Mitt Romney, following a long tradition of GOP candidates unable or unwilling to resist the continued expansion of employment discrimination law, has pre-emptively blessed Congress’s 2009 enactment of the ill-advised Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act gutting statutes of limitation. Hans Bader offers reasons why he should consider drawing the line. [Examiner] More: Ted Frank.
Related: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signs bill repealing duplicative damages law passed by his Democratic predecessors, thus contradicting the accepted narrative in which the scope of available damages in job-bias suits is supposed to be revisable only in an upward direction.
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Lilly Ledbetter Act, job creation, and inequality…
Before the Lilly Ledbetter Act was passed, there were already federal laws on the books prohibiting sex discrimination in pay. The only thing the Ledbetter Act does is make it easier for employees to bring bogus fair-pay claims accusing long-gone……
Thanks for the link! It doesn’t surprise me that Romney has taken the same position as Obama on this particular law, the 2009 Ledbetter Act. The Ledbetter Act is already law, and there’s no chance of it being repealed, anyway, so I am not surprised that Romney didn’t want to burn any political capital on an exercise in futility.
The more important question for me is whether Romney will oppose another bill, the misleadingly-named Paycheck Fairness Act, which is much worse than the Ledbetter Act (President Obama unfortunately supports the Paycheck Fairness Act, which economists like Diana Furchtgott-Roth have criticized as costly, unfair, and deceptive), but which has not yet become law. Even some moderate Democrats and Republicans who voted for the Ledbetter Act (like Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho)) opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act, viewing it as a substantially worse bill.
To date, Romney has not endorsed the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would undermine merit-based pay practices. I hope he does not, since the Paycheck Fairness Act is far from guaranteed to pass (it has only passed the House in the past, when the House was in Democratic hands — not under its current GOP majority).
I explain why the Paycheck Fairness Act is a bad idea here:
http://www.examiner.com/scotus-in-washington-dc/paycheck-fairness-act-would-mandate-equal-pay-for-unequal-work-triggering-flood-of-lawsuits