Gorsuch just wrote an opinion so radical that Clarence Thomas wouldn't join it
Not even Justice Thomas would sign onto the paean to the Gilded Age that Gorsuch enshrined in his most recent dissent.
IAN MILLHISER JUN 11, 2018, 4:19 PM
For more than a quarter century, Justice Clarence Thomas served as the Supreme Court’s daft old uncle. Under Thomas’ reading of the Constitution, federal laws ranging from child labor laws, to minimum wage laws, to the ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional. Thomas once argued that the First Amendment does not apply to high school students because eighteenth century fathers behaved like petty tyrants.
But Thomas may have just been dethroned. Dissenting in Sveen v. Melin, Neil Gorsuch tells Thomas to hold his beer.
Sveen is the sort of routine clean-up case that the justices often hand down after a lower court goes too far out on a limb and needs to be reined in. It involves a Minnesota law that, among other things, governs how life insurance policies should handle divorces.
If one spouse lists the other as the beneficiary on their insurance policy, and then the couple divorces, Minnesota law automatically revokes that designation. The theory is that “the average Joe does not want his ex inheriting what he leaves behind,” but in practice, many forget to fill out the paperwork to remove their spouse as a beneficiary. Minnesota law does not forbid someone from designating their ex-husband or ex-wife as an insurance beneficiary, but it does require them to refile the paperwork to do so after the divorce.
There is a robust policy debate among states about whether this sort of automatic revocation is a good idea, but, as Justice Elena Kagan explains on behalf of every member of the Court who doesn’t occupy a seat that was held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, Minnesota’s law is clearly constitutional.
https://thinkprogress.org/neil-gorsuch-sveen-v-malin-most-radical-opinion-yet-233125a182f6/
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Epic Systems involved employment contracts that forced workers to sign away many of their rights to sue their employer, often under penalty of termination. Yet Gorsuch’s opinion rested on the fiction that these coerced agreements were voluntary contracts.
Indeed, Gorsuch’s willful blindness to the power differential between workers and their employers closely resembles the logic of one of the Supreme Court’s most infamous decisions, Lochner v. New York, which struck down a New York law prohibiting bakery owners from overworking their workers.
These workers often labored for 13 hours a day or more, in squalid conditions, for meager weekly pay. Nevertheless, the Court held in Lochner that the state could not intervene to give such workers a more humane workload because “there is no contention that” bakery workers were unable “to assert their rights and care for themselves without the protecting arm of the State.”
The fact that Gorsuch’s Epic Systems opinion was joined by four justices is a worrying sign that the Court’s present majority no longer recoils against Lochnerian ignorance of how the workplace functions. Gorsuch’s Sveen opinion is worrying for a different reason. It suggests that Gorsuch is eager to implement an anti-government agenda that would even make Justice Thomas cringe.
This asshole really needs to be impeached..................I mean really.....................