years and didn’t find out about the pay inequity until recently. If she didn’t know about it within the first few months, she’s out of luck. How many employers tell their workers what others are making? Salaries are usually kept under wraps by employers.</p>
<p>This law would put back the spirit of the anti-discrimination laws that have been circumvented by the Supreme Court with this 180 day provision.</p>
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<p>Either McCain supports the Supreme Court’s decision to allow only a few of months for a woman to find out about and then file a suit once she takes a job, or he is ignorant of the true implications of the Court’s ruling and the extreme disadvantage any woman would have trying to implement the law. Which is it, I wonder.</p>
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It is not BECAUSE of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court properly interpreted the law as it was written that created a statutes of limitations of 180 days. The original language of the statute should have been written better, but is not the Supreme Court’s fault for failing to re-write statutes. </p>
<p>The proper response of Congress is to amend the statute for clarifiction. Unfortunately, what the Democrats did was try to create an essentially indefinate statute of limitations so that a women who spends 30 years working for a company and then retires can file a law suit against the company long after all of the key witnesses have left and all a court would hear would be her opinion of how she was treated. There are many reasons for have statutes of limitations. </p>
<p>The liberal media is trying to say that McCain opposed equal pay for woman. That is a lie. The bill is a statutes of limitations bill not an equal pay bill.</p>
<p>So, does McCain understand the implications of this bill, and he just doesn’t care, or doesn’t he get it. Seriously, it could be either. But since Bush threatened to veto the bill if it goes through, I think he knows exactly what he is against- a woman’s right to use the anti-discrimination laws in the spirit for which they were intended.</p>
<p>[National</a> Women’s Law Center](<a href=“http://www.nwlc.org/details.cfm?id=3253§ion=newsroom]National”>http://www.nwlc.org/details.cfm?id=3253§ion=newsroom)</p>
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Maybe he supports a better bill. You know, one that would not grant never ending liability to a company which can’t defend itself 30 years after all of the managers have changed and all the key evidence is no longer available. </p>
<p>The trial lawyers are hard at work lusting for the Democratic party as usual. It’s a horrible bill that is harmful to American business.</p>
<p>“The House of Representatives acted quickly to correct the Court’s ruling by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would restore the law that existed for decades in virtually every region of the country prior to the Ledbetter decision.”</p>
<p>The anti-discrimination laws that were on the books before Alito’s “interpretation” didn’t seem to be a horrible bill for business or damage American business. .</p>
<p>He’s dead to me. Dead.</p>
<p>“The Supreme Court properly interpreted the law as it was written that created a statutes of limitations of 180 days.”</p>
<p>Are you familiar with the way that statutes of limitations are interpreted in the vast majority of tort environments, both statutory and common-law? The majority rule, by a mile, is that the limitations period starts to run when the plaintiff discovered, or by reasonable diligence should have discovered, the injury.</p>
<p>Here, there was no way for the typical plaintiff to know that she was injured until she found out what her male peers were earning. There’s no “duty of investigation” requiring an employee to sneak into human resources files and research what her peers are earning. So under the usual rule, the statute shouldn’t start to run until she discovers the truth. The Ledbetter decision was a sharp departure from both Title VII precedent in general and tort statute-of-limitations law in general. If you don’t like activist judges eviscerating the laws enacted by the political branches, you shouldn’t like the Ledbetter decision.</p>
<p>“It is not BECAUSE of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court properly interpreted the law as it was written that created a statutes of limitations of 180 days. The original language of the statute should have been written better, but is not the Supreme Court’s fault for failing to re-write statutes.”</p>
<p>And Senator McCain is in the forefront of leadership to rewrite the statutes to ensure equal pay, right?</p>
<p>But the reality of the situation, as Hanna notes above, is that the Activist Supreme Court did indeed “rewrite the statute”. </p>
<p>Now what is Senator McCain going to do about it?</p>
<p>Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, author of the dissent, underscored her displeasure with the ruling by reading her dissent from the bench.</p>
<p>“The Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg said. She explained that early in a woman’s employment at a company, she may not even be aware of the salaries of others, and “understandably may be anxious to avoid making waves.”</p>
<p>Often, as in Ledbetter’s case, Ginsburg said a woman’s salary can slip gradually in comparison to men’s, so that a substantial gap might become apparent only years after the original discriminatory decision was made. “Only over time is there strong cause to suspect that discrimination is at work,” Ginsburg said.</p>
<p>The Court’s only female justice noted that in 1991, Congress responded to several Supreme Court decisions that gage a cramped reading of Title VII by enacting a law in effect overturning those interpretations. “Today, the ball again lies in Congress’ court,” Ginsburg said. “As in 1991, the legislature has cause to note and correct the Court’s parsimonious reading of Title VII.”</p>
<p>[Law.com</a> - Supreme Court Limits Time Frame for Filing EEOC Claims](<a href=“Law.com”>Law.com)</p>
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That is essentially a correct interpretation of the law but not in all cases and certainly not when a statute says otherwise. </p>
<p>The Supreme Court applied 42 USC §2000e5(e)(1) which says you have 180 days to file with the EEOC:</p>
