"Fair Pay Act" Will Only Further Damage Economy

When President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise but undermining the American economy. This bill is not about sex discrimination — paying men and women different wages for the same job has been illegal for nearly half a century — but rather about statutes of limitations. How long after an incident of discrimination should someone be allowed to sue? The Supreme Court ruled that an employee has six months after a company’s initial pay decision to file a discrimination claim. While this was a fair reading of existing law, critics legitimately questioned whether the law itself unfairly foreclosed redress for a decision made long before an employee discovered the pay discrimination. They correctly went to Congress to fix the law, instead of demanding that courts rewrite it themselves.

But the solution is not to eliminate statutes of limitations altogether, which is essentially what the Fair Pay Act does when it restarts the litigation clock with every new paycheck. No, the proper solution is simply to codify the common law “discovery rule” for these types of cases, making clear that the statute of limitations begins to run only when the employee discovers the wrong that had been committed against her way back when — a compromise that was proposed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison but rejected by the Senate. Instead, the new law introduces major uncertainty into business operations and gives every employee a Sword of Damocles to dangle over her employer’s balance sheet. Companies will all of a sudden be subject to decades-old discrimination claims they have no ability to defend.

At bottom, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act takes a bludgeon to an already reeling economy, acting as a stimulus only for the lawyers bringing and defending the coming avalanche of lawsuits.

[Cross-posted from Cato's blog.]

Little Hope for Judges Until the Judiciary Stops Legislating

In a recent editorial, the Washington Post issued a “hope for improvements” from the vitriol, partisan rancor, and blocking of qualified candidates that has increasingly dominated nominations to the federal bench. Don’t hold your breath; this is one hope that will not inspire change during the course of the Obama administration.

No, the poisoning of the judicial appointment process won’t end till courts stop acting as policymakers, finding powers in the Constitution that aren’t there and limiting rights that are. Thus the problem with judicial nominations has less to do with cynical politicians and embittered ideologues than it does with a ”living Constitution” that has been stretched over the years beyond any Founder’s recognition. In failing to enforce the constraints on federal powers — and to protect the rights retained by the people under the Ninth Amendment (along with those covered by the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause, to name but the most maligned) – what Alexander Hamilton called the “least dangerous branch” has devolved into a disfunctional policymaking body that understandably attracts political passions. While various parties wrestle to direct the government’s expanded powers in their favor, as my boss Roger Pilon wrote in 2002, “everything is politics, nothing is law.”

Until we reset the balances of power among the branches and the government again abides by its constitutional parameters, I’m afraid that the partisanship and politics of personal destruction surrounding judicial nominations will continue unabated – to the detriment of the nominees, the judiciary, and the country. When so much is at stake, it can be no other way. (You might as well ask elections to be less partisan or otherwise heated.)

But the Post’s editorial is on the right track about one thing: the failure of Republicans to define the word “extremist” when speaking of likely Obama judicial nominees. Democrats and their hard Left brethren were so unsuccesful in blocking John Roberts and Samuel Alito in large part because they had cried bigot about practically every previous lower-court nominee. Instead, let’s define what is unacceptable practically and establish an objective standard for judicial nominees from the new administration. Then it will only be a matter of measuring the degree of support or opposition when analyzing each one’s record. I suggest the following: “An extremist judge is someone who puts policy views over the text of the law as written, someone whose record shows a propensity for rewriting statutes or the Constitution.”

If you don’t like the result you get when following the law or the Constitution, change the law or amend the Constitution. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said when asked whether he would be doing justice on the Supreme Court, “This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.”

[Cross-posted at Cato's blog.]

Our Latest Salvo in the Battle Over Campaign Finance Reform

Yesterday I filed an amicus brief on Cato's behalf in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, an election regulation/campaign finance case that will be argued before the Supreme Court in March or April. Testing the bounds of the Court’s landmark decision in Wisconsin Right to Life II (WRTL II), the Federal Election Commission recently sought to apply certain prohibitions and disclosure requirements of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 to advocacy group Citizens United’s political documentary, Hillary: The Movie, and to the group’s broadcast advertisements for the film. Though the FEC conceded that the ads, at least, are not the functional equivalent of express campaign advocacy, as defined in WRTL II, it nevertheless determined that Citizens United must disclose the identities of its contributors.

Cato’s brief argues that BCRA violates the First Amendment freedom of association belonging to those contributors, which freedom includes the right to associate anonymously and to control the group’s character and message free from government intervention. For groups engaging in political speech, compelled disclosure of contributors’ identities infringes their freedom of private expressive association, a burden often no less severe than direct restraint of the group’s speech. This type of government action must be subject to strict constitutional scrutiny—a level of scrutiny that in practice is almost always fatal. The district court failed to afford sufficient value to associational rights and so failed to scrutinize appropriately BCRA’s unjustified infringement on those rights.

