In May of 2007, a Supreme Court packed with Bush appointees voted 5-4 to prohibit victims of pay discrimination from filing suit against those who’ve discriminated against them — unless they file suit within six months of the date of the occurrence of discrimination against them. It’s not like corporations that engage in pay discrimination, like Goodyear Tire, send the victims of discrimination a memo notifying them of the discrimination. Gathering evidence of pay discrimination (being paid less for the same work because of race, gender or other characteristic) takes time, especially when a corporation hides the evidence. And what happens when a person uncovers evidence that they were discriminated against a year before? Ah, the Republican-packed Supreme Court didn’t care about that. So now, even though pay discrimination is illegal, actually bringing the lawbreakers to account ranges from difficult to impossible. This is what you get when you vote for a pro-corporate president…
… and when you vote for a pro-corporate Congress, you exacerbate the problem. You see, the Supreme Court told the Congress that it could change the law to remove the six-month ruling. Yesterday, the Congress tried to do just that by passing a revision of the law through the Senate. But a phalanx of Republican Senators prevented the bill from even coming up for a vote yesterday (Harry Reid voted against the bill for procedural reasons, so that under the rules as Majority Leader he can bring it up again).
Why would Senate Republicans want to bring a halt to pay discrimination? Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell let the reason slip:
We think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country, and I think that is the reason for the resistance to its passage on our side.
In other words, McConnell just revealed that he thinks there’s a lot of pay discrimination going on in the country; after all, if there weren’t a lot of pay discrimination, there wouldn’t be a lot of potential lawsuits out there. Senator McConnell sees it as his job to do what he can to keep that discrimination going on without any accountability or punishment.
The bottom line: the Republican Party stands once again in the way of fairness. Why would you support such a party, unless you don’t care about fairness in America?
