The ACS-Missouri Supreme Court Series:
 Ledbetter v. Goodyear and the Roberts Court

Panelists:  Assistant Attorney General of the State of Missouri Heidi Vollet, and University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law Professors Christina Wells and Rigel Oliveri.

Here, a video of Ledbetter describing her case before the House Committee on Education and Labor.

The Democrats’ legislation would allow employees to sue within 180 days of their last affected paychecks. Senate Democrats are working on a similar bill.

Ledbetter, who will not be helped by the legislation, said she hopes it helps other people. “I just want to open the doors for women in the future so they can be treated fairly,” she said in an interview.

The White House has threatened to veto the bill, and has enough votes in the House to make it stick.

As John Sweeney says in the article, this legislation wouldn’t even be necessary if the five justices in the majority hadn’t “bent over backwards, ignoring both precedent and common sense.”

The effect of Sandra Day O’Connor being replaced by Alito is particularly stark in this case. O’Connor–who was offered only secretarial jobs after graduating third from her Stanford Law class–had a good record on gender discrimination, while Altio’s record on both gender issues and civil rights claims more broadly is atrocious. The useful idiots who claimed Alito was a moderate notwithstanding, his vote in this case was inevitable; I held out a shred of optimism that Thomas and Scalia might defer to the EEOC based on the former’s opinion in the Morgan case, but this was apparently hopeless optimism. Although these kinds of cases flay under the radar, this is a major way the Alito-fied Court will work to advance bad outcomes.