By Dahlia Lithwick
SLATE
Updated Saturday, April 26, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill
that would have overturned a Supreme Court ruling
(PDF) that sharply limited pay-discrimination suits
based on gender under Title VII. In Ledbetter v.
Goodyear (2007), the Supreme Court, by a 5-4
margin, held that the clock for the statute of limitations
on wage discrimination begins running when the
employer first makes the decision to discriminate,
and does not run for all the subsequent months—or
in this case, years—that the disparate paychecks are
mailed. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court,
found that the plaintiff in this case, Lilly Ledbetter, was
time-barred from filing her discrimination suit
because it took more than 180 days after she first got
stiffed to discover that she was being stiffed on
account of her gender. The court agreed her jury
verdict should be overturned.
Many of the Republicans who blocked the vote to
reinstate the original reading of Title VII claimed they
were doing so to protect women—read "stupid
women"—from the greedy clutches of unprincipled
plaintiffs' attorneys and from women's own stupid
inclination to sit around for years—decades even—
while being screwed over financially before they bring
suit. That means they were, in effect, just protecting us
from the dangerous laws that protect us. Whew.
For the purely Vulcan reading of the case, Justice
Alito's opinion offers some good reading. But for
those of you who suspect that gender discrimination
rarely comes amid the blaring of French horns and
accompanied by an engraved announcement that you
are being screwed over, it's worth having a gander at
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, already passed by the
House, would have reinstated the law as it was
interpreted by most appellate courts and the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, i.e., that every
single discriminatory paycheck represents a new act
of discrimination and that the 180-day period begins
anew with every one. Yet 42 members of the Senate—
including Majority Leader Harry Reid, but only
procedurally to keep the bill alive—voted to block
cloture. How can that be? As Kia Franklin notes here:
Women in the United States are paid only 77 cents for
every dollar earned by men; African-American women
earn only 63 cents, and Latinas earn only 52 cents for
every dollar paid to white men. Yet the Ledbetter
decision tells employers that as long as they can hide
their discriminatory behavior for six months, they've
got the green light to treat female employees badly
forever. Why isn't this problem sufficiently real to be
addressed by Congress?
