The Supreme Court Hearings Begin: Let’s Talk About What’s At Stake

By Marcia Greenberger, Co-President,
National Women's Law Center

Today at 12:30, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to become a Justice on the Supreme Court will begin. Supreme Court confirmation hearings offer the country a unique opportunity to hear a discussion about the important legal questions that the Court decides, the impact of the Court’s decisions on all of our lives, and the qualities that we want in the Justices who make those decisions.

Later in the week, I have been invited by the Committee to testify in support of Elena Kagan – and I’m honored to do so. The Center strongly supports the confirmation of Solicitor General Kagan given her extraordinary qualifications. I’m also honored by the company I’ll be keeping, including Lilly Ledbetter. 

You may have heard of Lilly. Like Elena Kagan, she was a path breaker. And like countless other women, she turned to the courts for justice when she faced discrimination along the way. She was one of the few women supervisors in a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama. She didn’t learn until close to her retirement that she had been paid less than her male co-workers for nearly 20 years. She suspected that she was getting fewer and lower pay raises than the male supervisors, but Goodyear didn’t allow its employees to discuss their pay, and Lilly had no proof until she received an anonymous note. She filed a lawsuit against the company, and the jury agreed that she had been illegally denied equal pay. But a federal Court of Appeals disagreed with the government’s decades-old interpretation of the law and that of every other appeals court that interpreted the law around the country, and reversed the jury verdict. The Appeals Court ruled that her case was filed too late because the company’s original decision on her pay had been made years earlier, even though she had no way of knowing about the discrimination back then, and even though the discrimination continued with each paycheck she received up to the day she filed charges. Lilly appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. The Center filed an amicus brief in support of Lilly and had the privilege of fighting for justice alongside this amazing woman.

But in a 5-4 vote in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Alito, actually took the ability to fight this kind of injustice away from employees like Lilly by agreeing with the Court of Appeals’ startling departure from the longstanding interpretation of the law. As Justice Ginsburg stated in her stinging dissent, this decision made it virtually impossible for women and others subjected to pay discrimination to protect their rights. Lilly and her family lost thousands of dollars in salary, not to mention the lower retirement benefits that she will receive for the rest of her life, and Goodyear Tire got to keep the money that rightfully belonged to her. 

It took a huge effort just to restore the law to where it was before the Supreme Court’s ruling.  President Bush threatened to veto the bill that would have reversed this damaging decision. And while 57 Senators voted in favor of the bill, 60 votes were needed to break the filibuster. It took two years, a new Congress, and a new President before the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law in January 2009, the first bill signed by President Obama. So, as you can see, when the Supreme Court gets it wrong, even something this wrong, it’s not easy to get Congress to fix it. And when the Supreme Court rules on a question of constitutional law, Congress can’t do anything to fix a decision, no matter how wrong or how unjust.

What Lilly’s story shows, and what her testimony later in the week will make plain, is that the stakes around a Supreme Court decision are incredibly high. The Court makes decisions that affect what we take home in our paychecks, whether we can go to school or work free from discrimination or harassment, and whether the government can intrude in our most personal and private decisions. It matters deeply who is sitting on that Court because each decision can affect the lives of women and their families, and all Americans, far into the future. 

Stay tuned as the conversation unfolds this week!