"The end of the conservative legal movement… as we know it"
This past week, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that was nothing short of a legal earthquake. In a speech on the floor of the US Senate, Republican senator Joshua Hawley of Missouri called it “truly a seismic decision… a historic decision.”
In Bostock v. Clayton County, a 6-3 majority held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects against discrimination on the basis of gender, also protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and orientation. The biggest shock of the decision is that the majority opinion, which Chief Justice John Roberts joined, was written by Trump-nominated Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The importance of this decision is twofold. First, that a conservative justice regarded as a staunch textualist, who believes laws must be interpreted based on their actual words instead of importing meanings into words to reach a desired result, issued a decision that many conservative legal scholars say departs entirely from the text.
Senator Hawley referred to the ruling facetiously as an “historic piece of legislation,” the only problem being that “it was issued by a court, not by a legislature.” Justice Samuel Alito wrote likewise in his dissent, that a “more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.”
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