Supreme Court Makes It a Little Interesting

The common refrain this Supreme Court term is that, after several years of blockbuster cases—race-based school assignment, partial-birth abortion, the rights of Guantánamo detainees, the D.C. gun ban, etc., etc.—this year the Court is giving the front pages a break. Indeed, as we celebrated the advent of 2009, the only cases guaranteed to make it into the Cato Supreme Court Review were a drug regulation case (Wyeth v. Levine) and one involving the detention of a civilian in the United States as an enemy combatant (Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli). Almost all the cases garnering media and scholarly attention would have been after-thoughts in previous years.
On Friday, however, as it rounded out its docket for the term (no more than a handful more will be added to the list of cases to be argued and decided before the Court recesses in June), the Court gave us four fascinating cases to chew on:

Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One (“NAMUDNO”) v. Mukasey
This is a challenge to the requirement of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that certain state and local governments, mostly but not entirely in the South, obtain “preclearance” before making any changes affecting voting. A small (3,500 residents) utility district in Austin, Texas, argues that it has never been accused of voting discrimination or other irregularities and should not have to seek federal permission to, for example, move the location of a polling place or coordinate voting for its board with other county or state elections. You may recall that the latest extension of the VRA, in 2006, did not pass without some controversy. Indeed, in our federal system, should certain jurisdictions still be under the Justice Department’s thumb over 40 years after the demise of Jim Crow (and to this extent of micromanagement)?

Ricci v. DeStefano
A group of firefighters (19 white, 1 Hispanic) allege that New Haven city officials racially discriminated against them when they refused to certify the results of two race-neutral promotional exams that yielded racially disproportionate results (i.e., a much higher percentage of whites and Hispanics qualified for promotion than did blacks). As offensive as the facts of the case are, the way that the Second Circuit—a panel including oft-mentioned Supreme Court contender Sonia Sotomayor—summarily dismissed the petitioners’ appeal is even more disconcerting. When the full court voted 7-6 not to rehear the case en banc, Judge José Cabranes (a Clinton appointee) excoriated his colleagues, concluding that “[t]his perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.” I won’t get into the weeds of legal analysis here, but Ed Whelan has two excellent posts discussing the Second Circuit shenanigans over at NRO and Stuart Taylor last month wrote a typically hard-hitting piece on it for the National Journal. But again, however the Supreme Court decides this one, it has already provided a potent line of attack on Judge Sotomayor when the next vacancy arises on the high court.

Republic of Iraq v. Beaty
This case asks the simple question of whether U.S courts have jurisdiction over claims regarding misdeeds committed by the Saddam Hussein regime—or whether today’s Iraqi government can assert sovereign immunity. This simple question actually involves the interplay of a host of legislative and executive action that the Court will have to wade through. Beaty joins the Eurodif (international trade, about which I wrote here) and Elahi (treaty enforcement) cases as this year’s leading contributions to the Court’s international law jurisprudence.

Horne v. Flores
Taking up a complicated conflict between the No Child Left Behind Act and earlier legislation, this is the term’s leading education case. The main issue is whether a state, in this case Arizona, which complies with NCLB on English language instruction can still be violating the funding requirements for such instruction imposed by the Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974. The Ninth Circuit declined to modify an eight-year-old injunction requiring Arizona to spend millions on this instruction and imposing millions in fines. It’s a highly technical case but one with significant ramifications for a key part of President Bush’s domestic policy legacy.

Despite these four grants, however, it is still safe to say that Court shied away from many, many cases that should interest readers of this blog—not least the patent/abuse of state sovereign immunity case called BPMC v. California, which I had earlier urged the Court to accept for review. I will be commenting further at least on NAMUDNO and Ricci when the Court hears argument and decides them.

[Cross-posted at Cato's blog.]

No Supreme Court Vacancies, But a New "Tenth Justice"

The selection of Harvard Law School Dean Elana Kagan to be the next solicitor general (and the first woman nominated for a position known as the “Tenth Justice”) is not at all surprising. While President-elect Obama is under great pressure to nominate more women for cabinet and judicial positions, in Kagan and former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan he had two highly credentialed candidates who would have been front-runners regardless of their gender. Two things we know about Kagan is that she is very smart – even before the Supreme Court clerkship and record of scholarship, she won a Sachs Scholarship, sometimes called a “Princeton Rhodes” – and has done a fabulous job as dean (including poaching star professors from law schools across the country). While the White House and Attorney General will, of course, be setting the administration’s legal policy, we can expect Kagan to defend those policy positions ferociously and expertly. Whether those efforts will coincide with a defense of the individual liberty and limited government encapsulated in the Constitution remains to be seen.

[Cross-posted at Cato's blog.]