March 29th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Digest this for a minute:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance, except…
I for the life of me cannot see in this, nor in the exceptions to this law, protections for people who allege Title IX (20 USC 1681) violations. Yet five Justices (the usual suspects: O’Connor, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) spend 19 pages (PDF) to state that this law establishes protection from the consequences of a whistleblower’s actions.
The Court’s, and any court’s, job is to interpret existing law. Pages 2 and 3 of the Opinion even state that the federal court dismissed the case and the appeals court affirmed the dismissal! The Court took this case because the original ruling and the appeal conflicted with its expansionist rulings in 1997 (Lowery v. Texas A & M Univ. System) and 1994 (Preston v. Virginia ex rel. New River Community College).
If Congress wants to mandate protections, it is more than capable of writing more law. Instead of reading the law’s own language, the court determined that its prior opinions must be unquestionable. When someone sits on the bench for as long as some of these Justices have, it sadly seems more in their interest to perpetuate bad opinion instead of reading the law with their own eyes.
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