Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online reports on a little-discussed recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion.
The Supreme Court cases that set off the fiercest conflicts among the justices aren’t always the hot-button ones. Consider last week’s decision in Stanley v. City of Sanford. The Court took the case because the plaintiff asked it to resolve a long-standing circuit split on a fairly prosaic question of employment law: whether the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) protects disabled retirees from discrimination regarding their retirement benefits that occurs after they’ve retired. The Court, in a 7–2 opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said no. …
… Even Justice Elena Kagan joined the majority’s straightforward analysis of the statutory text.
Yet Stanley produced an anguished and histrionic dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that included an assault on textualism so overwrought that even Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointedly refused to join the footnote that included it. As a progressive judge, when Kagan thinks you’re wrong and Sotomayor thinks you’ve gone overboard, you should rethink your choices.
Stanley also produced a second set of sideshows over exactly what questions the Court should be deciding, after the plaintiff tried to change her argument from the one that produced the circuit split and got her case taken up in the first place. This resulted in more bitter sniping between Gorsuch and Jackson, while Justice Clarence Thomas — joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett — bemoaned game-playing lawyers and implicitly criticized both Gorsuch and Jackson for letting the lawyers get away with it. The section of Gorsuch’s opinion analyzing and rejecting the new argument was joined by only two of the justices (Kagan and Justice Samuel Alito) who signed the rest of the opinion, plus Sotomayor, who had disagreed with the rest of the opinion. It was a sharp break from an extended stretch of unanimity on the Court.
