feste_sylvain

For those of you who don't hang on every $3 word written by our Supreme Court Justices, they just strung together a bunch of them which declared that whistle-blowing by public (read: government) employees as part of their jobs are not granted the same job-related protections as the statutes provide for private-sector employees.

Huh?

The headlines scream that public-sector workers are being "muzzled" by the Supreme Court, but that isn't exactly accurate. Majority opinion-writer Justice Kennedy was careful to say that the exact same employee can blow the whistle as a citizen, just not as part of their job.

Huh?

I delved into the decision itself (PDF file), and found a few areas of concern:

The Supreme Court was divided along the popular imagination of partisan lines: Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito were the majority, leaving Stephens, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer in the minority. This is the American left's nightmare scenario.

That said, Roberts left the opinion writing to Kennedy, who couched the decision in very conservative terms. And here, I mean "conservative" in its mathematical sense: it's as if Kennedy took all of the laws, precedents, and contractual terms, aligned them on paper, and found the Venn set of intersections and exclusions to deduce the decision. In several places, he even seemed to regret it.

The dissents (plural), including Souter's, were framed by telepathically inducing the "intent" of the statutes. Granted, I agree with their inductions, but I expected to see more support of precedent (Souter especially).

This decision is confusing to many, including the quite-concerned experts at the First Amendment Center. And where there's confusion, you know there's going to be more lawsuits.