Happening now.
Gorsuch and Roberts hand the liberals a surprise win on LGBT rights.
Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.
The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberal justices.
This outcome is all the more odd as the government's reading of the portion of the law prohibiting discrimination based on sex as prohibiting only discrimination against an employee or job applicant on account of being male or not being male, or on account of being female or not being female - is surely correct as a fair reading of the actual wording of the thing, understood as it normally would have been at the time of adoption, and indeed as it normally would be understood even today.
That fact, generally urged by conservatives, is nevertheless flatly denied by liberals.
(Don't you love it when liberals piously insist everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts?
Or when they with equal piety - but still falsely - protest that alternative facts are not facts but untruths?)
(Don't you love it when liberals piously insist everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts?
Or when they with equal piety - but still falsely - protest that alternative facts are not facts but untruths?)
So Gorsuch and Roberts?
Neil Gorsuch, one of the Trump appointees, wrote the sweeping decision that extended federal employment protections to gay and transgender workers.
He is proving to be more of an ideological wildcard than many on the left expected.
Chief Justice John Roberts, another Republican-appointed justice who has at times defied predictions, joined to give the ruling a comfortable 6-to-3 margin.
Both are sure to face an uproar from conservatives quarters.
It's difficult to overstate the significance of the decision.
While the court is establishing a long history of decisions expanding gay rights, this is the first time it spoke directly about the legal protections for transgender individuals.
That the ruling comes out just days after the Trump administration announced it was removing transgender health-insurance protections only puts the issue in stark relief.
Transgender rights is becoming a political battlefield, and a majority of the Supreme Court just announced which side it's on.
Update later that same day.
MSNBC reports Gorsuch wrote that though protection of homosexuals and trans people was doubtless not the intention of the congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that doesn't matter because according to the meaning of the words discrimination on account of sex covers discrimination on account of sexual orientation or trans status.
CNN
"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," Gorsuch wrote.
"There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking," the opinion read.
. . . .
But the ruling was also sharply criticized by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, whose president issued a blistering statement about Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," said Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas.
"This was not judging, this was legislating -- a brute force attack on our constitutional system."
So Gorsuch simply drank the liberal Kool-Aid on the language of the statute.
Alito and Thomas call bullshit.
Kavanaugh is not impressed, either.
Surely a novelty is the spectacle of a conservative judge so egregiously violating his own alleged principles not in order to reach a result required by conservative ideology - as Scalia himself so often did - but to reach one condemned by it and required instead by liberal ideology.
Neil Gorsuch, one of the Trump appointees, wrote the sweeping decision that extended federal employment protections to gay and transgender workers.
He is proving to be more of an ideological wildcard than many on the left expected.
Chief Justice John Roberts, another Republican-appointed justice who has at times defied predictions, joined to give the ruling a comfortable 6-to-3 margin.
Both are sure to face an uproar from conservatives quarters.
It's difficult to overstate the significance of the decision.
While the court is establishing a long history of decisions expanding gay rights, this is the first time it spoke directly about the legal protections for transgender individuals.
That the ruling comes out just days after the Trump administration announced it was removing transgender health-insurance protections only puts the issue in stark relief.
Transgender rights is becoming a political battlefield, and a majority of the Supreme Court just announced which side it's on.
Update later that same day.
MSNBC reports Gorsuch wrote that though protection of homosexuals and trans people was doubtless not the intention of the congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that doesn't matter because according to the meaning of the words discrimination on account of sex covers discrimination on account of sexual orientation or trans status.
CNN
"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," Gorsuch wrote.
"There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking," the opinion read.
. . . .
But the ruling was also sharply criticized by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, whose president issued a blistering statement about Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards," said Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas.
"This was not judging, this was legislating -- a brute force attack on our constitutional system."
So Gorsuch simply drank the liberal Kool-Aid on the language of the statute.
Alito and Thomas call bullshit.
Kavanaugh is not impressed, either.
Surely a novelty is the spectacle of a conservative judge so egregiously violating his own alleged principles not in order to reach a result required by conservative ideology - as Scalia himself so often did - but to reach one condemned by it and required instead by liberal ideology.
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