Supreme Court Ruling Increases Federal Power
By LINDA GREENHOUSE ASHINGTON, May 27 In a surprising break with its
march toward states' rights, the Supreme Court ruled today that states can be
sued for violating their employees' federally guaranteed right to take time
off for family emergencies.
The vote to reject Nevada's claim to constitutional immunity from suit under
the Family and Medical Leave Act was a decisive 6 to 3. Most unexpectedly, the
author of the majority opinion was Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, under
whose leadership the court has produced a series of bitterly contested 5-to-4
decisions expanding the scope of the states' immunity from suit and, correspondingly,
curbing the power of Congress to make federal law fully binding.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor joined the chief justice in abandoning their allies
in these earlier decisions, leaving Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia,
and Clarence Thomas in dissent today. In addition to Justice O'Connor, Justices
David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined Chief Justice
Rehnquist's majority opinion. Justice John Paul Stevens concurred separately.
The decision affirmed a 2001 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.
The majority opinion today reviewed the recent Supreme Court rulings that immunized
states from lawsuits by their employees for age discrimination and disability
discrimination, explaining why the Family and Medical Leave Act required a different
analysis and outcome. The family leave act was more "narrowly targeted"
than the others and addressed a workplace problem that was persistent and well
documented, Chief Justice Rehnquist said. [Excerpts and full text are linked
at right.]
The key to the outcome of the case lay in the chief justice's conclusion about
exactly what problem Congress intended to address when it passed the family
leave measure 10 years ago. Endorsing the view of the act's proponents, he said
the goal then was to "protect the right to be free from gender-based discrimination
in the workplace" by removing "the pervasive sex-role stereotype that
caring for family members is women's work."
The law sought to accomplish this, he said, by granting up to 12 weeks of unpaid
leave a year to both women and men to deal with family illnesses and other emergencies.
By giving men and women the same entitlement, "Congress sought to ensure
that family-care leave would no longer be stigmatized as an inordinate drain
on the workplace caused by female employees, and that employers could not evade
leave obligations simply by hiring men," he said.
In adopting this analysis, the court rejected Nevada's argument that the law
should be seen as a federal labor regulation that simply conferred a benefit
of employment. The distinction was crucial. Under the court's recent precedents,
Congress lacks the ability to abrogate the states' constitutional immunity from
lawsuits under the general authority to regulate interstate commerce. The only
way Congress can overcome state immunity is by its power under Section 5 of
the 14th Amendment to "enforce, by appropriate legislation," that
amendment's guarantees of equal protection and due process.
For the Family and Medical Leave Act to prevail over the immunity from suit
that the 11th Amendment confers on the states, it therefore had to be accepted
by the court as a remedy for discrimination. But that would not be enough. The
Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act
also dealt with discrimination, but the court found that these were insufficient
to overcome the states' immunity.
For the family leave law, the difference was that sex discrimination, when engaged
in by the government, is presumed to be unconstitutional, unlike discrimination
against the elderly and the disabled, which the court's precedents deem acceptable
as long as the discrimination has a "rational" basis. In the majority
opinions curbing the reach of the age discrimination and disabilities laws,
the court rejected Congress's findings that discrimination by state employers
was pervasive.