Want to get this daily news briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
SCOTUS SCHISM – Here’s a joke that will kill at your next Zoom happy hour: Why couldn’t the U.S. Supreme Court textualists agree? They weren’t on the same page. As Marcia Coyle reports, yesterday’s landmark SCOTUS decision applying Title VII to protect LGBTQ workers revealed a rift between Justice Neil Gorsuch and his conservative colleagues over the true meaning of textualism. Gorsuch, leading the majority, found that Title VII’s provision barring employers from discriminating “because of … sex” includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity—even if the law’s congressional drafters could not have anticipated such an application way back in 1964. But Justices Samuel Alito Jr. and Brett Kavanaugh strongly disagreed, with Alito calling the majority opinion “breathtaking” in its “arrogance” and Kavanaugh arguing that it conflated textualism with literalism.