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<p>Note the law says from the time the “unlawful employment practice occured”. It does not say from the time the plaintiff figured things out. Judicial activisim would have been to re-write the statute to say that the 180 period ran from the time the plaintiff figured things out. Instead the plaintiff in the case argued a new statutory period arose each time a pay check was issued even if the occurrance of the discriminatory practice occured many month (heck, years) before. The Supreme Court’s ruling was the correct one under the law as it existed.</p>
<p>“It does not say from the time the plaintiff figured things out. Judicial activisim would have been to re-write the statute to say that the 180 period ran from the time the plaintiff figured things out.”</p>
<p>This is the difference between occurrence and accrual. I’m saying that there’s a very robust and long-standing precedent for holding that a statute of limitations cannot begin to run until the plaintiff could have discovered the injury. So robust and so long-standing, in fact, that members of Congress, most of whom have law degrees, would have understood exactly what they were doing when they wrote the law. You don’t know how many thousands of laws are read in this way. It’s a basic principle of due process that you can’t bar people from access to the courts due to circumstances beyond their control that prevented them from learning they were injured. But the current SCOTUS majority disagrees with Title VII, so they cut its guts out by sealing it off from the rest of federal law. It’s pretty nakedly activist.</p>
<p>Besides which, it’s pretty off the wall to claim that this week, when I got a lower paycheck than my male colleague for no other reason than my gender, I suffered no injury. I lost the difference in this week’s pay – that’s the injury! Again, this is a standard way to read tort law. If you hit me in the head every week for ten years, I can sue you this week for the injury resulting from this week’s hit. It’s no defense for you to say that you started hitting me in the head ten years ago and I should have sued you then. This particular shiner came from this week’s punch, and I can recover for the injury.</p>
<p>Putting aside the issue of overturning decades of precedent, think about the incentives the new, revolutionary Supreme Court reading sets up. It tells employers that it’s legal to discriminate as long as you hide it from the employee for 180 days. It incentivizes employers to lie. It makes no sense that Congress would pass a remediative civil rights statute like Title VII with the intent to prevent suits against the sneakiest and most deceptive employers. Why pass the statute at all in that case? It just doesn’t make any sense. When there are two possible readings of a statute, and one makes a lot more sense than the other, it’s probably the right one.</p>
<p>This case actually provides a classic example of the difference between conservative and liberal justices, and republicans and demoncrats. </p>
<p>The specific issue was what is the meaning of the phrase “unlawful employment practice.” If, in January of 2000, you make a decision to pay a woman less than a man, that is clearly an unlawful practice. But what about the paycheck you issue in January of 2001, which still pays the woman less for no valid reason? The Supreme Court ruled that issuing a check to a woman for less than a man, when the only reason was the sex difference, is not an unlawful employment practice, unless the employer sat down and revisited the situation in January of 2001. If no new decision was made, the lower paycheck in 2001 was merely the “effect” of a prior unlawful act, and therefore not unlawful in itself. So the lawsuit had to be filed within 180 days of the January 200 decision. </p>
<p>Frankly, this is a close call. However, a conservative justice inevitably goes the pro-business way, and a liberal justice inevitably goes the pro-worker way. That is what happened here in a 5-4 decision. Similarly, democratics introduce a bill that is pro-worker, while republicans vote the pro-business way. </p>
<p>It’s really as simply as that. On the close calls, where arguments can be made both ways, Democrats and their judges favor the worker who has been the victim of illegal conduct, whereas republicans and their judges look to keed the worker’s remedy as narrow as possible.</p>
<p>“The Supreme Court’s ruling was the correct one under the law as it existed.”</p>
<p>So what does Senator McCain propose to do about it?</p>
<p>“On the close calls, where arguments can be made both ways, Democrats and their judges favor the worker who has been the victim of illegal conduct, whereas republicans and their judges look to keed the worker’s remedy as narrow as possible.”</p>
<p>Philosphically, I’m a legal realist too. The difference is that Democratic lawyers think this is fine, we often SAY that this is what we’re doing, and we do it. Note Justice Ginsburg expressing concern about what’s going to happen to workers as a result of the decision. We think it’s just fine for judges to acknowledge that there are close calls, and lots of choices for dealing with them, and talk about the policy implications of going one way or the other.</p>
<p>The conservative majority, on the other hand, insists that their decision in this case has nothing at all to do with their feelings about Title VII, and that they are blind and impassive to policy concerns, and they are just following the language of the statute where it leads them, come what may.</p>
<p>I mean, come on. That’s bunk. If you’re deciding based on policy, let’s have the policy conversation. We can’t do that if you pretend like you’re never swayed by your desired outcome.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether or not razorsharp’s suggested outcome of decades-long periods before lawsuits are filed would actually come about, the 180-day statute of limitations is far, far too short. There’s no chance a worker is going to be capable of (or willing to, given how confrontational it would look) getting information on her coworkers’ pay in that time. I’m not surprised McCain opposes the new bill, but I am disappointed.</p>
<p>For all Democrats who think they might as well vote for the Republican if they don’t get the Democrat that they hope for…please think long and hard about your decision. (simba, poetsheart…
)The Supreme Court is one of the major reasons why it matters and why a write in or throw away to Nader is throwing away your voice. A vote for McCain will solidify the already ultra-conservative court that we now have with Alito and Scalia.</p>